Free The Genius of Little Things by Larry Buhl

I didn’t want her to share it with the school.
 Rachel clicked off her recorder with a touch of peevishness. Before she left, she tore a piece of paper out of her notebook and wrote her number on it. From the way she pressed hard, I assumed she was ticked at me.
“If you decide to open up, call me,” she said.
I hated my lunch, suddenly. The Swiss cheese was slimy and warm. The mustard was runny. The chips were compressed sawdust. Why did I choose to consume this five days a week? I wanted to tell Rachel that I was tired of being such an obtuse clam, but I had no practice being anything else. I wanted to be like the guys at the next table, with slightly less overt machismo. I wanted to be, if not exactly a cool kid, and not necessarily the firebrand who advocates sex demonstrations and drug dialogue—or drug demonstrations and sex dialogue, or whatever I had advocated—then, at least, a guy who did not spend his formative years hiding out in library stacks. I wanted to be a guy who wasn’t afraid to share things about his life when a pretty girl paid him attention.
That’s what I might tell Rachel if I ever saw her again.
     
**
     
September 21. Things I usually carry in my safari vest:
     
·          Sunscreen. The sun causes skin cancer.
·          Sunglasses. The sun can damage retinas.
·          Tissues.
·          Ibuprofen.
·          Claritin.
·          Antacid.
·          Pens.
·          A small bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
·          Eye drops.
·          Saline spray.
     
Dry eye is a problem caused by living in the desert. That’s why I carry eye drops and saline. A doctor told me once that tear ducts can dry out in below 10 percent humidity. One would think tear ducts would produce more moisture to compensate. But in some people, they don’t. My ducts seem to be barren.
     
**
Even though I needed the money, I would have preferred to let Levi have my shift at Covenant Catering. With me was a new co-worker, Tina, who was hired for her ability to drive a van and be pretty. We were catering a party for a nine-year-old. The parents were not home. It was just me, Tina, and a strangely Zen-like housekeeper. It was bound to end badly.
I knew there would be a problem the moment we pulled up to the house. It was not unlike the Kim’s—new, fake-opulent, with way too many vases, enormous paintings and glass items. The kids, all boys, were Satan’s spawn. As boys tossed pepperoni, gouged furniture with forks, and basically recreated scenes from Lord of the Flies , Tina whined, “I neeeed you to stop doing that.” This only made the brats worse. The housekeeper stared at the scene as if she were watching a sunset, on downers. It was only my quick reflexes that managed to save a lamp from crashing into a window. And I don’t think it was my job to save the lamp.
The crowning touch of the event was when the birthday boy emptied the contents of his stomach—three glasses of grape soda, pineapple pizza and coconut cake—directly onto a Persian rug. I watched the event unfold, as if in slow motion. The kid stopped running, like he just had a sudden, deep thought. His hands made a fast, quivering motion, as if playing an accordion at triple speed. Then the purple chunks flowed and splashed.
As Tina and I unloaded the serving trays back at Covenant Catering’s kitchen, Mr. Ferguson told me the birthday brat’s parents were unhappy. He would be forced to deduct the cost of the damage from my pay. But not from Tina’s, because she was new and she had been attending his LDS indoctrination meetings. Given the amount of destruction to the house, it would be weeks before I was in the black. I could have asked him to consider the cost of the lamp I saved, but I knew that would be useless.
When I was about to punch out, I decided to quit. There was no pen or paper anywhere, and Mr. Ferguson was in his office, on the phone. I