by Adam Selzer
Plus, Principal Floren was walking around the room the whole time while we took the test, taking a lot of notes and muttering under his breath and sweating a lot. Everyone knows that Floren is one sweaty guy, but it’s always weird to see someone sweating in January.
Then, after school, my mom decided we should celebrate the fact that I qualified for the bee by going down to Burger Baron, and Principal Floren was there. He was sitting in a corner booth with a couple of old bums—I think one of them was that guy Mr. Agnew, who used to be the janitor before they fired him a few years ago. And he looked terrible, like he hadn’t had a bath since he got fired. He, Floren, and some other guy were all talking really quietly, and when he saw me, Floren kind of turned up his collar and tried to keep me from seeing that it was him. But I did.
Have you ever been to Burger Baron? Everyone in town knows about it, since it’s been there forever, but few people ever go inside. I had never been before, myself. The food was pretty lousy, and it smelled like a butt that someone tried to cover with perfume, only you could still smell the butt underneath the flowery smell. Floren and that band of scuzzy-looking guys were the only other people there.
They certainly seemed like they were up to something, but I didn’t think much more about it at the time. I don’t normally go around looking for clues, you know.
That’s your job, Chrissie.
6
MUTUAL
corrupt—adjective. Immoral and dishonest, using one’s position for personal gain illegally. Jason figured that if he was ever arrested for frightening an old lady, he could pay a corrupt judge to declare him innocent.
I was quiet during the ride home after my first day at Gordon Liddy. School was not nearly as scary as my parents had always made it out to be. Lots of kids tried to talk to me, and only a couple of them really seemed at all strange. None of the students seemed like hooligans, except for Jason and Amber, but even they seemed friendly, in their own way. Perhaps they were trying to trick me into becoming a bad kid, but they were being very nice about it.
I had overheard Jason talking about Paranormal Execution—the words on top of his shirt. At first I did not think those words made any sense, but I came to realize that it was a musical group of some sort. I wondered what they sounded like, and hoped that I could find out soon. It was safe to assume that they did not sing campfire songs, which were the only kind of songs I knew.
“Well, Mutual,” Mother asked, “did you keep your mouth shut?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“And did you pay attention to the teacher?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Good boy. She was probably trying to indoctrinate you. Do that word.”
“Indoctrinate,” I said. “Verb. To teach doctrine as absolute truth until the indoctrinatee accepts it as fact. As in ‘Television producers try to indoctrinate viewers into immoral philosophies.’ I-N-D-O-C-T-R-I-N-A-T-E. Indoctrinate.”
“Good boy.”
My parents have been making me “do” words since I was six. To do a word means to pronounce it, define it, use it in a sentence, spell it, and then pronounce it again. In those days, it was my favorite game.
As we pulled out of the town and into the farmland that surrounded it, I looked out my window at the cows. I had, in fact, listened to the teacher, and very carefully, all day long, when Amber and Jason were not talking to me. I had waited patiently for Mrs. Boffin to start in with the indoctrination and the immoral values, but she had not done it. She had just talked about explorers all morning, then talked about math all afternoon. Maybe she had done the indoctrinating during the science class, when I had been excused to go to the library. Even there, I honestly expected to find nothing on the shelves but pornographic magazines and socialist pamphlets. But there had not been any.
Once again, I was terribly disappointed.
And recess was even stranger—while I sat on the steps outside the school, I pretended to read from my dictionary, but I was actually watching everybody. I expected that the children were going to divide into opposing gangs and have a rumble, but there was not even a scuffle. The younger children just played on swings and metal sliding boards. The older ones, including the students from my class, stood around talking or, in some cases, throwing balls back and forth. Nobody got hurt, as far as I could tell.
“Was the written test for the bee difficult?” Mother asked.
“Not at all,” I said.
The written test was very boring. We had to sit on the floor of the gym with a pencil and a sheet of paper while Mrs. Rosemary read out fifteen very easy words. Principal Floren wandered around making notes the entire time. He seemed like a very strange man. He was the only person I saw who looked just as scary as my mother said he would be.
“Now,” said Mother, as we turned into the wooded area that would, eventually, lead to our house, “did you find out who the best spellers were?”
“There was one girl named Marianne that I thought would be good.”
“Why is that?”
“She answered every question the teacher asked, and she was always right.”
“Ah,” said Mother. “I bet they are using her to cheat, then. That is what they do—they pick their favorite students, and they brainwash them. Then, when the government comes to inspect the school, they just show them the students they have brainwashed. Right, Norman?”
“That is what they do,” said Father, nodding.
“Right,” said Mother. “They had her brainwashed into knowing all the answers, but they might not be able to help her during the spelling bee. They will surely try to cheat, though. We will have to be on the lookout for cheaters.”
“Always vigilant.” Father nodded.
“Do that one,” Mother commanded me.
“Vigilant,” I said. “Adjective. Carefully observant and on the lookout for danger. As in ‘The boy was always vigilant against brainwashing and indoctrination.’ V-I-G-I-L-A-N-T. Vigilant.”
“Good. Who else looked like a good speller?”
I thought for a moment. “Jennifer Van Den Berg. She seemed smart.”
“None of those children will really be smart, Mutual. They have been in that awful school all their lives.”
This time I knew they were wrong. Jennifer was clearly very smart, and didn’t seem awful or corrupt to me at all. She did not seem to pay much attention to the teacher, really, but when she was drawing in her notebook, or just sitting at the desk, reading, she would sort of talk to herself, and, when she did, she smiled a lot. It was as though she was living a whole different life in her head than the one she was living at school. I stared at that smile every chance I got.
“During sustained silent reading, she was reading a Shakespeare play,” I said. She smiled the most during sustained silent reading. I had read from my dictionary, and had noticed Marianne and a few others were reading from larger ones than mine. I wished I had a Shakespeare book, too.
“Shakespeare?” asked Mother. “She probably has a dirty, perverted mind, then. Shakespeare’s plays were just filthy. Right, Norman?”
“Filthy,” Father agreed. “And violent.”
I was not certain that they were correct in this. I had never read any Shakespeare before—I barely knew who he was. So I read about him when I went to the library during science and gym. I had read most of Henry V, one of his plays, during science, but Jennifer sort of ignored me when I asked her about it. I thought that perhaps it was the only one of his plays most people had read, and experts like her got tired of talking about it.
Father began to pull the car up to our little house, which was over a mile from the main road, and far enough from the town itself that no one would deliver a pizza to us. If you can believe it, I had never had a pizza before in my life. Today the thought of going a month without a pizza is enough to make me say “Oh, crap!” right out loud.
“Did anyone try to sabotage you as a speller?” asked Mother.
“No,” I said.
“How about corrupt you?”
I thought about Jason and Amber’s promise that they would corrupt me if I wished. I wondered if dancing naked in the cafeteria was really a part of growing up. None of the kids in the class seemed like the kind of person who would dance naked, and when they went to lunch, I certainly had not seen anyone doing it, though I kept looking around for someone doing such a thing. But no one had even danced in his underwear!
I sat still, staring straight ahead, for a minute after the car had been parked in front of the house, not saying anything. My parents stared back at me.
“No,” I said, finally. “No one tried to corrupt me today.”
“They must be waiting until you get comfortable, then,” said Mother. “But they will. Just you wait! I know their tricks and their manners!”
Jason had promised to try to corrupt me. He had not done so yet, but he had given me the idea to become a “spelling hustler,” which is a kind of person who goes into bars and makes money by getting people to bet him twenty dollars that he can spell any given word. He said that this was the best way to make money in spelling, and promised to teach me the tricks of the trade.
Corrupt or not, there was a lot that I could learn in a town like Preston. Things I could never learn on my own.
That night, before dinner, I sat in my room with a pen and a sheet of paper. I was supposed to be studying spelling words, but I was actually trying my hardest to draw the logo for Paranormal Execution.
7
JENNIFER
umpteen—adjective. Very many; used to express a number that is unspeakably high, although not as unimaginably high as a jillion or bazillion. After Marianne got on my nerves umpteen times in one afternoon, I started to fantasize about defenestrating her.
Tuesday afternoon, after the written test, I was stuck in the Spirit Squad room, making a bunch of stupid posters. That’s really all we ever do in Spirit Squad—make posters. Spirit Squad is supposed to be like cheerleading, only there aren’t really any teams to cheer for in town. So we make collages and posters for all the school events—or, if there isn’t an event going on, we’ll make posters about things like diversity, while Mrs. Jonson, the faculty sponsor, sits in the corner grading papers and sipping coffee. I was drawing a large bumblebee with markers and writing “BEE there or BEE square.” And I was really, really bored.
“Isn’t this a little trite?” I asked.
“Trite?” said Marianne. “As in boring or clichéd?”
“Yeah. I mean, a bumblebee on a spelling bee poster? Isn’t it the same thing they do every year?”
Brittany Tatomir glanced up from the poster she was drawing, which said “Who will the winner BEE?,” and looked at me. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s a bit lame, but what do you want to put on them instead? A grasshopper?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Something different. Maybe a great speller from history.”
“Like who?” asked Marianne. “Name any three people who are famous for their spelling skills.”
“Noah Webster,” I said, after thinking about it for a second. “The guy who wrote Webster’s dictionary.”
“Who the heck would recognize him if we put him on a poster?” asked Marianne. “I wouldn’t, and if I don’t, nobody else will, either.”
I didn’t fight her on this. Mostly because I wouldn’t recognize Noah Webster myself unless he showed up on my porch holding a sign that said “Hi, I’m Noah Webster.” And even then, I’d think it was probably just some nut in a costume, not Noah Webster. I hate it when Marianne makes good points.
“Fine,” I said. “How about Shakespeare? People know what he looked like, don’t they?”
Brittany looked up from her poster again. “Was he a good speller?” she asked. “I heard most writers stink at spelling.”
“Actually,” interrupted Mrs. Jonson, “nobody was a good speller back then. They didn’t really have any rules of spelling in Shakespeare’s day. They just spelled things however they thought they should be spelled, and figured people would know what they meant.”
“Really?” I asked.
Mrs. Jonson barely looked up from grading papers, but she nodded.
“Wow,” said Marianne. “If people just spelled things however they wanted, it must have taken weeks for anyone to lose a spelling bee!”
“Yeah,” said Brittany. “It would have been a much harder sport in those days, huh?”
“Anyway,” said Marianne, “that means we shouldn’t put him on a spelling bee poster. As P-R-E-S-I-D-E-N-T of the Spirit Squad, I say we keep going with the bumblebee theme.”
It’s not like it mattered what was on the posters, anyway. The real reason to make posters for the spelling bee was just that they needed something for the Spirit Squad to do. The bee was going to be held during the day, so everyone in school would have to attend whether they liked it or not. And it was the talk of the town, anyway. There was no real reason to advertise it.
Twenty minutes later, Marianne looked up from her umpteenth bumblebee poster. “Hey,” she said. “What did you guys think of that new kid?”
“Well,” I said, “he sure seemed different.”
I was pretty certain there had never been a kid at Gordon Liddy like Mutual Scrivener, the new kid. I’d never heard of a kid actually wearing a blazer and a tie to school when it wasn’t picture day. No one quite knew what to make of him.
“I hear he moved in from a bigger town,” said Brittany, “because his parents thought he had a better chance in the spelling bee here.”
“Yeah,” said Claire, a fifth grader. “I heard they homeschooled him and taught him nothing but spelling since he was, like, four. He already has the whole Webster’s dictionary memorized, and now he’s working on the American Heritage one.”
“That’s not true!” said Marianne, who was probably scared to death to see another kid studying the dictionary as carefully as she was. “If you ask me, he’s either A, a freak, B, a mutant, or C, a jerk.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked. “He didn’t seem like a jerk. I thought he seemed nice.”
“Nice? He was a total snob!” said Marianne. “He hardly said a word to anybody!”
“Maybe he was just nervous,” I said. “Wouldn’t you be?”
“You can just tell by looking at him that he’s a jerk, can’t you?” said Marianne. “And anyway, how smart can he be if he hasn’t been in school a day in his life?”
“He looked pretty smart to me,” said Claire.
“Ha!” said Marianne. “That’s prejudice. Just because he had glasses doesn’t make him smart,” she said. “Look at me. I don’t wear glasses, and I’m still smart.”
“You saw him in spelling practice!” said Brittany. “He was fierce!”
We had a full hour of spelling practice in the afternoon, and it was very clear that Mutual knew his stuff. He hadn’t missed a word. He hadn’t even looked as though he had to think about any of them. He might have actually HAD the dictionary memorized.
“I’ll bet he kicks your butt at the bee,” I said, just to egg her on, though I sincerely hoped he would.
“Jennifer,” Mrs. Jonson interrupted, “watch what you say. This is the Spirit Squad, girls, not the gossip club. Let’s not spend our time saying mean things about your fellow students.”
Actually, it WAS the gossip club. Almost all of the after-school clubs were really gossip clubs.
“Anyway,” said Marianne, “he can’t possibly study the dictionary as hard as I do. I did A and B last night, and tonight I’ll do C and D.”
“You did not!” I said, laughing.
“Did so!” she said. “Listen! Abnegation. A-B-N-E-G-A-T-I-O-N. Brecciated. B-R-E-C-C-I-A-T-E-D.”
I have to admit that I was a bit impressed—Marianne must have been studying to even come up with words like those.
“Yeah,” I said, “but what do those words even mean?”
“Who cares?” said Marianne. “You don’t have to know wha
t they mean, just how to spell them. Wasting your time with the definitions is a real rookie mistake for spelling bees, if you ask me. I’ll bet the new kid reads the definitions.”
“Well,” I said, “what good is knowing how to spell a word if you don’t even know what it means?”
“Duh!” said Marianne. “You can use it to win a spelling bee! And I have to cut corners wherever I can to get through the whole dictionary. Plus, everyone knows the new kid is probably cheating.”
“What?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Claire. “I heard they’re going to feed him the answers through some kind of high-tech earpiece. And Jason Keyes is going to steal the master word list. And I heard that Harlan is planning to slash the tires of the bus on the day of the bee so people can’t get here!”
“That’s nonsense,” I said. “Harlan wouldn’t do that.”
Marianne snorted. “You’ve got a lot to learn about how spelling bees work, Jen,” she said.
By the time Spirit Squad ended, it was nearly five o’clock. I ran as fast as I could to my mother’s car, which was waiting right outside the school. I never got to walk home from Spirit Squad this time of year, since it would be getting close to dark out when it ended.
“I assume you passed the written test?” Mom asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I knew you would,” she said. “Who else took it?”
“Almost everybody,” I said. “It was all words we had in spelling last year. Harlan and Amber both passed, too. And Brittany Tatomir, and Tony Ostanek, and Jake…and a new kid, too!”
“New kid?” my mother asked. “You have a new kid? Is he a good speller?”
“Yeah. Rumor has it that he’s some kind of prodigy.”
“Sounds like he’ll be a tough contender, then. Drat. I was hoping it would just be between you and Marianne. What’s his name?”
“Mutual,” I said. “Mutual Scrivener.”
“Mutual?” my mother said. “I’ll bet his parents must be dirty hippies to name him something like that—they’re always naming their kids things like Starflower, Love, or Togetherness.”
