Free Also Known as Elvis by James Howe Page A

being an adult?” she screams. “I can’t handle it! I’m thirty-two years old and I feel like I’m fifty! I can’t help it that I need your help, Skeezie! I can’t help it that your father left me here with you three kids and hardly comes around and when he does it’s so he can get married to someone else. Some girl in Rochester! Some girl he knows in this life he has in Rochester that doesn’t include us!
    â€œAnd for your information, I hate garlic knots! They are doughy and greasy and I was not eating them last night! I was not having a good time! I was sitting across the table from your father in his ridiculous tie wondering why I was hoping he wanted to come back to me when I hate him even more than I hate garlic knots! Do you get this? Do you get any of this?”
    It is not fun watching your mother have a nervous breakdown, even if you have seen it before. You never know what to say.
    â€œYeah, okay,” I tell her. “You hate garlic knots, I get it.”
    Clearly, this is not the right thing to say. She bursts into tears and runs out of the kitchen.
    And now it is time for me to go to work at the Candy Kitchen. I swear, if Kevin Hennessey shows up today, I am going to have to do him bodily harm. I am not normally the violent type, but sometimes a person can only take so much.

Life is funny, and I don’t mean ha-ha. What I mean, Little E, is that even though it may not seem like it at the time, sometimes things happen for a reason. Like that summer. If my friends hadn’t all been away the week my dad was in town, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to talking about things with Steffi the way I did.
    I was only thirteen, so I wasn’t used to talking about serious stuff all that much, but the closest I’d ever had to what you might call heavy conversations were with Bobby and Joe and Addie. They had become my best friends after Addie sent me a secret Valentine in second grade. Up until then I didn’t really have any friends at all, except for Penny and she was a dog. I don’t like admitting this to you, because I don’t want you getting the idea that you should follow in my footsteps, but I was kind of a troublemaker before that secret Valentine. I did things to get noticed, things that weren’t very nice. So bigsurprise that I didn’t have any friends, right? But Addie, well, she was this no-nonsense person—she still is; you’ll get to know her because she’s still one of my best friends—and she just said, in so many words, “Skeezie, I think you’re nice even if you are kind of a jerk.”
    The other thing about Addie is that she’s strong. When she makes up her mind about something, that’s it! I don’t know why, but she made up her mind that I was going to be her friend and she wasn’t about to have a friend who was a jerk, so what could I do? I became her friend and stopped being a jerk. And because Bobby and Joe were already her friends, I became their friend, too.
    Anyway, like I said, I think there are reasons that things happen when they do. Like Penny running away a couple of months before Addie asked me to be her friend. I had finally known what it was like to have a friend, even if she had four legs and stinky breath, and I wasn’t ready to be lonely again.
    And then near the end of second grade, Bobby’s mom got real sick. I didn’t know just how sick at the time, and I couldn’t make sense of it when she died the summer between second and third grade. But when we wentback to school that fall, I knew that being friends was the best thing Addie and Joe and I could do for Bobby. And so we became the Gang of Five, even though there were only four of us. I was the one who came up with that name, because I thought it was funny, and it stuck. And we stuck. Up until then, it was as if we’d been held together by Scotch tape, but once we were the Gang of Five, we were