Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie

by David Lubar

  And once, when a kid had tripped over his sneaker laces and fallen flat on his face, she’d shouted, “Mon dieu!” As I thought back, that sure seemed pretty French to me.

  I knew just how to find out. I waited until seventh period, when I had life skills. Ms. Pell is pretty cool, and she likes to talk. After class, I went up to her desk and asked, “Is Ms. de Gaulle from France?”

  “Oh yes,” Ms. Pell said. “She came here last year. Good thing for us. There’s quite a shortage of qualified Spanish teachers. We were lucky to get her. Lovely lady, though I do admit I sometimes have just a teensy bit of trouble understanding her.”

  Lucky me. My Spanish teacher spoke mostly French. I guess even her Spanish came out with a French accent. No wonder the stuff she said didn’t resemble anything in our book. Great. I was learning a language that virtually nobody else would ever understand. Except for the other kids in the class. I guess you could call it Fanish. Or Spench. Maybe we could start our own country. Our flag would be a huge upside-down question mark.

  September 24

  Don’t ever tell anyone you heard this from me. Okay? But it’s something you need to know. There are a lot of good teachers. But some of them don’t have a clue. That’s the problem. Teachers are just like doctors, plumbers, or painters. Or bus drivers, for that matter. Some are fabulous. Some suck. Most of them are somewhere in the middle. Here—I’ll make a list for you.

  Scott Hudson’s Guide to Teacher Types

  The Newbie: Fresh out of teachers’ college, she’s full of enthusiasm and eager to bond with her students. Newbies are almost always wonderful. Some of them are pretty hot, too.

  The Legend: A great teacher. Makes class fun and interesting. Some legends have a gimmick, like they’ll wear costumes or play the guitar, or have a famous friend who comes to visit the class.

  The Ogre: It’s hard to imagine why a person who hates kids would go into teaching. I guess it’s some sort of power thing. Or maybe the ogre didn’t always hate kids. They come in both male and female varieties. As they age, it becomes very hard to tell them apart.

  The Enthusiast: This teacher loves her subject. And she wants you to love it. Her class can be fun, but sometimes she goes way over the students’ heads because she knows so much.

  The Lifer: He’s putting in his time because he couldn’t think of any other way to kill twenty-five or thirty years. Doesn’t hate kids. Doesn’t like kids. Doesn’t really care. He shows up every day and covers the material in the lesson plan, but he could just as well be attaching bolts on an assembly line.

  The Lame Duck: A lifer who’s about to retire. He has nothing to lose. This can be good since he doesn’t give out much work. But it’s bad if you want to learn anything.

  The Comic: All he wants to do is make the kids laugh. This can be fun if his jokes are any good, or torture if they aren’t. The young ones are usually okay. The older ones make jokes about stuff nobody has ever heard of, like old songs and ancient actors.

  The Natural: Sometimes, you get someone who just flat-out loves to teach, and is really good at it. No gimmicks. No bad jokes. When you get one, consider yourself lucky.

  {eleven}

  Our homeroom teachers passed out the paper Tuesday morning. As soon as I flipped it open, I discovered Mouth had a book review on page 2 of Revenge of the Mutant Zombies, a Bucky Wingerton Adventure. He gave it five stars. I almost tossed out the paper when I saw that. Bucky Wingerton books are this cheap series. They churn out a book or two each month. I read one last year, just out of curiosity. It was awful. I doubt there’s even a real author. I’d bet they put the books together with some sort of kit. Or a computer program. At least nobody was going to pay any attention to Mouth’s review.

  My article was on the next-to-last page. I read the whole thing. Which was kind of stupid, I guess, since I was the one who wrote it. But it felt different reading it in the paper. Julia’s guest column was in the middle. She’d written about how high school was a great place to make new and interesting friends. She didn’t mention anything about long-lost kindergarten pals.

  Mr. Franka nodded at me when I walked into English and said, “Good job.” Nobody else mentioned my article in any of my classes. I guess mainly because almost nobody knew who I was. I saw Kyle pick the paper up in study hall to look at the cartoons. I wanted to show him my article, but I felt weird about pointing it out. That would be like bragging.

  Patrick had the paper with him at lunch. “Not bad,” he said when I sat down.

  “Thanks.” I waited for him to say more, but I guess literary criticism wasn’t Patrick’s favorite subject. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered someone else who’d read it. Vernon Dross. The varsity quarterback. His loud complaints rumbled at us from the jock table.

  “This football stuff sucks,” he shouted, tossing down the paper. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Great. My writing was getting ripped apart by a guy who moves his lips when he reads a stop sign.

  Vernon turned to the kid next to him. “How come he didn’t mention my name?”

  The kid shrugged, which isn’t the best gesture for someone to make when he doesn’t have a neck. From behind, it looked like his head was being swallowed by his shoulders.

  “I’m the quarterback,” Vernon said. “He’s supposed to write about me.” He jabbed a finger at the paper. “Anybody know this idiot?”

  I felt my whole body trying to vanish in a shrug.

  They all shook their heads, doing a great imitation of an earthquake at a bobble-head convention. At least my lunch wouldn’t be interrupted—or my anatomy rearranged—by an angry quarterback. The team didn’t know me, and I wasn’t going to do anything to change that.

  I brought the paper home, but didn’t show it to Mom and Dad. I was worried that the whole thing with the Tom Swifties was sort of stupid. I’d wait to show them my next article. Bobby was on his way out to work. He’d pulled the four-to-midnight shift at the diner. So I didn’t show the article to him, either.

  Mom was planning to cook lasagna for dinner, but she got this wild craving for tacos, so Dad and I made a food run.

  “School going okay?” he asked as we left the house.

  “Yeah. Just fine. How’s work?”

  “Fine.” I looked out the side window for a while, watching the curbs and phone poles fly past.

  “This is what your mom does best,” Dad said.

  “What? Gets cravings?”

  “No. Being a mom. She’s just so good at it. You should see her with babies.”

  “I’m pretty sure I will.”

  “Oh yeah. Right. But it’s like she has a magic touch. Babies just melt in her hands.”

  “We should be so lucky.”

  “What?”

  “Just kidding. What about you? How are you with babies?”

  “I managed not to drop either of you.”

  “Thanks.”

  September 28

  Congratulate me, Smelly. I made it through my first month of high school. No broken bones. No disasters. On the other hand, no hot dates or leaps in popularity either.

  I’m pretty sure I carried my middle-school status with me. Most of us do that, no matter how much we’d like to change. Except Julia. And a few other girls who performed similar metamorphic stunts. (Did you spot the vocabulary word? If you thought I said metaphoric, take another look.)

  Today Mr. Franka introduced the topic of stream-of-consciousness writing. That’s where the writer sort of vomits the contents of his mind onto the page, just letting whatever comes flow out. Go out. Show out the prose and cons and all the twisty little pretzel bends of each thought untaught in the belief that anyone else on the planet would want to read the spewings despite the fact that the writer didn’t plan it but just kept going and going like a battery bunny banging a drum like the drum I wanted when I was five but got a toy clarinet instead which broke when I tried to use it to pry up a rock in the backyard next to the apple tree so I could bury my hur
t feelings.

  Don’t feel bad if you skimmed that last sentence. I sure wouldn’t read it. I already spend too much time with my streaming, screaming consciousness.

  Mr. Franka didn’t talk too much about the topic. “You’ll get a fair dose of it in college if you forget to duck,” he said. “For now, we’ll stick with more accessible literature.”

  Speaking of ducking, my teachers screwed up big-time. None of them gave out any homework. I can relax and enjoy the weekend. Sleep late. Catch a movie with the guys. Oversleep. Shoot some hoops. Get some sleep. All I have to do tonight is cover the game.

  I might even go hang around the garage tomorrow. Dad and Bobby are out there now, grinding some sort of cylinder or widget or gasket. Or perhaps it’s a brisket.

  I saw three kids in the halls carrying Revenge of the Mutant Zombies. I’m definitely going to strangle Mouth.

  The team got clobbered again. I paid special attention to Vernon, which was like being forced to watch a very bad movie. I needed to mention him a lot in my next story. It wouldn’t be easy. He was one of the main reasons the team stank.

  At the end of the first quarter, Kyle said, “This really rots.”

  I glanced over at Patrick. “You aren’t even going to make it to halftime, are you?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll stay if you want me to.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “No reason all three of us should be miserable.”

  They split. I wished I’d left early, too. Especially when I saw Julia and Kelly walk over to the players’ bench and hang out there after the game. Julia spent a lot of time talking with Vernon. I never would have guessed he could hold a conversation. It killed me to see her hovering near him. She was so wonderful and smart. Maybe she was studying him for a science project or something. I sure hoped this wasn’t her idea of making new and interesting friends.

  When I got home, I went right to work. I didn’t want to do more Tom Swifties. That would get old pretty fast. As I thought about the writing I’d been doing recently, I got an idea. Amazingly enough, the second article rolled out as easily as the first.

  Once again, I figured I’d sleep late. Obviously, I was slow to learn new lessons. This time, it wasn’t thumping that woke me. It was the gentle whisper of a power sander.

  Mom, dressed in coveralls with a mask over her nose and mouth, was repainting the spare room. Or the nursery. Or whatever the heck it was going to be.

  “What do you think?” Dad asked when I peeked in from the hall. He patted a stack of decals—ducks, bunnies, squirrels, and other lovable critters. But at least, from what I could see, there wouldn’t be any Pooh on the wall. At least not yet.

  I stared at the plastic wildlife for a moment. “It’s nice,” I lied. As I left the room, I had a sudden urge to call Uncle Jack and ask him to take me hunting.

  September 29

  Here’s a fact for you. Squirrels are rodents. So are rats. Check out your walls before you go to sleep. Rodents all over. Just figured you’d want to know. But don’t worry. They aren’t real. At least, not while the lights are on. Who knows what happens in the dark?

  And as for flesh-eating ducks—you probably don’t even want to hear about them.

  I wrote my second article. Check out how it starts: Dear diary, today I watched Quarterback Vernon Dross and the rest of the Zenger Panthers fight a difficult battle against the Hoover Hawks. I mentioned Vernon nine times, which should keep him happy. Since guys don’t write diaries, I signed it at the end with a made-up girl’s name just for fun. The one I came up with was Ema Nekaf. I know it looks kind of fake, but I picked it for a reason. See if you can figure out why. I’ll give you a chance to think about it.

  I didn’t show it to Mom or Dad. They’d probably think it was kind of silly.

  Half the kids in school are reading Revenge of the Mutant Zombies. I hate Mouth. Strangling is too good for him.

  Sunday morning, I heard a crash from downstairs. I figured it was some new remodeling project. Maybe they were installing an indoor wading pool for toddlers.

  “Relax. Everything’s okay.”

  It was Mom’s voice. She didn’t sound okay.

  I went down. The coatrack was knocked over. Mom and Dad were hurrying for the garage, jackets in hand.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Mom said. But her face was really pale.

  Dad looked like he’d thrown on his clothes real fast. “I’ll call and let you know what’s going on,” he said.

  A moment later, they were flying down the street in the Subaru.

  Oh man. I went up to Bobby’s room and knocked on his door. He didn’t answer, so I went in. “Wake up,” I said.

  He pulled the pillow over his head.

  “Come on. Get up.” I pushed him on the shoulder.

  “Go ‘way.” He reached out and shoved me.

  “Knock it off! This is serious.”

  “What?” The muffled voice came from under the pillow.

  I told him about Mom. When I was done, he sat up, shook his head, and said, “I knew this was a bad idea.”

  “You think she’ll be okay?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” He reached out and ruffled my hair. It felt weird. Like when you see a cat owner petting a dog.

  I went downstairs and straightened up the coatrack, then waited by the phone. I figured Bobby would come down so we could talk. But he didn’t. After a while, when I wandered back upstairs, I saw him stuffing clothes in a duffel bag.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I can’t stand this place right now.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I don’t need all this stress. I’ve got too much stuff to deal with already.” He zipped up the bag, then put his guitar in its case. “Got any money?”

  “Some.”

  “Can I borrow it?”

  The last thing I wanted was to help him leave. But I figured he’d go no matter what. So I gave him what I had, and he took off for the bus station.

  About forty minutes later, Dad called.

  “Everything’s fine,” he said.

  “Mom’s okay?”

  “Yeah. We saw the doctor. We’ll be home in a little bit.”

  “Good.”

  “How you doing?”

  “I’m all right.”

  I didn’t tell him anything else. He’d find out soon enough. I still couldn’t believe Bobby had split. He was acting like he was the one whose life was being turned upside down by this. But he was already almost grown up and all. I was the one who had to deal with everything.

  September 30

  No more screwing around. Okay? Whatever it was you did to send Mom to the doctor, just cut it out. None of us needs that kind of excitement around here. So stop causing trouble. You’ll get your chance later.

  On top of everything else, Mom got all upset about Bobby splitting. I still can’t believe he did it. But he’s right about one thing. There’s way too much tension around here.

  Here’s a new word for you. Flux. It means “change.” Right now, everything is in flux.

  You know what? Flux sux.

  {twelve}

  trick or treat.

  It was only the beginning of October, but when the new girl walked into homeroom, I thought she was made up for Halloween. She’d chopped her hair short and dyed it green. I guess she did it herself. I can’t imagine paying anyone for a haircut like that. And she’d stuck pins in her face. Not just earrings or nose rings, though she had plenty of those. She also had studs and barbells and other stuff I don’t even know the names of. There was a safety pin jammed through her left eyebrow, and another under her lip. It was kind of freaky.

  When she came through the door, it got so quiet you could hear a safety pin drop. I tried not to stare at her. Okay—that’s not true. I tried not to let her catch me staring. But I couldn’t help myself. I mean, safety pins? There were some kids in school who looked kind of like that, but nobody anywhere near as extreme.

&
nbsp; She was wearing a black T-shirt for some band I’d never heard of. It showed a girl crying blood. The girl was clutching a headless teddy bear. Naturally, the bear’s neck was also pretty moist. We’d definitely moved far beyond Pooh. This bear more likely had a name like Gush or Spew. My homeroom teacher stared at the shirt for a moment, but finally shrugged and looked away.

  At lunchtime, I watched the new girl walk into the cafeteria. I would have bet anything she’d head over to the punks, or go to the darkest corner, where the goth batlings sat. Instead, she walked straight to the table by the center window where the popular girls held court. She plunked down, opened up a lunch bag, and started to eat a sandwich. From what I could see, she didn’t pay any attention to the evil stares.

  As fascinating as all of this was, I had something far more important on my mind. Survival. The paper had come out that morning.

  “You’re acting like there’s a bug in your burger,” Patrick said.

  “Huh?” I glanced down. I’d been gripping it hard enough to leave holes in the bun, but hadn’t taken a bite yet. I kept checking Vernon’s table, waiting for him to start shouting. But I didn’t hear any complaints. I guess I could cross that worry off my list.

  I sighed and took a bite. “Government regulations actually allow a certain quantity of insect parts in food,” I said.

  “Thanks a lot.” Kyle dropped his burger onto his tray. “Another thing I didn’t need to know. I’m happy being ignorant.”

  Patrick shrugged. “Good source of protein.”

  At least things were quiet at home. Though it was weird walking along the hall upstairs. Bobby’s room was on one side of mine. Smelly’s was on the other. Both empty. Meet the Hudson kids—one had split, one hadn’t arrived, and the other didn’t have a clue about where he was going.

  Dad spent a lot of time in the garage working on the ‘vette, even though Bobby wasn’t around to give him a hand. I hung out there when I had a chance, though I mostly just watched Dad, or read. Sometimes, he’d look over to his left, like he was going to ask Bobby to pass him a wrench.