by Wizner, Jake
One day I ask her to come sit with us at lunch. When I bring her to the table, Neil and Katie shoot me disbelieving looks and are uncharacteristically quiet throughout the meal. Charlotte does not seem to notice the stretches of silence, and she rarely speaks unless I address her point-blank. Several minutes before lunch ends, she excuses herself and slips out of the cafeteria.
“That girl freaks me out,” Katie says.
“Why?” For some reason it feels important to me that Neil and Katie approve of her. “She’s really nice,” I say.
Katie shakes her head. “I don’t know. She’s better than your douche-bag girlfriend, but there’s something off about her.”
“How do you even know her?” Neil asks.
“She’s in my math class, and we had English together last year.”
“Does she have any friends?” Katie asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Katie picks up her tray and gives her leftovers to Neil. “Well, the next time you want to eat with her, do it somewhere else.”
The next day on the way out of math class I ask Charlotte if she’ll read something I’ve written.
“Sure,” she says. “What is it?”
“I’ll show you. Are you going to lunch?”
We walk to the cafeteria, get our gray hamburger patties, and find an empty table.
“Okay,” I say, handing her the poem. “How would you react if someone gave you this? It’s not finished, but you’ll get the idea.”
To my relief, she doesn’t ask me who it’s for or why I wrote it. She just accepts the paper and begins to read, and as she reads she begins to smile, and when she smiles I think to myself that she is actually rather attractive, not as obviously pretty as Celeste perhaps, but with a face that lights up unexpectedly and catches you by surprise.
“I’m shocked and offended,” she says when she has finished, and we both laugh.
Then she says, “I think it’s great.”
I take the paper back. “Can I ask you something maybe a little bit personal?”
She takes on a guarded look.
“You don’t have to answer,” I say quickly. “I’m just wondering why you come late to school so much.”
It takes a moment for her to relax, and even when she does, she still seems troubled. “I have to help out at home,” she says at last, and even though I am consumed with curiosity, I know better than to press her.
Between thinking about Charlotte, playing boyfriend to Celeste, trying to finish my poem, arguing with my parents about college applications, and working on my memoir, I somehow manage to miss the moment when Neil and Katie move from being friends to being friends with benefits.
“Is something up with you and Katie?” I ask Neil as we walk out of school one day to catch the bus home.
Neil seems a bit uncomfortable. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. You guys have just been acting a little weird lately.”
Neil doesn’t answer, and I feel a pit in my stomach.
“Tell me you’re not sleeping with Katie.”
“I’m not sleeping with Katie,” Neil says quickly. His face is red.
“But you are doing other stuff.” It’s not so much a question as an accusation.
Neil does not say anything.
“You and Katie?” I am having trouble wrapping my mind around the concept.
“Well, you’ve been hanging out with Celeste so much.”
“Not really. I have lunch with you guys almost every day.”
Neil stops and faces me. “Are you angry?”
“No,” I say angrily. “I just can’t believe you’ve been doing it behind my back.”
I don’t know why this is all so upsetting to me. Am I jealous? Why should I be when I have a girlfriend already? Am I worried about being the odd man out? Is it that I always imagined that if Katie ever went out with one of us it would be with me? Or is it just the shock of discovering that in the blink of an eye your whole sense of the universe can be turned upside down?
We get on the bus and take an empty seat near the back. “So how did all this happen?” I ask.
“You have to promise not to tell Katie I told you,” Neil says. “She said if I tell anyone, she’ll cut my balls off.”
I promise, and Neil recounts how the day after that kiss in the cafeteria, they were hanging out at Katie’s house, and Katie pulled out a bottle of vodka and they got drunk and then they just started kissing. “Since then, we’ve hooked up a few times, but Katie always wants to get drunk first.”
When I get home, my brother and his girlfriend are in his bedroom with the door closed. I know they are in there, because I hear talking and giggling, and then Meredith’s voice saying, “You first.”
I hurry into my room, close the door, pull out the poem I have written for Celeste, read it over, and furiously compose a final verse:
These lines, I do hope, have been a diversion
And shown you more clearly my taste for perversion.
I wrote you this poem because I’m afraid
To come out and tell you I want to get laid.
I take a deep breath. I can’t give her this. I cross it out, lie down on my bed, and close my eyes. I replay the experience of kissing Celeste for the first time. In my imagination, she takes my hand and leads me into her bedroom. We sit on her bed and kiss some more. I move my hand up her chest and she does not stop me. “Take off your pants,” I whisper.
She looks at me and blushes. “You first.”
I return to my poem and write a final verse.
Take pity, Celeste, on a struggling bard
My mind might be soft, but my pencil is hard.
My pen has been leaking all over my hand
Please be my paper; that would be grand.
On the day before Christmas vacation, Neil and Katie come to school hungover, Charlotte White does not come at all, and I come completely undone.
We are in Mr. Parke’s class, and we have just submitted the next sections of our memoirs. Celeste has written about her political and ideological awakening, and I have written about getting caught in math class with a pornographic magazine.
“I wrote you something,” I say at the end of class. I pull a folder from my book bag and hand her the poem.
I expect her to smile or to thank me or even to throw her arms around me and give me a kiss. Instead, she just stands motionless, not looking at the poem, but looking deeply troubled. “Shakespeare,” she says at last, “we have to talk.”
This does not bode well. It particularly does not bode well considering the final stanza of the poem I have just given her.
“This is really hard,” she says.
Can we not do this in public, please?
“I really like you, Shakespeare.”
No, you don’t, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
“I think we should just be friends.”
Fine. Can I have my poem back?
“Are you okay?” she asks.
No. “I’m fine.”
“We can still be friends, right?” she asks.
No. “Of course.”
“I would still really love to read the poem.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. I take the poem and walk out of the room.
I’m late to math, and the only open seat is in the front row. Ms. Rigby gives me an annoyed look as I sit down. Normally, this would make me very uncomfortable. Today, I don’t care. It is impossible to pay attention, and without realizing what I am doing I pull out the poem and begin to read it.
“What have you got there?” Ms. Rigby says, standing over my desk. “Give it to me.”
My stomach lurches, and I feel history repeating itself. What is it about math class?
“I’ll put it away,” I say.
Ms. Rigby holds out her hand. “I said give it to me.”
I do not have the stomach to get into a power struggle with a woman who has been intimidating her students for ov
er twenty years. I hand her the paper. What the hell, I think. It’s hard to imagine my day could get any worse.
She glances at it, then lays it on her desk and resumes teaching, her expression unchanged. After class, she tells me I am free to write whatever I want on my own time, but if I bring my smut into her room again she will contact my parents.
“That’s all,” she says when I do not leave right away.
“Can I have the poem back?” I ask.
She gives me a hard look. “I don’t think so,” she says, folding it up and putting it in her bag. “Have a nice vacation.”
THE TIME I GOT CAUGHT WITH A PORNOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE IN MATH CLASS
I have never really understood the social dynamics of the classroom, but it seems to operate along the same lines as a dog run. You have all the regular dogs who come to the dog run each day, and then, every once in a while, a new dog arrives on the scene. When this happens, all the regular dogs stop whatever they’re doing and rush to sniff the new dog’s butt.
So it was when Will Baker arrived on the first day of seventh grade. He was one of those small-limbed, sandy-haired, freckle-faced boys, who looks just innocent enough to make you nervous. All through the day, groups of girls would surround him with a million questions, then hurry off, giggling and whispering.
I didn’t actually hear what the girls were asking, but I felt pretty sure that they were trying to determine his answers to such thought-provoking questions as whether he had a girlfriend, whether he wanted a girlfriend, and who in the class he thought was cute. It was more than a little disconcerting, then, when Lisa Kravitz and Stacey McCaber turned around and stared at me, then rushed away, giggling like a pair of demented hyenas.
Will shrugged his shoulders, as if he didn’t have any idea what the girls were carrying on about, but I could barely concentrate for the rest of the day.
I caught up with him after school and introduced myself.
“That’s your real name?” he asked in disbelief.
“My parents are crazy,” I said.
He nodded. “That’s cool.”
“What were those girls giggling about in class?” I was most interested in finding out about Lisa Kravitz, a childhood friend I was secretly in love with.
He shrugged. Then, in a conspiratorial whisper: “Hey, you want to see something?”
“What?”
He unzipped his book bag and pulled out a magazine.
My eyes popped as I looked at the cover. “Jesus, where did you get that?”
He stuffed it back in his bag. “I got a lot of them.”
I looked around and lowered my voice. “Let me see that again.”
Will smiled. “You want it? I’ll sell it to you.”
“How much?”
He looked me up and down. “I’ll give you a good deal. Ten dollars.”
“Ten dollars? That’s too much.”
“You don’t want it? Fine with me.”
All night I thought about that picture on the cover of the magazine. Even though I had paintings of naked women in my room, they were nothing like what Will had shown me. It occurred to me that if I bought the magazine, my parents would probably find it, and I would have to escape to a cave in Tibet to live out my days in utter humiliation. It’s not that I would get in trouble. My parents didn’t really believe in punishment. No, what would happen would be far worse: They would want to talk about it.
“Where did you get this magazine?” they would ask. “Do you enjoy looking at these pictures? It’s normal, you know, for boys your age to think about these things. Do you have any questions you want to ask us?”
I bought the magazine the next day.
It turned out that Will had lots of magazines, and he soon established a profitable little business.
We quickly became friends out of mutual need. I needed someone who raised my cool quotient and improved my chances of impressing Lisa, and he needed someone who would follow him around like a lost puppy and do whatever he said.
“Where do you get all these?” I once asked him.
“Steal ’em,” he said.
“What? How? Where?”
“Stores, magazine stands. It’s no big deal.”
“Oh my God, I’m friends with a criminal.”
He gave me a dirty look. “You better not say anything.”
My voice took on an increased sense of urgency. “Aren’t you afraid of getting caught? They put kids in jail these days.”
“Chill out. I’m not gonna get caught.”
I realized that if Will ever got caught while I was with him, I would probably be named as an accomplice. Everyone in town would read about it in the paper, and for the rest of my life, wherever I moved I would have to register with the police as a convicted sex offender.
Meanwhile, I had plenty of other things to worry about, first and foremost making sure no one discovered the magazine I had bought. I had agonized for days over the best place to hide it. The problem was that no matter where I put it, I was able to come up with a perfectly plausible scenario in which someone would find it. I had stuck it between the box spring and the mattress of my bed the first night, but then I thought, What if my brother and his friends start jumping up and down on all the beds in the house and mine collapses? Then they try to put it back together, and…hello, what’s this? So I buried the magazine in my closet, then hid it behind a picture, then put it inside an old notebook on my shelf. But no matter where I put it I knew deep down that the only sensible course of action was to get rid of it as soon as possible.
Of course, this was totally out of the question. The women in the magazine had become more familiar to me than my own family. There was Marina, who had short blond hair and enjoyed going to the movie sand riding motorcycles. Then there was Angela, who liked to travel and go skinny-dipping in the ocean. Will had offered to sell me other magazines at a discount because we were friends, but I felt a fierce loyalty to the women I had come to know. Didn’t Patricia, on page eighty-seven, say that loyalty was one of the qualities she most looked for in a man?
One woman who could legitimately compete for my affections was Ms. Mitchell, who looked more like an Amazon warrior than a seventh-grade math teacher. She was young and tall and blond and strong and, miracle of miracles, not yet married. But more than anything, what made her so incredibly desirable was the fact that she liked me. I knew this because she always smiled at me and asked me to solve the hardest problems on the board, and because sometimes she would put her hand on my shoulder while she was walking around the room.
I had always been a good math student without really trying, but with Ms. Mitchell I applied myself as I never had before. In class I would find myself staring at her in rapt attention and wondering how it was that I never before had seen the beauty of a mathematical equation.
It was inconceivable, then, that I would jeopardize my relationship with Ms. Mitchell by bringing my pornographic magazine to her class, and not just bringing it in, but actually taking it out while she was teaching. Unfortunately, sometimes things happen in life that are simply beyond your control.
The night before the fateful incident, my mother announced that she had hired a cleaning service to come in the next day. The house was a mess, she said, and it needed professional attention. I couldn’t risk having the cleaners find my magazine, so I stuffed it in my book bag to bring to school. Then Will pulled me aside at school and said there was a rumor that the principal was going to inspect the lockers.
“I have my magazine. Where am I supposed to put it?” I whispered.
“Just keep it in your book bag. I’ve got, like, ten in mine.”
Every time I had to open my bag to take something out or put something away, there was the magazine staring me in the face. By the time I got to math class, I was a nervous wreck. In math the desks were pushed together for cooperative learning, and when I opened my bag to get my book, Rocco Mackey somehow saw inside.
“Dude, is that a porno?” he whi
spered. Rocco Mackey was repeating seventh grade and had the IQ of a doorknob.
“Shhh. We’re in class.”
“Let me see it.”
I had to do something fast, or Rocco might begin to salivate. “Just be quiet. I’ll show you after school.”
He nodded. “Where?”
I tried to ignore him, but he tugged on my shirt.
“Outside the school, now shut up.”
Ms. Mitchell looked ravishing that day, but I was such a basket case all I could do was pray for the end of class to come quickly. We were supposed to be working with our partners on a set of problems, which usually meant me doing them, Rocco drawing obscene pictures in his notebook, and then Rocco copying what I had written.
“Dude, she’s not looking,” Rocco whispered. “Let me see the magazine.”
“Not now, we’re supposed to be working.” I could feel the sweat pooling under my armpits.
Ms. Mitchell moved around the room. “Do I have a volunteer to put number one on the board?” She looked at me expectantly, and I felt myself blush.
“How about it, Shakespeare?”
Normally, I would have been delighted to do anything Ms. Mitchell asked of me, but I was terrified of leaving my bag unguarded for even a second.
“I don’t think I got that one right,” I muttered.
She looked at my paper. “That’s right,” she said. “Go ahead and put it up. Who wants to put up number two?”
I gave Rocco my most threatening look, walked to the front of the room, copied the problem as quickly as possible, and hurried back to my seat. My book bag was unzipped, and the magazine was gone.
I looked over at Rocco. He was slouched in his chair, staring at his lap with his eyes popped out and his tongue making circles around his lips, looking for all the world like a starving boy with a big juicy steak in front of him.
