by Brian Adams
“Mr. Cooper. The science teacher. He’s going to be our advisor. The Big KABOOM.”
Sadie collapsed into a chair in the shade and began furiously fanning herself. She reached into her purse and brought out a mirror and lipstick and began beautifying.
“Mr. Cooper,” she said. “Mr. Cooper. Well, loddy-doddy. Imagine that.” Lipstick done, she reached back into her purse and brought out a hair brush, took the sun hat off her head, and began even more grooming.
“Do you think he needs an assistant?” she asked. “You know, someone to bring snacks to meetings and all? You girls are going to have your work cut out for you.” Sadie opened yet another bag of Cheetos.
“It takes fuel to function, girls.”
She started fanning herself in even more of a frenzy.
“My goodness,” Sadie said. “Is it me or has it just gotten much hotter out here?” Ashley and I looked at each other in amazement.
•
“I can’t believe it,” Ashley said. We were riding our bikes home, relieved to feel the breeze in our faces. “Sadie has the hots for Coop.”
“Stop it, Ashley,” I said.
“Who would have thought?” Ashley continued. “Sadie and Mr. Cooper. Imagine that!”
“No thank you,” I said, stifling the gag reflex.
“I mean, oh my God! What if it all works out? What if they hook up? What if they have sex?”
My bike swerved and I almost ran off the road.
“Seriously, Ashley! I’m begging you! For the love of Tom, no more!”
“What position do you think they’d use? Her on top could kill him!”
“That would be horrible!” I said, desperately trying to banish the image from my head.
“Damn right it would be horrible. Worse than horrible! We’d lose the battle. We’d lose everything. If they did the dirty? If they sealed the deal? That beast with two backs would move mountains all right! It would cause an effin earthquake! It would blow the top off Tom! KABOOM! Right then and there! No need for dynamite. One shaboink from the two of them, even a bump-nasty quickie and Tom is history!”
I shifted gears and upped my speed and raced ahead to get out of earshot.
29
“I SUGGEST,” Mr. Cooper said, looking straight at us, “that you stick with the legal.”
We were sitting in Coop’s room after school, planning the first meeting of KABOOM for Thursday.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, trying my best to avoid eye contact with Ashley.
Mr. Cooper’s eyebrows arched upwards.
“What you two do on your own time is none of my business,” he said. “And think carefully, very carefully, about what you choose to divulge to me about those activities. Perhaps the classic ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ strategy might work the best here.”
Ashley and I looked at the floor.
“But what goes on in this club of yours must and will remain legal. Do you understand me, girls? Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
We looked at each other and nodded our heads.
“As long as that’s settled I have your backs,” Coop continued. “I trust you girls to do the right thing. You’re smart, you’re courageous, and your hearts are in the right place.”
I looked over at Ashley and she was beaming. No teacher had ever called her smart before.
“KABOOM is yours,” he said. “You can come to me for advice, encouragement, support, whatever. But the club is yours.”
Ashley scooted her chair closer to mine.
“You know this is not going to be an easy sell,” he said.
We nodded.
“I don’t want you to be disappointed at the turnout. It may be a club of two.”
“You mean three,” I said.
Mr. Cooper smiled.
“You’re up against a formidable foe. American’s got the odds stacked against you. It’s a David versus Goliath thing.”
“Yeah,” Ashley said. “And David won.”
Latin. History. Now Bible trivia? There was nothing out of reach for Ashley’s intellect.
Mr. Cooper took out his flosser, twirled it around in his fingers, thought for a moment, and then put it back into his shirt pocket.
“I’ll be in the teacher’s room if you need me,” he said. “Knock on the door when you’re done.”
•
We had gotten a stash of poster board and markers from the art room to make signs for the meeting.
Ms. Fogg-Willits, the art teacher, was another exception to the “Teachers as Nazis” rule. She was young and pretty and fresh out of college. She hadn’t had the time to get jaded and cynical about what artistic morons most of us were. She would jabber nonstop about the “intensity of color” and “the need to blend light and shadow” and how Renoir and Monet and van Gogh were to be worshipped as art gods. No one ever had a clue as to what she was talking about but it was a fun class, and on rare occasions I even brought home something actually worth taping to the refrigerator.
“I just think it’s a terrible thing how they want to take the top off that mountain!” Ms. Fogg-Willits told us. “Absolutely terrible. David Hunter Strother would roll over in his grave, poor thing, if he knew what was going on. You take all of the art supplies you need, girls. And you come back anytime for more. My door is always open.”
“Who’s David Hunter Bother?” I asked Ashley.
“Strother,” Ashley said. “Some 1800s illustrator dude. Born across the valley in Martinsburg. I guess he was pretty famous back in the day. Maybe he painted a picture of Mount Tom or something.”
Like I told you: Ashley knew everything.
We were going to hang the posters that we made around school to advertise our first meeting. Ashley had drawn a first draft similar to the T-shirt design she had made last spring for the mascot audition. The one with the hillbilly coal miner holding a jug of whiskey.
“That’s so overplayed!” I said. “Why not take out the jug and have him smoking crystal meth instead? Much more up-to-date.”
“You don’t like it?” Ashley said. “You don’t think it’s a good idea?”
“I like it,” I said. “I’m all for stupid West Virginia stereotypes. But it’s been done. Maybe we should try for something else? Anyway, the hillbilly looks like he’s got a hard-on. And it seems as though he’s humping the mountain, not hugging it.”
“Details, details!” Ashley said, erasing away.
Eventually we settled on a picture we both liked: still a hillbilly hugging Mount Tom, but Tom didn’t look like just a mountain, it looked like the whole earth. Written on the side of the earth-mountain was “Mount Tom.” The hugging hillbilly’s T-shirt said “Save the Endangered Hillbilly.”
Underneath the picture it read:
KABOOM!
KIDS AGAINST BLOWING OFF OUR MOUNTAINTOPS
FIRST MEETING: THURSDAY AT 2:45 ROOM 205
SAVE MOUNT TOM!
SAY NO TO MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL!
I did the writing. Ashley did the drawing. In an hour and a half we had made six beautiful posters and hung them around the school, one of them conspicuously close to Kevin Malloy’s and Marc Potvin’s lockers.
We were psyched, ready to roll.
Game on!
30
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Ashley and I were in the middle of science class doing an experiment to see if planarian, a type of flatworm, would move away from light. We couldn’t for the life of us figure out why we should actually give a crap, but it was Mr. Cooper’s class so we were doing our best to pretend that we actually cared.
Suddenly the classroom phone rang. Mr. Cooper answered.
“Cynthia,” he said. “Ashley. To the principal’s office. Now.”
Mr. Cooper gave us the look as we silently filed out of his classroom.
“Shit!” Ashley whispered, clutching my arm as we waited outside Principal Miller’s door.
“Double shit!” I whispered back.
“Do you think
he knows about the flags? Do you think he somehow found out? We’re screwed, Cyndie. We’re totally screwed!”
If there was one way to get the principal’s attention in our school it was vandalism. Principal Miller hated it. He hated it with a passion. A year ago kids had broken into the school one weekend and spray-painted lockers and his office door with dirty words. Ever since then he had had it in for vandals. You could come to school loaded, curse out a teacher, or even punch another student now and then and just get a few weeks of detention. But woe to those who vandalized! If capital punishment were legal at Greenfield High School, vandals would have their heads chopped off. Miller would be judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one. Down would come the guillotine: chop, chop, chop!
Hence the principal’s Sermon on the Mount about the flag incident.
We already knew that Miller was not on our side on Mount Tom.
“Coal keeps the lights on!” read the bumper sticker on his car.
“Got a job? Thank a miner!” was proudly displayed on the door of his office.
He was the lead singer in the coal choir. Two years earlier, American had donated money to buy a new scoreboard for the football stadium. A year later they outfitted one of the computer labs with new Macs.
Miller was their lap dog. American would throw and he’d fetch. They’d say the word and he’d sit, shake, and roll on over.
“As much as I hate school I’m going to miss it when we’re in prison!” Ashley whispered. “Do you think they’ll let us room together?”
Not exactly comforting words.
After what seemed like a forever of math classes, the secretary finally ushered us into the principal’s office.
Miller was clearly pissed.
“I am furious!” he thundered, his pencil-thin moustache quivering. “I will not tolerate this type of behavior in my school!”
I could feel the shudders running through Ashley.
“Vandalism is the lowest of crimes. The very lowest of the low!”
All we could do was to look down and wait for the axe to fall.
I felt sorry for my neck. It was going to miss having my head on it. And if, I wondered, I were miraculously spared the guillotine, then what would the punishment be? Suspension? Expulsion? Waterboarding? Doing time with meth heads in juvenile lockup? That would be the hell side of horrible.
Maybe we could say we thought someone was littering. That was it! That was our defense. We removed the flags from Mount Tom because it was litter. Weakest excuse ever but maybe, just maybe, it could work.
“I think, I think, I think I can explain,” I managed to stammer. “There is a reason for what happened.” Ashley looked up at me with terror in her eyes.
“I don’t care what the reason is!” Miller boomed, banging his fist on his office desk and almost knocking his moustache off. “There is never an excuse for vandalism!”
The principal reached down under his desk. Ashley and I flinched. I thought he was reaching for an axe to behead us with.
From behind his desk he brought out the posters we had made. Four were ripped to shreds. The other two had been totally vandalized.
Kids For Blowing Off Our Mountaintops, one read.
BLOW UP MOUNT TOM.
SAY YES TO MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL.
The other poster had been altered to have the hillbilly sport a massive erection with the words FUK YOU written across the top.
“I’ll be honest with you,” Miller said. “I was not happy when you put those posters up. Not happy at all. I think you’re naïve, I think you’re misguided, and I think you’re just plain wrong about this issue. We all owe a tremendous amount of thanks to American for all they’ve done for our town and our school.
“But as unhappy as I was to see those posters go up, I was even less happy to see them come down.
“I may totally disagree with you about this issue, but, like it or not, it is my job to support your right to free expression. This is, after all, what school is all about. But vandalism! Vandalism! If I catch the people who did this . . .”
Miller’s face went all squishy and he furiously licked the bottom of his ’stache. As terrified as I still was it was hard not to laugh.
“Please accept my heartfelt apologies,” he said. He held out his hand and, still shaky, we both shook it.
•
“Oh my God,” I said as, arm in arm, Ashley and I happily skipped down the hall back to science class. “Miller may be psycho but he’s not half bad! And do the yahoos seriously not even know how to spell fuck? Could anyone be that stupid?”
“You got to give them credit,” Ashley said, laughing. “The ’billy’s boner wasn’t half bad either.”
31
IT HAD BEEN FOUR DAYS since Kevin had given me a ride home from the battlefield. The good thing about Kevin not being into texting was that I didn’t have to stare at my phone for hours on end, checking it 500 times a day, thinking that he might just possibly text me. (I only checked my phone 200 times a day, just in case he changed his mind).
Kevin had come up to me in between classes on Monday.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said.
“Have you thought about it?” he asked.
“Thought about what?” I answered, playing dumb. As if I hadn’t been thinking about it for days.
“About going to the dance thing. The cotillion. I know it’s a ways away. Maybe we could, you know, hang out before that. Do something together.”
“Like what? Please don’t tell me you want me to lose the hoop skirt, dress like a soldier and march beside you into battle?”
“You know,” Kevin said. “Girls really did that.”
“Did what?”
“Dressed as men and went off to fight in the Civil War.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Did any men dress in hoop skirts and stay behind to dance in cotillions?” I asked. Just then the bell rang and we hustled back to class.
•
“What are you doing?” Ashley asked on our walk home. She stopped, grabbed me my shoulders and shook me. “Are you crazy? Are you nuts? Are you totally and completely insane? The biggest moment of your life and you ask him if he’ll dress in a hoop skirt?”
“I didn’t ask him that!”
“Whatever! Enough of the stalling, Cyndie! He’s going to think you’re not into him. He’s going to think you’re a weirdo! For the love of Tom, just say yes!”
“I was trying to,” I pleaded.
“Don’t try, do!”
“We ran out of time!”
“Lead with the yes. Follow with the weird shit. You’re killing me here!”
•
Tuesday before lunch Kevin was waiting for me by my locker.
“Yes!” I said before he even had a chance to open his mouth. I had decided to take the goat by the horns and follow Ashley’s advice.
“Yes to what?” Kevin asked.
“Yes to whatever you’re asking me.”
“Ooh-la-la! To whatever?”
“Yes to the cotillion. As long as the hoop skirt stays on I’m good to go.”
“But I helped you out of it so nicely last time!” Kevin smiled that sweet smile.
I blushed.
“Promise to leave the peg leg at home?” he asked.
“I promise,” I said. “But what about what’s-her-name?”
“Who?”
“That girl. The one who’s always all over you. Sandra Lewis.”
Kevin shook his head and grimaced.
“You can’t be serious,” he said. “Have you ever seen her in a hoop skirt? Have you ever seen her swing a peg leg? Have you ever seen her resurrect me from the dead?”
“Come to think of it, no.”
“My point exactly. Anyway, the cotillion’s not for a few weeks. I’ll see you before then. And when I pick you up, I’ll be the one with the private’s hat on.”
“Good,” I said. “Tha
t way I won’t confuse you with my father.”
Once more the bell.
•
“You’re sure you said yes?” Ashley asked, holding my hand as we walked home from school.
“Absolutely positive.”
Ashley gave me a monster hug. Which felt so much better than the shakedown did the day before.
“Wow!” Ashley said.
“Double wow!”
“Our first Number Five. A real date. Can you believe it!”
Ashley put her arm around me.
“Next up, Marc Potvin,” I said.
Ashley sighed.
“You got an extra hoop skirt?” she asked.
32
WE REALLY DIDN’T HAVE A CLUE as to what to expect for our first KABOOM meeting. Ashley and I had made a list of which kids we were hoping would show up.
Becky: Becky’s parents were hippies and she was all about Mother Nature. She was the only vegetarian we knew and the word on the street was that she was a lesbian, although no one had ever seen her with another girl. She was totally out there but had somehow worked the high school scene so that just about everyone liked her, which was practically impossible. She would bring star power to the group. Ashley had asked her to come and she had said she was all over it.
Jason: Jason was a Number Three (friend), and Ashley had threatened to beat the crap out of him if he didn’t show. He was a runner on the track team so he’d bring in the jock element.
Sam: Sam was all about fish. It was always fish this and fish that. Sam really didn’t seem to give a crap about anything other than fish. He had a bumper sticker on his truck that read “A bad day fishing is better than a good day doing anything else.” Sam even had a fish tattooed on his right bicep. I had told him about the threats to the Green River if Mount Tom got blown sky high and he got all bent out of shape.
Frank: Frank was a Jesus Freak. He was active in the Souls’ Haven Evangelical Church down on Arlington Street and was a youth leader of the God Squad. Frank was to Jesus what Sam was to fish. Frank had a bumper sticker on his truck that said “What Would Jesus Do?” Ashley had been giving Frank the hard sell about how sacred the Earth was and how pissed Jesus would be to see Mount Tom blown up. Lord only knows, if we could get God on our side we’d be totally good to go!
