by Andrew Smith
I said, “Shh! Did you hear that?”
Bartleby’s eyes narrowed, which was difficult on account of the fact that an armadillo’s eyes are usually non-expressive.
“Hear what?” he whispered.
“I . . . I think he really did say something to us, Bartleby.”
I crawled close enough to Ethan Pixler’s more-than-one-hundred-year-old coffin to press an ear up to it, which was kind of disgusting.
And I don’t know which of us—Bartleby or myself—screamed the loudest when we heard this: “Sam? Sam Abernathy?”
We both screamed really loud.
If there was room enough, I would have jumped out of my pants. As it was, I nearly (excuse me) peed in them, anyway.
But in my defense (and Bartleby’s, too, I suppose), nobody ever expects a voice from a more-than-one-hundred-year-old coffin to call out to you. And I found myself thinking that it was not surprising that dead Ethan Evan Pixler’s initials spelled “Eep!”
“Sam? If you can, sweetie, can you say something to let us know you’re in there, bud?”
But the voice was not coming from dead Ethan Pixler.
It was coming from the well, and it was my dad.
They were looking for me.
EIGHTH GRADE
GROWN-UP BARBARISM
This starts on Monday, in my first eighth-grade Boys’ PE class.
(Excuse me.)
This was the only other class of mine that had a man for a teacher.
Everything about eighth-grade Boys’ PE was all man, man, man. It was unnerving and disgusting, like survival campouts with forty eighth-grade Dads.
In sixth-grade PE, boys and girls played together—games like four square or handball—and we got to keep our clothes on. Nobody ever told me about how when you get into grades seven and eight, you are put in classes only with boys and have men teachers, and they make you take off your clothes in front of everyone and change into uniforms—and worst of all, they make us strip (excuse me) naked and take (excuse me) showers together when the coach decides we are too sweaty.
Nobody ever—ever—told me about that until I showed up for Coach Bovard’s eighth-grade Boys’ PE class, and by that time it was far too late for anyone to do anything about it.
I had no idea, since the first few days of class all we boys did was sit on bleachers inside the gymnasium and read books. I’d assumed eighth-grade Boys’ PE class was about reading, which was fine with me.
Maybe it was my fault for not looking at the eighth-grade Boys’ PE class orientation pamphlet Coach Bovard had given me when I was moved ahead two grades. I just figured the pamphlet was about not swearing, or raising your hand when you wanted to say something. But the pamphlet was not about swearing or raising hands at all. It had all these specific policies about the exact kinds of clothes we had to wear in PE and what we were allowed and not allowed to wear under them or over them; how many exact minutes we had to change into those uniforms; how we were not allowed to chew gum or talk at all when we were inside the locker room; how we were required to use only roll-on or solid deodorant (which I’ve never used in my life) because spray deodorant was dangerous, especially to kids with asthma; and how we were required to bring our own shampoo and towels from home and always bring all our clothes home on Fridays to wash them; and how since nobody likes to sit next to a stinky boy in class, that whenever Coach Bovard turned on the showers it meant we had to take off all our clothes in front of everyone else in Coach Bovard’s (excuse me) dumb PE class, and we had to take showers together and then get dressed back into our OUTFITS OF NON-NAKED CIVILIZATION in exactly three minutes so we could get to our next class.
(Excuse me.)
I did not figure any of this out until after I opened the pillowcase-bag Mom had left out for me and saw that it contained a white T-shirt with my last name written in permanent marker across the chest, a pair of yellow Dick Dowling Middle School Mustangs gym shorts (that also had “Abernathy” written across the hem of the right leg), some new white socks, gym shoes, a towel, shampoo, and a stick of deodorant.
I wanted to run away from home, and maybe get a job as a line cook at Waffle House. As far as I know, Waffle House cooks are not required to take showers together.
To make matters worse, on this first Monday in the grown-up barbarism of Coach Bovard’s PE class, a day when I was all nicked up and viciously sunburned after Dad’s survival campout weekend, I found myself sitting down on a locker room bench and getting undressed for the first time ever in front of a bunch of other boys, and the one eighth grader assigned to the locker right next to mine happened to be James Jenkins, man-boy murderer, who took his clothes off really slowly without moving his head and just silently stared and stared at me, like a murderer.
“Hey, Well Boy,” James Jenkins said in his slow monotone, “you’re all sunburned.”
I nearly tripped and fell down pulling up my shorts. I wanted James Jenkins to stop looking at me in my underwear.
“I went camping with my dad,” I explained, tugging my (excuse me) stupid T-shirt with my name on it over my head.
“Oh. Fun.” James Jenkins’s voice was about as enthusiastic as a funeral director’s.
I imagined he thought camping was fun because it offered the likelihood of killing things.
Then Coach Bovard screamed at me and James, who just stood there, unmoving, in his underwear.
“What part of NO TALKING IN THE LOCKER ROOM do you nitwits not understand?” Coach Bovard yelled so loud, it echoed from the concrete walls and porcelain tiles of the locker room.
Every boy in the class stopped breathing and froze in place.
I was terrified.
I had never been yelled at by a grown man while I was taking off my clothes in my entire life. I almost started to cry, but there is nothing worse a boy in eighth grade can do than cry in front of a bunch of other eighth-grade boys in their underwear.
James Jenkins, without moving his head, slowly pulled on his gym shorts.
After we all got dressed into our uniforms and learned how to stand on our numbered spots on the outdoor basketball courts so Coach Bovard could take roll and yell at us some more, Coach Bovard made the whole class run two miles on the track.
I’m smaller than everyone else in Boys’ PE. Some boys like to make a contest out of everything and try hard to be the fastest in the class. I can never keep up with the pack, probably due to the shortness of my legs. But James Jenkins ran even slower than I did. Like a nightmare, James Jenkins, who never seemed to get out of breath on the two-mile run, stayed about ten feet behind me. When I’d glance back, there he was, staring right at me, not moving his head, just following calmly and slowly.
Halfway around the seventh lap on the track, James Jenkins caught up to me. I thought, this is it, I am going to die, which I decided was probably better than ever going back inside that locker room.
James Jenkins, staring directly ahead and not looking at me, said, “Don’t be scared of Blow-vard. He does this every year on the first day of PE class—finds someone to scream at, then makes us run so he can climb up the bleachers and have a cigarette while he watches us.”
I figured, out of all of us, James Jenkins would be the most familiar with Coach Bovard’s first-day routine, since he’d been held back for an extra trip through eighth grade. And for just a moment I thought James Jenkins, who was responsible for me falling into an abandoned well when I was four and my extreme claustrophobia and not talking for two years, was actually being kind to me.
But then James Jenkins said this: “And that’s why all these guys are going to hate you for the rest of the year, Well Boy.”
And at the end of the period, after we all straggled in from the two-mile run, Coach Bovard informed us that we were disgusting and sweaty, and that we all had to take showers.
I nearly lost consciousness from the fear and humiliation of the day.
THE RINGS OF SATURN
It starts the day of Dick Dowl
ing Middle School’s Back-to-School Dance.
There were threats, admonitions about my future—the kinds of things Mom and Dad always did. I recognize they wanted their version of what was “best” for me. They were so concerned now, after I’d skipped ahead two years in a sociological time warp, about my fitting in—or, more precisely, rising to the top of the academic caste. They had already planned out my courses in ninth grade next year at Blue Creek Magnet High School and had decided that I would take an emphasis in physics and engineering. The magnet school was a science and math school. I felt as enthusiastic about a science and math school as I’d felt about drinking boiled creek water from some stranger’s used beer can.
Mom and Dad had probably already chosen a spouse for me and put a down payment on a starter home too, for all I knew.
So that day, Mom and Dad made me wear the new checkered button-up shirt they bought specifically so they could also force me to go to Dick Dowling Middle School’s Back-to-School Dance. They made me tuck my shirt into my brand new pants, which were held up by a brand new shiny leather belt that matched my brand new shiny black loafers. I felt like I’d been imprisoned in the two-dimensional universe of a glossy photograph inside a JCPenney catalog.
What do people actually do at dances, anyway?
I had never been to a dance in my life.
And I may have known next to nothing about middle school, having at eleven years of age been skipped directly from week one of sixth grade to week two of eighth grade, but I did know that you just don’t show up in a brand new blue-and-pink-checkered shirt that no other boy in Dick Dowling Middle School would ever wear without running the risk of being made fun of for the next nine months, and probably into (excuse me) dumb magnet high school as well.
“Maybe you should punish me by making me stay home,” I suggested to Mom, after she asked what she was going to do with me. Mom’s question was the result of the fact that I had misplaced—or something—my permission slip for the dance. Everyone had to turn in a permission slip. It was like a contract that told parents what exact time they had to come to pick us up, and made us promise not to expose our (excuse me) underwear or dance in ways that were (excuse me) sexually suggestive.
Really. They have to make eighth-grade boys sign contracts about those things.
I didn’t get it. It was terrifying to me.
Mom combed my hair. She put gel in it.
I was certain no other eighth-grade boy at Dick Dowling was getting his hair combed by his mom that night.
She said, “I’m sure they’ll have extra permission slips at the door.”
The dance ended up being like a journey into another version of reality.
First off, if there were any sixth graders there, they made themselves invisible, which meant that as far as I could tell I was the only eleven-year-old boy inside the gym that night. There were some seventh graders, but everyone stood arranged in concentric rings, kind of like what you’d see around Saturn. Seventh-grade boys made up the outermost ring. They stood with their backs pressed up against the walls of the gym, holding plastic cups filled with diluted punch, watching what was taking place on the inside rings of kids, telling (excuse me) dumb jokes and making fun of people in the inner rings, but never being bold enough to detach themselves from the wall.
Seventh- and eighth-grade girls made up the middle rings. They were all dressed much nicer than any of the boys, and they kind of rocked and spun in place slightly, and talked to each other in small groups, pretending like they didn’t care that a small number of kids were actually dancing.
The innermost ring was made up almost entirely of eighth-grade boys. They defined the limits of the actual dance floor, but not one of them looked like he would ever get out and dance. About half the rest of the eighth-grade boys were rogue asteroids who cut through the rings and burned their way past the dancers on urgent missions to get more food or carelessly bump into and intimidate smaller kids. It was like the asteroids wanted to “accidentally” cause some mass extinction event or something. James Jenkins was the biggest (excuse me) asteroid at the dance. The asteroids also mostly came with half-untucked shirts, they were in their socks (the permission slip explained that shoes were the only article of clothing we were allowed to remove), their mothers had clearly neither combed nor gelled their hair, and for whatever reason they tended to all be sweaty and smell bad.
I wondered if Coach Bovard was going to take the asteroids down below to the dungeon of the locker room and make them take showers before they could go home. Nobody likes to sit next to a sweaty, smelly eighth-grade boy, after all.
The bravest kids in space—a couple dozen of them, maybe—danced in the center of all the rings. About three-fourths of the dancers were girls. Nobody actually danced with anyone; they just twitched and avoided eye contact with other dancers, and especially with the rings. The boys who danced tried to be at the very nucleus of the mass, probably so that none of their friends could make fun of them.
It was horrifying, especially because there was no ring where I belonged.
Also, I was very mad at Karim for breaking up with Faye McMahon just so he could avoid being there at the (excuse me) dumb dance with me.
I tried to squeeze my way into the outer ring between a couple of the seventh-grade boys, but there was so little room against the wall, I started to feel anxious and claustrophobic. So I transformed into an asteroid and wove my way through the inner rings of girls until I got to the edge of the dance floor with the other eighth-grade boys. Then I saw Mr. Mannweiler and Coach Bovard in the middle of the dancers, making sure no contracts were being breached, and when Coach Bovard made eye contact with me I nearly fainted. I was convinced he deeply hated me for being the first boy of the year to break his absolutely-no-talking-in-the-locker-room rule.
The asteroid that had once been Sam Abernathy was collapsing and fizzling into a black hole. And Mom wouldn’t be back to pick me up for hours.
If only I had a magnesium-flint fire starter and a knife with me, I would walk home and look for beer cans and a creek to live by for the rest of my life, I thought. Instead I decided to try the free punch and cookies.
The punch and cookies were both only slightly better than boiled creek water and crayfish. I looked around for a trash can to get rid of them in, hoping that time would somehow speed up—that we’d hit one of those bends Hayley Garcia (who was dancing in the center of Saturn) had told us about, and that this dance would end immediately, but no such luck.
Time was just unbending time.
I saw Karim’s cousin Bahar, who was also not a part of any ring, near the trash can, getting rid of her punch and cookies as well.
“Oh. Hi, Sam,” Bahar said.
Bahar was in eighth grade too. In fact, she was in my Algebra II class. She had always been nice to me, but I naturally assumed it was a political form of niceness, diplomatic, since she was my best friend’s cousin and all. Like most people who’d known me ever since I was “the boy in the well”—the kid people everywhere were supposed to pray for—Bahar always made me feel embarrassed and small, which is exactly how I felt most of the time around everyone else anyway.
“Hi, Bahar,” I said. I glanced over my shoulder toward the rings of Saturn, just to see if anyone might be making fun of her for talking to me.
“The cookies are terrible,” Bahar said.
“Grocery store cookies. There’s really no excuse for ever serving store cookies. And in the dark, raisins look like chocolate chips, which is another layer of disappointment on top of it,” I pointed out.
That made Bahar laugh and nod. “Is Karim here? There’s, like, no one to talk to. Everyone here is all caught up in either wanting to dance or wanting not to dance but looking like they do.”
I shook my head. “Karim broke up with Faye McMahon just so he wouldn’t have to come to the dance. So I guess Karim is champion of the not-dancing competition.”
Bahar said, “That sounds like something Karim wou
ld do.”
“I can’t dance, anyway.” I looked out to the pulsing center of Saturn. It didn’t look like anyone else could dance either, to be honest. I said, “I only came because my mom and dad forced me to come.”
“Oh. Sorry about your parents making you come. I never would have thought of you as someone who’d get all dressed up and go out to a dance. My parents almost refused to allow me to come, after they read what the contract said.”
“The—excuse me—sexually suggestive dancing and underwear rules?”
Bahar laughed. “Exactly. But at least we’re having fun, right?”
I thought about it.
This was the first time since landing in Dick Dowling Middle School that anyone had ever been nice to me. But I reasoned it was just because of Karim—the whole diplomacy thing.
“Oh,” I said, “I just love fixing up my hair and getting dressed up in a ridiculous outfit just so I can go somewhere and feel like I don’t belong.”
And Bahar said, “I think you look—”
But just then Bahar was cut off by a commotion of eighth-grade asteroids who came jettisoning out of the boys’ bathroom, crazed with excitement. One of them laughed hysterically and yelled (excuse me), “Poop! Oh my God! Someone made a poop on the floor! It’s as big as my leg!”
Welcome back to school, Mustangs!
This was a middle school dance.
And I imagined a new rule would inevitably show up in next year’s dance contract.
NEVER CLIMB A T. REX IN A KILT
“It starts with mastering Biology, Sam.”
My dad continued, advising me as he so frequently did, “That’s how a kid like you can enter ninth grade at Blue Creek Magnet and go straight into their Advanced Placement Physics program!”
One of these days—maybe it would be on one of our survival campouts, maybe it would be over dinner, or it might even be on kilt day at the miniature golf course—Dad would just maybe, possibly by accident, ask me what I wanted to do about future things.
