Don't Care High

by Gordon Korman

  Mrs. Wolfe was getting desperate. “What’s the point? We already know —”

  A hand shot up. “Venezuela?” came a wild guess.

  “All right, all right!” exclaimed Mrs. Wolfe. “Forget the game. We’ll just read the cards as a point of interest. Who’s got Brazil?” There was no answer. “Well, come on! Somebody’s got Brazil. I handed it out.” Still nothing. “Look, people, this is impossible! Someone has Brazil!”

  Mrs. Wolfe became so upset that she began to march up and down between the rows of desks, checking each card. She stopped before one boy and completely blew her stack.

  “You! You’ve got Brazil! Why didn’t you say something?”

  The boy looked confused. “But you said we shouldn’t tell.”

  The door burst open and Wayne-o breezed in. “Hi. Did I miss anything?”

  “We played a game,” Dan Wilburforce announced blandly.

  Mrs. Wolfe screamed, but no one seemed to notice.

  Sheldon leaned over to Paul. “Come on, Ambition, don’t look so freaked out. Think how funny this is.”

  “Mom, I’m home.” Paul staggered in the door of apartment 3305, his ears still popping from the high-speed elevator.

  “I’m in the kitchen, dear.”

  Paul tossed his coat unceremoniously over a chair and headed through the apartment, mentally planning out his sob story for maximum effect. He decided to start with:

  “Mom, I’ve got to talk to you about this school you’ve sent me to!” As he entered the kitchen, he saw his mother taking a cake out of the oven.

  “Well, how was it? I’m dying to hear about your first day.”

  “Well, Mom, it’s like this….” He paused. Should he talk about the dilapidated building that was fated to come down upon his head sometime between now and graduation, or should he concentrate on the zombies who hummed every time anything school-related was mentioned? And what about the “Don’t Care” thing? She probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. He only half believed it himself. “This school isn’t like Kilgour, Mom. It’s kind of —”

  A high-pitched beeping cut the air. Paul winced as his mother went to answer the phone. He wondered what was so wrong with the old kind that just rang. It had probably taken a team of scientists five years and several million dollars to develop a sound so irritating to the nerves.

  “Hello?… Oh, hello, Nancy… No, I’m not busy at all. I’ve just finished some baking.”

  Paul groaned inwardly. Auntie Nancy. Now there was a sore point and a half. It had been Auntie Nancy who had convinced his father to apply for a job in New York. Auntie Nancy had organized the whole move. Auntie Nancy, who was snug in a ranch house on Long Island, had arranged for this apartment up in the clouds; Auntie Nancy was responsible for placing the family in the attendance district for Don’t Care High.

  “So, Nancy, did Harry let you order the dishwasher?… No? But did you explain to him that you’re the only house on the block with no dishwasher?… Oh, he’s so stubborn, that husband of yours.”

  Paul wandered out of the kitchen, feeling a slight shred of satisfaction that his Auntie Nancy was not getting the dishwasher she had been nagging for as long as he could remember. He straggled into his room and went to stand listlessly by the window. Thirty-three floors below, the rush hour traffic jam was assuming its usual mammoth proportions. A Volkswagen had rear-ended a limousine, and the two drivers seemed to be squaring off, cheered on by a bus stop full of people. Coupled with the construction on the road, the accident made the street impassable. The honking of horns and the barrage of jackhammers wafted up to his aerie. He slammed the window shut and gazed through the glass at the apartment building across the street. That was always a lively showcase. A few floors below, a woman was shaking her mop out the window in proud defiance of all city ordinances. Directly above her, a man in goggles was welding something to a large metal contraption that looked like a chrome torpedo. The man paused in his work, seemed to see Paul and immediately closed the blinds.

  Through the wall he could hear his mother still on the telephone. It seemed to be shaping up into one of their longer conversations. He decided to postpone his case against Don’t Care High for at least a few days. He could already hear the “You haven’t even given it a chance yet” lecture, one of his mother’s favourites. Then his father would deliver the crowning touch with “Life is what you make it.” It was a devastating combination.

  He threw himself backward onto his bed to mull over his first day at Don’t Care High. Of his classes, Sheldon was in two, and he was beginning to recognize some of the familiar faces from homeroom in the others. The most prominent of these was Wayne-o, who was apparently registered for all six, yet on time for none. The best prospect for a friend was definitely Sheldon, who was certainly amicable enough, and the only student Paul had yet encountered who cared about anything. Sheldon had even promised to arrange things with Feldstein, the major locker baron of the school, so that Paul could have a locker instead of living out of a plastic bag.

  He sighed. It looked like, for the next little while, he would just have to see what happened.

  2

  Feldstein looked like a normal person, Paul thought. He must have been an exception to the rule at Don’t Care High, since he seemed to care about at least one thing — lockers. The locker baron hung out in the first floor east stairwell at all times when he wasn’t in class. There he sat in majesty in an old armchair with the stuffing bleeding out of it, nestled beneath a flight of stairs.

  “You know Paul from our homeroom,” said Sheldon.

  Feldstein looked blank. “Who?”

  “The guy with ambition.”

  “Oh, yeah — cool. How many lockers do you need, man?”

  “Uh… one is just fine,” said Paul.

  Feldstein looked a little shocked. “Just one? Okay.” From his pocket he produced a map of the school hallways with his many holdings indicated in red. “It’s a tight deal this year, and I couldn’t get a lot of the good locations. But I have got one with a southern exposure. At about quarter of two, the sun is reflecting off the windows across the street right at this little baby. Interested?”

  “We’ll take it,” said Sheldon decisively. “It’s just down the hall from mine.”

  “Zero — forty-two — two,” said Feldstein, quoting the combination from memory. “It’s number 746B. Enjoy.”

  “Thanks… uh… Feldstein,” said Paul. “I guess I’ll be seeing you in homeroom.”

  Feldstein shook his head. “No, man.”

  “Feldstein’s not too big on homeroom,” Sheldon supplied. “He has a lot of business responsibilities.”

  “Oh, well, what do I owe you for the locker?”

  “Forget it, man. You’ll pay me later.”

  “Oh no. I have money.”

  “Not money,” said Feldstein in disgust. “I just did you a favour; someday maybe you can do me a favour.”

  Paul opened his mouth to protest, but Sheldon burst in with, “Thanks a lot, Feldstein. See you around.”

  As they made their way toward homeroom, Paul complained nervously to his companion. “Why did you get me into this? I don’t want to owe that guy a favour! He’s some kind of gangster!”

  Sheldon just laughed. “He’s harmless as a puppy. He called in my favour last year. You know what it was? He needed a cake. You know why? Because he was hungry. Big gangster.”

  May I have your attention, please. The sun is shining, and therefore the ventilation system has malfunctioned. It is now eighty degrees at the airport, and ninety degrees in the school halls, with a relative humidity of ninety-eight percent, and prevailing winds coming from the music room. If any of you feel any dizzier than usual, I would like to remind you that we have a medical office on the basement level.

  You may or may not be pleased to know that the Varsity Basketball League has decided to allow us teams this year on the condition that we accept no home games due to lacklustre attendance in previous seasons.
Tryouts for the boys’ varsity begin this afternoon at three-thirty. I’d better add that the team needs at least five players to have a reasonable chance of winning any games.

  First period commences in three minutes. That’s all. Have a good day.

  “Who is that guy?” Paul whispered to Sheldon.

  “Oh, him? That’s the principal,” Sheldon replied. “Mr.… uh… Mr.…” he slapped his forehead. “I used to know it. Mr. —”

  “Doesn’t he sign all the official notices home?” Paul caught the look on Sheldon’s face. “You’re not trying to tell me there aren’t any notices here.”

  “We had a notice once last year, but I think it came from Morrison. I don’t think anybody brought one home, though. As I recall, the janitorial staff used it as grounds for a pay hike.”

  Mr. Morrison stood up behind his desk. “Okay, it’s time for class. Don’t forget the guidance office is open to all of you until four o’clock every day.”

  A dull hum greeted this announcement, and the class began to disperse.

  The only noteworthy event of the morning for Paul came in second period — chemistry class — when he was introduced to his lab partner for the year, Daphne Sylvester. At six-foot-one, blonde and stunning, she seemed designed to make him feel as insignificant as a dust mote in a typhoon. He slaved over the day’s experiment while she sat passively by, signifying her approval, he figured, by not falling asleep. The only thing that seemed to catch her interest briefly was when Wayne-o, making his customary late entrance, struck the teacher, Mr. Schmidt, with the door, sending him sprawling into a shelf of glass beakers. This event caused quite a hum in the lab. Mr. Schmidt decided to mark Wayne-o absent.

  “Oh, you got Daphne, huh?” Sheldon commented as he and Paul wandered through the halls after lunch. “Quite a pick.”

  “It was the luck of the draw,” said Paul glumly. “Talk about your silent partner. The girl is dead. I don’t know whether to do an experiment or an autopsy. I tried to check her eyes for signs of life, but the angle was too great. I’m getting a kink in my neck.”

  “What can I say? She’s typical. She isn’t dead; she just doesn’t care. You’re going to have to adjust to the fact that the different one isn’t Daphne. It’s you.”

  “I’m starting to get the picture,” Paul sighed, sitting down on a window ledge. “You know, at my old school, they told us we were the citizens of tomorrow.”

  “They’d never do that here,” said Sheldon. “It’d be too depressing. But as near as I can tell, people do learn things here. I don’t know how it happens, but it happens. There are bad grades and there are good grades, but Don’t Care students graduate.”

  “But why is it like this? The ‘Don’t Care’ thing, I mean?”

  Sheldon shrugged. “It’s hard to say. It could be Manhattan, but there are perfectly normal schools not a mile away. It could be this one-hundred-forty-year-old building, but there are worse, I guess. Maybe it’s the legacy of Don Carey and his sewage. But look. Look behind you out the window. What do you see?”

  Paul swivelled and squinted through the unwashed glass. “Looks like a highway interchange.”

  “Right,” said Sheldon. “It’s the 22nd Street ramp for the Henry Hudson Parkway. It also happens to be Don’t Care High’s athletic field. Look, you can still see one of the goalposts in the centre of the cloverleaf. They had to cut off the left upright to make room for the right lane merge. And if you look real hard, you can see the fifty-yard line by the base of that parking garage.”

  “But how did that happen?”

  “Well, the story goes that twelve years ago, when the city wanted somewhere around here to put their new ramp, it just so happened that the school board was looking for real estate to build a fancy new school uptown. So they gambled that, at Don’t Care High, no one would notice, let alone care. Don’t Care always concentrated on basketball rather than football anyway, since it’s a lot easier to find five players than twelve. So they traded our playing field for the uptown land. Anyway, a few years later they started a subway tunnel under there, but ran out of money, and eventually the ground caved in. So they paved it, all but that little patch around the fifty-yard line.”

  Paul’s face flamed red. “That’s ridiculous! What kind of city would do that?”

  “Oh, the city would have backed down if there had been any kind of protest. But this is Don’t Care High —”

  “It’s terrible, that’s what it is!” Paul interrupted hotly. “All this school needs is someone to take care of its interests, someone to represent it!”

  Sheldon looked mildly amused. “Why not you? Want to be student body president?”

  “Are you crazy? It’s my second day in the school. No one knows me.”

  “That’s no problem. It’s not as though there’s going to be an election or anything like that. We just nominate you, and you win unopposed.”

  “And then what?”

  “Oh, nothing, of course,” said Sheldon. “No one can do anything with this place.”

  “Forget it,” said Paul. “I don’t want to be president just because nobody cares enough to run against me. Why don’t you run?”

  “No way,” said Sheldon quickly, “I’m strictly a behind-the-scenes man. But I think you’re right. It is about time someone took over the reins of power around here.” His eyes scanned the near-deserted hallway and lit on a lone figure standing in front of a locker. “Him, for instance.”

  Paul stared in shock. There at the end of Sheldon’s gaze stood a bizarre character, motionless by his open locker. He was of medium height, slight and very dark, with an olive complexion. His straight black hair was slicked back from his forehead, giving him a weasel-like appearance, which was accentuated further by his beady black eyes. His posture was terrible, combining a slump with a forward tilt, and he wore a voluminous, full-length, dull-beige raincoat which hung on him as if on a bent coat hanger. Beneath his open coat he wore a pink shirt and jeans which were turned up tightly at the ankles. Each cuff was secured with a large safety pin. On his feet were glossy black dress shoes.

  “Who is that?” Paul whispered in awe.

  “I don’t know his name,” Sheldon whispered back. “I think he’s a senior. I’ve seen him around. Not the most outgoing guy in the world, I’d guess, but he looks like presidential timber to me.”

  “What? Are you crazy? You can’t make that guy president!”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, first of all, because he’d never let you do it!”

  Sheldon smiled wisely. “He won’t have to know about it. We’ll just file nomination papers on his behalf.”

  “But — But that can’t happen — Can it?”

  “I see no reason why not. We nominate him, wait a while, nobody else runs, and he’s president. I don’t think he’ll mind. Of all the people in this school who don’t care, I’d say he doesn’t care the most. I mean, it isn’t as though he’d have to do anything.”

  Paul shook his head. “But don’t you think he’ll complain when he finds out he’s president?”

  “He might, but I doubt it. From what I can tell about him, he’ll probably just ignore the whole thing. We’ve got a problem, though. We don’t know his name. We can’t just nominate him as the guy with greased-back hair and safety pins in his pants.”

  Paul looked back at the apparition, who was still standing and staring into his locker. Him? President? “Well, I guess that’s it then. You don’t know his name, so you can’t do it. Too bad.”

  “Follow me,” said Sheldon. With Paul tagging along cautiously, he approached the boy in the raincoat. “Hi. I’ve seen you around here a lot. I’m Shel, and this is Paul.”

  The black eyes remained blank. The response was quiet and dry. “Hi.”

  Sheldon waited for more and, when none came, added, “I don’t think we know your name.”

  The boy looked at him again. “I don’t think so either,” he said in an unpunctuated monotone. He shut his loc
ker door and snapped on the lock. “Bye.” Then he was gone, hunching down the hallway, headed for the stairwell.

  “What was that?” asked Paul in awe.

  Sheldon was impressed, too. “He’s something special, even for this school. But you’ve got to admit that he’s perfect to represent the students of Don’t Care High.”

  Paul laughed. “All right, Sheldon, let’s drop it. You can’t make that guy president. You can’t even get him to identify himself.”

  “I’ll find out who he is. Somebody must know him.”

  * * *

  Rosalie Gladstone shrugged almost expansively enough to dislocate both shoulders, then snapped her gum three times. “What do you want to know that for?” Her voice seemed to operate on the same frequency as Paul’s mother’s telephone.

  Sheldon put on his most charming smile and treated the question as rhetorical. “But you have seen him?”

  “Oh, sure. I guess. I don’t know.” She laughed.

  Peter Eversleigh was not much help, either. He sat cross-legged in front of his locker, taking precise, rhythmic, quarter-inch bites out of a long string of black licorice. He looked up at Sheldon and Paul.

  “Yeah, I know the dude about whom you are speaking. Greased-back hair, raincoat, jeans with safety pins. Must be one conceptual dude.”

  “Oh, he is,” said Sheldon. “Do you happen to know his name?”

  “Neg, dude. No name.”

  Even Wayne-o had no idea, commenting, “Well, he’s a senior, and he’s weird, and he drives a cool car. But I don’t know his name. It’s not Wayne-o, though. That’s me.” He walked away, laughing as though he’d just said something hilarious.

  “Well, I guess your man’s political career is on the skids already,” said Paul, mostly out of relief. “He’s the most anonymous person I’ve ever heard of. Why don’t you try making Wayne-o president? Everybody knows him.”

  “Wayne-o would never want to be president,” Sheldon explained patiently. “He’s just happy that he gets to be Wayne-o. But we’re not dead yet. We’ve got one more chance.” He headed for the stairwell.