The Dump Story
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In Eighth Grade I had a major crush on Jason Dibbies. There was no good reason for the crush as far as I could tell, besides the fact that Jason’s glasses never got foggy — which, everyone can agree, is an impressive feat to pull off. Sometimes other boys’ glasses got foggy and you couldn’t see their eyes, which I absolutely could not stand. If you can’t see their eyes, you can’t tell whether or not they are going to attack you. At least, I think I heard that somewhere. Anyways, you could always see Jason’s.
But there was really no other reason for the crush. We’d never even spoken to each other.
One morning I was staring at Jason in the hallway before school as he blew on his coffee to cool it down. Even as he blew, his glasses didn’t get foggy. Not even a little bit. I was staring at him not because I was obsessed with him or anything, but because he was using a regular coffee mug, rather than a travel mug. I couldn’t believe that someone would have the audacity to bring a normal coffee mug to school. What if it spilled? Or broke?? I nudged a random girl who was leaning against the wall next to me:
“Can you believe that?” I said, tilting my head over in Jason’s direction. She looked up at me groggily, then over at Jason, then back at me.
“Ugh, I know,” she replied, “It’s absolutely disgusting. I’ll tell my policeman dad about it at dinner tonight.”
I realized she wasn’t talking about Jason, but the gigantic pile of garbage right next to Jason that reached all the way to the ceiling. It appeared as though the town’s new garbage man, Harold, had dumped the garbage into the school hallway thinking that the school was the dump. This had happened three times now, and no one had corrected him yet. Nobody in town knew where the real dump was because the previous garbage man, Harry, had kept it a secret and then died. I thought that someone should probably do something about the whole situation soon since there were large packs of rats running around the school, but it also wasn’t any of my business, and rats loved me.
“I’m not talking about the stupid garbage!” I yell-whispered, “I’m talking about Jason!”
“What about Jason?”
“His mug!”
“What the hell about his mug?”
“Come on, lady, use your brain!” I almost accidentally spit on her, “he’s using a regular mug! With no top!”
“So what??”
“What do you mean, ‘so what?’ It could spill! What if it spills?”
She looked me up and down patronizingly, like a therapist or something.
“You need a therapist,” she said calmly, and left for whatever dumb class she was going to.
“You need a therapist!”
She didn’t hear me.
That was it. I decided I would have to take matters into my own hands.
I ripped a small piece of paper out of a notebook in my backpack, and wrote “I love you” on it. Then, I marched over to Jason and swiftly dunked the note into his mug as hard as I possibly could. Lukewarm coffee splashed all over his shirt, my shirt, the pile of trash, and the floor.
“THAT’LL TEACH YOU TO PUT A TOP ON YOUR COFFEE MUG, JERK!”
My yell echoed through the hallway three times, and all the rats nearby stood up on their hind legs, confused. I ran away as fast as I could, without checking to see Jason’s reaction. The rats chased after me.
The next morning I found a note in my locker. In tiny, messy handwriting, it said, “Meet me in the science lab at 12:21pm.” I stared at the little note so hard that I got dizzy.
When I got to the lab, Jason was sitting on top of one of the long white tables. He had some beakers and was doing an experiment. When he saw me, he set the beakers down in front of him.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
We stared at each other.
“I had some trouble reading your note because it was all wet and soggy,” he said.
“Oh.” I ran my hand over a bunsen burner, pretending it was on.
“You love me?” he asked.
I guessed the truth was out since I forced it to be.
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Why?”
I considered mentioning the glasses thing but then decided not to.
“I don’t know. I just do,” I said, “can I go now?”
“Well… you can do whatever you want, but I wanted your help with something.”
My stomach sank. I thought he was going to say he loved me back, but that wouldn’t have made any sense.
“Uh, sure. What do you need help with?”
He looked down. With a pop, the experiment he had been doing made a tiny explosion, and green smoke rose up towards his face. He inhaled it.
“I can trust you, right?”
I didn’t know the answer to that because when I really tried to think about the question I couldn’t comprehend it.
“Of course,” I replied.
“I knew it.”
He slid down from the table and then leaned back against it with his arms crossed in front of him. He had very skinny arms.
“I know where the real dump is,” he said, “Harry told me. You know, the old garbageman?”
“Oh.” I’d thought I was the only one telling Jason important things lately.
“He’s not dead.”
“Huh?”
“Harry isn’t dead. He faked his death and then used the land that the old dump was on to build his dream home.”
I should’ve been outraged, but in the moment I decided that that was pretty badass.
“That’s pretty badass,” I said.
“I know. And he’s been letting me clean trash out of his pool for a little bit of extra money so that I can buy more of my mugs. I keep accidentally breaking them at school.”
I decided that was pretty dumb, so I pretended he’d never said it.
“Well, we can’t just let our school become the new dump. I don’t know why exactly, but we can’t.”
At that moment, a rat scurried into the room and started listening to our conversation.
“I know. That’s why I need your help. I need you to come with me and help me try to convince Harry to tear down his dream home and turn it back into a dump.”
“Why do you need my help?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t want to go alone, and you said you love me, so I know that I can trust you.”
That didn’t make any sense to me, but I went along with it because I wanted to keep talking to him.
“Okay. True. I’ll help you, I guess.”
He grabbed his backpack off the floor and made a weird smile at me.
“Cool. Let’s go.”
We both kicked the listening rat on the way out.
Jason and I stood in the doorway of Harry’s stinky dump-mansion. Harry, a very tall, muscular man, looked down at us under huge ginger eyebrows. I couldn’t believe he faked his death, considering how noticeable he was.
“You want me to tear down my dream home and turn it back into a dump?” he asked. His voice was deep like a dump truck.
“Yes,” I said.
He frowned at me.
“No,” he answered.
“Well then, I guess I’ll have to tell on you. To the police!”
I don’t know why I said that. I didn’t know how to contact the police.
He frowned at me even harder. I looked up at Jason, hoping he would step in, but he was silent, his face expressionless behind his spotless glasses.
“Come with me,” Harry said, “I want to tell you a story.”
We followed him into the mansion, through the grand foyer, past the marble staircase, through a vestibule that held an indoor swimming pool filled with trash, past a movie theater and massage room and a beautiful woman getting a massage — who I took to be Harry’s wife — through a “happy dining room” and a “sad dining room” (according to signs outside the doors), and finally out into the backyard, which featured a stone statue of an old woman.
“That’s my mother,” Harry said, pointing to the statue, “she was this town’s first garbage man — ”
“That’s some good quality stone,” I interrupted.
“ — and she died before she could build her dream house for her family.”
“Oh, sorry,” I said.
Jason still said nothing. He was starting to annoy me. He had brought me with him in order to help, but so far I was doing all the talking and messing everything up. I poked him in the ribs and he looked down at me, but still said nothing. What was his deal? He wasn’t trying to convince Harry of anything at all.
Harry gestured for us to sit on a bench, so we did. I was very aware that it was the first time I’d ever sat next to Jason, and so I could only half-focus on Harry’s story. He cleared his throat and began:
“When I was seventeen I met my beautiful wife who you saw in the massage room a few minutes ago. At first I thought she had it all and I envied her life. Her mother and father were famous real estate developers, and she lived in a gorgeous mansion, much like this one. Only it wasn’t so gorgeous on the inside. Her family was constantly fighting, and after we started dating she would take refuge at my modest dump-shack, which was like a castle to her. I vowed that one day I would build a real dump-castle that she could always be safe in, and now I have. And I don’t care if some people had to be inconvenienced as a result of it, because my wife was inconvenienced in that mansion her whole life, and look how she turned out.”
He leaned back and put his hands behind his head, like he’d just made some huge point. Maybe it was because I was only half-focused on the story, but it didn’t make any sense to me. I just nodded as though I understood without asking for clarification — which I know you shouldn’t do.
“What I’m trying to say to you kids, is that sometimes a dump isn’t a dump at all, and that also, anything can be a dump, all at the same time.”
I nodded again. Up and down.
Jason spoke for the first time:
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
“FINALLY, he speaks!” I exclaimed, poking him in the ribs again. He looked down at me with a confused expression.
“Huh?”
I stopped poking him.
“Uh, nothing, nothing.”
“OF COURSE it makes sense!” Harry said, “It makes all the sense in the world!”
“NO IT DOESN’T!” We both yelled at him, then looked at each other.
“This guy’s crazy,” I said to Jason.
He sighed.
“I know. I’ve known this entire time. I just wanted to make sure.”
“What? No I’m not!” Harry yelled.
“I’m going to call the police on you now,” Jason said, and whipped out a clunky cell phone.
I watched Jason in awe as he dialed for the police. He stayed completely calm even though Harry was screaming and throwing clumps of grass at him. His face did start to turn red though after a moment, so I could tell he was bothered. I did my best to try to deflect some of the clumps.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Jason mouthed to me, while listening to the police on the other line.
I was very glad I dunked that note in his coffee.
The next day I saw Jason blowing on his coffee in the hallway again before school started. The big pile of trash, and all of the rats, were gone.
I walked up to him with a big smile on my face, and —
“Oh my god, your glasses are all fogged up!” I gasped.
He tried to look at me but couldn’t because of the fog, so his head looked towards me.
“Yeah,” he said, “my coffee is hot today. Usually it’s only lukewarm.”
I looked down and saw that he was using a thermos instead of a normal mug.
“I can’t afford to buy new mugs anymore since I lost my job, so I have to use my dad’s thermos.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay. This is much easier anyways. I don’t know why I didn’t think to do this before.”
The fog on his glasses cleared.
“So I heard they turned Harry’s dream house back into a dump, and he had to move into a normal four-bedroom,” I said.
“Yeah, I feel bad about it,” he replied.
“Same.”
“I didn’t want to call the police, but I didn’t know what else to do. He was talking nonsense,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee.
“Well, yeah, it’s very important to be clear.”
He didn’t say anything in response.
“So, um, that reminds me to ask you…uh…” I hesitated.
“What?”
“Uh…do you, like, love me back?”
He took another sip of his coffee without answering and I looked away at the other kids in the hallway around us.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” he finally replied.
My stomach dropped. That was the second time it had dropped in two days, which was a lot. I stepped away from him, trying to look him up and down. I squinted my eyes but had trouble focusing on his entire figure at once. It seemed like he was looking back at me, but I couldn’t be sure. His glasses were all fogged up again which I absolutely could not stand.
“Okay,” I said. “Well, bye.”
“Oh. Uh, okay, bye,” he replied.
I didn’t know what else to say then, so I walked away.
