Stealing Butterflies

Chapter Fifteen

                 

My favorite book when I was a kid was Green Eggs and Ham.

            Mom would read it every night, but I would always just look at the pictures. I thought that if I ignored the words, then the monsters wouldn't attack me. When I was six, I demanded that she make me a plate of green-goo colored eggs, which she did on my birthday, probably just to get me to shut up about it.

            I, brilliant mini-me, decided it would be smart to throw them on the ground. Because, well, the dude in the book didn't like them, right? But she just got angry. Not about the eggs, like I would have expected, but at herself. Supposedly, since I didn't actually know the end of the story she'd read to me for four years straight, that made her a "terrible mother."

            I think it's just more evidence toward my poor observation skills.

            She started crying, so I stuck my fingers in my ears and sang the one Christmas carol I knew until she stopped. And no, I don't know why, but that was my immediate response to sadness as a child. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer just helped, I guess.

Then I forced her to read the book to me again.

            So, in case you were wondering, the story rolls out like this: this guy, Sam-I-am, really hates green eggs and their matching meat counterparts. His buddy is trying to convince him to try them throughout the entire story, but he won't, until the end, where he finds out that, really and truly, the food is pretty damn good.

            Jacob is a lot like the friend.

            He's always trying to tell people things, only, because he doesn't talk much, nobody takes him all that seriously.  He never quits though, just keeps yammering and prodding you and being downright annoying until somebody finally gives in and pretends to go with it.

            Maybe that's what Sam-I-am did too.

            I mean, that was like nine pages of some punk rhyming at you. That's got to get annoying, after awhile.  I bet he just got sick of really catchy lines about foxes and boxes and goats and boats, and finally caved.

            It's what I've always done when Jake gets super determined.

            So as we were standing in Katie's living room arguing over the fundamentals of what made us hippies, and the point to shaving our heads, life, the universe and everything, Jake was getting rather frustrated.

            "I've got a tattoo, too," I finally said, breaking into the Jerk-Master's rant about the morals of permanent ink, and how he was convinced Jake had been stone cold drunk when he got his circles.

            "Really?" the girl, who'd I'd learned was named Alex asked, crunching her eyebrows together.

            "Yeah," I said, pulling up the front of my shirt for the big unveiling. I pointed to the skin above my hipbone, where a black hawk had its wings stretched out. It wasn't all that big, really, but the three people on the couch were staring at me as if it was eight feet long.

            "Oh my God," Alex said.

            "You must've been really drunk," King-Douche added.

            "What does it mean?" Katie asked.

            She'd been the only one out of the little group of non-believers who actually listened to Jake's explanation.

            "Freedom, I suppose," I said. "I don't know where I'm going yet, so, I'm just kind of coasting along. Soaring around until I find out."