Grouper's Laws

by D. Philip Miller

  He banged his knee into the sharp edge of one of the metal desks as he pinched his way down the narrow aisle. He winced but uttered no sound. To cry out would surely call his classmates down upon him. He fell into an empty seat at the back of the room.

  A small fellow in the next desk looked his way. His face was broad and concave as if a giant had pressed his thumb into it. Hair the color and texture of straw spiked at all angles from the flat crown of his head like pick-up sticks. Just Blondie’s luck — he’d been seated beside a fucking troll!

  For a long while, Blondie stared down at his lap, willing the teacher to speak, to break the awful stillness his arrival had caused. Finally, she did, and Blondie felt safe enough to open his beige spiral notebook and write at the top of the first page: “Fenton High (ugh!). Trigonometry. September 6, 1961. Miss Spalding.”

  The boy next to him leaned over.

  “She’s a real c-cunt,” he said in a high voice that carried.

  Nervous titters erupted nearby. Blondie plastered his eyes to the blank page in front of him.

  “Caldane!” Miss Spalding’s voice was sharp and sudden like a rifle shot. “Shut your yap.”

  Blondie became aware of a deep rasping sound a few desks away. It came from the bigheaded boy. He was trying to stifle his mirth.

  The teacher glared at him for a moment and then her face split into a gap-toothed grin. Blondie was astounded. The witch seemed amused by the bigheaded boy. No, more than that … there was a trace of affection in her face. The bigheaded boy never changed expression, though. He just sat Buddha-like, motionless except for a faint quivering in his large torso.

  Miss Spalding began discussing an arcane principle of trigonometry and the class returned to the buzzing anarchy Blondie had heard from the hall. Being an outsider and not privy to the undercurrent of excited chatter, Blondie did his best to follow her convoluted logic. Big boned as she was, Miss Spalding now and then tossed her head in a way that was almost coquettish.

  Just before the bell, Caldane leaned toward Blondie again and whispered, “Her l-lover was k-killed in a motorcycle accident.”

  Civics class proved a welcome contrast. The kids seemed normal and the teacher, Miss Darlington, was an attractive, auburn-haired young woman with a confident and cheery manner and freckles across the bridge of her nose. A couple times, she directed a warm smile at Blondie as if trying to put him at ease. He relaxed his guard a smidgen. Perhaps not everyone at Fenton High ate their young.

  It wasn’t until fourth-period English that Blondie saw either the straw-haired kid or the bigheaded boy again. In the meantime, he’d forced some coagulated spaghetti and wilted lettuce into his stomach in the school’s correctional-style cafeteria. He was still choking back indigestion as he recorded the date and “English … Mrs. Buckley.”

  When the latter, a large-rumped lady with buck teeth, entered the room, a ferocious belch erupted from the rear of the room. Blondie turned quickly but saw only the bigheaded boy gazing serenely toward the blackboard.

  Mrs. Buckley shook with suppressed rage.

  “It’s you, Whipple. I know it’s you,” she hissed at him.

  So that was the strange fellow’s name, Blondie thought. He waited to see what he would do. Whipple didn’t acknowledge her words with even a shift of his eyes. Unable to evoke any response from him, Buckley stomped to her desk, where she began furiously arranging papers and pencils.

  As the class proceeded, Blondie perceived that Whipple had a kind of retinue. To his left sat a handsome young man with a fluid body and longish dark hair. His face was etched into the delicate features of a Byron — high cheekbones, aquiline nose, cupid’s-bow lips. He seemed familiar. Blondie recalled that he’d glimpsed him in the rear of his third-period chemistry class.

  To the boy-man’s right was a compact little fellow with a mop of hair shaped like an inverted bowl. Beside him was a muscular kid with a flat top, and behind him was Caldane from first period. Blondie could tell they were a group, although they seemed to have nothing in common.

  Throughout the period — as Buckley droned on about the importance of Chaucer to the development of modern English literature — a slight hum periodically arose from their midst. Other students occasionally glanced toward them as if expecting something to happen. Blondie caught their sense of anticipation. But what did they do? What were they known for?

  The bigheaded boy maintained his stoic pose until the bell rang. His comrades had done no more than mutter to each other under their breaths from time to time, leaving Blondie’s undefined expectation unfulfilled.

  As he left class, Blondie realized he felt drained. He was glad only P.E. and study hall remained. Phys-ed brought no more than the slight discomfort of being new, since they engaged in no physical activity and hence Blondie could postpone until another day the embarrassment of a group shower. Study hall was a snap, with no teacher at all. An occasional visit by the Bear was enough to keep the peace.

  When the last bell of the day rang, the promise of life outside Fenton High revived him and Blondie hurried to his bus. Halfway home, he remembered the dark-haired girl he’d seen that morning. He looked around and spied the homely girl with pigtails sitting by herself. His angel was nowhere in sight.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The bus deposited Blondie at the end of Friar Lane, just across the street from the dirt embankment that marked the edge of Heritage Acres, the new development where they lived. Blondie flew across the road and clambered up the bank to his back yard, still more dirt than grass, then cut across a corner of Mr. Grafton’s yard to their house — a colonial-style tri-level, the bottom half brick, the top aluminum siding. Six smallish square columns — the “colonial” part, Blondie guessed — supported the portico above the front porch. In his estimate, their house lacked originality and grandeur, either unforgivable in his pantheon of values.

  Blondie hurried through the living room, vaguely noting the burl coffee table with its sprout of dried flowers, the hutch peopled with Hummel figurines, his mother’s paintings on the wall. He was in a panic to reach the sanctity of his upstairs room and relieve himself of the almost unbearable tension he felt inside. It had been a hard day, he told himself, but he knew that wasn’t the cause. It was the same insistent force that had driven him since he was thirteen: sperm pressure.

  Blondie sprinted up the gray-carpeted stairs to his bedroom. He smiled in anticipation as he reached down and pulled out the bottom drawer of his dresser. There, hidden between two sweaters was the secret treasure of his life: a 1959 calendar of nude pinups he’d managed to smuggle out of France.

  His favorite was a frontal shot of a young lady on a red satin sheet. She had her legs squeezed together so you couldn’t see her pubic hair — or maybe it had been airbrushed away. All in all, it was a photo a guy could get off with. And he had. But just as he wrapped his eager fingers around the calendar, Blondie heard a car door slam. His mother, a first-grade teacher, had returned from school early!

  Blondie stuffed the calendar back beneath the sweaters, skinning his knuckles against the top of the drawer. His heart was knocking against his ribcage like a blind bird.

  Blondie waited for his mom to barge into the house the way she usually did. The house remained silent. Blondie walked over to his window. A dark car sat in the carport of the house next door. The noise must have been caused by their new neighbors, the ones they’d yet to meet … or even see.

  His passion routed, Blondie tramped back down the stairs and out the back door to the utility shed. Lurking inside were his “thunder sticks,” the two-year-old set of golf clubs his parents had won at bingo, and a garbage sack full of shag balls. Blondie grabbed a pitching wedge and the sack and headed for one of the few patches of grass in the back yard.

  He dribbled the balls out of the bag, isolating one with the club head. Taking careful aim at a fledgling ash tree, Blondie imagined himself Arnold Palmer at Cherry Hills in the summer of 1960, cha
rging from behind. He just needed to flip the ball up near the flag and victory was his.

  Blondie chunked the ball about three feet, digging a divot in their just- seeded lawn.

  Damn!

  His next shot plopped into the ground halfway to the ash. Pathetic. Blondie pulled another ball from the cluster.

  “Head down, nice smooth swing,” he told himself.

  B-z-z-zing. The club caught the ball on the hosel, shanking it low to the right and long. It skittered across the string that marked their property line into the next yard. Blondie stared at the rebellious sphere for a moment before marching after it. He looked down to avoid tripping over the string and, when he raised his eyes, he saw a large black boot settling over the ball. Blondie’s gaze slowly rose from the boot to a heavy thigh, then upward to the huge torso and head of a Minotaur! It had to be. No human could be so menacing.

  A scowl etched the beast’s boxlike face, while his serpent eyes scoured Blondie face. Blondie’s stomach flipped. He remembered the name he’d seen on the mailbox next door: Potter.

  Mustering all his nerve, Blondie started to ask for his ball back, but no sound came from his throat. He decided it was just as well. The man didn’t seem the type to grant favors.

  “Sorry,” Blondie managed to mumble. As he turned away, he imagined he saw the beginning of a smile crease the ogre’s taut mouth. Bearing the dead weight of the man’s gaze upon his back, Blondie gathered up his wedge and sack of balls and put them back in the shed.

  “What a wimp,” he thought as he entered the house. “I should have kicked his ass.” Then he visualized the man again. “No way. No fucking way.”

  Blondie just got back to his room when he heard a loud bang and felt the wall shake. His mom had arrived. He wished she weren’t always so boisterous. Being big was no excuse. She called to make sure he was home and he answered, but he remained in his room. He wasn’t ready to face her yet.

  Shortly, Blondie heard his dad come in. How much more softly he entered, almost as if he were sneaking in. He briefly considered telling his dad about the man next door. But what good would it do? His dad wouldn’t do anything. He’d just tell Blondie he shouldn’t have hit his ball in the guy’s yard — “turn the other cheek” and all that crap.

  Blondie wondered how he could ever have been a soldier, not that he’d been a real soldier. Only a telecommunications engineer. The only thing he’d commanded had been a brigade of blueprints. Blondie thought of his father and how he trimmed his nails and nose hair every day, of the pomade he used to keep his hair down, of his overall prissiness. No, his dad would never confront a man like Potter.

  He was reading the newspaper at the kitchen table when Blondie answered his mom’s call to dinner. He noted the thinning brown hair on his dad’s egg-shaped pate, the faint moustache above his thin lips, and the wisps of hair poking from his pinched nose. Blondie had trouble accepting him as his father. He was too small, too old … too insignificant.

  Then again, maybe he wasn’t his father. Maybe he’d been adopted. After all, his parents both had brown hair and his was snow white. How could they explain that?

  “That Maris, he sure is something,” his dad said to him. “I think he’s going to do it.”

  “I don’t think so. No one will ever beat the Babe.”

  “How did things go today, Bernard?” his mom asked, as she placed a roast on the table.

  “Just fine,” he lied. How could he tell her about the angel on the bus, the jerk in the hallway, the bigheaded boy? If he said anything, he’d spend the next half hour explaining what he meant.

  “No problems?” his dad asked as he sat down.

  “I said fine, didn’t I?”

  “You don’t have to be testy, Bernard,” his mom scolded.

  “It was my first day of school, that’s all.”

  “Well, it was my first day at school too, but I’m not being grouchy.”

  His mother carved the meat, her heavy arms wielding the knife with authority, her eyes intent, dark as the seared skin of the roast. Flecks of gray sprinkled her chestnut hair. His mom was growing old. The thought made Blondie nervous.

  “What should we watch tonight, Francis?” she asked his dad.

  “Whatever you want, dear,” he answered. He kept reading his paper.

  Was this the way marriages were? If so, Blondie decided, he would never get married. What he wanted from a woman was passion. He thought again of the girl on the bus. Was she the passionate type? He was sure she could be with the right guy, someone who would be sensitive to her needs. Someone like him.

  “Did you hear me, Bernard?”

  “What?”

  “I asked if you wanted more meat,” his mom repeated.

  “No, no, I’m fine.”

  After dinner, he watched Cheyenne and The Rifleman and later The Andy Griffith Show with his folks. His dad loved all that small-town stuff — Mayberry and Aunt Bea — probably because he’d grown up in a small town in South Carolina, a place where everyone knew everyone else. The kind of place where everyone counted, where everyone developed roots. Not like his own childhood, being jerked somewhere new every time his dad had been reassigned.

  When Blondie returned to his room, moonlight was streaming in the window, turning the gauzy curtain into a silver veil. Blondie undressed in the dark, leaving only his skivvies. Then, feeling his way in the faint light, he placed a worn record on his small phonograph. Soon, he was listening to the soft, lilting strains of “Theme from a Summer Place.”

  For a moment, his parents’ voices broke through his musical cocoon. Their tones were sharp, cutting. Blondie feared they were going to get into an argument. They’d been doing that a lot lately. His dad had told him it was because his mom was going through “the change of life,” but the only thing new about their quarreling was the frequency.

  Blondie was relieved when the house fell silent again. He started the phonograph one more time, curled under his covers and envisioned Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue, the two young lovers from the movie, fighting to be together against their parents and society. Yes, that was how it should be.

  He thought again of the dark-haired beauty from the bus. He imagined kissing her and then removing her clothes. He could picture her lying naked on the bed, shy and modest. She would be a virgin, of course.

  “It’s all right,” he’d say to her. “I’ll be gentle.”

  He felt a stirring in his loins, then a tugging at his underpants. He found himself reaching for his one constant friend.

  “Forgive me, please forgive me,” Blondie whispered to his angel’s phantom image as he transported himself into a spasm of bliss.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After four days at Fenton High, Blondie had found no evidence of higher life forms within the student body. His schoolmates’ predilections lay in horsing around in the halls, acting up in class, and, except for occasional rude stares, ignoring him. A notable exception was the rawboned storm trooper he’d encountered his first day. Barnwell had passed Blondie a couple times in the corridor, thankfully always when it was crowded, and although he’d said nothing, his look had told Blondie he hadn’t forgotten. The only one who talked to him was the runt with the stutter — the Caldane kid — and Blondie was pretty sure he didn’t want to be identified with him.

  The school day’s only relief was an occasional glimpse of her, the nameless dark-haired girl. Several times, he’d seen her walking with the pigtailed girl who rode his bus. She was usually wearing a solid-colored sweater with a straight skirt and bobby socks. Nothing fancy — your basic female high schooler’s outfit. But that didn’t matter. She was beautiful. At a certain angle, her eyes were almost violet. In a certain light, her skin was almost translucent. In a certain mood, her cheeks revealed the tiniest of dimples.

  Blondie wondered about the other girl, too. He couldn’t say she was totally ugly, but she was close enough to be in danger. What could she possibly have in
common with his Madonna? Was it what his mom had told him once — that pretty girls always surrounded themselves with plain ones so they’d stand out even more?

  Once, he’d passed close by her in the hall. He’d managed to fire off a smile, a wasted expression left hanging like a holograph in the air behind her retreating form. He told himself she probably hadn’t seen him. He knew it didn’t matter. Even if he weren’t painfully awkward around girls, even if she’d been in one of his classes where he might have had a pretext for speaking to her, he’d still be an out-of-towner, a newcomer. In the harsh world of high school society, she was as remote from him as the farthest star.

  His isolation added to his despair. He needed to connect with someone, anyone. Thus, he was secretly grateful when Jerry Caldane approached him at Friday lunch holding a tray of the cafeteria’s strange-looking offerings.

  “M-mind if I j-join you?”

  “Why not?”

  Blondie shrugged.

  “You’re n-new here.”

  Blondie contemplated a smart retort but nodded instead.

  “Sometimes it’s h-hard to be accepted even wh-when you’re not n-new.”

  It was the first personal comment anyone had made to him. Blondie looked at Jerry and appraised him coolly. He detected a faint strawberry mark under his left eye, like the remains of a welt. He hadn’t noticed it before.

  Jerry’s face reddened under Blondie’s gaze.

  “What’re you trying to say?” Blondie asked, keeping his expression neutral.

  “B-being in a group. If y-you’re n-not in one of the groups here, y-you’re n-nobody.”

  “I don’t want to be in a group,” Blondie said. “I don’t need any group.”

  He must’ve spoken more forcefully than he’d intended, because Jerry clammed up. He caught him looking toward a table full of guys halfway across the room. It was the group that sat together in fourth-period English. Whipple’s bulbous head protruded from the mass like a polyp. Except for him, Blondie knew none of their names, except he’d once heard the muscular one with the flat top called “Brick.”