Muchacho by Louanne Johnson

Author:Louanne Johnson [Johnson, LouAnne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-89355-1
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2009-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

STICK TO THE DEAD DOG

A COUPLE WEEKS AGO, MR. MCELROY WROTE THE WORDS ARGUMENT and fight on the board and then he drew a line through fight and said an argument isn’t a fight with a winner and a loser, it’s just people exchanging ideas—which is exactly the kind of thing that teachers say and you wonder if they can hear how stupid they sound and do they really believe all that crap. I never heard anybody have an argument where they exchange ideas like old baseball cards. If it’s my uncles, they start out trading jokes and then insults and then punches. If it’s me and Papi, we skip the jokes and the insults.

McElroy made us read this whole article about how to argue the right way, like you have to stick to the topic of your argument the whole way. You can’t bring in all the stuff you’ve been saving up to nuke the other guy with. So, if some dickhead got drunk and ran over your dog, you had to just say how sad you were to lose your pup and not bring up the fact that the same guy borrowed your lawn mower and brought it back with a broken starter or came over your house to watch the Super Bowl and drank seventeen beers and then never even invited you over his house to watch his new plasma TV.

You have to just stick to that dead dog. And you can’t do all the normal argument stuff like call the other person names, or break some dishes, or scream your guts out, or take off and don’t come back until tomorrow, or turn up the stereo so loud you can’t hear the other person and you both get brain damage. You can’t even do little shit like say the other guy is a liar and a freaking loser who can’t even afford his own lawn mower. You have to say everything from your point of view, like instead of saying, “You’re a selfish dickhead for borrowing my shit and bringing it back broken,” you have to say, “I feel like you don’t value my friendship or respect my property.”

I totally forgot all about that argument crap until Lupe got so mad she almost broke up with me. It’s not like we never had a fight before, but usually we just have those little kinds that you can get over pretty fast if you go out and eat some good green chile enchiladas in a dark place that has a little candle on the table so you look real handsome, or if you rent a movie and sit on opposite ends of the couch with the soles of your bare feet touching each other for the whole thing even if you feel like grabbing each other’s nalgas halfway through.

But this time nothing worked even though the whole thing seemed pretty lame to me. Lupe got so mad just because me and her have a whole different idea about time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.