Crash and Burn

by Michael Hassan

  She had her own notebook in which she took my notes and transcribed them into girl language, with her flowery script, hearts practically over every “i” so I could hardly read them.

  And then she went through the courses, one by one, every day, what did I do in math, what about history, what about Connelly’s class.

  And I tried to work with her, but it was pointless. Whenever we tried, she would leave screaming or I would leave agitated for the rest of the day or Jamie would interrupt us, asking if we could just be a little quieter, so she could hear the TV.

  I didn’t know exactly what Lindsey was getting paid, but after me, she had to move on to Jamie’s work, so you could not envy being Lindsey at that point.

  It lasted until the day I came home without my Of Mice and Men book and she threw a tantrum, saying if I wasn’t going to try, why should she? And I lied and told her I read the whole book at school, during a study period, which I was required to have as part of my 504 program. So she quizzed me, who was Lennie? What did Lennie have in his pocket? Why was Lennie always talking about rabbits? Who was Curley? What happened to Curley’s wife?

  And, of course, no way could I answer any of Lindsey’s questions.

  Which led to me being all frustrated and her getting in my face and calling me a hopeless moron, sounding a lot like Jacob.

  Which, of course, led to me pushing her, which I didn’t mean to do, but she was in my face and enough was enough and she landed on the bed anyways, but it was all she needed for her to tell my mom that I was physically abusing her, which was definitely not the case, as me and Jamie often had play-fights that were way more tough on both of us, being as Jamie was not afraid to fight back and drop-kick me like a pro wrestler. But no way had either me or Jamie ever play-fought with Lindsey. Or even so much as touched her before.

  So while Lindsey was telling my mom what an animal I was, I flung myself onto the couch in the family room where Jamie was watching As Told by Ginger. When she looked up at me, she said, “You do know that The Wild Thornberrys is coming on in a few minutes?”

  Which I understood to mean that she was not thrilled with the possibility of a family altercation that was going to interrupt her afternoon TV schedule.

  Then a commercial hit, which meant Jamie could talk more freely. “What did Mom actually expect? You and Lindsey in the same room. Something was bound to happen.”

  But my mom was already downstairs, standing in front of us.

  “Did you push your sister, Steven?”

  I have since learned what a rhetorical question is, and that was one of them, because the actual answer didn’t matter. What followed was a telephone conversation with Jacob and a call to the doctor who prescribed the Adderall, who had already said to my mother that we should try to increase the dosage, because it wasn’t working at the levels I was taking. Déjà vu all over again, having gone through the same drill years before with Ritalin.

  The following Monday I was back with another old-lady tutor.

  The extra dosage of Adderall did not make me any smarter. In fact, by the middle of October, I slipped into a miserable funk where life seemed completely hazed over, like everything else in the world was speeding up, leaving me behind. To make matters worse, I was becoming totally forgetful and oddly more psychic. Plus whenever I played sports, my heart would race like I was in the Olympics and I couldn’t catch my breath. This sometimes also happened for no apparent reason even when I was sitting, just sitting in class.

  Mostly in Connelly’s class.

  We were finished with Of Mice and Men (I got a 67 on the test) and then we started reading To Kill a Mockingbird. I had no clue what was going on with that book, even though I really did try to read it over and over again.

  “Mr. Crashinsky, can you explain why Scout doesn’t want to go back to school after the first day?”

  So I start, “Well, because he . . .”

  “He who?” Connelly’s eyes brightened.

  “Scout.”

  There was some laughter in the class.

  “Mr. Crashinsky. Did you read the first two chapters?”

  “Sure.” I had actually read the assignment during study hall, big surprise, and I thought that I was ready. So I couldn’t believe that I was being criticized, as I hadn’t even said anything.

  “Does anyone want to help Mr. Crashinsky?”

  Sarah Cohen’s hand shot into the air. “Steven, Scout is a girl.”

  I was jolted by this, like I was in a car accident or something. My heart started overpumping again. Reason being, I had no clue, I absolutely read the first two chapters and I had no fucking clue.

  What kind of name was Scout for a girl anyway?

  “I knew that.”

  “You said ‘he,’ Mr. Crashinsky,” Connelly boomed. “That’s why your fellow classmates were laughing.”

  A voice from the back of the class interrupted his flow of venom.

  “I thought Scout was a boy too.” This from the new kid, Newman.

  I looked at him. Was he telling the truth or covering for me? I couldn’t tell.

  “I meant the other kid. The one who doesn’t go back, ever.” I could swear there was a kid in the book who didn’t go to school after the first day. I was wishing I was him.

  “Which other kid, Mr. Crashinsky?” he repeated. “Or should I call you Boo?”

  “Boo who?” I asked. OK, I was pretty dazed, which had to be from the drug (being as Boo turns out to be a major part of the first chapter and I remembered seeing the word more than a few times during my attempts to read it).

  Connelly repeated this. Loudly. “Boo who?”

  “Don’t cry,” Burn yelled out, and everybody laughed and I didn’t know why. So I looked at him and he mouthed “boo-hoo” again and I got it.

  “Mr. Burnett, do you care to enlighten your friend with a little wisdom?”

  And so Burn deflected for me and went on about Boo Radley, who he called Arthur and not Boo for some reason, and the rest of the characters, but tell you the truth, I just couldn’t listen, because I wasn’t caring about anything at that particular point: not Connelly, not English, not math or science or history or even girls, which was the most strange, because after all that time of superpopularity, I was suddenly in high school and no one seemed to be into me. Not girls, not even my good friends. It didn’t help that the few times I saw Roxanne in the halls, she basically ignored me and acted like she either didn’t see me or didn’t care to notice that I was there.

  And whatever it was that happened was getting worse, and what was worse than that was I didn’t care.

  Now Burn and Connelly were arguing over a point in the book, which I didn’t get, and I don’t think the rest of the class got either, and all the time Burn continued to sit in his new posture position, superstraight upright, using his hands to express how off base Connelly’s opinion was. Connelly starts to raise his voice to get his point across, but Burn continues with his point, which I think the class thinks makes more sense than Connelly’s point. In response Connelly actually says, “Why don’t you start another fire or something?”

  So the honeymoon was definitely over and it was back to being us against him. Only I didn’t know why, not for the life of me.

  My mom got a call from my guidance counselor before I got home that afternoon, and apparently she put a call in to my doctor, who suggested that maybe I was having a bad reaction to Adderall. My mom asked if I was feeling any different, but I could swear that I had already told her over and over again about the dizziness and the racy heart and the fogginess.

  So I was weaned off another medication. Only this one was supposed to be my last hope, since I’d already tried everything else. So now what?

  In a few weeks, I was starting to feel like my old self again. But my old self wasn’t all that much smarter.

  And Connelly’s class was no more tolerable, with Connelly mostly avoiding me but going after Burn almost every day with challenging questions. Burn respo
nded with his own spin on things, and Connelly was not backing off, like he was testing to see if Burn had a breaking point.

  Then, like two weeks later, the test on the book. I actually did OK for me, as in getting a 74, which I thought was pretty good until I compared it to other marks, as in Newman’s 98 and even Bosco getting an 82, and I had to wonder, was Bosco actually smarter than me? How stupid was I really?

  Except Burn failed. I saw the back of his paper, all red-marked up with a huge circle at the top. Which again made no sense as Burn knew everything about the book and probably could’ve taught a class on To Kill a Mockingbird if he wanted to, no question about it. And when Burn politely raised his hand to ask whether Connelly would reconsider the grade, Connelly ignored the question completely, like Burn wasn’t even there.

  “I’m slashing his tires,” Burn told me and Newman in the lunchroom, after letting us peek into his backpack where he had this huge hunting knife. All I could think of was, the combination of Burn and a hunting knife was not a comfortable image, even if he was, on the surface, the completely reconstituted version of himself with virtually no outward signs of the kinds of crazy that I remembered from earlier years.

  “You can’t,” I said. “They’re watching us.”

  “They’re always watching me,” Burn told me, zipping up his pack. “But I’m watching them too.”

  He bailed on us, and even before he was gone, Newman and I exchanged our knowing glances for the very first time, something that we would be doing the same way throughout high school, because we both knew, we totally knew, even then, that Burn was going to end up doing something supremely fucked up.

  Just a matter of time. At least that was our opinion. The rest of the school seemed to embrace the new Burn, who had developed this huge social life, high-fiving everyone in the hallways, joking around with other teachers and getting involved in after-school activities. Instead of holding a grudge about the Mockingbird test or trying to get some kind of teenage revenge, he went direct to Principal Singh and argued his case, and somehow they got Connelly to reconsider the mark.

  And then Burn showed up one morning during intramurals to tell me that he heard that me and Pete were going to his aunt’s for Thanksgiving and he couldn’t wait because he had something to show us, something absolutely amazing. And all I could think of was the trouble I had gotten into the last time he used those words. Actually, that wasn’t the only thing I thought about. I couldn’t help but wonder how my mom could ever have agreed to expose us to another Thanksgiving dinner with the family that basically blew apart the holiday two years before, not that I was blaming them for anything, since Burn did save my life and all. I was also thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this time. I couldn’t help but think about Roxanne, and while I didn’t think that making out was a possibility at this point, I was hoping that she maybe would be nice to me again, or even notice me in her sarcastic Roxanne way.

  And after the second marking period, I got my grades, and they weren’t good at all, worse than I thought. But there were other kids who were doing worse, like Callahan and Shaun Leary, who we called Peanut because of his severe allergies to nuts. Oh yeah, and I got like a B+ in science, so clearly I could learn if I wanted to, at least according to Jacob. The good news was that I didn’t have to deal with him immediately as he was off to eastern Europe with Felicia for the holidays.

  So Thanksgiving Day came, and my mother spent the morning in the kitchen, working on the turkey and preparing side dishes while Lindsey followed behind her, tracing her every step, in full-tantrum mode, whining about how horrible Roxanne was and asking over and over again why my mom had ever agreed to go to the Burnetts’, but my mom just wasn’t having it as her mind was already made up.

  Then it was us and Pete’s family and some older adults from our town, all assembled that afternoon at Burn’s aunt’s house, the one that smelled like urine, where Burn and his family were still living. Well, all of us except Roxanne, who had apparently spent the night with friends in Manhattan, which she was doing a lot, according to Burn, because she didn’t have many friends at Meadows. Mrs. Burnett kept promising that Roxanne was on her way and that it would only be a few more minutes, doing what she could to keep us out of the dining room until her daughter showed up.

  It was after six when she finally did, dressed in goth clothing, all pasty-white skin and jet-black spiky hair, looking like a holdover from Halloween. The thing I noticed most was the black circles around her eyes. It was kind of unsettling.

  I overheard Lindsey from behind me whisper to no one in particular, “She’s absolutely stoned.”

  Before Roxanne could even say anything, Mrs. Burnett was ushering her into a far corner of the house where you could hear the two of them arguing, but you couldn’t make out the exact words. A few minutes later, it was me, Lindsey, Jamie, Pete and his brothers Bernie and Joe, and Burn, and Roxanne all sitting around the table in the kitchen while the adults were in the dining room, apparently having mastered the seating arrangement issues this time around. Not that I was worried, being as there were no milfs at this Thanksgiving.

  I noticed Burn staring at his sister more or less constantly, more like he was worried about her than angry with her.

  Watching him watching her made me nervous, like I was on the Adderall again. Something was definitely up.

  It was Jamie who broke the tension, saying that she wanted to eat quickly so she could get home for a Nick special, which got us all talking, and then Roxanne asked how I was enjoying Connelly’s class. This being the first time she talked to me in a very long time, I took it as a good sign, although she didn’t seem to have the usual fire in her eyes when she said it.

  It was Lindsey who asked her about the Connelly letter. “I didn’t know that anyone actually liked him as a teacher,” Lindsey said.

  To which Roxanne confessed, “I fucking hated him.”

  To which I had to ask, “Then why send a letter to Principal Singh to support him?”

  Roxanne looked at Burn, and when she answered, her answer was directed at him.

  “Revenge is sweet,” she said, with a forced smile that told us there was still something between the two of them that apparently had been resolved with the letter.

  That wasn’t the end of it either. After we were clearing the plates off the table, for just a minute, it was just me and Roxanne in the kitchen, and I had to say, “But now I’m stuck with Connelly, too, because of your letter. That’s not fair.”

  To which Roxanne said, “It’s your own fault. You were supposed to make out with me before anyone else. You broke your promise. Now no one is interested in you anyway. As I said, revenge is sweet.”

  While this seemed to be a phrase that I was destined to hear from the Burnetts every Thanksgiving, this time I noticed that there was no conviction in her voice when she said it. She was going through the motions, but there was something so un-Roxanne about the way she talked that I had to wonder was it her or was it something I did? But then my mind filled with concern about what she meant about no one being interested in me, even though I knew that she liked to put me off my game. Was she fucking with me, or was something else going on?

  Then Burn came back into the kitchen with Pete, talking about the incredible thing that he promised to show us. Then Roxanne was gone, and me and Pete followed Burn out the back door, down the rolling lawn behind the huge Victorian house, to the freestanding garage all the way at the back edge of the property, which was a pretty long walk from the house. Burn gave us flashlights and swore us to secrecy before he would let us in, because, he explained, he had something in there that no other kid had ever had before, and if we told anyone, he’d get into major-league trouble.

  Me and Pete exchanged glances. How dangerous was this going to be?

  So Burn opens the garage doors and we step inside, hit by the overwhelming smell of supermoist cut grass, skunk, and dog shit. We don’t see anything, but we hear this scratching sound behind all
this old landscaping equipment, and I proceed with caution, checking around to make sure that I can bolt if I need to run out.

  Burn leads us to the back, where the smell gets stronger, switches on the light, and there, on the bottom shelf of this huge floor-to-ceiling shelving unit, is a cage, which is covered up.

  He pulls the sheet off it. “I caught a baby fox back in October,” he tells us, revealing a very spectacular animal with the shiniest red fur.

  “I’ve been training it.”

  “Dude, you can’t train a fox,” Pete says, carefully choosing his words. (Keep in mind he already had an altercation with Burn over animals in the past.)

  “Well, I am,” he said. “Training it.” And with that Burn sticks his hand into the cage and starts petting it, and the fox doesn’t seem to mind. Then he reaches around and undoes the latch, carefully, gingerly moving the fox forward out of the cage.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “She likes being touched.”

  We don’t move.

  “Go ahead,” he demands, like orders us, and so Pete does it, sticks out his hand and carefully touches, then pets the animal.

  But I do not. I know something is wrong with this. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s beyond trouble. Meanwhile, Pete is having the best time with the fox, as they start to feed it from a bucket that Burn kept by the side of the shelf.

  So I ask Burn where he got it, the fox, and he tells me that he built a trap for raccoons but caught the fox instead, and if either of us, me or Pete, tells anyone, he will seriously kick our asses, because it’s illegal and all, he’s checked the laws as to wildlife. Pete and I look at each other: no way we’re telling anyone.

  I get close to the animal’s face, stare at it. It stares back at me with empty black eyes, reminding me more than a little of Burn’s sister in a weird way. It is cute and all, but there is something in its eyes that tells me it knows that it doesn’t belong there and will never belong to Burn. It’s a matter of time, I tell myself, before something goes wrong. I even mention this to Burn, telling him, “Dude, a fox is not a dog. A fox is always a fox and always will be a fox.”