by Gary Paulsen
My father always says she only works to feed our family’s book addiction and that we’d be further ahead financially if she collected aluminum cans from the side of the freeway to recycle.
In the past couple of weeks, I’d been seeing Daniel reading some business book about how to unleash your inner hound to get ahead in sports; I’d read Lady Chatterley’s Lover (because I thought it was dirty, but I couldn’t find the sex parts); and, over supper, Sarah had been flipping through a baseball book about the steroid scandal. As for Mom, she reads so much and so fast that I can’t keep up with her.
We read a lot, and we have great vocabularies as a result, but we don’t talk very much.
Which kind of leads to a bad place, I guess.
I tried to shrug off a dark feeling I was getting and recapture the warm sense of justice: Sarah and Daniel, carless too. I’m a guy who’s all about justice. In a week they’d get their keys back, but they’d have a better sense of my point of view, and maybe they’d remember to give me a ride now and then.
I headed to my bedroom to start homework and tried to ignore the shiver that ran down my back when I passed three closed doors.
4. A GOOD LIE CAN BE USED MORE THAN ONCE
Meanwhile, back to Operation Tina.
I was sitting on the front steps of school Tuesday morning before the homeroom bell rang, trying to finish an assignment while keeping an eye on Tina, three steps down, when it hit me: Classes were getting in my way.
It’s not that I don’t like school—I do. But wasting my time in class was a problem if I was going to make Tina understand what a great guy I was.
Out of the eight periods a day, I only saw Tina in three—language arts first period, lunch fifth period and science seventh period. Thanks to the social studies get out of jail free card, I could go to the commons and watch her during her free period while waiting for the perfect moment to dazzle her with my personality.
But I needed more free time. Classes were slowing me down.
A lesser mind would have accepted defeat, since the odds were stacked against me, but the best military leaders always find ways to eliminate obstacles. It was clear that I was going to have to bail on my Tina-free classes: Spanish, math, and gym and art, which alternated days.
I looked around the front steps and sidewalk, assessing my options. I saw Freddy Dooher, who’s on the wrestling team. Normally I hate him because he’s as mean as a snake during the season when he’s starving to death, trying to make weigh-in before the meets. But that day I loved him because he gave me a great idea.
I dashed inside as soon as the first bell rang and ran to the Spanish lab to tell Señora Lucia that I’d recently begun student-managing the wrestling team. She’s only at school two or three times a week because we share her with the other two middle schools in the district, so I didn’t think she’d have a clue about the sports schedules. I didn’t, and I’m here five days a week, all day.
“Buenos dias, Señora.”
“¿Cómo está, Señor Kev?”
“Bueno. For a while now I’ve been wondering how I can add more to the school spirit. I’ve decided to become an athletic supporter.” I snorted at my own lame joke. I wasn’t sure the humor translated, because she kept organizing her stack of bilingual flashcards.
“So I’m helping the wrestling team, keeping track of scores and … like that.”
“¡Que peligroso!” she said, clearly mistaking wrestling for extreme sheepherding or something riskier than a bunch of guys rolling around on stinky mats in the gym.
“Would it be okay if I missed some classes so that I can … help the guys get ready for … tournaments? I’ll get the homework and reading assignments from Roberto.”
“¡Bueno!” She beamed. She gave me a hall pass so that I could go to the gym when I was supposed to be in Spanish.
I hustled to get to homeroom on time. Once I was there, Brooke Daniels and her sickening boyfriend, Timmy Kurtz, caught my eye. They’re Mr. and Mrs. Drama Department and really annoying—always eee-NUN-cee-ate-ing. It’s really gross the way Timmy lets loose with flying gobs of spit. He gives JonPaul total germ fits when he talks.
However, seeing them gave me another idea. Art! I asked for a pass from my homeroom teacher and blasted down to the art studio, where Mrs. Steck was counting tubes of paint.
“Mrs. Steck!” It’s the only way to talk to her about anything, because she herself speaks with lots of exclamation points in her voice. “I’m working on the crew for the musical!” I blurted. “Can I miss a few days of class to paint scrims?!” I was glad I’d seen a rerun of High School Musical recently; I had my drama department terminology nailed.
“Kev! That’s wonderful!” Mrs. Steck looked at me with admiration. “I always give extra credit to my students who paint flats and build sets!”
I hope she’ll feel the same way about pretend walls on imaginary stages, I thought as I tucked her hall pass into my pocket.
Two down, two more to go.
On my way to language arts, I passed the school newspaper office, which gave me a new idea. Coach Gifford was about to discover that the athletic department was finally going to enjoy the editorial support it had long been denied.
I caught him as he headed into the locker room.
“Hey, Coach, gotta second? I’m gonna be writing for the sports section of the newspaper.”
“Good work. I’m always available to offer a quote. Do you want one now?”
“Not just yet, thanks. But I was hoping it would be cool with you if I missed gym for a few days while I learned the ropes.”
“Anything for some friendly press, sport.” We fist bumped, he scribbled a hall pass and I turned to leave. “Don’t forget to run a few laps,” he bellowed down the hall after me. “Wouldn’t want you to get flabby and out of shape.”
I flashed him a thumbs-up.
Check. Check. And check. One more.
I thought for a few minutes, stymied about how to get out of math. Then the voice came from on high, the loudspeaker in the hall.
“Would all members of the student government please report to the auditorium at the start of the fourth class period? Thank you.”
No, thank you.
Tina is the student rep for room 81. I knew this because I’d looked up her name on the school website the night before in my information-gathering process.
I’d skip fourth-period math and send Mr. Meyers an email alerting him to the fact that I’d taken over as the room 82 alternate. He’d be impressed by that, because he’d run for town council once and was always talking about “what a pleasure and a privilege it is for one citizen to serve another.”
Even though all the information about the wrestling team and the musical crew and the newspaper staff and the student government could be verified on the school website, I’d never been a troublemaker, so no one would suspect I was lying and check up on me. I knew they’d want to think I was a good kid working his tail off to make the school a better place.
My friends would keep me up on homework and warn me about tests. I made a note: (1) Ask them to shoot me info about assignments every day after school, (2) text Katie that I’d been feeling feverish and achy, to keep her sympathies alive.
I’m really doing nothing more than increasing the value of my education, I told myself. Making mostly As had been getting too easy. Skipping classes would be a challenge if I wanted to keep my grades up. And I did. But I had to make time to get to know Tina better. And, more important, to have Tina get to know me better.
She was worth anything it took to show her that I was the only possible guy in the entire school she should think about spending time with.
5. A GOOD LIE HAS AN OUTCOME ADVANTAGEOUS TO ALL PARTIES
Like any good military mind, I decided that a direct assault was the wrong move. Too bold; better to start on the periphery and work my way in toward my final objective, gathering intel, studying the secondary targets in order to acquire data about the main obj
ective. So I’d learn all I could about Tina’s BFFs, find a way to make nice with them, crack their inner circle and then, ding ding ding, Tina would notice me and talk to me and, one thing leading to another, before you know it, I’d be her official boyfriend.
Tina’s best friend, Connie Shaw, was also in the student government. Perfect. It was like the planets and the stars were aligning to ensure my success. Everything was falling into place, I thought as I strolled into my first-ever student government meeting and looked for my soon-to-be-girlfriend’s best friend.
Connie is a troll. I’m not being mean; she just is. She’s kind of … husky, I guess you’d call it if you were looking for a nice way to say that she’s got a great future ahead of her as a load-bearing wall. And she’s got a monobrow going too. I never would have noticed if Sarah hadn’t practiced eyebrow waxing on me last summer.
“Won’t hurt a bit, Kev, I’ll pull it off clean and fast,” she said before she ripped off so many layers of my forehead along with my eyebrow hair, you could almost see brain matter. I peed and screamed—a little and not so little, respectively. But now I notice girls’ eyebrows.
Anyway, I walked into the student government meeting just as the president was calling it to order. JonPaul, of all people, was standing at the door, handing out copies of the agenda. I wanted to kick myself for not remembering that he was the other room 81 delegate. I have got to stop tuning him out all the time; apparently, he doesn’t just talk about sports and illnesses. He looked surprised to see me, but we didn’t have time to say anything because everyone was rushing to get seats. I wished he was in on my scheme so we could signal each other surreptitiously and look suspicious and in the know, like a couple of spies being used by the military to collect important data.
Instead, he headed up to sit on the stage with the officers and handed the leftover agendas to the person he sat next to. The lights were bright and it took my eyes a few seconds to adjust, but it was Tina! She was up onstage. All that prettiness and blond hair and soft voice and she’s civic-minded, too. How could I have missed how perfect she was all these years? And what was the fastest way to get her to feel the same about me?
I scanned the rows of chairs and then hurried over to where Connie was sitting.
“Hey, mind if I sit with you? You can kind of show me the ropes and tell me what I missed.”
Connie looked up at me. It was one of those stares girls can do—the kind where nothing is said but a point is being made. I don’t speak wordless glance so I’m not sure what she was saying, but I sensed it wasn’t good for me.
“I’ve never seen you at a student government meeting before,” Connie said. Coldly, I felt.
“It’s the social studies project,” I explained. “I’m all of a sudden interested in the functions of government.”
“Really?” Connie raised her monobrow at me suspiciously.
“Yeah, sure, I love government. In fact”—I frantically tried to recall that morning’s announcements—“I’m worried, uh, concerned, really, one could even say dismayed, about the … referendum … thingie,” I finished, and hoped I’d turn into a socially aware and deeply concerned kind of guy in the next 3.4 nanoseconds.
Connie furrowed her monobrow in shared worry, or concern, or dismay. It was hard to read one eyebrow.
“Yes”—I kept babbling, trying to win her over—“the referendum about the distribution of property tax income and how it’s used to fund public schools and if the idea of a tax hike should be put on the upcoming ballot.”
I had no idea how I remembered that.
Connie thawed a bit. “I’m glad you care about such an important issue. Sit down and I’ll explain what’s going on until you catch up.”
I tapped into my ability to go on mental autopilot. My face looked interested and I made “um-hum” noises at the proper times. All the while, I was watching Tina and getting more annoyed with JonPaul, who whispered to her the entire meeting. I was sure it was just about his body mass index or the tensile strength of his ligaments, but still, he had her ear and he wasn’t using it to talk me up.
The fact that he didn’t even know he should didn’t cross my mind.
By the end of the meeting, Connie had pushed her phone number and email address on me and I think I’d offered to serve on her committee to present ideas to the school board. She was going to argue the … distribution of something, and the something public ballot.
I wondered if she and Katie Knowles were close friends. If they weren’t, they should be, because although I was looking at Connie, I was seeing a Katie clone. I’d have to find a way to tell Katie about Connie’s committee and the presentation and, presto, she’d probably volunteer to help me out with that, too.
Then, when Tina and I were finally dating, I’d make sure Connie and Katie had the chance to hang out together and get to be BFFs. Minds like theirs, working together, could rule the world. And I was finding that they were very handy to have around. Plus, I was already starting to feel a twinge of guilt for the way I was about to take a lot of Tina’s free time away from Connie.
Until then, though, Connie would give me insight into Tina’s likes and dislikes so I could shape myself into perfect boyfriend material. And hanging around with Connie, I’d be hanging around with Tina by extension. And proximity would give me opportunities to catch her attention by being wonderful.
I don’t know how dumb guys get girlfriends, I really don’t. It’s a lot of effort, and it seems to me that without my work ethic, you’d be screwed.
6. A GOOD LIE HAS HUMOR AND STYLE
JonPaul came home with me after school to hang out and watch movies. But not until he’d asked if anyone else would be around.
“No, just us. Why?”
“Your mom and Sarah are okay and your Auntie Buzz moves so fast I don’t think germs have a chance to land on her, but Daniel … well, he doesn’t seem like a lather-rinse-repeat kind of guy, and I’ve seen how hockey players bleed on each other. That can’t be sanitary.”
“What about my dad? Does he give you the germ willies too?”
“No. Not since I got him to buy those preflight vitamin packs to ward off airplane-cabin viruses.”
Bought them, gagged on them, flushed them, I remembered. But I didn’t tell JonPaul; he’d have been so disappointed in my dad and probably too worried to come over to my house again.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, we’ve been friends since nursery school and always will be, but it’s hard to get his attention. Once you do drag his mind off bacteria and injuries, he’s okay. But keeping a conversation alive with him is a lot of work, and I worry that there aren’t very many people like me who would put that kind of energy into getting past JonPaul’s paranoid outer layer and finding the decent guy inside. It’s not like our other friends bust him for the way he is, but I can tell they’re not as understanding as I am.
JonPaul is nearly six feet tall, with shoulders as broad as a four-lane highway, and he can bench-press me. He’s an über-jock and a gym rat, but he lives in such fear of illness that he never wants to get close enough to anyone to catch anything they might have or be carrying. I didn’t understand how he could play all those full-contact sports if being touched and being breathed on were so abhorrent to him, but when I asked, he got a determined look in his eye and said, “I don’t think about it during the game. I get in the zone and stay there. It’s about discipline.”
He washes his own equipment and uniforms after every practice and game, though, and he takes showers that seem like the kind that workers get after there’s a chemical leak at a nuclear power plant. I heard his mother tell my mother that she has to buy industrial-sized bottles of bleach and boxes of detergent in bulk at the buying club.
I thought we were going to kick back, shoot the bull and watch a movie, but JonPaul couldn’t relax until he’d disinfected his gym clothes. He tossed me a duffel bag.
“Hey, there’s only one pair of shorts and a single T-shirt in here,”
I pointed out. “Are you sure you want to wash them all by themselves? We usually wait until there’s a full load.”
He didn’t answer. I looked up to see him reading the ingredients on my mother’s box of presoak powder. I was kind of surprised when he didn’t ooh and aah.
Right. Time to change the subject to what I wanted to talk about. I started the washer and we walked out of the laundry room and crashed on the couch in front of the TV.
“So, hey, you seemed to be pretty friendly with Tina Zabinski at the student government meeting,” I said. “I didn’t know you knew her that well. What’s up?”
“Oh yeah, what were you doing there?” As I suspected, JonPaul had completely forgotten my surprise appearance that morning.
“Broadening my horizons. So, back to Tina—are you two friends?”
“No, not really. She’s just, you know, around.” He pulled a small lunch cooler out of his backpack and became completely engrossed in pouring out individual portions of raw almonds and golden raisins into cereal bowls he’d wrapped in plastic. Undoubtedly after sterilizing them.
I am not easily distracted. “What do you think about her?” I persisted.
“Oh, she’s … hey, I only have enough organic peanut butter left for one sandwich. Wanna share?”
“No, I’m good.” I peered into the jar of what looked like baby diarrhea and then jerked away.
“Looks like baby diarrhea, doesn’t it?” He spread it happily on some whole-wheat, flax-enriched bread and took a hefty bite. “This stuff is so good for your digestive system. Healthy turds float, bro, did you know that? The ones that sink are bad news and mean you’re eating all the wrong stuff and poisoning your own body with toxins like preservatives and additives.”
We. Are. Not. Talking. About. This.
I couldn’t take it anymore, and as he started jotting down the details of his snack in his food log like some obsessive hippie survivalist scientist hybrid, I jumped up from the couch, hollering, “JonPaul, are you okay? Can you hear me? Don’t go toward the light, come back to my voice!”
