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Show 40 Simpsons instead. Sure, and maybe while we're at it we can ask God to cancel church this Sunday and we'll stay home and gamble on football games. Missing family dinner altogether is also out (If that's how you want to repay your mother for making this meal for us, that's your choice), so I'm here. But I eat my potatoes fast. By the time Mr. Edwards has to fake Rose's death because she has been declared a danger and a menace for hitting Nellie in the face, I am finished and ask if I can clear my plate and be excused. I am seventeen, and I've been waiting all day for night to flood the city, for family dinner to be over so I can meet my friends at the park. We meet at Anderson Park because it's a private park. Even though the sign says there's a dusk to dawn curfew, no police patrols ever come by, and there are ten foot lights guarding the pavilion at every angle. The lights shine all night long, so at any hour you can read the Fuckyous and numbers to call for a good time etched into the metal benches, and you can see bodies moving on the grass, too. The park is hard to find if you haven't lived in Pleasant Grove, Utah your whole life. It's pocketed at the back of a residential neighborhood, and can easily be mistaken for a rich person's yard if you don't see the green sign. It takes twenty minutes to walk there from my house. I walk through the orchard, always on the lookout for deer, and then up Locust Avenue. I cut through Pleasant Grove High School, across the football field and up the bleachers. I cross the street and take Anderson Way. The park is the dot of a question mark at the end of a curving Dead End. |
