by Gary Paulsen
Contents
Title Page
1. Higher Education
2. The Joys of Home Life
3. Trapped
4. The Horror of Gym Class
5. Hit and Run
6. The Lure of the Stage
7. Lost in Fantasia
8. Life Beneath the Boards
9. Phantom of the Auditorium
10. Misery
11. Tomorrow
12. Surrender
13. Love Blossoms
14. Love Fulfilled
About the Author
Also by Gary Paulsen
Copyright
IN.
Jacob Freisten stood in the shadow of the dumpster in back of the Reddi-Ralph store across from the high school and studied the front of the school carefully, as if considering buying it. Once his mother had read an article in a magazine about positive reinforcement, and for seven or eight days every morning she would greet him with, “Good morning — and how is the boy who owns the school today?” She thought it would help him get better grades. Jacob winced, remembering it — the boy who owned the school. If she only knew how far off the mark that was. On the other hand, he thought, leaning against the dumpster, it wasn’t as bad as the time she read the piece about the all-bran diet. They’d even had to eat bran sprinkled on their meat. Jacob had lost seven pounds.
In.
That was the hardest part about school.
Getting in without being noticed. There it was — he had to not be seen. The thing was, when he was seen, or noticed, or watched, things … happened. Ridiculous things. He couldn’t explain it even to himself. But if people started to notice him, watch him — or the worst, stare at him — one thing led to another and there was always a disaster. Over the years he had noticed it getting worse and worse, and now he just kept from being seen. It wasn’t just that he was shy — it was more the way he was, a way that his everyday life had come to be.
Fact: If you get noticed, bad things happen. Solution: Don’t get noticed.
There were only four doors, two in the front, big ones that led straight into the main halls where everybody could see you, then one at each end of the old, rectangular building. But both of those doors were the kind that only opened from the inside, and you had to be lucky to hit it just right when somebody you didn’t know was opening one and you could slip in. Even then there were two rows of lockers, and that’s where the jocks usually took lockers for themselves, and that was the worst of all — if the jocks noticed you. They were like sharks smelling blood if they saw you; one of them would say something, then they would all laugh the hard laugh they had, and another of them would poke or jerk or punch or shoulder-hit you, and it was all over.
Once Jacob had been caught in death row — as he thought of the jock locker area — the wrong way at the wrong time and most of the football team had been there and they had shouldered him from one to the next the entire length of the hall like a sack of potatoes, like seals throwing a ball — except that he figured seals were smarter — and the ball had been him, punched and bruised until the jock at the end had jammed him down into a trash barrel by the door to the girls’ toilet.
An awful day, that had been. One he had not forgotten and one he still had not found a way to get even for, because he could not bring himself to think evil enough thoughts. Though he was working on it. He figured hell was made for jocks, and it was simply a matter of letting his thoughts sink low enough for an idea to come….
There was an art to getting in. A definite art. He removed his glasses and wiped them gently with the tail of his T-shirt. With the glasses off he was nearly blind and had to squint so that the freckles on his cheeks — he hated them — seemed to become more dense. He was thin, wiry-thin with faded jeans and a zip-up sweatshirt over his T-shirt and scuffed tennis shoes that felt right when he bought them but were too big now and slopped on his feet.
He had high cheekbones and even, blue eyes that saw everything as a fuzzy cloud without glasses, and he thought, when he wore the glasses and could see himself well and looked in the mirror in the school toilet, that he was probably the ugliest boy in history except for one, who was Darrin Murston, and who looked exactly like a pimple about to come to a head.
Timing was everything.
The buses would unload and the main mob of kids would go in. At that point everything was confused and moving but still too crowded. Then — just as the main group of kids finished going in and the hall monitors were getting ready to head for the rooms and all the kids were busy with their lockers and nobody was paying any attention to the door — then. Right then.
He waited, watched. The buses unloaded, and kids yelled and joked and moved into the building, and still he waited. The last ones began moving to the doors, and two of the buses started to drive away, and he made his move.
Across the street to the right main front door, in the door looking straight ahead, through the kids still dragging back but not looking at them — with a glazed look he had perfected for just this use, getting in — he went right and down the hall to his locker. Perfect.
They were old lockers, with combination locks that never worked right, but he had come one night with a tube of bicycle lubricant and worked at his lock until it was like a fine watch. Three turns, stop, one turn, stop, one turn and click — open and he had his books for the first class, still without looking up, still without seeing or being seen, and he was gone, down the hallway to his homeroom and the first class of the day, English, where he took the back corner chair and sat with his book open, eyes to the front, ignoring everything and being ignored.
Perfect. Another perfect entrance.
A perfect start for another day of education for Jacob Freisten, he thought, looking at the old map of Europe hanging like a tattered shade, then out the window at a bird that flew past the window.
Jacob Freisten — the boy who owned the school.
HE never thought of it as home somehow, nor his house. When forced to think of it, to deal with it, he thought, as he did now sitting in English waiting for the squeal of the buzzer to announce class: It’s this way where I live.
This way:
His mother and father were normal enough except that they drank a bit too much. Not enough to be alcoholics, and they didn’t abuse him, but it was enough so that he didn’t really know them except as drinkers. Kind of fuzzy looking. His father did something with mutual funds and was always Doing Business even when he was home, which wasn’t often, and sometimes the Business was good and he would be happy and drink, and sometimes the Business was bad and he would be sad and drink.
His mother was Completely, Utterly, Totally Committed to his sister’s Career.
That was the problem. His sister. She was seventeen and so beautiful that even Jacob admitted it. Her skin was like soft ivory — seemed almost to glow — on top of which she had a perfect figure and naturally pure blonde hair. She had won every teen beauty contest in the state and region, had walls covered with trophies and ribbons for contests ranging from Miss Cement Mixer to Miss Teen Bicycle Wheel, and was fast on her way to becoming Miss America if her mother had anything to do with it.
She called Jacob Buttwad.
It was not just that she hated him — a fact she readily admitted and told him every chance she got. It was more that she considered him a nuisance — something that got in the way. “Like an insect,” she said. “Like a slug. I should have drowned you in the toilet when you were small enough to catch.”
They gave her the large upstairs bedroom for her room, with a huge bed and a view of the yard and neighborhood, carpeted with lush shag, and a couch — a couch of her own against one wall — and her own bathro
om. A couch.
He got a small, dank room in the basement with a cot and a window high in the wall that looked up at a small square of sky. Kind of like a dungeon cell, he thought. Two walls were painted concrete block, and when the weather was warm the humidity in the room was so high that the tape didn’t stick and all his posters fell off.
They gave her a car, a small red sporty car with a snappy look — “For her image,” his mother said. “To go with her image” — and kept it supplied with gas and tires. She could come and go anytime she wanted.
He got a bike. With two wheels. And to heck with his image. It was a good enough bike, as bikes went, but it had two wheels, not four like a car, and it was too big for him, so that when he pedaled it he felt like he was falling forward all the time, and that made him try to look up, over the top of his glasses, and he was nearly blind over his glasses, so when he rode his bike he spent a lot of time plowing into things. Which meant he didn’t ride it all that much. And he had to pedal it, not drive it, and buy tires for it himself.
They gave her an allowance as big as the budget of some small countries — fifty dollars a week.
He got ten — and had to remind his parents when it was time for that. And if he had wanted school lunch (which he did not) he would have had to pay for it out of the ten.
They gave her new dresses, whole new outfits made of real silk, and special bathing suits to show her off.
He got a pair of socks.
They gave her a “coming out” party, with caterers who made little sandwiches by hand, and live music, and a rented banquet room at the Hillary Inn with punch in a glass bowl.
He got a cake most birthdays from Discount Doug’s bakery covered with dancing drunk little elephants made of gushy pink frosting that looked like blown styrofoam.
If she got so much as a stain on her precious skin they called in specialists from New York and spent fortunes consulting still other specialists in Switzerland to make certain it was not a permanent blemish that would require cosmetic surgery to maintain her beauty.
He got braces that hummed when he went through the detector device at the entrance to the public library.
It wasn’t that he complained or even felt bad about it anymore. It was just life. And God knew, he thought, as he watched another bird fly past, that they had told him often enough it was a temporary problem — if you considered temporary to mean his whole life so far.
“It’s only until we get her launched on her career,” his mother had said, sipping a martini while his father read some paper about business being either bad or good and sipped his own. They never drank in gulps. Just sipped. “As soon as we get her off and going we can concentrate on you….”
So they knew of it, and said they were going to do something about it. But Jacob lived in the real world and had to deal with reality.
The reality was that for as long as he could remember, all of his life to date, his sister had only to frown and she was given the earth, the moon, and the stars, any small or large thing she wanted or even thought she might want, and when newspaper and television and radio people wrote and talked of her they tore themselves apart to find more beautiful names for her.
And he was called Buttwad.
And that, he thought as the buzzer sounded, pretty much summed up the old home life.
“JACOB, are you listening?”
Jacob’s mind snapped back. He had been thinking of his sister, hoping there would be an earthquake with the epicenter just under the little red car, and visualizing the sudden opening of the very earth to take his problems away….
“I said, are you listening?”
The English teacher — Mrs. Hilsak — was looking at him. Worse, far worse, some of the other kids had swiveled to stare at him. Bad, really bad. He was being noticed. Disappear me, he prayed. Disappear me, now, from the eyes of all people in this room.
He nodded. “Sorry …”
But it was too late. She had asked twice, and that was too much for him to slide back into the gray world of mystery. He started to reach under the desk and pull himself down, then remembered the boogers and gum stuck under there and drew his hand back.
“Stay a moment after class,” Mrs. Hilsak said, pinning him with her eyes, and he saw many of the kids smile at this. Mrs. Hilsak was notorious. If you were told to stay late in her class it was the same as telling you you were going to die.
He nodded again.
She went back to the class, talked for another ten minutes or so about using too many adjectives, and the buzzer sounded.
Everybody filed out, which left Jacob sitting alone in the room.
Mrs. Hilsak stared at him.
He appeared to look back but actually was looking just to the right of her head, a method he had perfected over the years.
“Jacob, I don’t know what to do with you.”
Talk to my sister, he thought — she knows what to do with me. Exactly. Just give her a toilet.
“You’re smart, you could do well but it’s like … like you aren’t here. Don’t you want to be in school?”
And that, he thought, is the Big Kazumba — right there. Don’t I want to be in school? I would rather be in school than be boiled alive, he thought, barely. He said nothing. Used the perfect non-look.
“The truth is you are close to failing English and I know in my heart you could do very well with it….”
He looked down at his desk. Somebody had scratched a dirty word in the surface. He had seen the same word on the toilet walls, the dumpster in back of Reddi-Ralph, the side of a garbage truck, and his sister’s diary before she’d caught him by surprise and hit him with a tennis racket in an almost-perfect backhand that loosened his braces and left his forehead looking like a waffle for three weeks. It was not an adjective. Maybe Mrs. Hilsak would cover it later, in nouns. Or was it a verb? If he’d paid more attention in class he might know that, he thought….
Mrs. Hilsak sighed. “I don’t want to fail you.”
He looked up, to the right of her head. Waited.
“I will accept extra work. Of any kind. I mean, I’m giving you a chance here, do you understand?”
Jacob nodded.
“Anything you want to turn in. A paper, a speech.”
He shuddered. Not a speech. Never a speech. Not even for the earthquake under the red car would he do a speech.
“Better yet — as you know, I am directing the class play this fall. We are doing The Wizard of Oz. I will even accept work on the play as extra work for English.”
A play, he thought. She wants me in a play? God. That would be worse than a speech. Stand up on a stage in front of two, three million people … he felt ill. Weak. What was it he’d had for breakfast? It was there now, waiting to come up. Act. In a play. Right. I could let a car run over my foot, he thought desperately — have to be hospitalized with car-foot.
“All the parts are filled,” she said, saving his life. “But we need people to do set work, to help run the special effects, the curtain — you could do that. I’ll give you extra credit for that, all right?”
And it was in this way, this simple way, because he was flunking English and Mrs. Hilsak tried to be good to him, that Jacob was given to love, given to understand love and to be in love and in a love story and become the boy who truly owned the school.
But that was later, much later, after many twists of fate, and for now the worst of all possible twists had happened. Mrs. Hilsak let him go with a promise that he would show up for rehearsal that afternoon after school, and he left the room at nearly a dead run — but it was too late, too late.
He was going to be late for gym.
JACOB had an uncle named Frank who looked like a spark plug. Narrow at the top and bald, wider at the bottom, and tough as nails. Frank had been in the Navy and stationed in the Philippine Islands. Sometimes when Frank visited and drank martinis with Jacob’s dad he talked of a girl in the Philippines, and it was a good story except that Jacob’s mother alwa
ys stopped Frank before it was done, and all Jacob ever heard was up to where the girl poured warm oil …
Never past that. Just poured warm oil …
It was very frustrating. But during the telling of the story of the girl, one time Frank told of a delicacy they love to eat in the Philippines. It was called a baloot — or that’s how it sounded — and ladies went around with baskets of them and sold them for about a quarter. So Jacob asked what a baloot was and wished he hadn’t.
Just before a goose egg was ready to hatch, they took it from the mother goose and put it in the hot sun, so the heat killed the baby goose inside the shell. Then they buried the egg in warm sand for weeks, so that inside the shell the little dead baby goose (sometimes they used ducks) rotted and putrefied and got runny in a stringy-lumpy-slimy kind of way, and when it was rotted just exactly enough they took it out of the sand, cracked a little hole in the end of the shell, and sucked the entire contents out and ate it.
“Feathers, beak, feet, guts and all,” Frank had said, watching everybody turn green. “I tried it once when I was drunk and got a whole string of it about halfway down my throat when I felt the little head coming through and that was it — I lost her. Never tried it again. That was the night that this young woman took me back into a darkened room and poured warm oil …”
“Frank, stop it,” Jacob’s mother cut in. “The children.”
The point was Jacob would rather eat a baloot, every day, than go to gym class.
And to be late to gym, to actually be late for gym was so incredibly terrible that it had only happened once before in his life — in the sixth grade — and he had thought then of just shoving his head in the garbage disposal and ending it.
What made gym so bad, he thought, running down the hall, was everything.
You had to go to gym in the first place — which he considered a complete waste — and then you had to cope with the gym teacher. A grownup jock (as Jacob thought of him) named Mr. Rocco, who had a neck bigger than his head and seemed to know only three words:
