Free Nobody Cries at Bingo by Dawn Dumont Page B

abandonment by his equally beautiful but depressed mother.
    â€œShe went crazy and tried to kill herself, right, Adrian?’ Malcolm said behind the barn as he teased a rooster with a stick.
    Adrian nodded with a soft smile on his face.
    I was in awe of his reticence. Here Adrian had the saddest story in the world and he wasn’t taking advantage of it. I talked about everything bad that happened to me. Once one of my uncles said that my younger sister Celeste was prettier than me and I didn’t stop talking about that for two years.
    I didn’t even need to tell people in order to derive satisfaction from the story. On days when I was particularly bored, I would sit on my bed and replay those fateful words, “You’re pretty Dawn but Celeste is like a wildflower . . . ” until I could make myself cry all over again.
    Then after my supply of tears had run low, I rehearsed my brave speech to the offender. “A wildflower! Then what am I? A weed? A dirty stinkweed! What do people do with weeds? They cut them down! I am not a weed you mean, old man — I am a flower and there is no such thing as an ugly flower! You cannot appreciate my beauty because you are a sad, old man and you have no imagination.”
    Now if I’d had a crazy, yet beautiful, mother and abandonment under my belt, I would have been set. Such unfortunate circumstances would have supplied me with enough self-pity for two lifetimes.
    Adrian’s story made him even more adorable to us. What girl wouldn’t want to heal Adrian’s broken heart? Celeste, our cousin Rachel, and I had crushes on him. Publicly we declared that we loved Corey Haim but we all knew that a real Adrian was a thousand times better than a distant Hollywood beau.
    Each summer while the boys spent their time taunting the farm animals until the animals chased them, the girls decorated our playhouse in the woods. That summer, however, Adrian’s presence lured us out of the bush more and more often.
    At Malcolm’s suggestion one night we were even cajoled into a game of strip poker. The game was a favourite of Malcolm’s who thoroughly enjoyed mooning his younger cousins as they hid their eyes and screamed: “Gross!” He drank our disgust like ambrosia.
    Strip poker was a new game for us. If one of the boys had suggested it before, all of us girls would have said, “No way, as if!” Adrian’s presence made strip poker less repulsive, exciting even. We had no cards so we improvised with a bottle. Wearing three sets of clothes each, the game moved pretty slowly. Sadly the bottle never went near Adrian. Malcolm got impatient with the evening’s pace and mooned everyone; unfortunately this was the moment that our parents walked in the door.
    After our first foray into nude gambling, we girls began to play strip poker on our own. Strip poker gave us insight into one another’s progress through the mysterious, and mostly gross, miracle of puberty. Some of us had breasts, some of us had hair in new places, some had neither. The dark light we chose to play in obscured anything else. Our cousin Dotty was the oldest of all of us and we were in awe of her breasts.
    They were huge and Dotty was understandably very proud of them. Dotty had always been big. At least once a day someone called her names like huge cow, fat slob, and lazy pig. Adults can be very cruel. Unfortunately, having a life-long experience with obesity did not make the insults go down easier. But, the breasts took the sting out of the insults about her weight.
    â€œI don’t know why they tease me,” Dotty said to me one day. “It just makes me eat more.”
    â€œTell me about it,” I said, as I tossed another handful of potato chips into my mouth.
    At the end of July, Auntie Beth had enough of living out of a suitcase and decided it was time to return home. My brother, sister and I begged my mom to let us go visit our cousins in