Sophomores and Other Oxymorons

by David Lubar

  “That’s okay, Wesley. It gave me an excuse to toss out some stuff I’d been meaning to get rid of. And I reorganized my socket sets. Come check it out.”

  Dad headed back to the garage, along with Wesley and Bobby. It looked like the party was winding down. But I’d accomplished the first of two goals on my list.

  So much for the easy one.

  “Isn’t there something called cake makeup?” I asked Lee.

  She joined me in admiring the way Sean had managed to apply a huge quantity of birthday icing to his face. “I think it’s pancake makeup,” she said.

  “It’s not just for breakfast anymore,” I said. “Walk you home?”

  “Sure.”

  We left the house, strolling side by side. This was it. I was going to ask her to the dance. There were no interruptions or distractions. No school bells. Words from people whose advice I’d sought, and images of their faces as they spoke, floated through my head like flashbacks in a movie.

  Amala . . . shyness is real . . .

  Wesley . . . so ask her out . . .

  Mr. Cravutto . . . women are scary, but loneliness is scarier . . .

  Mr. Fowler . . . she values honesty . . .

  Dad . . . I needed her in my life . . .

  I promised myself I’d ask Lee to the dance before we reached the midpoint of our walk, which was roughly at the corner of Locust Avenue and Bayard Street.

  I wavered between Would you like to go to the dance? and Let’s go to the dance. The question allowed for rejection. The imperative sounded a bit bossy. Maybe there was some middle ground.

  “Happy anniversary,” Lee said.

  There goes my train of thought, Scott said to himself distractedly.

  Lee must have misread my expression for confusion, because she added, “We went to the dance exactly a year ago. So Sean’s birthday is our anniversary. Remember?”

  “Vaguely. I have fuzzy memories of racing from the cops in a limo and facing down a bully in the gym. There might also have been a birth that drastically altered my family’s dynamics. Is that particular May 17 the anniversary date to which you refer?”

  “That’s the one,” Lee said. “And I have bad news.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t get you anything.”

  “Thus making reciprocity a piece of cake,” I said.

  “Cake is always appreciated.” Lee laughed. “Hey, I have an idea. Let’s go to the dance.”

  Just like that, she’d asked me. Or suggested. Or something. Good enough, for now. Part of me realized I’d just slipped off the hook. But all of me realized I had a date with Lee for the dance.

  “Well?” Lee asked.

  “Sure. But no cops or babies.”

  “What about baby cops?”

  “That’s fine. I think we can outrun them,” I said.

  Zenger Zinger for May 19

  Last week’s answer: “I lost my favorite board game,” John Peter said cluelessly.

  This week’s puzzle: “They took away the knight’s title,” John Peter said _________.

  FORTY-THREE

  Bobby dropped us off at the school. That was my crafty way of avoiding parental involvement.

  “You sure you don’t need a ride home?” he asked.

  “Nope. I’ve got that covered.” I’d arranged for Wesley to pick us up after the dance.

  “This feels a lot different from last year,” Lee said.

  “Back then, we were fresh,” I said. “Now, we’re smart and stupid.” I looked at the familiar trappings of a school dance. Nothing within the gymnasium had changed. The snack table, the couples and the clusters of single kids, the decorations—it could have been any year at any school in any town in America. But we’d changed.

  We danced several fast dances. Lee didn’t seem to mind that I was at about the same skill level as Sean. Except that I didn’t frequently fall down. They played a slow song. I held out my hands. She held out hers. We stepped toward each other and danced.

  “I like this,” I said. Her body felt as if it belonged within my embrace.

  “You’re supposed to.” Her own embrace tightened. “I like it, too.”

  As we danced, I couldn’t help thinking about the year I’d wasted. How many slow dances had I missed because I hadn’t found the courage to ask her out? How much easier would this school year have been if I hadn’t walked through the doors of Zenger High with an overabundance of arrogance?

  The dance ended.

  “What are you thinking about?” Lee asked as we stepped apart.

  “I was pretty much a nonstop bungler this year,” I said.

  “True. But you provided a lot of entertainment for the rest of us.”

  “Then it was worth it, I guess.” I spotted Jeremy, standing by himself. He was staring across the gym at a group of girls seated on chairs along one wall.

  I consulted with Lee as we walked over to Jeremy, then pointed at a girl in a knee-length skirt, whose expression seemed to show she’d accepted the sad truth that spectating would probably be the highlight of her evening.

  “Ask her,” I told him. “The one with the ponytail.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. She wants to dance,” Lee said.

  “What if she says no?” Jeremy asked.

  “Ninjas will leap from the walls, slice you open, and hang you from the ceiling by your intestines, causing unimaginable pain and unbearable regret,” I said. “But it’s worth the risk.”

  “If you say so.”

  Lee and I watched Jeremy cross the gym.

  “This is more exciting than football,” she said.

  “That’s because the risk of injury is greater,” I said.

  “He’s doing it!” Lee said.

  “Score!” I shouted.

  “No, Scott,” Lee said. “Don’t take the metaphor there.”

  “Sorry.”

  We danced some more. We talked. We mingled with friends and classmates. We’d become a couple.

  “That was definitely a lot more low-key and uneventful than last year,” I said as we headed out to meet Wesley.

  “Are you disappointed?” Lee asked.

  “Not at all.”

  She took my arm. “Low key is nice sometimes.”

  “It is,” I said. “But so are surprises.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I smiled as I pictured her reaction when she discovered Wesley’s new job.

  “You think of all my needs,” she said a moment later, as he pulled up to the curb in an ice-cream truck.

  “I try.”

  May 22

  Good things happened, Sean. I’m not sure I want to recount the magic of the dance here. Maybe I’ll write a poem. Or carve a mountaintop.

  Memorial Day weekend followed the dance. Once again, I went with my family to Lee’s place for a cookout of epic proportions. And portions.

  “Lee’s changing,” Mr. Fowler said when I walked over to him at his Vulcanlike place of power. He pointed toward the house with a massive two-tined fork.

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  He almost smiled at the joke.

  “How’s the toad case going?” I asked him.

  “It’s over,” he said.

  That surprised me. I’d gotten the impression it would drag on for months. I wondered how the trial went. I couldn’t read anything from his expression. “Did you win?”

  “No.”

  “Sorry you lost,” I said.

  “I didn’t lose,” he said.

  Okay, now I was wondering whether I had no understanding whatsoever of our legal system. “What do you mean?”

  “The owner got an offer to sell the company to an overseas competitor in Malaysia that is wo
rking on a less ecological but more profitable battery. They bought all the patents so they could bury the technology. The plant’s already been closed.”

  “What about the employees?” I asked.

  “I doubt they’ll want to transfer overseas, even if they were offered jobs.”

  “So, pretty much the only ones who made out okay are the owner and the toad.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” he said. “The owner would have preferred not to sell. But the penalty if he lost the case would have ruined him. I made out well, too. Although I would have preferred to win the case.”

  “How primal,” Lee said as she walked up next to me. “Men and fire.” She wore her compromise clothing, devoid of dark images, but the sculpin was fastened to the collar of her shirt.

  “Hi.” I put my arm around her shoulders. It was a casual move I’d rehearsed in my mind a thousand times. It took a major gut check on my part to actually go through with it, but I wanted to let Mr. Fowler know some things had changed.

  “Hi,” Lee said, reciprocating my show of affection with a non-mandatory but highly supportive arm across my back.

  I stared at Mr. Fowler. He stared back and hefted the deadly fork. After a moment, he said, “Be careful.” It wasn’t exactly a congratulatory expression, but at least he hadn’t tossed out any reminders of the threat of destruction.

  “I will.”

  Lee and I walked across the lawn, toward a bench.

  “He likes you,” she said. “Usually he stabs boys who touch me.”

  I pushed away the flickers of jealousy her words had evoked, and reminded myself that she was kidding. “How many dozens of stabbings have there been?”

  “Dozens? Hardly. At last count, it was hundreds,” she said. “Half the backyard is reserved for shallow graves.”

  “All well-deserved,” I said.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Mr. Fowler had turned his attention back to the grill. That was good. He’d accepted things. Not that he would stop challenging me and testing me. But Lee deserved a boyfriend who could face those challenges and tests. Later, when we sat down to eat, Mrs. Fowler smiled at me.

  Just as the dance felt different, so did the cookout. I hadn’t realized how heavily the weight of wanting to ask Lee out had pressed on me all through last summer and the school year. I guess I hadn’t been so much a basket case as an ask-it! case.

  That evening, after the guests had left, we found ourselves once again on the front steps, just like way back on Labor Day. Well, not exactly like then.

  I started telling Lee my regrets about the school year. “I should have worked harder. I should have paid more attention in class. I totally wrecked my English grade. I slacked off all over the place. Even in history, I skated through a lot of the assignments once I saw Ms. Burke liked anything I wrote. I failed miserably on the newspaper. I blew off stage crew. I didn’t run for office. I failed to write a novel, and I failed to write a bad opening. And when I actually carried through with a plan and did something, it was my horribly bad idea for a satire. I screwed up from top to bottom.”

  “Scott,” Lee said, putting a hand on my shoulder, “I never thought I’d say this to anyone . . .”

  “Yes.” I held my breath and wondered what her words would be.

  “You think too much,” Lee said.

  “What?”

  “You’re smart. Very smart. And creative. But not everything needs to be analyzed and thought through. Not everything has to be viewed as a major thread in the plotline of a gigantic novel called The Life of Scott Hudson. Sometimes, you just have to act. You have to live in the moment. You just have to be.”

  As I tried to think up a response, Lee put her hand behind my head, pulled me forward, and kissed me. It was a long kiss. A wonderful kiss. To describe it at any greater length, or in any greater detail, would be to kiss and tell. And that’s against my code.

  “That was a nice surprise,” I said.

  “For both of us,” Lee said. “I think I liked that.”

  “We’d better make sure.” It was my turn to initiate a kiss.

  Later, lazing in the afterglow of tender moments, I laughed as a thought hit me.

  “What?” Lee asked. She stroked my cheek. That, too, felt perfect.

  “I just realized something,” I said.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “It’s a good one, but the first part isn’t totally accurate. Still, I like the sound of it, though I’m not sure how it would be classified, rhetorically.”

  Her hand slid from my cheek to my lips, sealing my mouth. “Shut up and say it,” Lee said. She removed the hand, freeing me to speak.

  “The Labor Day cookout was laborious, but the Memorial Day cookout was memorable,” I said.

  Lee snuggled closer to me and let out a fake sigh. “Cute and smart,” she said. “What more could a girl want?”

  Or a guy.

  We kissed again before I headed home.

  May 25

  The magic grows, Sean. Kissing someone you’re crazy about is an amazing feeling. Not that I have anything to compare it to. I really haven’t kissed a girl before. Not like this.

  Tuesday on the bus, Jeremy said, “Thank you for giving me the courage to ask Gina out.”

  “You gave yourself that,” I said. “I just gave you a prod. Did you ask her for her phone number?”

  “Nope. I wasn’t that brave. It’s hard to ask girls for personal stuff.” He shook his head. Then he grinned. “But she asked me for mine.”

  I gave him a high five.

  Back at school, I guess kids picked up pretty quickly that Lee and I were together in a new way.

  “Cute couple,” Edith said at lunch.

  “About time,” Kyle said in the locker room.

  Ms. Denton gave us an amused smile and suggested we didn’t have to sit quite that close together in class.

  Mrs. Gilroy looked directly at us as she read the class “Unending Love” by Rabindranath Tagore. I was glad she hadn’t gone with Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”

  People at home noticed, too. They were happy for me. And for us.

  • • •

  May blended into June. Lee and I spent a lot of time together, though I made an effort not to allow too blissful an expression to linger on my face when we were within sight of her dad. And she made it clear that she still needed time to herself. I guess I did, too, though not as much as her. I suppose when you’re an only child, you get used to solitude. Either way, I cherished the moments we spent together, even though they seemed to have influenced me to use words like cherished far too often.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Come over?”

  “Sure. But only for the snacks. You aren’t very good company.”

  As we got off the bus after school, I noticed Kyle staring at Julia. “I can’t believe we all hung out together in kindergarten,” I said.

  “Remember the time she started crying?” Kyle asked.

  It came back to me in fragments.

  “Wow, I’d totally forgotten about that.” We’d been at the easels, painting. I was absorbed in whatever I was creating. Then I heard whimpering. The teacher went over to comfort Julia. “I had no idea what was going on when it happened.”

  “You always were pretty clueless,” Kyle said.

  “I still am.” I’d noticed a puddle on the linoleum at her feet. But it wasn’t until a year or two later, thinking back, that I’d realized she’d had an accident.

  “Think she remembers?” Kyle asked.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s the sort of thing you don’t forget.”

  “This is weird,” Kyle said. “I don’t think I want to talk about kindergarten bladder-control problems.”

  “Yeah. Let’s never mention it again.” I held out my fist. He gave it a bump. We walked the next block
in silence.

  “She sure is hot now,” Kyle said.

  “For sure . . .”

  “I don’t think she’s dating anyone.”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  Kyle sighed. “What a shame.”

  “She and Kelly are still good friends,” I said.

  “That could be a problem,” Kyle said. “Maybe I’ll just pull a Hudson and settle for stalking her.”

  “I never stalked Julia. I worshipped her from afar.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Nope.”

  “Yup.”

  “No way.”

  “Way.”

  By then, we’d gotten to my place, so we let the debate die a natural death, smothered by oatmeal raisin cookies and milk.

  • • •

  There was an article in the local paper about how the school board was hopelessly deadlocked on any issue involving money. And a lot of other issues, as well. There was going to be a special election this summer, to fill the empty position. Whoever won the seat would be the tiebreaker. I hoped it would be someone who cared about education, and didn’t have an ultra-conservative agenda to push. Maybe more people would vote this time.

  June 1

  It’s the last month of school, Sean. And not even a full month. I’ll be pretty busy studying for finals this week, and taking them next week. That’s sort of an ominous word. Finals. Especially since tests seem to be endless. Both in school and in life.

  At lunch, Richard and Edith were talking about some television program.

  “I already had it previously recorded,” Richard said.

  Finally. I’d been listening to him for weeks, waiting for my chance.

  “Second-year sophomore!” I shouted, punching him hard on the shoulder.

  “Ouch! What the heck was that about?”

  “Previously recorded is redundant,” I said.

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “When someone says something redundant, you get to hit him on the shoulder and say second-year sophomore.”

  “When did that become a thing?” he asked.