Dad was already out the door, on his way to the Boredom Factory, when I left, but Mom was in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher. “I won’t be home right after school today,” I told her. “I’m going over to a friend’s house to work on the video.” I wouldn’t have told her that the friend was Anna if she offered never to cook a disaster for dinner again; I could just imagine the look on her face if I did.
“Okay,” she said. “Just make sure you come back before dark.”
“I’ll call you if I’ll be any later than that,” I promised, though I knew it would probably slip my mind. Could I actually be at Anna’s that long? What could we do that would take us till dark? Well, I had a few ideas, but none that I actually expected to happen.
So I hiked off to school, wishing that I was on the bus, in a way. But if I was, I would have had to leave about half an hour earlier, and instead of sitting in the back watching all the kids having oral sex (which they weren’t doing anyway), I probably would have been assigned to sit by one of those assholes who thinks he’s a big deal because he’s a third-string defensive back on the football team.
That had happened the year before; instead of getting to sit wherever I wanted, I had to sit next to Nick Norton, who spent most of his time trying to get me to do his damn homework for him, or at least to let him copy mine. That was usually pretty easy to get out of, though, since I hadn’t done it myself. Anyway, I was glad to be rid of jerks like him, at least on the bus. I still had to deal with them most of the rest of the day.
I got to school with just about five minutes to spare and walked into the media immersion room, where everybody was sitting in the circle already. I took a seat next to Anna, trying to look all casual and stuff, like the fact that I was going over to her place that afternoon was no big deal.
“So,” I said, just muttering instead of actually talking, “you wanna just meet up after school and walk to your place? Or do you ride the bus home?”
“We can walk,” she said. “They won’t let people on the bus if they don’t ride it normally anymore. Some kind of security threat.”
“Well, that makes sense,” I said. “How do you know some kid isn’t going to another kid’s house to plot a killing spree or something? There are so many terrorists in Cornersville.”
“At least we don’t have to go through metal detectors to get into the school building,” said Anna. “Not yet, anyway.”
Our parents were always coming up with new and exciting ways to keep us safe; a few had suggested that they put metal detectors in all the buildings. Others had said we should all have clear plastic backpacks, which struck me as dumb; any kid with half a brain could still hide something in his lunch bag.
“Did you finish your outline?” Anna asked.
I nodded.
“Same here,” she said. “Check this out.”
She handed me a piece of paper. It said:
Anna Brandenburg
Smoking/Drugs Video Synopsis
My video will consist of a series of images of dead people, with voice-overs saying which drugs they took, followed by the message that kids should avoid drugs and smoking if they don’t want to end up as dead as the people in the movie.
“You’re sort of glossing over a few key points,” I said. “Like who the dead people are going to be.”
“I’ll plead ignorance. It’s easier to get excused for something after you’ve already done it than to ask permission beforehand, right?”
Mr. Streich came waltzing on in just as the bell rang, and clapped his hands together once or twice to get our attention. “Okay, gang,” he said, like calling us a gang would make us think he was any cooler than he was. “Everybody got their outlines ready to go?”
We all pulled them out and Mr. Streich began to walk around the room, looking them over. This whole process struck me as slightly backward. We’d done a bit of brainstorming and some talk about what was expected of us and all that, but we were also supposed to spend at least another week on research before we started making the videos. It seemed to me that it would be a better idea to do the research before we started in on the outlines. But that’s just me. I honestly think they if they just let the gifted pool run things, the school would be in better hands. And anyway, I couldn’t complain. I wanted to get started on the video, not spend all my time reading books from the health section.
Mr. Streich looked over Anna’s outline for a good long time. “Well,” he said, “this is a little morbid. Do you think you could also add some instructional things, like how to resist the pressure to smoke and take drugs?”
“I will consider it with great care over the coming weeks,” said Anna. She didn’t say that she’d already finished the video.
Mr. Streich moved on to mine and stared down at it.
“Oh,” he said, as he got to the end, “I forgot to tell you something. I know I said we could find a way to put in an explosion, but I talked to some people in the office about it, and they said I couldn’t allow that. I can’t let you do anything dangerous.”
I was starting to get pissed off already—and it was too early to be all that pissed. If I was angry before regular classes even started, I’d never make it all the way through the day. “What if I didn’t make the explosion myself?” I asked. “What if I just used some footage of an explosion that somebody else filmed?”
“I’ll ask, but I doubt it. If you show anything with a lot of fire in it, they’ll say that you’re encouraging kids to burn things. And that would be trouble.”
“That’s a bunch of crap,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Anna, coming to my defense. “If he shows something to do with a girl getting her period, will that encourage kids to bleed?” I think I blushed a bit, but Anna didn’t.
“I happen to agree with you,” he said. “But they don’t want to leave themselves open to getting sued. And anyway, you’re really sort of toeing the line with this video to start with. It’s pretty risqué.”
“It’s art!” I practically shouted.
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m going to approve the rest of this, at least for now, though you might have to simplify it a bit to keep the school board happy. Just no explosions.”
“It was Smollet, wasn’t it?” I asked. “She’s the one who told you you’d get sued, right?”
“It’s…just the rule,” he said, not answering my question, which made it pretty clear that it had been Smollet, all right.
Unfortunately, things went downhill from there. In history, Coach Wilkins pulled a pop quiz on Manifest Destiny on us, and, though I knew most of the basics, I hadn’t paid attention to all the key terms or vocabulary words, so I only got about a D on it.
A few seats ahead of me sat Joe Griffin, the religious creep, and midway through Coach Wilkins’s follow-up lecture on Davy Crockett, he passed me a note.
It read, “Why are you wearing that shirt?”
I was wearing a T-shirt with a peace sign on it. I wrote “Why not?” on the note and sent it back up front. He probably thought that wearing a peace sign meant I took a lot of acid.
A few minutes later, it came back with “Why do you listen to heavy metal?” on it. Once again, I wrote “Why not?” and sent it back, with the note “Does God approve of passing notes?” at the bottom.
This went on for a few minutes. Over the course of the class, he asked me why I sat in the back, why I hung out with a communist, and other little stupid things. I always just answered with “Why not?” This wasn’t exactly harmful or anything, but I was sure that he was just doing it to be a jerk, not because he was genuinely curious about what made me tick.
My family wasn’t particularly religious, but I’d say we were as religious as anyone else I knew. Every now and then, like when somebody was sick, we’d get dressed up and go to some church or another, and we usually showed up on Easter and Christmas, but that was about it. Still, I had read the Bible from cover to cover the year before, just so I could argue with Joe about i
t.
Joe passed the note back.
At the bottom, he’d written, “Why are you making an obscene movie?” I wondered how he’d even heard about it.
“I’m not,” I wrote back. “It’s an artsy one. And an informative one.” I passed it up, and it came back in a second.
“Informative about what?” he wrote.
“Sex and adolescence. In an artsy way,” I replied.
It came back with his best question yet: “Aren’t you encouraging people to fornicate?”
“Fornicate”! I love that word. I’ve never really heard anyone use it, but it actually sounds a lot dirtier than regular old sex. Playing the field is one thing, but how would you like to be known as one who fornicates?
“No,” I wrote back, hoping he could see the sarcasm in my handwriting. “I’m encouraging people to masturbate. Starting with you. You need to relieve some tension.”
Ha. I thought that would make a fine last word, but a few minutes later, the paper came back to me.
“God doesn’t like it,” he wrote back, predictably.
I had to admit that even though I disagreed with Joe on just about everything, I kind of enjoyed arguing with him. It helped kill time during a dull class, which even Coach Wilkins’s imitation of Davy Crockett begging the Mexicans not to stab him to death at the Alamo couldn’t save.
Lunch was a relief; at least I would be surrounded by people I liked. As soon as I sat down, Anna turned to me and said, “Did you know that in the eighteenth century in Hungary there were twelve hundred villages populated entirely by poor nobles? Like counts and dukes and stuff?”
“Twelve hundred?” I asked. “There must have been a hell of a lot of nobles to begin with.”
“Maybe that’s why they were all poor,” said Anna. “There were so many of them that there wasn’t enough money going around for all of them.”
“I wish I’d been there,” said Brian. “If there were a whole bunch of poor counts roaming around, I could buy a title off one of them cheap. Then I’d be Count Brian.”
“Like one of them who didn’t support the very idea of nobility?” asked Edie.
“Yeah,” said Brian, nodding. “Some commie count who was looking for a fast buck.”
I told them all about my note-passing battle with Joe Griffin, and everyone had a good laugh. Anna said that a couple of days earlier, he’d told her whole biology class that America was doomed because kids weren’t allowed to pray in school. Exactly what this had to do with biology went unexplained.
“You know,” I said. “You actually are allowed to pray in school. You can pray anytime you want, the law just keeps the schools from organizing a special time for kids to do it. The only rule against doing it yourself is that you can’t disrupt the class.”
Anna laughed. “Damn,” she said. “I was planning to spend my next math class praying to Satan at the top of my lungs.” She dug into her backpack and pulled out a pair of devil horns, the kind you get in Halloween costumes, and put them on.
“I think they should have prayer in school,” she said, “because then I could claim that I was a Satanist. I could demand a minute every morning to slaughter a goat, and they’d have to give it to me!”
I doubted that was true but laughed anyway.
“Did you bring those for Smollet’s class?” Brian asked.
“Why else?” asked Anna.
None of us were actually Satanists. Anna and her parents went to synagogue pretty regularly, and I knew that Dustin’s parents made him go to church every weekend, but Mrs. Smollet got so freaked out by us just joking about it that we couldn’t help it. Sometimes I worried that it was a bit sacreligious to pretend to be a devil worshipper, but I was pretty sure that if God knew anything about what it was like to be in a class headed by Mrs. Smollet, He wouldn’t mind too much. He obviously knew that we weren’t actually sacrificing goats to anybody.
This brightened up my day a bit, especially since it reminded me that Halloween, the greatest holiday in the history of the world, was less than two months away, but it didn’t really pull me out of the bad mood I’d been in since hearing that I couldn’t do the explosion. That’s the kind of thing a guy doesn’t get over too quickly.
The fact that the next class was gym didn’t help matters. Guys like Nick Norton always think gym is the highlight of the day, but I’ve never liked it much. I thought it was okay in elementary school, when all we did was play around with parachutes and stuff, until one day when we were playing elimination, which was like free-form, every-man-for-himself dodgeball, and Todd Moreland cornered me against a wall and threw a ball at my chest. I jumped straight up to get out of the way, and very nearly made it, which would have been really cool. But I didn’t jump high enough, and instead of hitting my chest, the ball creamed me in the nuts. That pretty well killed my appetite for gym. And anyway, some kid a couple of towns over had had something similar happen and had to get one of his nuts removed at the hospital, or so the story went. I preferred classes where I wasn’t in that sort of danger.
If teachers hadn’t been watching us like hawks and ready to suspend anyone who missed a class, I would’ve cut gym every day. All we did was sit around in some smelly locker room, change into nasty clothes, and then run around the stupid gym while Coach Hunter shouted at us like we were in the marines or something. I swear to God that the maniac once shouted at me and called me a girl when I made a mistake during square dancing. Why the hell did we have square dancing in gym anyway?
The only guy from my lunch table I had gym with was James Cole, who was about as interested in the whole thing as I was. He was standing next to me while we were all doing the usual exercises.
“Ten push-ups!” shouted Coach Hunter. “Drop! Now!”
We all dropped, and, by going at a slower pace, I got away with doing only six or seven. Then he shouted for us all to get up and start touching our toes.
James suddenly hopped about two feet closer to me and muttered, “Bongos at twelve o’clock.”
“What the hell?” I asked. “Bongos” must’ve been one of his newer slang inventions; I didn’t know if it meant that he had muscle spasms in his back or someone had farted or what.
“Bongos!” he said, pointing his chin in front of us. I looked up and saw that Rachel Strutt was touching her toes directly in front of us, and found out right away what “bongos” were. She was wearing this loose-fitting shirt that hung down low when she bent over, and you could see right up it. She was wearing a sports bra and all, but, well, still. It was the kind of sight that helped a guy get through the day.
A few minutes later the coach was barking for us all to run laps around the gym. As usual, James and I just walked. As we passed the coach one time, he started walking along with us.
“I’m sick of you girls,” he said.
“Don’t you worry that calling us girls could leave us with unresolved gender issues?” I asked. I figured that if the school was that concerned about getting sued over an explosion, they wouldn’t want a teacher going around calling us girls when we certainly weren’t.
“Don’t smart-mouth me,” he said. I think gym teachers don’t like any part of you to be all that smart. “Every day I see you two girls in here giving twenty percent. I want to see some improvement.”
“Twenty-one percent it is, sir!” said James, with as much conviction as he could manage. I smiled, nodded, and kept on walking. I normally make it a rule only to run if something is chasing me, and not something small. Something like a bear. And there aren’t any bears in Cornersville.
So we ended up being made to run a full three laps as fast as we could, to keep from getting detention and a failing grade. By the end of it, I was a mess, sweating like a pig and probably smelling about like one, too. The five seconds or so that we got to shower afterward wasn’t enough to help, and all this just a few hours before I had to go to Anna’s house.
Poor James had it even worse than I did; he was panting and wheezing after the
first lap, and coughing so much I was afraid his guts might come flying out. I know marijuana isn’t the most harmful drug in the world, but it sure does make a guy cough.
Now, I’m not a violent person. I never really get into fights, partly because I know that, realistically, most of the guys in school could probably beat the crap out of me, and partly because I know that I just couldn’t bring myself to really hurt anybody. I couldn’t kick a guy in the face, even a guy I really hated. But all through the last hour or two of classes, every time some kid threw a piece of paper that ended up on my desk, I just wanted to punch the guy’s lights out. I knew it wouldn’t really help my problems and all that stuff that they drill into your head starting in kindergarten, but it would have at least made me feel better for a second.
In math, the last class I had before gifted pool, I came as close as I’ve ever come to decking someone. By that point, I was in a pretty bad mood. If there’s a kid alive who’s in a good mood after being barked at by a wannabe marine, I’m not sure I even want to meet that kid.
Math was occasionally fun. Not because math itself is any fun, but because Mrs. Wellington would usually just teach for about five minutes, then give us the rest of the time to do worksheets and stuff. This gave us plenty of time for screwing around, and there were days when that was a blast. That afternoon, however, I was just not in the mood.
I was about halfway through a multiplying fractions worksheet when a couple of guys I knew only from gym class came over to my desk. They both wore the sort of mini–bowl cuts soccer players tended to favor at my school.
“Are you really screwing Anna Brandenburg?” one of them asked.
“Who told you that?” I asked, getting pissed off already.
“It’s like, general knowledge,” said the other.
“Well, it’s not true,” I said.
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