by Josh Lieb
Randy looks at his hand, amazed by his own strength. “But I was just—”
“Child abuse! Child abuse!” I grab my lunch bag and sprint from the room. The laughter of the chimpanzees follows me out the door.
It’s been an eventful day. The reason Tati’s so mad at me is because of what happened in homeroom this morning. My homeroom teacher, Lucy Sokolov, was leading us through the process of nominating candidates for student council. Ms. Sokolov is an intelligent but scary woman. She looks like someone stretched a thin layer of Silly Putty over a skeleton and slapped a red wig on top. My Research Department tells me she wants to be a novelist, but the publishing houses always reject her masterpieces. Which makes her mean. She takes out her thwarted ambitions on her students.
After my more spineless classmates finished nominating each other for the more meaningless offices (secretary, treasurer), we got to the meat of the issue: nominations for class president. Naturally, five people nearly got into a fistfight in their eagerness to nominate Jack Chapman. Sokolov sorted that out, and the nomination was swiftly seconded. Then she asked Jack if he would accept the nomination.
Every neck in the room twisted toward Jack, the best student in school, the wide-shouldered (but gentle) king of recess. Ah, Jack! That high Shakespearean brow. That broad masculine nose. He stared thoughtfully at his hands. Then he stood, paused, and nodded.
I cannot describe this nod adequately. It was slow, impressive. It was the kind of nod Abraham Lincoln would give. It was the humble nod of a man who has not sought out a position of leadership but who will take on that dreaded responsibility if his community needs him. And it was suddenly understood by all that we did need him. Everyone in the room—Sokolov included—seemed to melt an inch in the presence of such magnificence.
Everyone, that is, but me and Tatiana. Obviously, I’m too stupid to recognize greatness. Tatiana’s so mean she hates greatness when she sees it. Her hungry little arm snaked into the air, demanding Sokolov’s attention.32 Sokolov frowned, confused. “What do you want, Miss Lopez?”
Tati stood. Tight curls. Tiny teeth. Snub nose. Cinnamon skin. She opened her mouth and let out the words that would forever sully Jack Chapman’s moment of glory: “I nominate Oliver Watson for president.”
The class, to its credit, was for once too disgusted to laugh. Sokolov looked like she’d been slapped with a fish. Tati threw me a mean wink and flounced down into her seat.
Logan Michaels, a desperate and fat girl who occasionally functions as Tatiana’s slave, dutifully seconded my nomination. La Sokolova turned to me. “Oliver,” she said, with an expression on her face like she’d just bitten into a chocolate bar and found a toenail, “do you accept the nomination?”
I made her explain the question to me three times before I declined.
Later, Tati taunted me in the cafeteria and violated the sanctity of my fluffernutter. But you saw all that.
I have P.E. after lunch. More accurately, my classmates have P.E. after lunch—I have a note from a doctor that says I will suffer explosive diarrhea if I ever have to take part in P.E. Coach Anicito doesn’t like it when people drip sweat on the gym floor; he doesn’t make me participate.
He does, however, make me suit up in shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers, like everyone else. Plus, like all the other boys, I have to wear a legally mandated (but in my case, wholly unnecessary) jockstrap.33
Today, like always, I stand by the water fountain, watching my classmates exert themselves. The boys play kickball on one side of the gym; the girls play kickball on the other. Liz Twombley, the Most Popular Girl in School, kicks a dribbler off the inside of her foot. Her curly blonde hair (and everything else) bounces as she tries to beat the throw to first. Both games come to a halt as everyone watches her with a mixture of longing and awe. Liz, bless her great big stupid heart, doesn’t notice.
I’m catching up on some business. I have a bud—a listening device—in my ear so I can talk to Sheldrake. “I really think we should consider buying more Kreelco stock,” he natters. “The company is solid and the price is at an all time low.”
“Sell all our shares,” I command.
A moment of silence. Then: “Oliver, normally I wouldn’t argue, but—”
“I said, sell it.”
“But I thought—”
“Don’t think, Lionel,” I say. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
I pause to take a sip of cold chocolate milk from the water fountain. I get that by pressing on an old mildew stain on the wall. If I press the spot right below the stain, the fountain spits out root beer. Sometimes I switch back and forth between the two while I’m drinking. It’s like making a root beer float in my mouth.
I burp. “Trust me. We’ll buy it all back next week at half the price.”
I do most of my business through Sheldrake. For security reasons, only fifty-two of my most-trusted minions even know of my existence. The next tier down is a group of five hundred agents who think Sheldrake is the head of the vast criminal empire they work for. Then there are roughly a thousand agents, scattered around the world, who don’t even know who they work for. That way, my enemies can’t get any information from them if they’re captured.
And that’s just the secret side of my Empire. There are also several hundred thousand people whom Sheldrake Industries employs openly (and who think Lionel Sheldrake is their boss).
“Next on the agenda,” I say. “Redecorating. Put in a call to Paris—”
I shut up as Josh Marcil trots off the court and pushes me aside so he can get to the water fountain. He doesn’t know about any of my secret buttons, so he makes a face as he slurps up the warm dishwater that comes out. “Tastes funny,” he says.
I smile and say, “I like it.”
He flares his stubby little nose at me and says, “You would.” Then he quite unnecessarily pushes me again as he runs back to the game. My head bumps the wall. That hurts a little. Josh is a loud boy, chubby, freckled, and sweaty. I watch him go back to his position in the “outfield.”
“You were talking about Paris—” says Lionel.
“Just a second.” I click my jaw, taking me off the private channel I use for talking to Sheldrake, and onto the channel I use for Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym.
“Josh Marcil,” I say. “Stomach.” Then I click back over to Sheldrake and turn my back to the game. “Now, I was saying—”
From behind me I hear the loud hollow Spong! of a red rubber ball hitting the belly of a middle-school boy—hard. Then the sound of a middle-school boy falling to the ground and moaning.34 Coach Anicito is yelling at someone: “No! We do not throw the ball at people on our team. Unacceptable!”
“As for Paris, Lionel,” I say, through a cute little smile, “I think it’s time we stopped playing games.”
Chapter 7:
WHAT USE IS A NEWBORN BABY?
Your earliest memory is probably of a walk in the park when you were four. Or getting a teddy bear for Christmas when you were three.
I can remember being born.35 Everything about being born. What I saw. What I felt. What I heard. What I smelled.
I would give up half my fortune to forget that smell.
I was taken home the next day by two animals. One was big and soft and sloppy. She stared at me so much I was half convinced she wanted to eat me. The other animal was thin and rat-faced. He smiled when he looked at me. That was the first fake smile I ever saw.
Later that afternoon, while Mom (as I learned to call her) took a well-deserved nap, Daddy stood over me as I lay in my crib. He was talking to his college roommate on the phone.36
“Yeah, we named him Oliver Junior . . .” He listened for a second, then laughed like a machine gun going off—gaga-ga-ga-ga . “Of course, he’s named after me, you jerk! Seriously, Don, you’re hilarious.”
Daddy settled into a chair and propped his feet on my changing table. “Oh yeah. I’m totally thrilled. You know, childhood and innocence—it’s all very important to me. In some
ways, I’m just a big kid myself, right?” He reached into my crib—for a second, I thought he was going to pet me—and grabbed a teddy bear, which he started squeezing absentmindedly.
“I can just relate to kids. I know how they think. Little Oliver Junior—the little guy’s brain is so simple and pure and innocent, free from the prejudices of the ugly adult world.” He looked in the mirror and started fiddling with his hair. “I’m looking at him right now, and it’s like I’m looking at the future.”
He suddenly froze. I focused my day-old eyes and saw that he’d found a gray hair buried in his brown mane. He rolled it between his fingers like it was a poisonous worm, then plucked it out savagely. Then he looked at himself in the mirror again. He was frowning now. I could hear Don nattering through the phone line, but it didn’t look like Daddy was listening anymore.
“What? Huh? Yeah, I’m here.” He lowered his voice and glanced at the door that led to where Mom was sleeping. “Listen, man . . . you know I couldn’t be happier about bringing this fresh new life into the world. . . . But . . . I mean, man! It’s all happened so fast. First Marlene, now a baby . . . I can’t help wondering if maybe it all isn’t gonna keep me from doing . . . well, the great work I’m destined for. . . .”
My crib was in a room that doubled as my father’s home office. This was in our old apartment. The room was the size of a large closet, and the walls were painted a manly dark green, but Mom had plastered stickers of frogs all over them for my benefit. Daddy’s computer was next to my crib. The only “great work” I ever saw him do on it was play backgammon.37
“You know, I feel like I’m destined to help all the children of the world, to be famous for it, right? Like, maybe I’ll write a book or something. Or go on TV. And I wonder if it’s selfish of me to devote so much energy to this one kid, when I could help so many. Like it’s a distraction. . . .”
He listened for a second.
“No . . . he doesn’t cry or anything like that. He just stares at you . . . like, he’s always staring . . . with these big blank eyes. . . . And his forehead is, like, huge. Plus, his nose is almost nonexistent—just a flat spot in the middle of his face. . . .”
He suddenly realized how that sounded. “Don’t take that the wrong way. The kid’s gorgeous. I’m looking at the little guy right now. He’s . . . amazing, man.”
For the record, he was still looking in the mirror when he said that.
“But, you know, what if . . . and it’s way too early to tell, obviously, but what if he inherits her intelligence? I don’t know if I could handle—no, of course I love her, man. That’s not the point.”
“I mean, she put on a little weight during the pregnancy, but I’m sure that’ll come right off. . . .”
He sighed, the sigh of a man who suffers more than the world will ever know or care. It was a sound I would come to know well.
“I’m just saying . . . I’ve known since I was a kid that I was destined to produce something amazing. Something that would totally change the world. I don’t know what—a book, a play, an invention—something. And I don’t see how I’m going to do that with this instant family weighing me down.”
Here Daddy looked at me. I smiled at him. It was the first fake smile I’d ever made.
It’s interesting, on your second day of existence, to realize that your father is going to blame all the future failures of his life on you. Not an experience I recommend.
That was when I decided to “hide my light under a bushel”—to play dumb. I could already tell that Mom would be terrified by my brain. And Daddy . . . well, he didn’t know it, but he already had produced “something amazing,” something that would “change the world.”
Namely, me.
But I didn’t see any reason to share that information with him. I wasn’t going to let him warm his frigid little heart by the hot flames of my genius.
If he couldn’t love me for simply being what I appeared to be, he didn’t deserve to know the greatness that lurked within. I resolved at that very moment never to care what Daddy thought, never to give him an inkling of what a magnificent monster he had sired. He meant nothing to me.
Nothing. Nada. Zilch. And I haven’t, for one second, cared what he thought about me since.
P.S. All babies have little noses, you jackass.
Chapter 8:
I ACCEPT A CHALLENGE
Daddy sits at the head of the dinner table, toying with his beef stew, as he solves the world’s problems for us. I’m not really listening, but the gist of his argument seems to be that we’d all be a lot better off with stricter seat belt laws. Mom listens with less than her usual rapt attention. She squiggles in her seat, which makes her cheeks jiggle, occasionally opening her mouth, as if to say something, then thinking better of it and closing her lips into a shy, delighted smile.
Daddy doesn’t usually act like he cares much what Mom thinks, so it’s fun to see how annoyed he gets when he doesn’t command her full attention. “The simple lap belts of yore just won’t do it anymore,” he intones. “We’ve got to make people understand, these so-called classic cars need retrofits to conform to . . . is there something on your mind, Marlene?”
This last is said in a tone of controlled annoyance and (understandable) surprise that there would be anything on Mom’s mind.
“Ollie was nominated for class president!” she explodes. “That pretty little Lopez girl nominated him. He said no, but they nominated him!”
He makes her repeat the news three times before he believes her.
I’d mentioned my nomination to Mom over my after-school grilled cheese (which was perfect, incidentally), but I’d had no idea it had made such an impact on her. I guess the excitement’s been brewing inside her all afternoon, like a can of soda that’s been shaken too much.
Daddy seems less impressed. “Oh,” he says. “Well. Obviously some sort of—”
He stops himself before he says “joke.” But I can hear it anyway. He awkwardly pats me on the head. “Congratulations, Oliver. That’s . . . quite an honor.” Then he starts buttering a piece of bread so he doesn’t have to look at me anymore.
Mom trots off to the bathroom. Being the bearer of such momentous news has put an enormous strain on her bladder.
I lower my spoon and concentrate on my stew. Daddy and I don’t talk much when we’re alone. My mind relocates to my most pressing concern: a corrupt trade official in Hong Kong who’s putting a serious crimp in my exports to South Asia. This will require a complex web of bribery to solve. . . .
“Man. Student Council. That really takes me back.”
I look up, surprised. Daddy’s talking to me. Or, more accurately, he’s talking to himself, and I happen to be in the room. He’s leaning back in his chair, glasses off, eyes pointed at the ceiling as he casts his mind back to his glorious yesteryears.
“It was me. Rhena Vinson. Louis Goldberg. Heather Grich was secretary-treasurer one year. That’s when you started to be able to tell. When we started to separate ourselves out. The people who were gonna make a difference, who felt a commitment to the community.”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard the planners of bake sales described in such glowing terms before.
“You know, we . . . It was like everybody suddenly realized that we were the ones who were going to do something important with our lives.38 The whole class was saying, ‘Okay, you guys represent us.’ And when they made me president in tenth grade—I beat Louis by twenty-five votes—it was such an honor. I’d been given a trust, a sacred duty, and I knew I couldn’t let them down.”
I feel like I’m hearing the secret origin of the world’s most annoying superhero. His eyes are moist. So are his lips. (Is he salivating?)
“It was just . . . amazing, man . . .”
Then, plainly all too soon, his reverie ends. He rubs his eyes and slips his glasses back on. He lowers his head and sees me.
