The Downside of Being Up

by Alan Sitomer

  14

  Now, everyone my age knows there is really only one place you are not allowed to get a boner. Nope, it’s not church. I’ve sported wood on the pew a bunch of times. And no, it’s not the swimming pool, either. Although I do admit, bathing-suit boners are the worst. Ain’t no backstroke when you have one of those woodies going, I tell ya that. No, the only place you are not allowed to get a boner is in the boys’ locker room. It’s like an unspoken rule of life or something.

  Of course, it’s not really fair that they make all the boys get naked with one another at the same time. I mean, just because I’m in eighth grade doesn’t mean that I’m as big as some of the other eighth graders.

  Not that I’m a pecker peeker or anything.

  See, when you’re getting naked in a room full of other naked people, as I happened to be doing the next day, it’s kind of like driving by a car accident. You don’t want to look to see what the damage is, but you kind of can’t help yourself either, and most of the time you do end up catching a glimpse. But to do that in the boys’ locker room is strictly off-limits.

  Me, I strip and I dress. No small talk. No extended towel drying. No allowing my wanker to flop around in front of other people. Strip and dress, that’s the rule.

  “Hey, Bobby, want to hear my latest poem for English class?”

  Arrgh!

  “Finkelstein!! Put on some clothes.”

  “What?” he said. “We’re all men here.”

  I turned away from Finkelstein’s hairless bologna. Jeez, the kid didn’t even have a sprout of pubes yet?

  “Finkelstein,” I ordered. “Put on some clothes and stop staring me in the face with your dinglehoffer, ya freak.”

  “Okay, you don’t want to hear my poem for English class, fine. Let’s hear yours,” he said, putting his hands on his hips.

  “I haven’t done it yet,” I said, looking away. Still no towel.

  “You know you can’t pass English this quarter without having recited a poem in front of the class, Bobby,” he informed me. “And if you don’t pass third quarter English, they automatically make you go to summer school.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “When?”

  “I said, I’ll . . .”

  Just then, while trying to avoid looking at Finkelstein, I noticed Tommy Williams.

  And he had the hugest schlong I had ever seen!

  My God, it was the thickest, beefiest, longest, down-to-his-knee pecker I had ever witnessed on an eighth grader. And I bet that when he got a boner, it grew to be the size of a big-league baseball bat.

  “Uh, Bobby . . . ?” Finkelstein asked.

  I didn’t respond. Tommy possessed the most mammoth tube ever attached to a thirteen-year-old boy in the history of children. Elephants had less reproductive material.

  “Um, Bobby . . . ,” Finkelstein said again.

  How did Tommy even walk?

  “Hey, Bobby, snap out of it! What are you doing, staring at Tommy’s penis?”

  Suddenly, every boy in the locker room froze . . . then turned to stare at me.

  “Shut up, Finkelstein!” I said. Jeez, why don’t you use a megaphone?

  But it was too late.

  Tommy quickly pulled up his underwear. I quickly pulled up mine. Python boy wore jungle-print boxers. Me, I wore tighty-whities.

  So pathetic.

  “Dude, you staring at my wang?”

  “No, of course not. No way, man.”

  Oh God, I had just broken the golden rule of the boys’ locker rooms: no pecker peeking.

  Tommy stepped so close, we were nose to nose. Actually, we weren’t nose to nose because he was six inches taller than me. I had to bend my head all the way back just to keep eye contact with him.

  “I’m going to ask you just one more time, Connor: Were you staring at my dong?”

  “Staring? No,” I said, my heart beating about a million miles a minute. “I mean, did I accidentally take a look?” I continued. “I might have. You know, a little glance, like the kind when a person is searching to find the clock on the wall, but instead sees another boy’s sexual organ.”

  Bam! Tommy punched me in the face. The force knocked me over a locker-room bench and I crashed to the gray tile floor.

  “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Finkelstein shouted, cheering us on like we were gladiators.

  Why is Finkelstein cheering? I thought. I mean, I had already taken one shot to the head and if I got up, Tommy would have pulverized me into hamburger.

  I stayed down. Besides, I’d been pecker peeking; I kinda deserved to get popped.

  Tommy glared. “Keep your eyes in your own head, punk!” he said, and then he stormed off.

  A moment later, I picked myself up off the floor.

  “Wow, Bobby, are you okay?”

  “Shut up, Finkelstein.”

  I touched the side of my face, right below my eye.

  “He really nailed you good.”

  “Would you shut up, Finkelstein?” I said.

  Ow, that really hurt, I thought.

  If only, however, that was the greatest pain I was to suffer.

  15

  My brain was hazy for the rest of that day after I’d gotten walloped by Tommy. All afternoon long I couldn’t focus on a darn thing.

  I couldn’t pay attention to any of my teachers’ blabbering.

  I couldn’t focus on stupid Nathan Ox as he called me a hundred thousand penis-themed insults.

  I wasn’t even able to pay attention to the three more times that Alfred Finkelstein said “She wants to taste my taste buds” when another round of girls rejected his invitation to the Big Dance.

  All I could concentrate on was one thing. And it wasn’t my eye. Okay, I’d been bopped. Big deal. Like I said, I deserved it. No, I was being distracted by something else entirely: walking Allison home from school. As each minute passed bringing us closer to the end of the day, I got more and more excited. And jumpy. And happy and nervous, too. Truly, the last bell to end the last class of that Thursday could not have come fast enough.

  “Hi-hi,” Allison said when she saw me walking up the hall. Funny how the entire afternoon I was rushing to get to this moment, but now that it had arrived, all I wanted to do was slow time down, like have each second on the clock take an hour or something.

  It’s weird how girls can make your head so fuzzy. More fuzzy than a punch, that’s for sure.

  “Hi-hi,” I responded.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “Navy SEAL mission. Can’t really talk about it,” I said. “Sometimes I work for the government.”

  “Saving hostages?” she asked.

  “Taking out terrorists, disabling nuclear devices,” I answered. “All while doing math homework for your dad.”

  “Sounds like you’re pretty busy.”

  “Not too busy to walk you home,” I answered. “And look what I brought.”

  I took out a yellow bag of Peanut M&M’s. She smiled.

  “Of course, I don’t know what you’re gonna eat,” I added.

  She laughed. I tore open the bag and poured three or four into her hand.

  Smooth, Bobby. Real smooth.

  We headed toward the front gate of campus, over the grass no one was ever supposed to walk on—which kids always did—side by side. Even though there were like fifty million students all around us, it felt like Allison and I were the only two people on the planet.

  “So, what’s it like being a teacher’s kid?” I asked.

  “You get answers to all the tests.”

  “You do?” I said.

  “Naw, I wish,” she replied. “Basically, it’s like being any other parent’s kid, I guess. I mean, my dad still treats me like I’m three years old, I hit him up for money when I need stuff, and he’s hopeless when it comes to new technology. He stills uses a calculator from, like, the nineteen eighties.”

  “I wasn’t even born yet,” I said.

  “Google wasn’t even b
orn yet,” she answered, popping a yellow M&M into her mouth. “Other than that, he drives me to school in the morning, but I walk home by myself because he usually stays late doing teacher things.”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “She died.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry, I . . . I didn’t know.”

  “That’s okay. It was a long time ago.” We crossed the street. “I don’t really remember her all that much. Just been me and my dad for most of my life.”

  I stepped over a piece of broken sidewalk. “Not having a mom, you miss that?” I asked.

  “That’s kinda personal, isn’t it?”

  “I, um, yeah . . . I just . . .”

  “No, it’s okay,” she said, opening up. “I guess so . . .” I offered her another M&M but she waved me off. “I mean I guess I don’t really miss it so much’cause I never really had one, ya know?”

  We took a couple of steps without speaking. The fact that she’d stopped eating the M&M’s made me think I’d upset her.

  “I guess I do miss having a mom, now that I think about it,” she suddenly added. “Especially when I hear other kids complain about how their moms nag them about this and that. It makes me sometimes wish I had that, ya know?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. I guess I never really thought about the positive side of my mom giving me all the grief she did. But she was always such a pain in my butt that it was sorta hard to look at it that way.

  “Of course, kids think they don’t want that stuff, but deep down, they do. They all do,” she said. “It let’s ’em know they’re loved.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s deep.”

  “Deep?”

  “Yeah. I mean usually I just walk home with Alfred Finkelstein and all he talks about are boogers.”

  “Boogers?” she said, scrunching up her face.

  “You wouldn’t believe some of the things that come out of that kid’s mouth,” I said. “Or nose,” I added with a laugh.

  She didn’t laugh back.

  Watch it, Bobby, you bonehead. Don’t gross her out. Think of something classy to say.

  “But sometimes we talk about opera, too.”

  She stared. I don’t think she bought it.

  A minute later, we crossed another street, hustling to make it across while the sign still flashed WALK.

  “My turn,” Allison said once we were on the next sidewalk.

  “Turn for what?” I said, putting the bag of M&M’s back into my pocket.

  “My turn for personal questions.”

  “Um, I think my chauffeur is gonna be here in a minute,” I said, pretending to look around for a stretch limousine.

  “I’ll go easy,” she said. “What’s your favorite color?”

  “Purple.”

  “Your favorite food?”

  “Grapes and pizza,” I said. “But not at the same time. I mean, like, I don’t put grapes on my pizza.”

  “Got it. Your favorite musician?”

  A chance to be classy again.

  “Mozart.”

  “Really?”

  “Beethoven?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, not believing me.

  “Picasso?”

  “You mean Picasso the painter?” she said.

  “Yeah, well . . . He played rock guitar, too,” I offered.

  “Why’s your sister hate you?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Oh, come on, you gotta know.”

  “Really, I don’t know.” I paused. “Well . . .”

  “Well what?” she asked. We made a left and started walking up a street with a lot of big, tall trees.

  “Well, I guess she kind of blames me.”

  “Blames you?” she asked. “For what?”

  “For being in seventh grade.”

  “Huh? How’s that your fault?”

  “It’s not,” I said. “But still, she blames me.”

  I hopped over a puddle made by someone’s broken lawn sprinkler. Allison just walked around it.

  “I don’t understand.” She stopped. “This is my house right here.” The house with the broken lawn sprinkler was her neighbor’s.

  Allison’s house looked like most of the other houses in the neighborhood. Nothing too fancy, but not so bad, either. The door was brown and the trim over the front windows was light yellow. A new paint job on the front steps wouldn’t have hurt.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I’m listening.”

  I thought she might go inside or something, but nope, she didn’t budge. She stood right there waiting to hear my story.

  “See, my birthday is in January,” I began. “And her birthday is in December, so really, we are less than a year apart. And Hill’s smart, one of those good-in-school types, so my parents put us in first grade at the same time, kinda like twins who go to school in the same grade, even though we’re not twins.”

  “Uh-huh . . .”

  “So we’ve been in the same grade our whole lives,” I continued. “First, second, third, and so on. All the way up to this year. And for the most part, we always got along.”

  “Why not this year?”

  “Because my sister had a diving accident.”

  “Like scuba diving?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “My dad won a raffle at work and scored a free week at some hotel in the Bahamas, so we all went two summers ago for a vacation and learned how to scuba dive. My sister and I were partnered up.”

  “The buddy system,” Allison said.

  “Yeah. You scuba dive?” I asked.

  “No, but my dad’s taken me snorkeling before. Same principle. Go on.”

  “So, like, we’re down in the water diving and next thing you know my sister gets a piece of seaweed slightly wrapped around her foot—like not even that much at all—and she freaked out. Like, all she had to do was unwrap one little twist, but she panicked and rushed up to the surface too fast, giving her this thing called the bends. You know what the bends are?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “It’s when too much oxygen goes to your brain because you surfaced too fast. Or maybe it’s too much nitrogen, I dunno. Either way, it’s like this serious brain thing that can happen from coming up too quick from under the water when you’re diving.”

  “And this happened to your sister?”

  “Yeah. So the next year she ended up missing so much time away from class in oxygen tanks and stuff like that trying to get her brain right, they just decided to have her take the entire school year off to recover, get healthy and do seventh grade this year’cause that’s kind of her real age group anyway.”

  “Is she okay now?” Allison asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re lucky, she’s fine. But she’s really mad because . . .”

  “Because all her friends are in eighth grade,” Allison said.

  “Yep. And they’re going to the Big Dance, and they’re eating during a different lunch period, and blah, blah, blah,” I said. “She hates being in seventh grade and blames me for all of it. I just don’t get it.”

  “You don’t get it?” Allison asked.

  “No, I don’t get it.”

  “Jeez.” Allison shook her head. “Boys are so dumb.”

  “Why am I so dumb?” I asked. But I gotta admit, I said it kinda dumbly.

  “You really don’t know?”

  “Nope, I really don’t know.”

  “Let me ask you,” she said. “Where were you when the seaweed got all tangled up around her foot?”

  “It wasn’t all tangled up,” I said. “Don’t exaggerate. It was slightly wrapped.”

  “Answer the question. Where were you?”

  “Looking for a clown fish,” I said softly.

  “Looking for a clown fish?” she repeated.

  And don’t think I couldn’t tell there was a ton of sarcasm in her voice, either.

  “Um, hello? You were supposed to be her buddy,” Allison said. “You were supposed to be there for her, Bobby.”

 
; I guess I’d never really thought of it that way.

  “Like I said, boys are so dumb.”

  She headed for the house.

  “Um,” I called out from the sidewalk.

  “Yes?” she answered in a snippy tone.

  “Does my dumbness mean I can’t walk you home again tomorrow?” I asked. “I’ll bring M&M’s.”

  Allison closed the door without answering. I stood all alone on the sidewalk not knowing what to do.

  “Well, does it?” I called out.

  No response.

  Sheesh, women.

  16

  When I walked into my house later that afternoon, my sister was sitting at the table wearing a gray hoodie sweatshirt and doing her homework. She looked up when I entered but didn’t say hi.

  I was dirt to her. Lower than dirt. I was pond scum, the green, slippery kind.

  I turned to close the front door behind me but suddenly felt someone pushing it open from the other side.

  “Man, we gotta score chicks for the Big Dance,” Finkelstein said as he barged in. “By the way, how’s your eye?”

  “Shut up, Finkelstein,” I said. “And hey, why don’t you just come right on in?”

  “Don’t mind if I do. He-hurrggh, he-hurrggh.”

  Finkelstein leaned his neck out, clearly looking for something. He and my sister made eye contact.

  “You couldn’t score a chick if one fell out of a truck and hit you on the head,” Hill said with a bite.

  “Hey, Hill, I hear they invented a new bra for girls with your figure,” Finkelstein answered. “It’s called the Ironing Board.”

  “Nice braces, Alfred,” Hill replied. “Or did you swallow a pile of bicycle spokes?”

  “Toothpick!”

  “Chain-link-fence face!”

  “Chalkboard chest!”

  “Magnet mouth!”

  “Will you two shut up!!” I said. “Holy cow, what is it with you two?”

  They glared at each other.

  “Jeez,” I added, and headed upstairs. Finkelstein, of course, followed right behind me.

  But not without tossing another dart at Hill.

  “Skeleton girl.”

  “Wire lips.”

  “Shut up!” I said. “Give it a rest already.”

  In my room, I discovered Gramps sitting at my computer.