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  Zits: Shredded

  Copyright © 2014 by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman

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  Library of Congress catalog card number: 2013953797

  ISBN 978-0-06-222853-6

  EPUB Edition February 2014 ISBN 9780062228543

  14 15 16 17 18 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FIRST EDITION

  For the King Features folks, who go

  the extra mile for us day after day after day:

  Rocky Shepard, Keith McCloat, Brendan Burford,

  Frank Caruso, Claudia Smith, John Killian, Richard

  Heimlich, Jack Walsh, Dennis Danko, Lou Albert,

  Mike Mancino, Robin Graham, John Perry,

  and Evelyn Smith

  CHAPTER 1

  hat’s the trouble with milking french fries—slippery

  elbows. Once you’ve been at it for a couple of hours,

  T

  you get a grease slick down your forearms that threatens

  your stability. One careless bump from, say, your 230-pound

  sumo-size best friend and you can go skidding forward across

  the table, sending a giant cup of your morning’s work sliding

  ahead of you. As in just now. We all freeze as the oily Big Slurp

  teeters on the edge, and then dumps about seventeen fossil

  fuel–free miles onto the floor and into the crisp cuffs of some

  salesman’s khakis.

  Ever since we had the van converted to run on veggie oil,

  Hector, Pierce, and I have been scrounging stray fries and

  orphan onion rings off abandoned fast-food trays and squeez-

  ing the free mileage out of them. It’s annoyingly slow, and even

  if we’re careful we can’t get more than a cup of grease out of

  a small order of fries. There are sixteen cups in a gallon, and

  the van has a ten-gallon tank. Do the math. There’s no way I’m

  wasting this puddle of liquid freedom.

  “Don’t just sit there,” I yell. “SCOOP!” Pierce dives for the

  floor, and Hector grabs a spare cup while I try to surround the

  pool of oil that’s spreading slowly across the table.

  Before long, we salvage most of the spill, and I carefully

  snap a plastic lid on the cup. Out of the corner of my eye, I see

  the salesman guy flipping us off on his way out the door.

  “What’s his problem?” I ask.

  “No idea,” says Pierce. “Dude was slapping at me with the

  comics section the whole time I was under his table. Talk

  about anger issues!”

  Hector scrolls through the apps on his phone, and then taps

  the maps icon. He sits up really straight and gets this weird,

  plastic look on his face.

  “Contestants,” he rumbles in a deep, corny announcer

  voice. “The category is Historic Cool Places We Should Visit.”

  “Can we just have a normal conversation for once?” Pierce

  moans. “As in, ‘If you were going to get a Renaissance painting

  tattooed on the roof of your mouth, what would it be?’”

  Ignoring him, Hector goes on. “This band famously

  played a nineteen-hour jam at the Pioneer Inn in Nederland,

  Colorado, that launched their career. You have five seconds.”

  Then he starts to hum that Jeopardy tune. Hector’s game-show

  host imitation always cracks me

  up. I hate that buzzer of his,

  though.

  “Does anybody

  have a guess?”

  Hector prides

  himself on

  his obscure

  rock trivia, and he totally thinks he has me stumped. I fan the

  air and raise my hand.

  “Who is the String Cheese Incident? Duh. Does anybody

  not know that?” Hector slumps back down to his normal pos-

  ture and mumbles something in Spanish. He hates it when I

  get these answers right.

  “AARGH! I knew that one,” Pierce howls and then pops a

  mutant onion ring in his mouth. A half

  second later he remembers where

  we found those onion rings.

  “Dude! Keep your head in

  the game! That’s free

  fuel you’re wasting,” I

  yell.

  “Sorry . . . sorry,”

  he mumbles as he

  wipes his tongue

  on his T-shirt,

  then wrings his T-shirt into the cup. Then we all get back to

  the business of milking french fries.

  Converting the van to run on veggie oil has been kind of a

  hassle, to tell you the truth. It all started when Sara came back

  from an OSSWRAC (Overly Strident Students World Resource

  Austerity Conference) in Columbus last fall. She was all hyped

  up about stuff like eliminating fossil fuels and stopping global

  warming. I was picking her up after band practice when out of

  nowhere she gets this amazing idea:

  Who knows what inspires these insights? At the time, it

  seemed like an awesomely excellent suggestion, but let’s face

  it, almost any suggestion is awesomely excellent when the

  suggester is a hot girl wearing skinny jeans, boots, and a tight

  tank top. I mentioned it to Hector, who mentioned it to Pierce,

  who called his uncle, the motorcycle mechanic, who happened

  to know everything there is to know about converting diesel

  engines to run on veggie oil. He got his automotive training at

  an ashram in Bhutan, so he’s a master of reincarnated engines.

  And he knows his yaks, too.

  There were a couple of problems to overcome right away,

  like the fact that the van didn’t have a diesel engine and it

  was going to cost way more than we could afford. But Pierce’s

  mom stepped in and traded Pierce’s uncle the bail money he

  still owed her for the cost of converting the van. We even got

  to help with the conversion, which we all found educational.

  After about a hundred trips to the junkyard and a month

  of weekends, we actually got the van’s new used diesel engine

  running on recycled veggie oil. And even though it can be

  kind of a pain to scrounge for used grease, the van is more

  awesome than ever because (1) it’s überly good for the planet

  (the van’s old motor put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to melt

  an iceberg),

  (2) it’s a total chick magnet,

  and (3) it always smells like french fries.

  Combine that with the fact that the fuel is basically free

  and available in any fast-food Dumpster or alley and you have

  a win-win-win-win situation.

>   I squeegee another drop of oil into a fresh cup and catch a

  glimpse of Hector tapping on his phone screen again. We’ve

  been working out the route of our Epic Summer Road Trip

  since we bought the van. The plan is to take off the day after

  we graduate and spend the summer rolling down the highway

  on good karma and fast-food squeezings. Yeah, okay, it’s still

  a ways off, but a journey of this magnitude takes serious plan-

  ning. Hector switches off his calculator app and announces,

  “At twenty-five miles per gallon, the String Cheese detour to

  Colorado would take just over forty-nine gallons of grease.”

  “Totally agree,” I say. “Add it to the itinerary.” And then we

  all groan as a big jock at the next table downs two huge fistfuls

  of fries whose partially hydrogenated innards would have got-

  ten us halfway to St. Louis.

  “Let’s get back to Midwest destinations,” suggests Hector.

  He holds his phone up for Pierce and me to see. “I think it’s

  pretty clear that there’s nothing really interesting between

  Moline, Illinois (the birthplace of three of the founding mem-

  bers of Flatulent Rat), and Hibbing, Minnesota (the boyhood

  home of Bob Dylan), agreed?”

  “Just Chicago,” shrugs Pierce.

  “Right. So it only makes sense that we’d head west from

  Hibbing and drive straight through to Jamestown, North

  Dakota.”

  “Correct,” says Hector. “And the next logical stop would

  be . . . ?”

  “Jerome, Arizona, home of the world’s best buffalo-wing

  restaurant,” I answer, channeling his brain.

  “I love it when a plan comes together,” Hector says, topping

  off another cup of grease. Then something outside catches my

  eye. Climbing over Hector and standing on the back of his

  chair is the only way I can really see through the giant danc-

  ing cheeseburger that’s covering most of the window. I’m no

  advertising expert, but does this restaurant really believe that

  an anthropomorphic sandwich with a top hat is going to make

  me hungrier? Doubtful.

  Anyway, by lining my head up just right to look through

  the cheeseburger’s monocle I can see Sara’s tan 2005 Sensible

  Boringmobile ease into a spot at the far end of the parking lot.

  She says that she likes to park in the very last space because

  there’s less chance of her car doors getting dented, but I think

  it’s because her car is so incredibly bland that it’s the only way

  she can find it later.

  “Sara, D’ijon, and Autumn just pulled in,” I report, scram-

  bling back over Hector’s shoulders.

  “Are they coming in here?”

  Pierce asks as we all

  grab for our

  phones.

  After a quick look-check, we try to think of a way to seem

  all casual and bored. It’s important that a guy never appear

  eager or needy in front of females; they can smell pathetic a

  mile away. So we all get ourselves arranged in our best fake

  kick-back poses right as the girls roll in the door. Sara looks

  around the restaurant, points at us, and then they all stroll

  over to our totally relaxed corner. The element of cool is on

  our side.

  Okay . . . WAS on our side.

  CHAPTER 2

  umped. Yeah, not my favorite word. When I was in the

  fifth grade, I was the only one out of the fifteen kids who

  D

  tried out for basketball that didn’t make the team. The offi-

  cial reason was that they only had fourteen team uniforms,

  but it felt more like being dumped. I think the whole thing

  would have blown over fairly quickly if the coach hadn’t tried

  to make it all better by naming me Head Male Cheerleader as

  a consolation prize. Thanks for the popularity boost, Coach! I

  spent the whole basketball season faking laryngitis and forg-

  ing excuse notes from my mom. To this day I get queasy at the

  sight of a pom-pom.

  “Dumped is a strong word,” I squeak, bracing myself for

  the millionth discussion with Sara about us. She seems to eas-

  ily surf the waves of relationship junk between us, while I get

  caught in every boy-girl riptide and undertow there is. I guess

  that putting up with these emotional slogathons every few

  weeks is the price a horndog like me pays to keep my name

  in the same sentence with a hot girl like Sara. But as I men-

  tally line up my usual set of all-purpose apologies and peace

  offerings, I realize something isn’t adding up. This was a mass

  dumping? Did these three just get picked up by a roving band

  of triplets in the parking lot?

  “You’re right, I need a stronger word,” she says. “How about

  rejected? Or burned?”

  Then D’ijon jumps in to put a point on it.

  For a few seconds Pierce, Hector, and I don’t say anything

  while that image sets up camp in our brains. When the silence

  lasts too long and

  Sara can see that

  our minds have

  wandered, she

  herds them

  back to real-

  ity with a little

  clarification.

  Oh. That. Whew.

  For those who haven’t heard, or may be living in a cave

  somewhere without Wi-Fi or a decent smartphone, Connor

  Mattson throws the best party of the year, every year. Period.

  The dude’s birthdays are epic for two reasons: his parents, who

  are never there. We actually got to play a set at his last party,

  back when we were still calling ourselves Chickenfist, and we

  were happy to grovel for the chance. Mattson never respected

  us, I could tell, but he was desperate because his usual band,

  Lung Mustard, was breaking up over “creative differences.”

  (The creative differences happened when their bass player’s

  mom read the explicit version of the lyrics to his newest song,

  “Exacerbation.” They say that she backed her minivan over

  his amp and donated his guitar to the PTA’s Monkees cover

  band. The poor guy is now playing clarinet in the marching

  band and spending the rest of his time collecting socks for the

  homeless.)

  Mattson acted all grateful when we said yes and then air-

  penciled us in for the party next month, but I always wondered

  if he really meant it. Whatever. Goat Cheese Pizza remains

  dumped and that causes a serious crapification of everyone’s

  mood. Then Sara cheers us down even further by suddenly

  changing the subject to college application deadlines. I swear,

  this girl’s brain cells ping around like a handful of marbles in a

  food processor. I don’t feel like talking about anything having

  to do with school, so I grab her hand and climb over Hector.

  “I need some air. Let’s drive.” Hector and Pierce grab the

  three cups of french fry grease we’ve collected and we all head

  for the van. I get there first, automatically making me the

  driver. Pierce and Hector funnel the precious oil into the fuel

  tank while I hold the doors open for the girls. Two minutes and

  eleven conversations later, we’re
rolling.

  As usual, everybody ignores me, so I do what I always do

  and just free-style it. There’s nothing like driving, especially

  when there are other people in the car. With the (obvious)

  exception of my mom, I like to listen to people talk when I’m

  behind the wheel and just get lost in the experience. Not lost

  like Pierce-lost (the guy has an epically bad sense of direc-

  tion), but just living in the moment.

  “Hello? Can we get back to the college applications?” D’ijon

  is pretty intense when it comes to her education, and a col-

  lective groan circulates through the van when she asks, “Is

  anybody besides me worried about this community service

  project requirement?”

  I make a right turn because right turns tend to make the

  engine run a little better. Pierce says that he’s going to fig-

  ure out why that happens, but it doesn’t really bother me too

  much. I’m good at right turns, so maybe it’s just one of those

  things that’s meant to be, you know?

  D’ijon has everybody’s attention, so she keeps rolling.

  “Okay, first of all? I do NOT think it’s fair that the rest of us

  have to compete with people like Gilbert or Phoebe.” We all

  mutter in agreement. “I mean, those people have been geek-

  ing out on service and charity projects since they were in

  elementary school. Their extracurricular activities résumés

  would make Gandhi look like a slacker!

  Does that sound like a level playing field to you?”

  “Well, it—” starts Hector.

  The thing you need to know about D’ijon is that when she

  asks a question, she pretty much has the answer she wants

  in her head already. Coming up with your own is not always a

  great idea.

  “The answer is no because the

  rest of us have not had the oppor-

  tunity to focus on others because

  we have been busy creating the

  selves we have become. Do I

  hear an amen?”