by Josh Berk
This is what I am thinking, scribbling in my notebook, sitting there in Social Studies, lost amid the thoughts of Dad, dong bracelets, pizza-dough boobs, and Raquel Flores’s short skirt.
“You look like you’re trying to solve the mysteries of life,” Anoop whispers, in reference to the serious look I must have adopted while deep in thought. “Or maybe holding back a dump. Either way, let me know how it comes out.”
I chuckle. And then I realize: My own dad, through all his little comments, all his quips, all his asides, had left me a kind of procedures manual. He had an amazing life—he was an inventor, a world traveler, a scuba diver who literally discovered sunken treasure. A mensch. He was always spouting gems. Pieced together in the right way, these gems might provide a road map through life’s confusing wilderness. Now that he’s dead, I can’t get anything new from him, but maybe I can still get something … crucial. This thought hits me like a life preserver thrown to a drowning man, a floating inner tube in the raging sea that is my life. I know what I’m going to do: I’m going to write a book about my dead father. Rules for Living by Francis Langman, deceased. Maybe no one else in the world will ever read it, but maybe it will be just the thing I need to figure out how to live.
Then I join in laughing about the pizza-dough boobs and dong bracelets. They are pretty awesome. Can I say “dong bracelets” one more time?
Dong bracelets.
After Social Studies, Anoop and I go to lunch. School lunch sucks. Ever since the “healthy lunch” program began last year, there’s no more pizza, burritos, barf-a-roni, tots o’ tater, or even those awesomely gooey chocolate chip cookies. We can’t even have peanut butter anymore, because one kid is allergic to peanuts and apparently can’t be in the same room with even a dab of PB&J without having his face explode or something. That one kid happens to be the super-wealthy Hairston Danforth III. The Danforths donated a million dollars for the healthy lunch program, with the strings attached that it be peanut-free. There’s no such thing as a free healthy lunch initiative.
Of course, various ingenious methods have been devised to sneak peanut butter into school, resulting in a whole thriving black market, much like the trade in stolen cell phones and prescription pills. And also, of course, now everyone calls Hairston “Peanut-Head.” And, yes, they say it with a lisp on the “t” in “peanut” so it sounds like “Penis-Head.” Mean, yes, but is that really so much worse than the name his parents gave him? Hairston? The only name worse than Guy at the whole school.
I am eating hempseed butter, which, no, doesn’t get you high, and, yes, is disgusting.
“That looks like something that came out of my nose,” Anoop says.
“Thanks,” I say. It really is green and booger-ish.
“So, you staying after for Forensics today?” Anoop asks, chewing on some curried something he brought from home. He always packs. I tried packing my own lunch once, but found it too taxing. All that opening and unopening of jars, spreading things on things. My mom’s not the “make your lunch” kind of mom. She’s the “make it your darn self or take a five from my purse” type.
“I’m not so sure I’m going back,” I say.
“Yesterday was humiliating,” Anoop says. “But it really will look good on your college applications. And the ladies are still probably going to be in attendance.”
“I’m beginning to think that chasing girls might be too much work,” I say.
“Now, I know that you are a lazy bastard, Guy, but no one is too tired for girls.”
“Meh,” I say.
He throws down his fork. It’s a plastic fork, which doesn’t really make a satisfying clatter. Anoop doesn’t let the soft plastic clatter slow him down, though. He’s rolling. “That’s what it’s going to say on your tombstone,” he yells. “Here lies Guy Langman. Meh.”
“Well, yours is going to say ‘Here lies Anoop Chattopadhyay: An Indian guy who became a doctor. Real goddamn original! ! ! ! ! ! !’ Man, I feel bad for whoever has to carve that stone. ‘Chattopadhyay’ has a lot of letters. That would take ’em all day. Plus, I don’t know if you could tell, but I said that with a lot of exclamation points at the end.”
“I’m pretty sure they have machines to do that now.”
“We can’t even hand-carve tombstones for the dead anymore? What has happened to us as people?” I ask.
“Some of us are incredibly lazy bastards. But you really should come back to Forensics. You need something on your applications under ‘Extracurriculars’ besides video games, cartoons, and bubble baths.”
“I’m learning useful skills playing video games,” I say. It’s not true. I spend most of my time playing an ancient Atari 2600 I bought on a whim. It came with, like, ten games for two dollars total, plus shipping. Obviously, a thirty-year-old video game system isn’t for everyone, but it is pleasingly simple to me. The new video games are a workout. My favorite Atari game is Yars’ Revenge. You get to be a bug or something, and it’s pointless and thus perfect. A minimalist movement among video game players is going to come back. You mark my words.
“I’m working on a new project,” I say, trying to derail Anoop. The book about my dad.
“That’s cool and all, but …,” he says. He clearly doesn’t believe me, even though it’s actually true. “I can’t believe you’re not even thinking about college. You’re smarter than ninety percent of these fancy-pantses who are applying to Ivy League schools.”
“Fancy-pantses?” I say.
“Isn’t that the plural of ‘fancy-pants’?” Anoop says. “We brown people don’t talk English no good.”
Basically, every one of my classmates is certainly rich, and many of them are indeed headed for the fanciest-pantsyest colleges. But they are still putzes.
“What do you mean, ninety percent?” I say.
“Present company excluded,” Anoop says.
“You ain’t ten percent,” I say. “Who else is supposedly smarter than me?”
Anoop starts counting on his long fingers. “Maureen Fields, TK, Hairston Danforth the Third.”
This last addition to the list is a joke. Hairston is not at all stupid and is brilliant with computers, but he’s hardly in the academic elite. More to the point, he’s just … weird. “Poor, poor Penis-Head,” I say, mainly just to change the subject.
“So, are you going back to Forensics or not?” Anoop asks. Changing the subject with him is like asking a bulldog to give up his bone.
“Anoop, I don’t care about my college application, I don’t really like science, and Mr. Zant’s annoying,” I say. All good reasons.
“Is there nothing that could change your mind?” Anoop says.
“Shut up,” I say. “What are you so smug about?” He really does look smug. He’s doing that thing with his chin that I call “the smug chin.”
“Let’s just say I have some information,” he says, and takes out a piece of paper, folded in the intricate origami style that only girls can manage.
“What the hell is that?” I ask.
“But, Guy,” he says. “You’re not going to Forensics, so I see no reason why it should matter what—”
I grab for the paper and come up only with a fistful of air and a sleeveful of hempseed butter. “Damn you, Penis-Head!” I yell, mainly just as a joke, but Hairston looks over with a sad expression on his pasty face, and I feel a little stab that I added to what must have been the daily torture of life as Him the Third.
“I’ll read it to you,” Anoop says, unfurling the tiny paper with the sort of delicate motions that will one day no doubt make him a top surgeon. “Anoop,” he begins in a chirpy voice that speaks of money while still having a slight Spanish twang. “Are you and Guy going to be coming back to Forensics? Yes or No. Circle one. From Raquel.”
I stop mid-chew, staring at him. Stunned. He hands me the note. It is as he described. Nothing too encouraging about that “from,” but the “i” in “Forensics”—it is dotted with a little heart. A little heart. But wa
it—what’s this?
“Her handwriting looks like your mom’s,” I say. Every day, up to and including this, our junior year, Anoop’s mom puts a note into his lunch alongside the homemade curry. Every day I steal it and read it out loud. Take note that these, uh, notes, are distinctly not of the cutesy-lovey sort, but instead intend to convey things like “Don’t forget the rules for solving the cosine!” Trigonometry tips in the lunch bag—classic Chattopadhyay. Anoop just shrugs.
I continue to stare at the note. Raquel Flores? Could it be? I can’t think of a single reason why she would care if I would be at Forensics Squad, except for the obvious one. Girls only ask this if they like you, right? Okay, I have dashing Semitic good looks, a sizable trust fund, and a charming personality, but I am hardly rich by Berry Ridge standards. Plus, there are dozens of guys cooler than me. Plus, her family is one of the richest of the local rich and she is seriously melt-your-face hot, upper-echelon popular.
And yes, let’s get this out of the way: I go to Berry Ridge High School. And yes, it’s known to one and all by the probably kinda obvious nickname “Very Rich High.” (I won’t tell you what they call Wyckoff High.) And yes, Berry Ridge is filled with a lot of rich kids. The really rich school nearby, however, is North Berry Ridge. Pretty much everyone just calls them “Stupid North Berry Ridge.”
“Circle ‘yes,’ ” I say, suddenly choking. My hempseed butter is turning to concrete in my throat. “Circle the beautiful ‘yes.’ ”
CHAPTER THREE
So here I am, back in the dungeon. Mr. Zant’s classroom is known as “the dungeon” because, well, the name fits. As a first-year teacher, Mr. Zant has one of the worst classrooms in the entire school. And the entire school is not exactly a high-gloss temple of modern learning. I mean, we have SMART Boards and laptop labs, but the bathrooms are crumbling and most of the windows are stuck shut. We’re perpetually out of paper towels. And Mr. Z’s room is dark and dreary, stuck in the basement of the school. Much of Berry Ridge High is actually half submerged, underground. There are small windows just below the ceiling, but otherwise you feel like you are indeed in a torture chamber well below ground. Rumor has it that the building was designed during the height of the Soviet Union Cold War paranoia. Apparently, back in the 1980s, the Russians, no doubt sensing the great strategic implications of our shopping malls and golf courses, seemed incredibly likely to point their nuclear warheads right at Berry Ridge. Having a bomb shelter for a school seemed a prudent and patriotic idea.
Mr. Zant’s classroom is suspiciously less filled today. Most of the hot girls are gone. Most everyone is gone. Something fishy is going on. Get it? This time it makes sense! He specializes in marine biology! Fish jokes! But Mr. Z just smiles at the six of us who sit scattered around his otherwise empty classroom. Hairston is back, the weirdo. Then there’s Anoop and me, in addition to the aforementioned nerds, Maureen Fields and TK. And what’s this? Who else has returned? My, it’s Raquel Flores for some reason. For some reason? Am I the reason? Or is she a secret intellectual? Smart and beautiful? Man, I think I love her. Are you supposed to talk to someone first before falling in love with them? Probably. I don’t see it in the manual, though.
“I’m glad to see some of you aren’t scared off by the idea of doing hard science,” Mr. Zant says, calling our little group to order.
I am scared of “hard science” myself. I don’t like “hard” anything—hard work, hard exercise, hard candy. Well, I guess I do sort of like hard candy. Who among us doesn’t enjoy the occasional mint? But I prefer soft foods with less chewing. Soup, mashed potatoes, pudding—stuff like that.
I can’t stop thinking, Why did Raquel come back? Does she really like me? She seems too pretty to like forensics. Maybe that’s a stupid generalization. I don’t like making generalizations. “People who make generalizations are idiots,” my dad used to say. “Generally speaking.” That’s gotta go in the book.
The presence of the others makes more sense. What I know about Maureen is what everybody knows: that she was a total overachieving honor-roll-and-science-camp-type girl who recently underwent a Goth transformation that isn’t fooling anyone. Over one long President’s Day weekend she went away dressed in jeans and a cable-knit sweater and came back the following Tuesday in an all-black uniform featuring pants with about a thousand zippers and makeup that would easily gain her employment as an extra in a zombie movie (Revenge of the Goth Nerds!). She still seems sort of sunny a lot of the time, so it’s just confusing. And her pants must take a really long time to get on in the morning …
TK—does he even have a real name? Everyone calls him TK. What can we say about him? Style-wise, first of all, he cuts his own hair. The result is fascinatingly uneven, and pretty much bald in spots. Anoop and I have theorized that TK probably invented some sort of electric scissors or robot barber that he is testing on himself. He also seems to bathe infrequently, and with little attention to detail. We have something of a metrosexual epidemic at Berry Ridge. Most dudes (besides me, the hard-core nerds, and a few choice others who keep it slackerish) are all model six-packy, primped and fancy. They always look like they just walked off a billboard trying to sell you a four-hundred-dollar pair of jeans. Not TK. TK dresses like he’s about to punch his time card at an auto garage—full-on jumpsuits or grease-smeared jeans from the “stonewashed” age. He is also one of the prime peanut butter smugglers, having invented a variety of weird contraptions to sneak the banned legume into the caf.
Those eccentricities aside, TK does seem to be some sort of a genius, with skills in a variety of subjects. According to Anoop, who jealously tracks the other smart kids like a star athlete might check the stats on the opposing teams, TK is annoyingly well-rounded. He gets A-pluses in every class. In History he is able to wake from a class nap (TK is always tired) and instantly talk at length about the Sino-Japanese War of 1937. Who else even knows what “Sino” means? He is in AP Math, whizzed through Calc, and is also skilled in Gym and Shop class. He made a samurai sword out of wood! And he can run, jump, and throw with the best of the jocks. These latter qualities are what frosts Anoop’s ass the most. TK is like those guys on weird cable shows who have PhDs but also are good at building a bomb out of a toilet paper roll and preparing a crawfish soufflé.
I once asked TK why he was so tired. “Up late again,” he said.
“Doing what?” I asked.
“Research” was all he would say. Research into what? Ingenious peanut-smuggling devices? Robo-beauticians?
“Are you going to try to get Raquel to be your partner? You totally should,” Anoop says.
I haven’t been paying attention and didn’t realize that Mr. Zant was assigning an exercise that requires a partner.
“That seems like a big step,” I say. “I haven’t actually even talked to her yet.”
Anoop wrinkles his eyebrows at me. “Not like a sex partner, Romeo,” he says. “For the fingerprint exercise.” Blank look.
He sighs and explains. We’re supposed to examine paper printouts of fingerprints. This will allow us to “become acquainted with the concept of ridges.”
Alas, I move too slowly, and Raquel quickly pairs off with Hairston, of all people. She holds two of the high-powered magnifying lenses up to her face. She already has big, beautiful golden brown eyes. They are the color of a well-toasted marshmallow and just as warm and gooey. Magnified through the glass of the lenses, just the sight of them makes my heart hurt. Hairston is almost, but not quite, smiling. That dude is hard to read.
“I guess you’re stuck with me, toolshed,” Anoop says loudly in my direction. He is weird with cursing, like, instead of calling you “tool” he’ll say “tool belt” or “toolshed.” One time he called me a “multi-use hand tool.” Now he’s holding both magnifying glasses over his eyes, which are also big and brown. Somehow the result is not quite as fetching.
“Before we begin,” Mr. Zant says, squeezing into the seat next to my rightful partner, “allow me to explain Locard
’s exchange principle. The great Edmond Locard was an absolute lion in the field of forensics.” He continues, reading in a serious voice like a snooty professor. “The forensic scientist Paul L. Kirk best explained the exchange principle as follows: ‘Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibers from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool marks he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects—all of these and more bear mute witness against him.’ ”
I watch as Maureen turns bright red at the mention of the word “semen.” She probably has a crush on dreamy, hip Mr. Zant. He is so handsome.
“Now let’s collect some evidence!” Mr. Zant commands, making an upward twirling spiral in the air with the tip of his pen. As I have been trying to do for the whole hour, I catch Raquel’s eye.
“The game,” I blurt out, “is a-finger!”
See, because of how Sherlock Holmes said, “The game is afoot.” But we were talking about fingerprints? So I said “finger”? It doesn’t get better if I explain it. Judging from the look on her face, Raquel doesn’t think so either.
See why I need a manual?
Mr. Zant hands out the cards, each with an image of a fingerprint on them. All we have to do is look at them through magnifying glasses and compare them to a second set. We have to figure out which, if any, are identical. I know I’m going to be bad at it. Attention to detail is not my strong suit. Plus, I drifted off during the discussion of ridges and patterns and whorls. The patterns really are called “whorls”—that I remembered, because I thought he wrote “whores” on the board and started laughing. Especially funny was when he started talking about “double loop whores.” (I mean “whorls.”)
