Math was out to kill me. I’d always known it. Overall I was an average student, but multiplication and division signs were like bayonets against my brain. That Friday it didn’t help that Ms. Pinkton was in a foul mood. The morning announcements were read by our student council president, who could not conceal her excitement about the Festival of the Fallen Leaves, Shakespeare on the Fifty-Yard Line, the game versus the Connersville Colts, and the big unveiling of the long-awaited jumbotron. All of it put Pinkton on edge.
“A scoreboard,” she muttered. “What about Bunsen burners to replace those fire hazards in the lab? New calculators for calculus? A Wi-Fi signal that actually works? Have any of you seen the fetal pigs they’re dissecting in anatomy? Half are deformed and the other half are freezer burned.”
She was right, of course. The school’s priorities could be summed up in that noise two classrooms down: SMACK, SMACK. Pinkton’s opinions ought to have endeared her to a loser like me, except that she took out her frustrations on her students. My only hope for the semester was to slow the bleeding so I could squeak through the class with a D. Pinkton had been reminding me all week that I needed an 88 percent on next Friday’s test if I had any chance of that.
Public humiliation was an important part of Pinkton’s psychosis. She wasted no time calling a series of victims to the chalkboard to be struck down by a kamikaze battalion of quadratic equations. I hid behind my book, pretending that my naked fear was total absorption in a spellbinding text. It worked for thirty-five minutes but I couldn’t help but peek over the top. Claire Fontaine was at the board, after all, and I couldn’t miss that.
Everything Claire did was worthy of slow-motion replay, and math was no exception. The chalk swooped upward and fluttered downward. Her pilled sweater stretched this way and that. She tucked her long dark hair behind her ear and left it with an adorable smudge of white dust. I thought she was beautiful, though she wasn’t in the classic sense. The popular girls would say she wasn’t skinny enough. They would also point to the fact that she didn’t wear makeup or do anything to tame that hair. And her clothes—well, what could be said about her clothes? Her boots were not sexy and knee-high; in fact, they were ankle-high and rubber-soled and looked suited for hiking. Her clothes were beyond vintage; they looked picked from military surplus racks, an array of pea-green coats and sand-colored skirts and multi-pocketed slacks, all of which looked as if they’d been through actual World War II combat. And that beret she wore before and after school wasn’t of the look-at-me-I’m-French variety; it was more in the style of I’m-going-to-invade-your-country-and-be-your-new-dictator.
Only one thing didn’t make sense: that bright pink, exceedingly girlish backpack that inexplicably hadn’t one anti-establishment patch sewn onto it, nor a single permanent-marker defacement. Most thought the spotless backpack made her even weirder. To me, it meant that she just didn’t care. A good backpack was a good backpack.
None of that was to say that she wasn’t feminine. Believe me, she was. It just wasn’t her whole deal. Though she’d only been at our school a single semester, it was obvious that she had other stuff going on in her life. That was considered a violation by the cool crowd, but she seemed ignorant of those rules, maybe because she wasn’t from California. She came from across the pond. Oh, I forgot to mention that. Claire Fontaine came from the UK. That’s right—the girl had an accent. I think you’re starting to get the picture here.
All I can say is that Europeans must be way ahead of us in math. That’s the only explanation for the way Claire tore apart equations. You could see the chalk crumbling to dust in her fist. When she was done—it never failed—she slammed a period on the end of the equation like she was finishing a sentence.
“Punctuation remains unnecessary,” Pinkton said. “But nice job, Claire.”
She exhaled like she’d just pinned an opponent. As she took up the eraser and wiped the board clean, Pinkton wrote a new line of gibberish and began surveying the class for the next casualty.
“We’ve got time for one more. Volunteer, folks. It’s the American way.”
I cocked my head to make myself look even more engrossed with the textbook. Pinkton’s gaze swept past me and I felt a rush of pride in my acting. Then disaster: Claire was strutting back to her desk, clapping her chalky hands in front of her so that she emerged again and again from smoke like a rock star, and she happened to glance my way. I, of course, was ogling. Her lips twisted into a wry smile.
“Cheers, Mr. Sturges,” she said.
That accent never failed to turn my body parts traitor. This time, it was Mr. Right Hand who betrayed me. It shot up in an overzealous wave, as if Claire were a mile away, and Señor Stupid Mouth got in on the act, too: “Cheers to you, too, Claire!”
“Is that you, Jim?” Pinkton asked. “What a nice change. Let’s see if you can untangle this knot.”
My grin wilted and I faced the equation. It looked as if both the alphabet and the number system had puked all over the board. I grimaced; the bruise on my cheek stung. I considered displaying my wounds and explaining how I could not possibly walk all the way to the board without breaking into wails of the greatest suffering. Instead I gave Pinkton my best pleading look.
She “gave me the chalk,” as we called it, holding up the chalk in her fist like a middle finger.
I steeled myself, stood, took the chalk, and walked until my nose practically touched the board. Without having any idea what I was going to do, I raised my arm before realizing that Pinkton had written the equation at Claire’s upmost reach, which was a good four or five inches above my own. I couldn’t even reach the problem, much less solve it. I bore the laughter rising behind me and let my vision lose focus so that the eraser-swirls of chalk became a fog. A London fog, where girls like Claire Fontaine walked around kicking ass in berets and solving dangerous calculations in between forceful kisses with short, courageous men.
It has been confirmed again and again throughout time that nothing strikes fear into the hearts of uncoordinated kids like a rope dangling from a gymnasium ceiling. Tub went so far as to lodge a formal complaint with the front office last year, scheduling a meeting with Principal Cole and everything. It was barbaric, Tub insisted. And a liability, too—what if some kid fell twenty feet and became paralyzed for life? Baseball, fine. Volleyball, okay. You might conceivably run across those sports later in life. But when you’re an adult, when the hell are you going to encounter a rope that desperately needs to be climbed? According to Tub, he had Principal Cole in the palm of his hand until he let that hell slip. Cole had a no-tolerance policy for cussing. Tub was out the door and the ropes remained.
Tub and I were the only two who had yet to reach the obligatory halfway point on the rope. While the rest of the boys shot hoops, I floundered four feet off the ground, trying to figure out how the Steve Jorgensen-Warners of the world operated all four limbs independently. I held my breath and shimmied up a couple more feet. My palms burned and my legs wobbled. All I could think about was how to protect my sensitive parts if I fell.
“That a way, Sturges!” Coach Lawrence shouted. “Momentum is the key to success!”
I heard a grunt and checked the rope to my right. As opposed to my unpredictable lurches, Tub was moving steadily, though at a glacial pace. Sweat popped from his every pore and he bared his metal teeth in strain. His entire body was trembling as if it might explode.
“That’s it, Tub!” In his excitement, Coach Lawrence had forgotten to use Tobias’s proper last name. “You’re going to kick this rope’s butt! Don’t you give up! Men do not give up!”
“Please, Lord, take me now,” Tub whimpered. “Or Satan, anyone.”
“Four more feet,” I grunted. “Put your shoulders into it.”
“The hell’s that mean?”
“No idea.”
“Then quit with the motivational speaking.”
“Okay,” I rasped. “Man, I wish this rope had a noose.”
“Oh, wow, th
at’d be great. Quick, easy death, no pain.”
Below us had arisen a chant: Tub! Tub! Tub! I glanced down and caught Coach Lawrence wincing; it was his use of the nickname that had set it off. I turned my attention back to the rope. The halfway point was marked with a red bandana just ten or twelve inches out of reach. All I had to do was touch it and then I could limp over to the bleachers and weep over my ruined muscles. I took an unsteady breath and reached up for the bandana with a sweaty hand. The threads of rope were hot iron wires in my palm.
“Sturges!” Coach Lawrence cried. “Go for the gold!”
I was drunk enough with exertion to think I could do it. Then Tub yipped. I looked and he was wagging his head around as if trying to evade a bee. It was hard to see because both of our ropes were in motion, but I saw the problem: a thread of hemp from the rope had gotten caught in Tub’s braces. I knew from his cross-eyed panic just what he was envisioning: when he fell, his entire jaw would come flying out the front of his face.
Tub’s rope began spinning. I lashed out with an arm to try to steady him but only felt his fingers grasp frantically at mine for an instant before his weight dragged him down. Naturally the thread of hemp snapped immediately and Tub went down on his ass, right in front of everyone.
The arm I’d used to help Tub never made it back to my rope. It pinwheeled, my feet slipped, and then I dangled from one arm. Unlike Tub, I tried to hold on and instead slid all the way down, the rope scorching my palm until I struck the floor with both knees. It hurt all the way up into my skull.
Coach Lawrence offered both of us a hand. Tub looked miserable, wounded, resigned to his fatness. The chant of his name, which for a while we could have pretended was serious, had broken apart into hoots and howls. A single basketball continued its steady SMACK, SMACK. Eventually Tub made it to his feet, rubbing his sore butt, and that’s when the basketball looped over the crowd and bounced off the side of his face. You couldn’t deny that it was one hell of a throw.
For the second time that Friday, Tub and I found ourselves cleaning our wounds. There was little either of us could do this time to lighten the mood. Both of us had lingered in the shower, where our blood ran into the central drain. Now we were the last two guys in the locker room. I was almost dressed, but Tub sat motionless and dripping on the far end of the bench, facing away from me, still wearing his towel.
It sounded like something a teacher would say, but I couldn’t come up with anything better.
“Don’t let them get to you, Tub.”
“Gee, thanks for that totally sound and utterly useless piece of advice, Mr. Guidance Counselor.”
“They’re not our friends. Who cares what they think?”
“Then who are our friends, Jim? Go ahead and list them. I’m sure I can spare the zero seconds that will take.”
“Don’t be dumb. We have friends.”
“I’m not talking about friends that only exist in chat rooms. Or friends of the feline or canine variety. I’m talking about real, human friends who do human-type stuff, like talk and hang out and eat with silverware. Wouldn’t that be great, Jim? Some friends who knew how to use silverware? That’d be a real step up for us at this point.”
Tub’s eyes glowered over his bare shoulder.
“Trying to cheer me up just makes it worse,” he said. “We have to accept who we are. And before you ask, I’ll tell you. We’re nobody. We have no life. We have nothing to look forward to. We’re not special. I just want it to go away. All of it. The stupid being scared. Doesn’t it seem we’ve been scared forever?”
“Look, remember when I was scared of monsters in my closet?” I asked.
“Now that was dumb. Everyone knows monsters live under the bed.”
“Yeah, well, I was pretty sure it was the closet. And then I couldn’t take it anymore, being afraid all the time like my dad, and so one night I got out of bed and opened the closet and got inside and spent the whole night there. Eventually I fell asleep and then it was over. I mean, it’s all got to end sometime, Tub.”
He didn’t respond. I finished tying my shoes, too tight. The whole room felt too tight, squeezed in against my shoulders like the locker I’d been inside a few hours earlier.
“Least we’ve got each other,” I offered.
“So true,” he said. “Where you think we should set up our wedding registry?”
Though constructed with sarcastic words, the sentence had the tone of an apology. I sighed in relief and checked the clock. The bell would be ringing soon. It had been a long day for me and an even longer one for Tub.
“I bet someone gets us a nice china set,” I said. “And a bread maker.”
“Awesome. When the zombie apocalypse strikes, that bread maker will save our asses.” He took an unsteady inhale and cleared a phlegmy throat. “You need to give me a minute, or I will never finish dressing. You got no idea how hard it is for me to put socks on.”
Tub hated changing his clothes with someone else in the room. He was going to have to accept his weight at some point, but this was not the time for pushing that agenda. I ambled over to the next aisle.
The coach’s office was in the far corner. The lights were off. In fact, Coach Lawrence must have hit most of the lights on his way out. Darkness lay over the locker room like a tarp. Aisles looked too long and were notched with unexpected crannies. I hesitated before going any farther. Locker rooms were places stained with bad memories: snapping towels, underwear tossed in a toilet, tennis shoes burned through a locker grill with a lighter. It was no wonder that shadows there loomed larger.
I reminded myself of the nonexistent closet monster and kept walking. I got about three steps before I saw the thing.
It was crouched in the farthest corner. I took a deep breath and leaned in, but it did not go away. It was amorphously shaped and taller than me but did not move or make a sound. In the distance, I heard the sighs of Tub getting dressed and felt a surge of protectiveness. I couldn’t let this thing chase my naked friend into the hallway. That was one humiliation too many.
There was a light switch just five feet away, right between me and the thing, and I edged in that direction, my shoes splishing through some foul locker room liquid. Reaching for it felt like reaching for the red bandana on the rope. I paused, afraid to see the truth behind the thing’s multifaceted folds of skin and pungent odor.
I slapped at the switch. It winked on, a single, weak bulb.
A mountain of damp gym towels sat piled in the corner. It stunk, but it wasn’t exactly going to leap out and kill me. My face went hot and I almost starting kicking at the pile, except that, with my luck, that would cause a landslide and I’d be smelling like one hundred underarms for the rest of the day.
There came a clanging noise from the shower room.
I glanced over, expecting another false alarm, but noticed that the grate over the center drain had been moved aside. The streams of water leading into the drain were splattered about as if disturbed by feet. Pink daubs of Tub’s blood and my own were mixed in there, too. I took a step back to try to get a better look, and my peripheral vision caught a dark shape lumbering across the opposite end of the locker room.
It was Steve; it had be Steve, out to collect from Tub his overdue five dollars. This time, I wouldn’t let it happen. I lunged into the next row of lockers and just caught the back end of what might be a foot, though it looked too large for Steve. And there was a sound, a glottal, huffing snort so resounding it had to have come from a colossal chest.
I sprinted, my sneakers cracking through shallow puddles. Away from the light bulb, it was even more difficult to identify what was passing the aisles on the opposite end of the room. I saw what looked like giant, hunched shoulders dragging thick arms. But hadn’t I thought the towels were a murderous blob? I sped for the next row and arrived there with a bold, terrified “AHA!”
Tub wrapped his arms around his shirtless torso. He was still working on those damn socks.
“What? Jesus! C
ome on! Privacy, Jim! Privacy!”
Heavy footsteps crossed somewhere behind me with such force that the tiled floor vibrated. I turned, dashed three steps, and then heard a clanging noise from the shower. I tore around the corner. The grate was back over the drain hole. Had I been wrong before? Had it been in place all along? I grabbed the mildewy wall for support, tried to catch my breath, and thought I saw the grate still shuddering, just a bit.
Few Fridays had been longer. What I didn’t suspect was that it was only beginning.
I exited the school alongside Tub. Predictably, several of the pumpkins lining the front entrance had been kicked in, and the two of us had to step around the scattered guts. Tub made some quip, but the orange gore turned my stomach. I was still stricken by what had happened in the locker room. Naturally I had said nothing to Tub. Either I was going crazy or the athletes of our school had been taking too many steroids. Neither possibility was going to put my best friend in better spirits.
My foot hadn’t hit the sidewalk before a group of girls accosted the both of us. This being a highly suspicious event, we started searching for the bucket of pig’s blood about to be dropped on our heads. But instead there were flyers in neon colors being thrust in our faces. Three of the girls were classic drama dorks decked out in the most calculatedly uncoordinated of outfits. But the fourth wore the colors of army fatigues. It was Claire Fontaine.
“Play tryouts tomorrow.” She bit off the end of a licorice whip and downed it with a swig of cola held in the same hand. “Either of you gentlemen interested?”
Gentlemen—it sounded so musical that I wished I was wearing a tuxedo with a carnation on the lapel. I looked at the hot pink flyer that Claire was holding. No surprise that the play was Romeo and Juliet. The drama coach, Mrs. Leach, had learned her lessons when it came to Shakespeare on the Fifty-Yard Line. Tradition held that the short, half-hour play was cast and rehearsed in a single week, so to keep things simple she cycled through the same four abridgments: Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. The last had been performed so many times that it had its own nickname: RoJu.
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