My Awesome/Awful Popularity Plan

by Seth Rudetsky

  Ouch. He was right. But Spencer was friends with kids who were one echelon—or maybe one and a half—above me. And once he even ate lunch with that ten-year-old. “I talk to your friends at lunch,” I offered, trying to appear nice.

  He let out a laugh. “You only talk to them because you have no choice—they’re sitting right next to you.”

  I tried not to look like he was totally right.

  “Justin, I can tell you’d cut the conversation off in a minute if a popular kid started talking to you.”

  “What’s wrong with wanting to be popular?” I asked.

  “That’s not why you make friends.” Spencer was talking to me like he was my dad. It was annoying. “The kids you’re chasing after don’t share any of your interests. Do you really want to sit around discussing whether Michelle Edelton should or shouldn’t get a nose job for her Sweet Sixteen?”

  Not really. Especially since there was nothing to debate. She should get a nose job … preferably by her Sweet Fifteen.

  “By the way,” he said quietly, “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything when Gool called you a fag.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “No one wants to get beat up by him for talking back.”

  He seemed surprised. “Oh, I’m not scared of getting beat up. I’m just trying to practice a Zen thing of not responding to negative energy.”

  Oy! Lately he was doing nonstop name-dropping of various Dr. Phil/​psychobabble/​Eastern religion theories. Unfortunately, I asked him to clarify.

  “Well,” he explained, “I’m basing it on the theory that if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, it hasn’t fallen. In other words, if I don’t respond to negative energy, it doesn’t exist.”

  I was still trying to understand the tree-falling-silently theory when my cell phone rang.

  It was my mom reminding me I had a violin lesson in an hour.

  I hung up and turned back to Spencer. “Look, I have to go home, but I appreciate everything you’ve said today.” Even though I didn’t understand half of it and disagreed with more than 30 percent.

  “Justin,” he said as he left, “you don’t have to be somebody you’re not.”

  Hmph. That’s easy for him to say, I thought as I walked home. Everybody likes him. Or at least ignores him.

  I snapped out of my remembrance as my Tale of Two Cities slipped to the floor. I picked it up. I knew I should finish the chapter since we were going to be tested on it, but I suddenly didn’t care if I got an A or an F on the exam. People would still ignore me in the hallways. Besides, there was only around ten minutes left until the bell rang. That’s right—it took me almost an entire period to think through what happened that afternoon, and it had been a big waste of my time. Spencer hadn’t said anything helpful to get me out of the loser bin. His main advice was “be yourself.” But I don’t want to be myself if the rest of my high school years are going to be like this morning. I want more. Why should I settle for being so near the lowest rung of the school’s popularity ladder? And even though there’s not much further to go, every day I keep getting lower and lower. It’s only three weeks into sophomore year and I’ve already dropped two rungs.

  I recently did an informal calculation and figured out that 94 percent of freshmen are more popular than me! I thought that everybody hated freshmen. That’s supposed to be the fun of being an upperclassman. Somehow I’ve become the exception to the age-old rule. My loserishness has trumped the inherent loserishness of almost the entire freshman class—even that kid who carries around his tuba!

  I sat in the library and finally gave thought to something that’s secretly dwelled in the back of my mind for years.

  I’ll always be a loser.

  Then I said it out loud. “I’ll always be a loser.”

  It made me feel terrible.

  But … there was something familiar about that sentence. Who did it sound like?

  My mom!

  “I’ll always be a college dropout.” My mom has said that my whole life whenever people would ask her what she did for a living. Well, she wouldn’t say that right away. First, she would look at me as if she were thinking, Should I say this in front of him? and then she’d plunge right in with the backstory. “Well, I had planned on having a career, but suddenly there I was … twenty and pregnant.…” She’d shake her head and trail off. My mom and dad met in college and, according to them, fell in love and got married their junior year. I say “according to them” because my grandmother let slip one Seder after too much Passover wine that the main reason they got married was so they could live in off-campus housing. Regardless, after a few months, my mom got pregnant with me and quit school to have me. By the time she felt I was old enough for her to go back to school, it was too late. She couldn’t bear to be the one older person sitting in the classroom with twenty-year-olds. “I remember taking sociology with a sixty-year-old woman who’d suddenly decided to go back to school,” she’d say. “I didn’t want that to be me. Everyone in the class called her Wrinkleface.”

  My father would always interrupt. “But her last name was Winkleface! She deserved it.”

  “That’s not the point,” she’d say, and then sigh as she ended with her classic line: “I’ll always be a college dropout.” She would follow that statement with what could pass as a laugh if you based it on sound alone, but when you factored in her face, you’d know it was actually sadness and regret escaping her mouth with sound attached.

  Except now everything was different.

  A few months ago, she saw one of those women-talking-about-women’s-stuff TV shows and asked me how to use the “World Wide Web.” Soon, she bought her own laptop and started “Goo-gul-ing” (she drives me crazy by always pronouncing it with three syllables), and now she’s online every day, taking college courses.

  However, she’s only taking two classes a semester, so she keeps telling me that she probably won’t graduate college until I do, but “at least I won’t be a college dropout anymore.”

  Even though it’s annoying to constantly have her asking me to explain “new math,” it’s pretty amazing that she’s changed what she thought could never change.

  Wait a minute … if she can do it, I can do it, can’t I?

  YES!

  And I don’t want to wait until I’m in my midthirties to get myself together like she did. I’m starting NOW!

  Hmm … there’s no online course for unbecoming the school loser, so apparently I’ll have to make it up myself.

  OK, I’m writing this down so it’s official:

  I, Justin Goldblatt, will, by the end of sophomore year:

  a. start dating someone. (PLEASE let it be Chuck.)

  b. have my first kiss.

  c. become popular.

  I don’t think this list is totally impossible. Other kids go out on dates and get kissed. Why can’t I? Give me one reason! Besides the Jewfro and thirty-five-inch waist. There must be someone out there who’d find that attractive (hopefully Chuck). And as for becoming popular, it could happen. Granted, I have to somehow magically overcome being disliked by basically an entire school, but I have the whole year to do it. There are 1,300 kids in the school, so … if I divide that by 180 days, which is the typical school year, minus the three weeks I’ve already lost … hmm … OK, I have to make 8.3 kids a day not hate me. “Not hate me”? Why am I thinking small? How about worship me?! And what’s with 8.3 kids a day? Let me challenge myself by bringing it up to 8.6!

  Excellent. Now I have a plan.

  Actually, looking over this piece of paper, it seems I more have a list of the results I want without the actual plan. Well, at least I’m about to see my football-playing, soon-to-be (possible) boyfriend in French class. Maybe gazing at his gorgeousity will trigger something in me besides the usual excessive sweating. Wish me luck!

  AS I RAN TO CLASS, I realized I had forgotten my French notebook, so I had to double back to my locker. I ran past the library and as I entered the hallway with my lock
er, I saw Mrs. Cortale, the guidance counselor, sitting at her desk. She was eating a bowl of something that was eight different shades of green. I’m a vegetarian but she goes many steps further than me by being a raw vegan. That means she’ll pretty much only eat what most people would consider a lovely corsage. She’s the school’s resident hippie, and her daughter, Mary Ann, is being raised like one, too. Apparently Mary Ann is forbidden to shave any hair on her body, just like her mom. Unfortunately, while it’s not noticeable on the very fair-haired Mrs. Cortale (née Olsen), Mary Ann’s father is Italian. You do the math. Actually, I will: two plus two equals a full head of black hair under each arm. Plus, her mother believes in “living simple in every aspect,” so Mary Ann’s wardrobe consists only of two non-animal/​organic/​environmentally friendly, shapeless sack dresses that flow down to the tips of her all-season Birkenstocks. Suffice it to say, she is equal to me in popularity, and typical of my luck, her locker is next to mine. That means that whenever someone writes something mean on her locker, they always add something to mine because the proximity makes it so deliciously easy. The reason I know they write on hers first is because I often arrive to find YOU SUCK or LOSER scrawled across her locker with mine sporting a YOU TOO or LOSER NUMBER TWO. The weird times are when she gets there before I do and wipes her locker off, so I arrive to see a cryptic SO DO YOU scrawled on mine and have no point of reference to be insulted by.

  Anyway, I got to my locker and found packages of dental floss taped all over it. Obviously a reference to the spinach incident but quite frankly something I could always use. Finally, I thought, some vandalism that could be repurposed.

  I placed the dental floss on the top shelf of my locker, silently cursing that it was plain and not mint flavored. Cheap asses. I walked into Monsieur Bissel’s class right as the second bell was ringing and plopped down in front of Doug Gool. Oh yeah. That’s one of the “great” things about my school district. We always sit alphabetically and, because my last name is Goldblatt, I get to always be in incredibly close proximity to Doug, which would be excellent if weight loss could be achieved from fear-based high blood pressure.

  The only advantage to the alphabetical seating is that I sit diagonally across from Chuck Jansen, my soon-to-be-possibly-one-day quarterback boyfriend. Every day I have an excellent view of his profile (perfect, with a strong nose, pouting mouth, sexily stubbled chin, piercing blue eyes) and often get to see him run his hands through his sandy blond hair, which he boldly has grown longer than the other guys at school. It’s not crazily long (I’ve never been into that hippie look), ending around an inch and a half below his ears.

  Of course, I’m just estimating that it’s an inch and half below … who knows?

  All right, I admit that I spent hours analyzing his yearbook photo from last year and getting his exact hair dimensions by using basic calculus and a protractor. Sue me.

  Anyway, Monsieur Bissel began class by teaching us an idiom that meant something like “I feel hungry and thirsty, but if I had to choose, definitely more thirsty than hungry.” I thought, When the hell am I ever going to use that in a French conversation? It’s never been something necessary to clarify in English and I’ve spoken that for the last fifteen years of my life.

  Suddenly I heard Chuck laugh and whisper to Becky, his ex-girlfriend, “When the hell am I ever going to use that in a French conversation?”

  Gasp! It’s a sign! What are the odds that he would use the exact wording of my thought if we weren’t meant to be together?

  Becky giggled and then Chuck laughed louder, and suddenly Monsieur Bissel looked up from his Big Book of Idioms and glared in their direction.

  “Chuck?” said Mr. Bissel. “Would you care to tell la classe why I just heard a big rire from your bouche?”

  Monsieur Bissel always spoke to us with a crazy version of half English and half French. FYI, rire is pronounced “reer” and it means “laugh,” and bouche, pronounced “boosh,” means “mouth.”

  Chuck looked up innocently and said, “Gee, Monsieur Bissel, I don’t know why my rire is so big.” In case the class didn’t get the reference to his rear end, he decided to push it further. “To be honest, my rire has always been big, but most people who’ve seen my bouche know that it’s even bigger!” His pronunciation of bouche sounded much more like “bush,” and that’s all it took for the room to be filled with rireing.

  “C’est tout!” Monsieur Bissel slammed his idiom book closed. “Chuck! Detention après school!”

  “But he has football practice!” Becky blurted out.

  “Not today, he doesn’t,” Monsieur Bissel said curtly. “And for speaking sans raising your main, Mademoiselle Becky, you’ll be in detention as well!”

  Chuck and Becky looked annoyed, but this gave me an idea. I’d never actually spoken to Chuck before but perhaps I could today. He’d be in detention without his moron sidekicks for a full hour. If I could hang out in that room, maybe I could at least become friends with him, if not ask him out. I know it’s crazy to think that he would ever date me, or even that he might be gay, but I’ve decided that sophomore year is the year I’m gonna dream big and go for what I want.

  Hmm, I thought, how can I get into detention? I’d already handed in my homework at the beginning of class, so that eliminated the possibility of being punished for not having it. I decided to pull the old talking-without-raising-my-hand routine.

  “What’s the homework today?” I asked loudly while Monsieur was talking. I figured interrupting him would be sure to get his dander up. Instead, he chuckled. “My, it’s nice to see such dedication from un etudiant.” He looked sternly at the other kids. “Would that more of you were like Justin.” He smiled kindly in my direction. “It’s chapter quatre in your livre.”

  Rats! That didn’t work. I’d have to push it. But how? While he started describing the pluperfect, Chuck began quietly rapping. “Hey, Bissel, ring the bell for dismissal.”

  Chuck would do this all the time and pass it down the row. The unspoken rule was that when it got to you, you’d have to repeat the rap you just heard and then make up a new one. The trick, though, was to do it quietly enough so Monsieur didn’t hear but loud enough so the other kids could.

  Roger Stanton, who fancied himself a soon-to-be rap star, was next. “Hey, Bissel, ring the bell for dismissal,” he repeated, and added some fancy moves. Then, “Hey, Bissel, this class has no sizzle!”

  Monsieur Bissel kept conjugating obliviously, and now Doug Gool was up. “Hey, Bissel, this class has no sizzle. Hey, Bissel, I gotta take a whiz-zle!”

  It was my turn. I had to get that detention. I decided it was now or never. “Hey, Bissel, I gotta take a whiz-zle!” I rapped, full voice, hoping to get busted. But right at that moment, Monsieur had a coughing fit and didn’t hear. I had to raise the volume on my new rap. Uh-oh! I hadn’t thought of one. I panicked and yelled the first rhyme that came to my head.

  “Hey, Bissel, how about a kiss-el?!?!”

  Total silence.

  Followed by class-wide laughter. As opposed to the Chuck laughter, these guffaws were not in alliance with me, but aimed with derision at me. They were literally accompanied by finger pointing, just like in a Peanuts cartoon.

  Monsieur Bissel turned red.

  “Fermez les bouches!” he bellowed. “Justin! You will be joining Chuck and Becky in detention.”

  Yes! Mission accomplished!

  “And, class, since you find Justin so très drôle …”

  Uh-oh.

  “… I want you all to think about him as you write your extra assignment for ce soir. A two-hundred-word essay on Paris.”

  The bell rang. Doug Gool stood in my way as I got up. “Thanks, dickhead. Because of you, we have to waste our night writing about Gay Paree.”

  I tried to move around him. He blocked me. “Hey, everyone!” he yelled. “Don’t forget to do the essay, ‘Justin’s Gay Paree.’ ” He started repeating it in rhythm. “Justin’s Gay Paree! Justin’s G
ay Paree!”

  Everyone started chanting it with Doug leading a parade out of the room. That gave me a chance to scurry around them and avoid the glowering of Monsieur Bissel.

  Well, at least I got everyone’s mind off the spinach incident. And I’m one step closer to snagging Chuck. This kind of thinking is what Spencer calls looking at the glass as half full. He said the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that an optimist sees a glass half filled with water and calls it half full while a pessimist sees the same glass and calls it half empty.

  I got to my locker. Someone had broken the lock. I looked inside. Hmm, I pondered, what does an optimist call a locker half filled with bags of spinach?

  I ARRIVED IN DETENTION ONE minute before the bell rang. There’s a fifteen-minute free period before all after-school activities began and I spent it in the bathroom. Not because of an upset stomach, but because I had just gotten some toothpaste with whitener and realized that I didn’t have time to wait for the results of brushing three times a day for a month. This was an emergency! I needed blindingly white teeth to impress Chuck by 3:15, so I spent a full ten minutes brushing my chompers. Unfortunately, any white that might have been added to my teeth was overshadowed by the red of my bleeding gums. I don’t normally have the gums of a seventy-year-old smoker, but I think the vigorous stroking of my newly bought “firm” toothbrush caused some capillary damage. I thankfully remembered learning in earth science that cold makes things contract, so I swished some cold water in my mouth frantically for the last two minutes and my gums called a truce.

  I ran into the detention room (which during the day is the computer room) and saw that the teacher du jour was “E.R.” E.R. is actually Ms. Horvath, the head of the English department and the biggest hypochondriac east of the Mississip’. Spencer and I nicknamed her E.R. because she always seems on the verge of being sent to the emergency room. Hmm … I guess we came up with the nickname before his obsession with karma.