Don't Care High

by Gordon Korman

  “Is Mike Otis here?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” sighed Mr. Willis, who was having his usual hard time getting the class under way.

  Mike surrendered himself in characteristically passive fashion, and was borne off to the office. Paul was overcome with guilt.

  After class, he and Sheldon sought out Mike at his locker.

  “Hey, Mike, what’s new?” called Sheldon.

  Mike gave them a quizzical look. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing,” repeated Paul, nodding. In Mike Otis language, what did that mean? “Why did Gamble want you?” he blurted.

  “There are a lot of things at this school I don’t understand.”

  Sheldon and Paul stood there, waiting for the elaboration that would not come. Mike reached into his locker, produced a small polishing cloth and dusted off the toes of his black dress shoes. He checked the security of the safety pins holding his cuffs and closed the locker door. He turned to leave and paused, perhaps pondering what to do with Sheldon and Paul.

  “I guess you’re going home now,” said Paul lamely.

  Mike nodded and headed for the stairwell.

  “See you Monday?” Paul called after him anxiously.

  Mike stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Sure.” Then he disappeared down the stairs.

  Paul exhaled. “He didn’t get expelled! What a relief!” He wiped his forehead. “Oh, let’s get a Coke! I’m buying!”

  All the way to the deli, Sheldon kept up a steady stream of chatter in praise of Mike Otis. “Can you believe that guy? He’s too cool for words! Gamble tears him out of class and probably chews him out for something that isn’t his fault, and he says ‘There are a lot of things at this school I don’t understand.’ What a philosopher! What a poet!”

  “Calm down, Shel. People will think you’re nuts.”

  “I mean, he’s got life right where he wants it! Picture this: It’s the Battle of Waterloo, and Napoleon’s forces are in ruins. Wellington demands that the French surrender, and Napoleon says, ‘There are a lot of things in this war I don’t understand.’”

  “I don’t see the connection.”

  “It’ll come to you,” Sheldon promised. “But when we picked Mike to be student body president, we picked a great man. I can’t wait till next week when The Otis Report will have had a chance to sink in.”

  * * *

  At three o’clock in the morning, Paul was awakened from a deep sleep by the persistent shaking of his shoulders. He sat up to find his mother standing over him.

  “Wake up, Paul.”

  Paul rubbed his eyes. “What’s the matter?”

  “Your cousins Cheryl and Lisa are here.”

  Paul looked at his clock radio. “It’s after three. Why can’t they come visiting at a decent hour?”

  “Paul, don’t be uncooperative!” his mother admonished him. “Poor Auntie Nancy! Fluffy got sprayed by a skunk.”

  “Fluffy,” Paul repeated dazedly. There was another sore point. Other people loved their dogs; Auntie Nancy was absurd about Fluffy. From years back, he could recall his aunt telling him, “Fluffy is not a dog. She’s a little girl with long ears and a fur coat.”

  Paul yawned. “Why are you waking me up to tell me about this tragedy?”

  “Well, you see, Fluffy went in the house, and now everything smells just terrible. The poor girls couldn’t sleep, so they phoned and asked if they could come here.”

  “And you said sure,” Paul sighed wearily. “Is Auntie Nancy here, too?”

  “Oh no. She’s at home with Fluffy.”

  Paul nodded sagely. “The captain stays with the stinking ship.”

  “Don’t be insensitive, young man. Now, come on. Out of bed. I told Cheryl and Lisa that you’d be happy to sleep on the couch so they could have your room until things are back to normal at their house.”

  “Tell them I was misquoted,” muttered Paul sourly.

  But in the end, Paul had to make do in the den while his cousins, smelling faintly of skunk, took possession of his room, which was, Paul decided, true to the direction his life was taking. The Steves of this world may be masters of their own fate, but Paul Abrams goes where he’s pushed.

  8

  The fumigation of Auntie Nancy’s house and decontamination of its resident canine took all weekend, and Paul was forced to spend Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights in the den. He did not sleep well, as the couch seemed to have several sizeable lumps which, for some reason, could not be found when his mother lay down to check out his complaints. Paul, in his sleepless frenzy, kept imagining large, beetlelike creatures crawling around below his body.

  The small shift in location gave him a whole new angle from which to watch the apartment building across the street. The poker game had reconvened, but he could barely see it; although from this new perspective he discovered Rabbit Man. Rabbit Man lived at the corner of the building on about the thirty-fifth floor level, and every night he dressed himself in a bunny suit, sat in the window and ate carrots. The first night, Paul had thought the man was on his way to a costume party; now he didn’t know what to think.

  Then there was the couple in the apartment adjoining the Abrams’. The elderly pair who, according to Paul’s mother, “have been married forty-three years and have the most wonderful relationship,” came to blows that weekend, hurling abuse and crockery at one another. Although not as instructive as the continuing adventures of Steve on the apartment’s other border, they were much more interesting, and a lot louder.

  To make matters worse, Sheldon and his family were away for a long weekend attending a boarding pass convention at a resort hotel in the Catskills. They were not scheduled to return home until Monday evening. This forced Paul to spend a lot of time at home, where he had to listen to the infernal beeping of the telephone with forwarded calls for his two cousins. In keeping with their eternal diets, there was cottage cheese at every meal, and Paul suffered from perpetual nausea Saturday and most of Sunday. He found himself thinking nostalgically of the tomato sauce patented under the name Rocco. All weekend he listened with a hopeful heart to bulletins on the progress of the tomato juice baths at Auntie Nancy’s house.

  So it was an exhausted and supremely overtaxed Paul who presented himself for school on Monday morning. The last thing he needed in this world, he reflected, was more aggravation.

  Mr. Gamble and Mr. Morrison arrived at the office at the same time, each with The Otis Report on his mind. Mr. Gamble was in a state of outrage, roaring, “Otis doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s going on here! You can’t even be sure whether he really knows he’s president! This lunacy has got to stop!”

  Mr. Morrison was in a quandary. Yes, The Otis Report was full of exaggerations and outright lies, but it was also a show of initiative — the first he had witnessed since his arrival at Don Carey. But if this effort wasn’t attributable to Mike, then whose work was it? Who was showing this potential that, with proper nurturing, could turn into — dare he think it — school spirit?

  “Son-of-a-gun,” was Mrs. Carling’s opinion.

  “Furthermore, I want to make the announcement personally,” Mr. Gamble raged. “I don’t want our great leader to interpret this as some big joke. It’s a hoax and it must be exposed and ended! And this time I’m not backing down!”

  A hush fell as Mr. Gamble strode purposefully into the principal’s office. One of the younger secretaries covered her eyes.

  * * *

  The regular bassoon voice came through the P.A. system that morning.

  May I have your attention, please. Just a couple of announcements.

  We have a complaint from police that our students are straggling across the street in front of oncoming traffic, causing great inconvenience to motorists and danger to themselves. I will at this point reiterate that bit of sage advice which I am sure all of you have at one time or another had bestowed upon you. Please look both ways before you cross the street.

  Oh yes, and this, accor
ding to Mr. Gamble, is important. For a number of reasons, Mike Otis will no longer be allowed to hold the office of student body president.

  That’s all. Have a good day.

  A hum went up throughout the school. Paul felt himself suffused with rage. Instinctively, he looked around for Sheldon before remembering that his friend would not be in school until tomorrow.

  The door opened and Wayne-o breezed in, his face mirroring perplexity instead of its usual blankness. “Hey, Mr. Morrison, did I just hear that they’re not going to let Mike Otis be president anymore?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Morrison uncomfortably. “The staff feels that Mike… uh… doesn’t really have the support of the students.”

  Wayne-o looked confused. “I support him.”

  That was all Paul needed. He leaped to his feet. “Me, too! We all support Mike Otis, right?”

  There was a thoughtful hum. As Paul scanned his classmates, he saw vaguely surprised looks on their faces, as though the question had caught them off guard.

  Dan Wilburforce verbalized what they all seemed to be thinking. “Well, I’ve never really thought about it much, but now that you mention it, I guess I do support Mike Otis. After all, he did do all those things for the school.”

  “He got the halls painted.”

  “He got the roof repaired.”

  “He fixed the can!” added Wayne-o breathlessly.

  “Wait a minute,” said Mr. Morrison. “Who told you all these things?”

  There was silence for a moment, so Paul yelled, “Everybody knows it! It’s all over the school!” And there was general agreement.

  “And it was in the paper,” Wayne-o added earnestly.

  Mr. Morrison tried to choose his words carefully. “What would you say if I told you that Mike knows nothing about that paper and did none of those things?”

  “But you’re a teacher!” blurted one of the LaPaz triplets. “You have to say that!”

  Paul spoke again. “They’re trying to take away our duly-elected president!” As the words “duly-elected” passed through his lips, he went a little red and sat down.

  “Besides,” said Wayne-o, “it has to be Mike’s paper. His picture’s on it. And it’s all about him.”

  Mr. Morrison gawked. “You read it?”

  “Of course I read it,” said Wayne-o, almost belligerently. “Okay, so I don’t read a whole lot. But when the guy who fixed the can takes the time to publish a newspaper to keep me informed, I read it.”

  Mr. Morrison sat down at his desk, overcome by his homeroom’s reaction. “All right, everybody. Go to class.”

  And suddenly Paul was on his feet again. “But if you support Mike, tell your friends about it! We can’t let this snow-job go through! Remember, when we needed it, Mike was there to fight for us!”

  The class dispersed, humming.

  Paul went through his day as though in a coma, hardly understanding his own reaction. Classes were a blur. He felt great anger over Mike’s dismissal, even though he was fully conscious of the fact that President Otis had sprung from the diabolical imagination of Sheldon Pryor. Yet when he saw a discarded and trampled copy of The Otis Report, he felt a rush of emotion and outrage that almost alarmed him. Mike’s humble beginnings were unimportant now. He was the president. They couldn’t impeach him. It was not fair.

  When he arrived in photography class and saw Mike, it was all he could do to keep from running up and embracing the deposed leader. He did say, “Raw deal this morning, Mike, but the war’s not over yet,” and received a confused stare in reply.

  A murmur went up in the room, and Paul could make out a few “That’s him” and “That’s Mike Otis.”

  Twenty minutes later, when the class was already under way and Wayne-o was making his entrance, the latecomer walked straight to Mike’s desk, clapped a friendly hand onto his shoulder and announced, “Hang in there, Mike. We’re with you all the way.”

  Poor Mr. Willis just stood there, the progress of his chalk arrested halfway through the diagram of a camera. He stared in amazement as all his students turned to Mike Otis and offered murmured words of comfort and support.

  After school, Paul went home and took possession of the phone. He was grateful that Cheryl and Lisa had been able to return home, but in his fervour, even this blessed event seemed unimportant. He called the Pryor house every fifteen minutes, finally reaching Sheldon on the fifth try.

  “Shel, we have to meet. It’s an emergency.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Don’t Care High threw Mike Otis out of office.”

  There was a pause, then, “I’ll be right over.”

  So urgent was the situation that the boys passed up their customary snack and did not even consider the radio. Sitting in Paul’s room with the door closed, Paul outlined the events of the day while Sheldon listened gravely.

  “Well, obviously we have to do something,” said Sheldon. “But we are only two guys against the whole staff.”

  “No we’re not!” said Paul vehemently. “I watched an entire class stop right in the middle so the students — Don’t Care Students — could give Mike a vote of confidence. Our whole homeroom came out in Mike’s favour. Wayne-o said, and I quote, ‘I support him.’”

  “That’s incredible!” Sheldon marvelled.

  “All that being true,” Paul went on, “they’re still not the kind of people who get excited at the drop of a hat. They have to be told about Mike. They have to have a chance to think about it. It’s not that they don’t care; it’s that they never think about it. Once they do, they’re on our side.”

  Sheldon looked at Paul almost proudly. “You’re really worked up about this, aren’t you?”

  Paul grinned in embarrassment. “You had to be there, Shel. You had to hear Mr. What’s-his-name say that Mike couldn’t be president anymore. I know it sounds funny, but it was like a kick in the ribs.”

  “If we can pull this off,” said Sheldon, “it’ll be the most amazing thing in the history of the world! We’ll build it up so that everybody thinks that kicking Mike out of office was not only an offence against Mike, but twenty-six hundred individual slaps in the face. We’ll demand that he be reinstated. “But,” he added with a dazzling smile, “not before we have everybody’s support. Because if we’re singled out as the guys who started the whole thing, we’re both instantly dead.”

  * * *

  Step One, according to Sheldon, was The Face.

  “We have to familiarize all the kids with Mike’s face. It will give them something human to relate to.”

  On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Willis’s entire photography class, with the exception of Mike himself, stayed after school to do extra work in the darkroom. The result: one hundred gleaming eight-by-ten glossies of the beleaguered president, and an agreement for a repeat performance the next day and subsequent days if necessary.

  “We won’t stop,” Sheldon vowed, “until the teachers at this school are seeing Mike’s face in their sleep!” His accomplices all nodded enthusiastically.

  As the days went by, the word spread. Along with the appearance of countless photographs of Mike Otis peering off every wall, students were talking among themselves and finding, in an increasing groundswell of surprise, that they had an opinion on the subject. They were angry. No one could recall having voted for Mike Otis, but all assumed his position to be legitimate. Everyone sensed the growth of his support. The situation was simple. He had fought for the students, and for this he had been cast out.

  “It’s our responsibility to fight for Mike the way he fought for us!” Sheldon harangued an ardent cafeteria crowd.

  “Yeah!” shouted a dozen voices.

  “Yeah!” agreed still more.

  “Yeah!” repeated everyone, until the single syllable grew into what would go down in history as the first cheer ever to come from a roomful of Don’t Care students.

  Paul produced a sheaf of photographs and jumped up onto the table that Sheldon was standing on. “I
f you’re with Mike, show it! Display his picture!” He hurled the pictures out into the sea of eager hands.

  Art classes became exclusively devoted to the manufacture of “We Want Mike Back” posters, which began to appear all over the school. All wood and metal shop projects were shelved in favour of the production of Mike Otis billboards and large ornamental M.O. initials. The school band set to work composing a Mike Otis anthem, which included a five-minute tuba solo played by one-time locker baron Slim Kroy. The anthem was never completed, but the tuba solo lived on. It sounded like a cross between “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” and “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” oompahed out at double-speed by Slim who, at two hundred fifty pounds, had the wind for it. It was quite catchy, and many of the students took to humming it under their breath. The picture of the burly Slim holding his tuba went on to become synonymous with Mike’s quest to regain power.

  Strangest of all, the students of Don’t Care High, renowned for their consummate lack of interest in everything, had almost overnight blossomed into an energetic gang of political zealots.

  Phil Gonzalez, whose former greatest achievement was the eleven-and-a-half-foot scratch he had put on his father’s Coupe de Ville last Christmas, suddenly commandeered his home economics class. Unbeknownst to the teacher, he was leading his fellow students in the sewing of an enormous Mike Otis flag. The background was a basic blue, which coincidentally matched the colour of some curtains missing from the teachers’ lounge. On it was a huge white O, skewered by a giant silver safety pin. Sheldon had liked it so much that he had photocopied a hundred miniature versions of Phil’s original design and put them into circulation with the already awesome amount of paper that was being passed around on behalf of the deposed president.

  Cindy Schwartz, on the other hand, was participating on more of a creative level. Her big achievement was the coining of the phrase “I Like Mike.” It caught on like wildfire, and began to appear on posters, banners and blackboards throughout the school. Cindy invested the money to have a T-shirt made with her slogan, and also wrote it in brass studs on the back of her genuine vintage 1973 jean jacket.