Extreme Elvin Read Free Page B

A whole season changed while you were in there. New colors, new fabrics.”
    Can’t believe I fell for it. I stuck my head out through the curtain again, and they nabbed me. Frank grabbed my head, Mikie ran into the dressing room and collected all my old clothes, shoes, everything, and the salesman led the group of us to the register.
    “He’ll take this,” somebody said, the voice muffled by the arm around my head.
    But they were right. I looked smashing. Once I got my shoes on I was a new man, and all I wanted to do was parade around that mall and check myself out in every store window. The shirt was one of those granddad things, with about a hundred buttons running between the straight-up collar and the navel, where the button deal stopped entirely. A button-down shirt that you still have to pull over head! Madness. Fashion genius. I could feel everybody looking at me, and well they should, with that one subtle-but-daring powder-blue stripe running between each pair of brown stripes. Imagine!
    And brown jeans. You heard me. Brown. I looked at my reflection in the Puppy Palace and had to just shake my head. Brown jeans. Not the basic boring blue jeans. Not even the now-cliched black jeans. Even the drug-addicted dogs of Puppy Palace sat up and took notice. Right, well they didn’t sit up exactly, not all the way up, but their heads lifted, a couple of them, with the drool making wood shavings stick to their chins like little goat beards.
    Maybe somebody would buy them, finally, if they were disguised as goats.
    Even the hopeless basset hound—who had been sitting right there in that front window since the mall opened in 1987, who couldn’t even remember being a puppy (and judging from his glassy eyes couldn’t remember this morning), who had been reduced to fifteen dollars with a coupon for a ten-pound bag of dry dog food—even he dragged himself closer to the glass and checked me out. I read his floppy brown felt lips.
    “Wow,” the basset hound said.
    Then he fell over dead. Finally, mercifully, dead. I killed him.
    That, ladies and gentlemen, is a fashion statement.
    “Oh, he is not dead, ya jerk,” Frankie said as he walked on ahead. “He always sleeps like that.”
    Mikie went up close to the glass. “I don’t know, Franko. His nose is pressed right up to the window, and he’s not fogging it.”
    “He hasn’t been able to fog the glass since that little girl dropped him at the sidewalk sale.”
    “Maybe if he’s dead,” Mike mused, “we could go in and see if they’ll let us have him for a fiver. The bag of food is worth that much, and I can bring that home to feed to Freckles, my hamster, for the rest of his life.”
    Frankie laughed. Obviously these guys were not as tuned as I to the bigness of this moment. I had just gone from portly ragbag to Killer Joe Ladyslayer in one afternoon. The dance was two days away, and I didn’t even want to go to sleep until then. I picked up the pace and led the boys on a few brisk laps of the mall. We looked like one of those old-dude mallwalker exercise clubs.
    “I can’t wait for the Ball now.”
    “The Ball?” they both yiked at once.
    “Elvin, calm thyself, all right?” Mike said. “This isn’t a ball. It’s not even a real dance, really. It’s like... a lab exercise. Almost like a cross between an extra gym class and a social skills seminar.”
    “It’s for scouting reports, really,” Franko said. “So they can tell right off the bat who they gotta keep tabs on.” He put his fists on his narrow hips and looked me and Mikie up and down. “You guys are safe. But they’re gonna make me wear one of those electronic monitor ankle bracelets for the whole year once they see me dance.”
    I’ve seen him dance. Without a girl, even. Saw him in his basement, demonstrating moves with a full-length mirror reflective version of himself. He should wear one of those anklets. He should wear one on each ankle. And they should be linked together with a