Free The Crimes and Punishments of Miss Payne by Barry Jonsberg Page B

socks, sweat, tobacco and despair. Kiffo noticed my expression.
    “Yeah, well,” he said. “It's the cleaning lady's day off. Come in and sit down.”
    I looked around. There was nowhere really that I considered a safe place to sit. The couch would have been rejected by the local dump on the grounds that it would have brought down the ambience of the place. Not that I cared too much about the fact that it was held together with fishing wire, or that it sagged alarmingly in strange places, like a depressed storm cloud. But there were things living in it. I could see them moving. It created a strange effect, like those Lava lamps. There was a never-ending rearrangement of the pattern. A microbiologist would have been enchanted, but I wasn't sticking my bum anywhere near it. I found a broken barstool in the corner. It wasn't clean, but at least it wasn't creating its own visible ecosystem. Kiffo slumped into the couch, which gave off a dense cloud of irritated bugs, some, undoubtedly, unknown to modern science.
    “Wassup, Calma?” he said, fishing into his pocket and producing a cigarette with a distinct dogleg to it.
    “You don't want to know, Kiffo,” I said.
    “Okay,” he replied and lit up. There was a silence.
    “Well, when I say you don't want to know, I mean that you probably do want to know. It's kind of a rhetorical question—well, not a question, obviously, more of a rhetorical statement—but it produces a similar effect. You're supposed to press me and then I reveal all. So not at all like a rhetorical statement, when it comes down to it.”
    Kiffo narrowed his eyes at me through the cloud of smoke and airborne bacilli.
    “You're talking like an English teacher,” he said. “Don't. It makes me want to throw up. If you've got something to say, then say it.”
    Good advice, let's be honest. So I told him all about what I had said to the Pitbull the night of the break-in and how she'd told the school counselor—
    [Mrs. Mills —
Gemini.
Your normal sense of discretion will desert you today. Beware of unfortunate slips of the tongue caused by either a momentary lapse of concentration or an innate tendency toward verbal diarrhea.]
    —who'd obviously said something to Rachael Spit-in-Her-Eye Smith, who'd let her mouth off the leash and created havoc. As I was telling him, I could feel the tears welling. But I kept them back. Kiffo's one of those guys who doesn't like crying. It would embarrass him and he wouldn't know what to do. So he'd have to get angry. Still, I tried to tell him how I felt as if my whole life had been ripped up and thrown away in the course of a single afternoon. I wanted him to know that this was important.
    And he listened. When I had done with the tale, a little breathless with the effort of keeping emotion out of it, he threw his cigarette onto the carpet and ground it out with his heel. Then he leaned back and looked at me.
    “You, Calma,” he said, “are something else.”
    “Yeah, I know.”
    “You did that for me? You told the Pitbull you loved her just to give me more time? I don't know what to say. I really don't. No one has never done nothing like that for me. Never.”
    “Never done
anything
like that,” I corrected.
    “But you
did
, Calma. You did.”
    “Listen. It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing, you know. It doesn't mean we're engaged or anything. Anyway, that's all beside the point. My life has just been flushed down the toilet because of it and I don't know what to do!”
    Kiffo fished out another cigarette.
    “Don't do nothing,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    Kiffo leaned forward and jabbed his cigarette at me like an accusing finger.
    “Christ, Calma. You're supposed to be the big brains of the class, but you're a dumb shit at times. What
can
you do? Go around saying to everyone, Listen, I'm not a lesbo, swear to God. You think that'll stop people talking?”
    “No, but—”
    “Stuff ‘em. I've spent my whole life dealing with people who think