Sophomores and Other Oxymorons

by David Lubar

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Figured you’d want a ride home.”

  “Thanks.” I climbed in.

  He glanced at his watch. “Don’t tell me you finally did something worth getting detention.”

  “Nope. Newspaper meeting,” I said. “So, you’ve been delivering bagels all day?”

  “Mostly.” He handed me a paper bag that was sitting between the seats.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Extras.” He switched on the ignition and backed out of the space.

  I opened the bag, grabbed a poppy-seed bagel, which seemed to be all there was, and took a small bite. I figured my stomach was far enough away from the memory of Splitty the Cat that I could keep my food down.

  “Tasty.” I risked a larger bite. Bagels aren’t designed for nibbling. I hadn’t realized how starved I was. I’d spent most of the day with an empty stomach. I bit off another hunk before I’d even swallowed the previous one.

  “Yeah. They’re not bad. They spilled out when I was unloading a delivery. But I brushed them off pretty good. We’re supposed to throw them out if they touch the ground, but that seems like a waste.”

  As those words penetrated my brain, I realized that poppy seeds weren’t normally quite as crunchy and gritty as whatever it was I was chewing.

  Wesley glanced over his shoulder. “That reminds me. I’m supposed to sweep out the back of the truck each day. Guess I’ll do it later.”

  I didn’t join him in contemplating the space behind us. I decided I’d rather not know what the debris on the floor looked like—especially since I was in the process of grinding part of it between my molars.

  I spat my mouthful of dirt bagel out the window. It splattered against the asphalt like a doughy snowball.

  Wesley was busy enough taking a corner on fewer than four wheels that he failed to notice my review of the food.

  “Call me later if you want to do something,” he said when he dropped me off.

  “Okay. I’m not sure how long my homework will take. I’ll call if I get it done early enough.”

  I spat a couple more stray particles of grit out of my mouth. Then I headed inside.

  The first thing I heard when I walked through the door into a cloud of beef-laden air was Mom’s voice, coming from the kitchen. “Hi, Scott. I’m making tacos for dinner.”

  Mom’s tacos were infinitely better than the school cafeteria’s, but the smell of spiced shredded beef, mixed with the memory of biology, almost launched that initial nibble of bagel back out of my stomach.

  “Great,” I said, barely managing to speak as I choked back my nausea. Normally, I’d stop in the kitchen after school for a snack. But I figured the farther I got from the smell of food right now, the better, so I headed for the stairs. “I have a ton of homework. I should get started.”

  “How was school?” she called.

  “Fine.”

  I did have a fair amount of homework. But that wasn’t a big surprise. After I finished, I took my journal from freshman year downstairs to the computer and typed up all the parts that contained the advice I’d written for Sean. I left out the personal stuff, like Bobby getting into trouble, and my pathetic yearnings for Julia’s attention.

  That still left a fairly impressive amount of material. I made the font large, so there were lots of pages. I wanted Jeremy to feel he was getting plenty for his money. As I was tweaking the layout of the pages so they looked nice, I remembered how badly I’d gotten lost in the building on my first day. I added a quick and easy color-coded guide to navigating the halls of Zenger High, with special attention to safe and dangerous areas. I even found an image online of the “here there be dragons” warning from ancient maps, and changed the key word to “seniors.” The map brought the count up to thirty-one pages. When I was happy with the way everything looked, I printed out the manual, complete with a cover, and put it in my backpack.

  September 2

  Good news, Sean. It looks like I’ll be compiling more survival advice for you. I’m too fried to go into details, so I’ll just summarize what I’ve learned. Don’t trust your memory when it comes to summer reading. Don’t eat right before biology class. If someone mocks you, hit back hard and fast. Take no prisoners. Keep track of the time when you’re in gym class. And just because something looks like a poppy seed doesn’t mean it is a poppy seed. Generally, it’s a good idea to know the entire history of anything you plan to chew. In cop shows on TV, I think they call that “the chain of custody.”

  By the way, I read through my journal this afternoon. When I did, I saw a couple mistakes. I’d told you O. Henry had messed up in the opening of “The Gift of the Magi” unless there were two-cent coins back then. I just looked it up. They did have two-cent coins for a while. But it still makes a pretty interesting puzzle.

  This wasn’t in my journal, but I stumbled across another mistake Mr. Franka, Lee, and I all made last year. We thought that “Ninety percent of everything is crap” was Sturgeon’s Law. (Named for the writer, not the fish. Though it would be fun if he’d written that ninety percent of everything is carp.) It turns out the real name for it is Sturgeon’s Revelation. Like most common mistakes not involving explosives, heavy machinery, or high speeds, it is of no importance in the real world.

  SEVEN

  Jeremy ran toward me when I was half a block from the bus stop. “Do you have it?” he asked

  “Yeah. Ssshhhh.” I noticed some of the kids at the stop were staring at us.

  “Great!” He pulled a cloth wallet—the kind you make in summer camp—from his pocket, extracted several bills, and waved them in my face. “I’ve got the money.”

  “Not here,” I said. “Wait until we get on the bus.” Oh, great. Now I guaranteed that he’d be sitting with me. But I didn’t want people seeing me selling something. I guess I sort of felt I was ripping him off. Or, at the very least, exploiting his fear. I was suddenly sure the manual was a worthless bundle of crap. On top of that, the whole thing reminded me of a spy-movie scene involving the sale of government secrets. I almost expected a SWAT team to descend on us with weapons drawn the instant I exchanged the item for the cash. Or maybe that would be a SWAP team.

  When we got to our seat on the bus, I pulled the manual from my backpack. “Here.”

  “Thanks!” He snatched it from my hand, gave me the money, then immediately started reading.

  As weirded out as I was by all of this, I couldn’t help watching his face as he read my words. Yeah, my words. I was used to kids reading my articles in the school paper, but this was more than that. It was a book. Okay, an extremely thin book. A manual, really. But, it was a manual I’d created, filled with my hard-earned wisdom. His eyes moved rapidly. He nodded. His respiration rate increased in a way I found oddly gratifying.

  “Yeah. Wow. I never thought of that . . . ,” he said. “This is brilliant!”

  He kept reading, as absorbed as if he were holding a tale crafted by one of the masters of modern fiction. Once in a while, he’d say a sentence out loud, as if tasting it. It felt strange to hear my words spoken by someone else.

  When the bus stopped, he looked up at me and said, “This manual is amazing! Great advice. It makes so much sense.”

  “Thanks.”

  I managed to stay awake in geometry. Mr. Stockman’s puns helped keep me listening to the lesson. Nobody in history seemed eager to resurrect the issue of bladder control. Bradley had no interest in stepping into the ring for round two. The lesson, about ice-age residents of our land, was fine. I wasn’t sure what to do about lunch. I decided to see how hungry I got if I skipped a meal. I’d had a big breakfast. I could make it through the school day without food, and then grab something as soon as I got home.

  When it was time for biology, I navigated a path that skirted Splitzkers. But as I walked along the side of
the room, Ms. Denton opened the round glass hatch on some sort of small oven. An odor wafted out. My whole body spasmed as I fought to keep from heaving my breakfast cereal into the air in a gastric rainbow. I managed to force everything to remain where it belonged.

  “It’s an autoclave,” Ms. Denton said. Not that I had any desire to know the name of that foul thing.

  “Phew . . .” The response spilled out on its own.

  “Wait until you hold your first child in your arms and he empties his bowels into his diaper,” she said.

  “Been there,” I told her.

  Her eyes widened somewhat. “How precocious of you.”

  “Baby brother,” I said.

  She smirked. “I guess your parents could use a refresher in biology.”

  I could have shot back with something, but I knew there was nothing to be gained from waging war against authority. I’d seen kids try to win a battle of words with a teacher. Even if they won, they lost. I kept my mouth shut and took my seat. One of the oldest and truest clichés out there is You can’t fight City Hall. Though I guess it’s actually only as old as City Hall itself. I’m sure there’s a prehistoric version along the lines of You can’t fight Gronk’s cave.

  “Looks like you made a friend,” Lee said.

  I nodded, but remained silent, just in case Ms. Denton was listening.

  “Teacher’s pet,” Lee said. “Hudson charm is irresistible.”

  I didn’t know about that. But Hudson hunger was definitely hard to ignore. I made it through biology, where hunger would never be a driving force, and Life Skills, but started to feel the pangs of emptiness in Spanish class. It didn’t help that we were reading a story about Luis and his mother making tamales. I was starving in study hall. By the time I got to art, I was ready to eat some paste, just to have something in my stomach.

  Then I got to English and forgot all about hunger. There it lay, in all its red glory, waiting for me on my desk, as if Mrs. Gilroy wanted to make sure I had every possible second of ninth period to wallow in regret. A sixty-seven. That was about a D+. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d put a sticker in the upper right corner of the paper, next to the grade. It wasn’t a gold star, of course. It looked like Mr. Yuk—the guy who sticks his tongue out to warn toddlers that the sweet tasty syrup in the bottle is really bad for them.

  Lee got a ninety-two. A happy yellow duck gave her a wink and a big thumbs-up. Or a wings-up. Stickers are stupid. I stuffed the test in my backpack. I had to do something about this. I was too dismayed by the grade to participate much in the book discussion.

  At the end of class, Mrs. Gilroy said, “I’d like to thank those of you who cared enough to participate in our discussion.” She looked right at me as she said that.

  I really had to do something about the hole I was digging for myself before the top of my head slipped below ground level.

  “Go ahead,” I told Lee when the bell rang. “I’ll catch up with you.”

  “Good luck, Lenny,” she said.

  “Enough with the Steinbeck references,” I said.

  Lee flashed me an evil grin. “Okeydokey.”

  “Thanks a lot.” I knew that Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was about people from Oklahoma—Okies. And Lee knew that I knew.

  I waited until the room was clear, and then walked up to Mrs. Gilroy’s desk. “Can I talk to you about my test grade?” I asked.

  “You can talk to me about whatever you wish,” she said. “I’d prefer that my students talk with me.”

  Good grief. If she was going to give me that much of a hard time over a stupid preposition, maybe it was pointless to talk to her. Or with her. Or at her. But I had to give it a shot. I was not a D student. Not in English. I pulled the test from my backpack. “I don’t want you to think I didn’t read the book,” I said.

  She glanced at the test. “I think you didn’t read the book carefully,” she said. “That’s a fairly obvious inference.”

  “I love that book,” I said. “I’ve read it twice. I swear.”

  “When?” she asked.

  I told her.

  She shook her head. “It was your summer-reading assignment. This summer. Not two summers ago, or however far back you crossed paths with it. You can’t participate in a class discussion of a book that’s at best a vague memory.”

  I was going to protest that the book was far more than a vague memory. But I realized the test in my hand was a lethal counterargument to that claim. “I know. I messed up. But I did love the book. Both times. And I love to read. I read a ton of books this summer.”

  “That is irrelevant. You neglected to read the right one,” she said.

  “I made a mistake. Is there anything I can do to get a second chance?” I asked.

  She regarded me for a moment, as if trying to see whether I was a hopeless scoundrel attempting to scam her, or a miscreant worth saving. “Write an essay on arrogance,” she said.

  “Great. I love writing. I’m really good at it.”

  “Perhaps irony would be a better topic for you.”

  I stared at her, not quite realizing at the moment that I’d just been skewered. Though it all became clearer during the dozens of replays my mind forced me to suffer through.

  “I see that subtlety is lost on you. We’ll stick with the topic of arrogance. You certainly are filled with love for things,” she said. Her tone hinted she thought I was filled with something less fragrant than love. “Since you love writing, you’ll have no trouble delivering an essay of five hundred words tomorrow.”

  “No problem,” I said. If she’d thought I’d flinch at the word count, she didn’t know me at all. “I could do that with my eyes closed.”

  “I’m sure it will read as if it were written that way,” she said.

  I stared at her. Had she just smacked me down with an insult? It definitely felt like a jab. She wasn’t finished.

  “Since you are so confident—perhaps even arrogant?—about your ability to churn out a large volume of prose in a short span of time, let’s make your assignment an even thousand words. I want there to be some problem. Otherwise, there’s no point in this exercise.”

  “Sure, I can handle that. Piece of cake.” Oops. That slipped out before I had a chance to give it any thought.

  “Two thousand, then,” she said. “Have we transcended slices of cake? Are we in the realm of soufflés, tarts, croquembouche, and other more challenging baked goods? Will two thousand words be a sufficiently grueling assignment to require the opening of at least one of your eyes?”

  I clamped my mouth down on my reflexive response. It seemed like a good time to merely echo her words. “Two thousand.”

  When I got outside, Lee said, “So, how much worse did you make things for yourself?”

  “I didn’t make things worse. She’s giving me another chance.”

  “What do you have to do?”

  “Write a two-thousand word essay on arrogance.”

  “For it or against it?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Probably safe to assume you should be against it.”

  “But she didn’t actually specify a position.” I got excited when I realized I could have fun with the essay. I’d spent all of last year stretching and expanding my writing. I’d found unique ways to report on sports. During the summer, I’d fooled around with poetry a bit, and even started to write some plays, and one marvelously gory short story, “Corpse and Corpuscles,” where a man drowned in his own blood. “Maybe I am in favor of it. This is going to be awesome.”

  Lee made a sound. It wasn’t the sort that accompanies encouragement. When we reached the bus area, I found myself facing a mob of freshmen. “It’s him!” one of them shouted. The group vibrated.

  “‘Him’? Did you form a band and not tell me?” Lee asked. “Or make a movie?”

/>   “Nothing that impressive,” I said.

  Jeremy detached himself from the masses. “They want to buy copies.”

  “All of them?” I asked. It looked like nearly a dozen kids.

  Their heads nodded. Their eyes widened. My brain went ka-ching! “Hands,” I said. Hands went up. I counted. Nine more copies. Wow. “I’ll have them for you tomorrow.”

  The cluster darted away, moving like a school of baitfish.

  “That was you not so long ago,” Lee said. “And yet, you smirk.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That look of amusement on your face. You think of them as pathetically helpless and clueless. Right?”

  “Sort of. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. I just find it amusing.”

  “You’re amused at my amusement?” I asked.

  “Constantly.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  • • •

  When I got home, I figured I’d tackle the essay first. After that, I’d print the nine manuals. Despite Lee’s warning, I knew it would be fun to take a position in favor of arrogance. I found out pretty quickly that I’d made the right decision, because the words just flowed directly from my mind to my fingers. I was totally rocking the task. It was fun defending arrogance. The first time I checked the word count, after what seemed like only two or three minutes, I was already up to three hundred words. Then I got on a roll, and fell into the creative zone where time no longer exists. When I checked again, I was close to a thousand words, and I still had plenty to say. Before I knew it, I had two thousand words.

  Take that, Mrs. Gilroy.

  Okay—I guess that was an arrogant thought, but I’d earned the right to think it. And I’d proved, by way of a well-constructed and clever series of arguments, that arrogance was not a bad thing. Now to get back to filling the orders for my manual.