33 Minutes

by Todd Hasak-Lowy

  I sit down next to Amy and much too close to her chickpeas and greens. My lunch box (which I’ve been holding for most of the last ten minutes in my sweaty right hand) is not happy to be sharing the table with actual vegetables.

  “He’s super mad at you.” She isn’t smiling.

  “Who?” I ask this only because I’m not sure I really feel like talking about it.

  “Who.” She rolls her eyes. “Morgan, you doofus.”

  I open my lunch box out of habit. “And you think I didn’t know this?”

  “I mean super, super, extremely super mad.” She sticks her plastic fork into her bowl. “But he wouldn’t tell me why.”

  “Did he say if he still plans to kick my butt in”—I look up at the cafeteria clock—“nine minutes?”

  She takes a bite of salad and chews a bit before answering. “No. But a bunch of the other guys, Chris and Brandon and Jordan and Kyle and some other jerks, they sure seem to think he is. They think it’s funny.”

  “I know.” I move the contents of my lunch around. PB&J, chips, grapes. All headed to the garbage.

  “Sam”—Amy’s so concerned, she puts her fork down next to her bowl of antioxidants—“what happened between you two?”

  I think this is what she just asked, and I’m thinking about answering. I’m thinking about telling her any and all of the following:

  •All he wants to do is play sports.

  •He thinks all I want to do is schoolwork and study tenth-grade math.

  •But I still wish he wanted to come over more.

  •And my parents barely seem to notice that he barely does.

  •Plus, there’s that really stupid thing I did that’s really to blame for today, that’s so stupid I can’t even say it out loud.

  •I just want us to stay friends.

  But I don’t say anything because I’m not even sure that’s what she asked in the first place, because at that moment the decibel level in the Wagner Middle School cafeteria finally reaches rock-concert level. I look up and see that Armin and Pat have started a game of floor patty, which quickly inspires copycat competitions, with at least a half dozen chicken patties now gliding across the waxed floor. Meanwhile, the underwear-as-handle fad has quickly spread among the rest of the sixth-grade boys and whoa, a sixth-grade girl as well.

  “Oh my God,” Amy sums up the situation nicely.

  Mr. Griegs runs around the cafeteria like a chicken with its head cut off, assuming this headless chicken somehow has a fuzzy mustache and a pair of four-foot-long rubber stilts where its legs should be. Through the noise, I think I can hear him shouting into his walkie-talkie, “We have a 9–18 situation in the cafeteria, I repeat, 9–18 in the cafeteria! This is not a drill! 9–18!! 9–18!!!” Janitor Budds, meanwhile, takes one of his many daily breaks, sitting on the edge of the cafeteria stage with a toothpick between his gums.

  Amy and I, being both short and curious, stand up on our bench to get a better look. We try to continue our conversation, even though the cafeteria keeps getting louder and louder.

  “So what happened between you two?!” she screams into my ear. “I thought you guys were best friends!”

  Phillip Gruden, Wagner Middle School’s leading theater dork, is juggling three chicken patties while singing a show tune.

  I lean toward her, keeping my eyes on the chaos everywhere. “We were! But we started fighting a lot!”

  Poor Benny Fink is wearing the back of his underwear over his head, like a hood. Actually, Poor Benny Fink looks perfectly happy being Poor Benny Fink.

  “Fighting?!” she screams.

  At the end of our very own table Ashley Rorshack, ­Wagner Middle School’s all-time leader in giggles per hour, stands helpless as two crooked streams of 2 percent milk flow from her eighth-grade nostrils.

  “Arguing!” I explain loudly. “Having disagreements!”

  A heroic sixth grader lunges for Mr. Griegs’s undies.

  “Why?” she hollers back.

  My old table, though not actively engaged in any full-blown mischief, eggs on their fellow Vikings, except for Morgan, who stands with his arms crossed and considers the mayhem in silence.

  I turn to Amy and open my mouth, only I don’t know where to begin.

  Because is there really any way you can explain to someone how me and Morgan went from the guys who won our first-grade field day competition together to the guys who are going to fight in eight minutes? How can I even get her to understand what that day at Deer Creek Elementary was really like?

  Picture this: It’s the end of our kickball game against the second graders, a game everybody had been talking about for a couple weeks already, like it was the Super Bowl or something. Last inning, two outs, no one on base, score tied. Sam Lewis steps up to the plate. I crush the ball (yes, that’s right, I crush the ball) over Kenny Telurski’s head and make it all the way to second. Next up? Who else but Morgan Sturtz. Morgan connects with the big red ball, but not quite as hard as he wanted. But so what, I just start running, because I can run pretty fast, at least I could back then. Jason Briggs (bigger in second grade than I am right now) is waiting for me at home, waiting for the ball to tag me. But guess what? I beat the ball and score. I score the winning run.

  We won, we won because of me, because of me and ­Morgan. I was the hero and so was Morgan, and everyone was jumping up and down and slapping us on the back, and when we sat down for ice cream after that, I knew we just became best friends. I just knew.

  Somehow the feeling of that day turned into the feeling of that summer and the feeling of second grade, and third, and fourth, and even fifth. Like we weren’t just best friends, we were the best, period. The best whenever we were together. And so we always were. My mom used to call us “MorSam.” But then MorSam got here, to this stupid school, and something changed, everything changed, changed in a way that was bigger than football or math. Until next thing I know, MorSam’s annual Friday-after-Thanksgiving tradition (Morgan comes over that morning and we take every last toy in my room and build two massive armies that fight all day long) turns into a five-minute joke that ends with Morgan going downstairs to watch football with my dad, who doesn’t seem to think anything is wrong at all.

  How do you explain any of that?

  I look at Amy and shrug my shoulders.

  And then it takes a moment for me to realize what I’m seeing: A milk carton whizzes past Amy, missing her head by no more than an inch.

  12:08

  Some questions about food fights:

  Why don’t they happen every day? Why aren’t there weekly food-fighting activities at our local community center? Why isn’t there a television show called The Wonderful World of Food Fights?

  Ever since I was really little, my mom would try to distract me whenever I was really upset about something. I’m crying, and suddenly there’d be a giant jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table, or she’d pull out a bunch of ingredients and ask me if I wanted to help her make her super yummy oatmeal-walnut-chocolate-chip cookies, or she’d say, “Hey, Sammy, let’s go through your clothes and see what you’ve outgrown since the summer” (she’d say this even though I still fit into the Lions sweatshirt I got for my tenth birthday).

  So here’s what I want to know: Why didn’t she just start chucking cupcakes at me? Because right now I feel like I don’t have a problem in the world.

  The great thing about food fights is that even if you throw some food at somebody and miss (which is obviously the case with me), you still get to throw food at somebody. It’s a win-win situation. Plus, sometimes, like when you’re Mandy Berlin with a sidearm delivery, you can miss but still hit a much better target, in this case a gangly school teacher/monitor who now has a yogurt-covered mustache. Unless that was her target all along, in which case, Ms. Berlin, you are my hero.

  Plus, I wasn’t going to eat my lunch anyway.
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  Amy enthusiastically approves. Just one more entry in the “yes” column on the “Is Amy Takahara Totally and Utterly Awesome?” sheet.

  Though the chicken patty would seem to be the centerpiece of today’s hot lunch, food value is measured differently in Foodfightaville. In Foodfightaville tater tots are an 8.3 (out of 10) on the tossability scale (they lose some points for being too light), while applesauce scores a 9.7 in splatability. Which isn’t to say that people aren’t heaving their chicken patties with everything they’ve got.

  Not to mention that the cloud of noise from before has turned into a full-blown fireworks display, because this is beyond fun, this is beyond the “hey, that was great” fun of a good movie, an afternoon of laser tag, or even a trip to an amusement park. Because this isn’t good, clean fun—this is bad, messy fun, which reminds me and every other applesauce-­coated Viking here of all that naughtiness they’ve kept us from since we were old enough to understand what naughty was. This is exactly not why they have places like Wagner Middle School in the first place.

  Kids are laughing and shrieking and whooping and hollering and barking and jumping on one another and rolling around on the ground and using trays as shields and wearing bowls as helmets and crawling with their hands in their shoes and attempting to swim freestyle through a pool of ranch dressing.

  I turn to Amy, who has just sent her chickpeas back toward the salad bar (where they belong). Her hair has mustard highlights, and next thing I know, we’re high-fiving each other but then not letting go of each other’s hand. After at least 2.7 seconds of pure joy, Amy pulls her hand back, extends a stubby, condiment-coated index finger, and runs it along the skin between my nose and my mouth, because giving someone a combination ketchup–ranch dressing mustache is a sign of friendship in many places around the world.

  Energized by this show of affection, I leap from our bench and head through the flying lunches toward Morgan’s table. Because maybe a not-so-little food fight is all Morgan needs to get over his silly grudge.

  I walk slowly and confidently in his direction. I am pelted with more foods than you’ll find in aisles three through eight of your local supermarket. But I do not care one bit.

  Each and every door to the cafeteria is now opening, with every single teacher pouring in to answer Mr. Griegs’s urgent 9–18 call. Mr. Rozier, the mightiest chemistry teacher this side of the Mississippi, has just tackled a half dozen tater-tot-armed eighth graders who had lined three sixth graders up against a wall. Ms. Ruyak, our hefty PE teacher, is blowing her whistle and herding students into a corner.

  But right now I don’t care about anything other than getting Morgan to smile back at me. I stride toward him, I hold out my arms, I tell him with my eyes, C’mon, pal, if all this can happen, then anything can happen, then even the two of us can make up and be MorSam like we used to be.

  Amy calls out to me, so I quickly spin around.

  But she’s just pointing ahead, quite concerned. When I look back toward Morgan, I notice, definitely a moment too late, that some fool over at his table has decided that the heavy-duty salad bowls are fair game too.

  And then something hits my head, hits my head hard, and I start spinning. Spinning fast, until the table and the kids and all that food are just one big blur.

  And then things get really weird.

  12:16:37 to 12:16:46

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the battle of the century!

  In this corner, standing at five feet, five inches and weighing one hundred twenty-two pounds, hailing from Glenn Hills, Michigan, future Division I college athlete and babe magnet extraordinaire, Morgan “The Factual Opinion” Sturtz.

  And in this corner, measuring four feet, seven and ­five-eighths inches and tipping the scales at almost eighty-four pounds, also hailing from Glenn Hills, Michigan, master of math, brightest star in the standardized testing galaxy, and future king of the nerds, Sam “The Square Root of Puberty” Lewis!

  Well, Jim, the waiting is finally over. This one has all the makings of an instant classic. The Factual Opinion, undefeated in his last eight showdowns, has announced that if he wins, he’ll donate half his sweat to charity. Meanwhile, the nearly dangerous and hardly imposing Square Root of Puberty has countered with an offer to tutor under­privileged children in pretending like you can’t smell unbelievably stinky eighth graders in public if he survives this match.

  That’s right, Bob, and in addition to a lifetime supply of Slurpees and tater tots, the winner of today’s fight will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, DC, to see Amy Takahara compete in the eighty-sixth annual Scripps National Spelling Bee, where she will also be a scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Adorable Smiling.

  And here she is now, Jim, right at ringside, the always fetching and punctual Takahara, offering to display the placards announcing each round along with one of this week’s vocabulary words. I for one sure hope we make it to round eight. It’s been much too long since I’ve seen “audacious” printed up in big letters.

  Now let’s go over to Mr. Griegs’s mustache, which spoke to both fighters just moments ago.

  Well, guys, The Factual Opinion was all business outside his locker room. He said he’s going to focus on the i-before-e rule and not saying hi to Sam in the halls when other guys from the team are around. Meanwhile, The Square Root of Puberty told me he plans to go out for third-string punter while posting on the Internet excerpts from Morgan’s C– book report on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which, The Square Root of Puberty added, is a pretty good grade considering The Factual Opinion read only the first four and a half pages of it.

  Now, fighters, you know the rules: No purposely misspelling words when the other is cheating off your quiz; no picking the other last; no correcting the other in social ­studies class; no “forgetting” to invite the other to your birthday party; no blaming farts on the other when girls are around; no biking so fast up hills; no getting impatient when explaining to the other what the Golgi apparatus does; no pretending your new PlayStation doesn’t work; no saying you’re going to dress up for Halloween and then laugh when the other one comes over dressed up like a mobster and accidentally used a permanent marker for the stubble; no saying your mom didn’t give you the message; no tackling hard in Kill the Guy; no inviting the guys over for cards and using a marked deck; no not saving the other a place; no spreading the rumor that the other thought the Civil War was between the United States and Germany; no not sticking up for the other when oversized eighth graders like TJ Potts purposely bump into him outside Mr. ­Glassner’s room; no not offering to split the last one; no canceling a sleepover and then going to someone else’s house; no explaining being dropped off at Kim Cohen’s party together by saying it’s just because your moms are friends; and no saying, “Who cares what the population of Peru is?” “We could go lift weights at Kyle’s,” “I mean, I guess you can come too, though I was sort of thinking maybe this time just me and Chris would go,” “That’s pretty good—for you, I mean,” “It’s not like you ever told me you like ice cream or anything,” “So what if it was me who said that to her?” “I hope your brain came with a receipt,” “Seriously, I didn’t mean to punch you so hard there—okay, I did,” “At least I’m good at lying, you can’t even do that well,” “You didn’t say I couldn’t show her your e-mail,” “Whoop-de-do,” “Get a life,” and “Used to be friends—you and I used to be friends.”

  12:18

  For some reason, Scotty Donaldson and Andrew Montego are leading me down a hallway, their arms wrapped around my back. We turn clumsily and go through a doorway. They dump me, even more clumsily, down onto a padded bench.

  We’re surrounded by jars filled with cotton balls, Q-tips, and bandages; posters detailing the ear, a healthy set of teeth, and perfect posture; photocopied announcements about vaccine season, a recent lice outbreak at a nearby elementary school, and the various reasons for w
ashing your hands thirty-five times each and every day.

  “Thank you, gentlemen, for helping walk Sam over here. You may go now.”

  I must be in Nurse Landen’s office, since she’s right across from me in her wrinkled skin and starched white uniform, rolling her chair in my direction.

  “Nurse Landen,” Andrew says, “he keeps talking about a boxing match.”

  “That’s nice,” Nurse Landen says calmly.

  “Something about the square root of puberty,” Andrew continues, sounding pretty confused.

  “And he keeps mumbling all these—I don’t know what they are—rules maybe,” Scotty says. “ ‘No’ this, ‘no’ that. I think maybe Sam went crazy.”

  “Thank you, gentlemen, you may go now,” Nurse Landen repeats politely, and waits until they leave.

  “Sam, can you hear me?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I tell her, trying to remember what, or who, the square root of puberty is. I have no idea.

  “How do we feel?” Nurse Landen speaks these four words in the time it would take me to list this week’s spelling words, all twenty-five of them, in reverse alphabetical order. Nurse Landen is, give or take fifty years, the same age as Janitor Budds, meaning she received on-the-job medical training during the Revolutionary War. This may also have something to do with the fact that she is the size of a chimpanzee.

  “My head is a little sore.” This is more or less accurate, if “a little sore” can also mean “throbbing like crazy.”

  “I would imagine it is. They said you got whacked something awful. Said your eyes rolled all the way up and you twirled like a top.” Nurse Landen slowly reaches a small, leathery hand toward my head. I’m covered in food, but the scent of her formaldehyde perfume still comes through loud and clear. “My, my, we’ve got ourselves quite a bump there, now don’t we, young man?”