Adam Selzer (8 page)

This brightened up my day a bit, especially since it reminded me that Halloween, the greatest holiday in the history of the world, was less than two months away, but it didn’t really pull me out of the bad mood I’d been in since hearing that I couldn’t do the explosion. That’s the kind of thing a guy doesn’t get over too quickly.

The fact that the next class was gym didn’t help matters. Guys like Nick Norton always think gym is the highlight of the day, but I’ve never liked it much. I thought it was okay in elementary school, when all we did was play around with parachutes and stuff, until one day when we were playing elimination, which was like free-form, every-man-for-himself dodgeball, and Todd Moreland cornered me against a wall and threw a ball at my chest. I jumped straight up to get out of the way, and very nearly made it, which would have been really cool. But I didn’t jump high enough, and instead of hitting my chest, the ball creamed me in the nuts. That pretty well killed my appetite for gym. And anyway, some kid a couple of towns over had had something similar happen and had to get one of his nuts removed at the hospital, or so the story went. I preferred classes where I wasn’t in that sort of danger.

If teachers hadn’t been watching us like hawks and ready to suspend anyone who missed a class, I would’ve cut gym every day. All we did was sit around in some smelly locker room, change into nasty clothes, and then run around the stupid gym while Coach Hunter shouted at us like we were in the marines or something. I swear to God that the maniac once shouted at me and called me a girl when I made a mistake during square dancing. Why the hell did we have square dancing in gym anyway?

The only guy from my lunch table I had gym with was James Cole, who was about as interested in the whole thing as I was. He was standing next to me while we were all doing the usual exercises.

“Ten push-ups!” shouted Coach Hunter. “Drop! Now!”

We all dropped, and, by going at a slower pace, I got away with doing only six or seven. Then he shouted for us all to get up and start touching our toes.

James suddenly hopped about two feet closer to me and muttered, “Bongos at twelve o’clock.”

“What the hell?” I asked. “Bongos” must’ve been one of his newer slang inventions; I didn’t know if it meant that he had muscle spasms in his back or someone had farted or what.

“Bongos!” he said, pointing his chin in front of us. I looked up and saw that Rachel Strutt was touching her toes directly in front of us, and found out right away what “bongos” were. She was wearing this loose-fitting shirt that hung down low when she bent over, and you could see right up it. She was wearing a sports bra and all, but, well, still. It was the kind of sight that helped a guy get through the day.

A few minutes later the coach was barking for us all to run laps around the gym. As usual, James and I just walked. As we passed the coach one time, he started walking along with us.

“I’m sick of you girls,” he said.

“Don’t you worry that calling us girls could leave us with unresolved gender issues?” I asked. I figured that if the school was that concerned about getting sued over an explosion, they wouldn’t want a teacher going around calling us girls when we certainly weren’t.

“Don’t smart-mouth me,” he said. I think gym teachers don’t like any part of you to be all that smart. “Every day I see you two girls in here giving twenty percent. I want to see some improvement.”

“Twenty-one percent it is, sir!” said James, with as much conviction as he could manage. I smiled, nodded, and kept on walking. I normally make it a rule only to run if something is chasing me, and not something small. Something like a bear. And there aren’t any bears in Cornersville.

So we ended up being made to run a full three laps as fast as we could, to keep from getting detention and a failing grade. By the end of it, I was a mess, sweating like a pig and probably smelling about like one, too. The five seconds or so that we got to shower afterward wasn’t enough to help, and all this just a few hours before I had to go to Anna’s house.

Poor James had it even worse than I did; he was panting and wheezing after the first lap, and coughing so much I was afraid his guts might come flying out. I know marijuana isn’t the most harmful drug in the world, but it sure does make a guy cough.

Now, I’m not a violent person. I never really get into fights, partly because I know that, realistically, most of the guys in school could probably beat the crap out of me, and partly because I know that I just couldn’t bring myself to really hurt anybody. I couldn’t kick a guy in the face, even a guy I really hated. But all through the last hour or two of classes, every time some kid threw a piece of paper that ended up on my desk, I just wanted to punch the guy’s lights out. I knew it wouldn’t really help my problems and all that stuff that they drill into your head starting in kindergarten, but it would have at least made me feel better for a second.

In math, the last class I had before gifted pool, I came as close as I’ve ever come to decking someone. By that point, I was in a pretty bad mood. If there’s a kid alive who’s in a good mood after being barked at by a wannabe marine, I’m not sure I even want to meet that kid.

Math was occasionally fun. Not because math itself is any fun, but because Mrs. Wellington would usually just teach for about five minutes, then give us the rest of the time to do worksheets and stuff. This gave us plenty of time for screwing around, and there were days when that was a blast. That afternoon, however, I was just not in the mood.

I was about halfway through a multiplying fractions worksheet when a couple of guys I knew only from gym class came over to my desk. They both wore the sort of mini–bowl cuts soccer players tended to favor at my school.

“Are you really screwing Anna Brandenburg?” one of them asked.

“Who told you that?” I asked, getting pissed off already.

“It’s like, general knowledge,” said the other.

“Well, it’s not true,” I said.

“Why?” asked the first jerk. “Is it because you’re gay?”

“Who are you gay with?” asked the second. Damn. They were teaming up on me.

Now, normally I might’ve said that they were probably the gay ones, but I didn’t want to get into it. I just muttered, “I’m not gay. And people with pudding-bowl haircuts don’t get a lot of room to make fun of anyone else!”

One of them sort of shoved my shoulder. “Yeah, well look at your hair, retard!” he said, running his hand through my hair, which was already sort of messed up.

“Hey,” I said. “You think I’m the gay one? You can’t keep your hands off me!”

“Go to hell,” said the guy, though he stopped touching my hair. “I’ll bet you
are
gay.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll bet you’re a hermaphrodite. Go look it up.”

The other guy shoved my other shoulder. “Brain,” he said. I wondered why he didn’t just say “Nerd.” Maybe that term is out of date.

I stood up. I turned around to face them, and I got my hand into a fist. I was just about ready to use it, too; then I heard Keith Messersmith saying, “Hey, leave Leon alone. He likes metal.”

“I’ll just
bet
he likes metal!” said Jerk Number One. “He probably listens to boy bands.”

And that was it. My fist was all set to go, and I was about the closest I had come all through middle school to punching someone. But there were two of them, and I wasn’t about to get in trouble over them. So I just said, “Yeah? You probably listen to old folksingers who sing about rainbows all the time.” Then I slammed my book shut and announced that I had to use the facilities.

“The gym facilities?” asked Mrs. Wellington, trying to be funny. “You can use those during gym class.”

I grabbed my bag and threw my pencil against the wall with every ounce of strength I had, hoping it would shatter into a million pieces, though it just clunked against the painted cinder blocks and fell to the floor. She knew perfectly well which facilities I meant, so, figuring that it would be easier to get forgiveness later than to wait for her to quit screwing around and give me permission, I walked out of the room and headed for the boys’ room. No one followed.

That wasn’t the worst encounter you could have with guys who had bowl cuts and thought they were hot stuff, but I just wasn’t in the mood for that kind of bullshit. If I had to listen to them rattling on like a couple of morons for five more seconds, I might’ve actually punched them or something. I was so mad I was practically seething as I walked along thinking about the soccer jerks and imagining how they were going to grow up. They’d probably major in financial management or something like that. Or they’d become gym teachers. I’d always wondered what kind of son of a bitch grows up wanting to be a gym teacher. That made me think about gym class and all that crap. I thought about not being able to have an explosion in the movie. Everything was bullshit—was this all the world had to offer? I imagined myself being shown the whole world by some angel, like in an old movie, and saying, “Well, I see that you’ve worked hard, but this sort of sucks. What else can you show me?”

The very notion of going back to class and sitting through the rest of math just seemed absurd, so I sat there on the toilet, with my pants still up, for several minutes. God, I wanted to punch those idiots.

Over on the wall next to me, which was covered in a thin layer or paint, I could still make out something Dustin had written the year before, back when he was still just doing limericks:

There once was a kid named Dan

Who got his butt stuck in the can

But before you say “dumbass”

Remember—he missed class

(He was really a very smart man)

Amen, brother.

I stayed in the bathroom until math was a few minutes from over, making it the closest I’d ever come to skipping a class. One couldn’t get away with the ol’ bathroom excuse every day, and I figured I’d be lucky if Mrs. Wellington didn’t catch on, but being suspended would be better than sitting through the rest of that class. And anyway, the suspension if I’d punched those guys would have been longer than the one I could get for cutting a third of a class.

I eventually got out and sneakily wandered around to the gifted-pool room. I was five minutes early, but I still wasn’t the first one there. Brian and Edie were already on the couch, making out. The gifted-pool room was supposed to be a more relaxed environment, but it still seemed about like a classroom; if I’d been in charge, I would have taken out the desks and put in some beanbag chairs. The thought of sitting in a desk again just then made me just about physically sick, so I went and joined Brian and Edie on the couch. Climbing aboard with a couple that was probably just a short jaunt from second base wasn’t something I’d normally do, but these were special circumstances.

Dustin came in a few minutes later; Jenny Kurosawa, a girl from Japan who had already gotten some seriously high score on the SAT, followed him, and both of them got onto the couch, too. Then Anna came in, still wearing her devil horns, and then James and a few other various people who I hadn’t really seen all summer and weren’t in the advanced studies activity.

Pretty soon the couch was full, but the people coming in got the idea that the couch was the place to be, so they just piled on top of those of us who were already there, until there were about ten or twelve people stacked up on the couch. Jenny’s butt was crammed into my arm, which wasn’t that bad, but between that and getting such a good view of Rachel’s bra in gym I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t have any luck left for Anna’s house.

Mrs. Smollet finally came in, carrying what looked like an armload of crossword puzzles, and made a really disgusted face at us, like she was silently horrified that we weren’t acting more like kids from a sitcom set in 1956. She was one of those people who thought 1956 was America’s best year. Apparently, she didn’t know what awful food people used to cook back then.

Right away, she ordered us all to get off the couch and I ended up back in a desk. Some relaxed atmosphere.

“All right,” she said, “did everyone have a good summer?” According to scholars, no teacher has ever come up with a more interesting greeting for a first meeting with students after the break.

We all sort of grumbled, and she began to call the roll.

“Anna Simone Brandenburg?”

“Physically here,” said Anna.

“James Patrick Cole?”

James belched; Mrs. Smollet rolled her eyes.

“Dustin Michael Eddlebeck?”

“He died in a car accident,” said Dustin.

She was halfway to my name before I realized that she was using people’s middle names, like that would magically make us more intellectual. I started to panic.

“Leon…,” she began.

“Here!”
I shouted, hoping she wouldn’t finish. But she did.

“Leon Noside Harris, here?” she repeated. About half the class turned and looked.

“What kind of name is that?” asked Jenny. She wasn’t being mean; she sounded like she was genuinely curious.

“It’s, uh, some ancestor of mine. Noside Magwitch Harris, Esquire. He was a real big shot.”

“That’s fascinating, Leon,” said Mrs. Smollet, who certainly couldn’t just politely let it go. “Maybe for one of your projects this year you could research his life!”

“Well, I’m pretty busy with projects right now,” I said, going for evasive action.

Her eyes narrowed. “Yes,” she said. “You mean the advanced studies project?”

“Yeah. I’m doing an art film.”

“Well,” she said, “as I understand it, you’re doing a porno film.”

“No,” I said, narrowing my own eyes. “It’s art. And it’s educational.”

“Well, just so you know,” she said, “I wouldn’t push my luck if I were you. You know the limits.”

“Sure,” I said. And we stared each other down for a minute or so. “But isn’t this program supposed to encourage our young minds to push the limits of what we can do? So we don’t end up as stupid as everybody else in this town?”

“Just watch it, Leon,” she said. “The last thing the school needs is to spend all its money on a lawsuit. It needs that money for fixing up the gym.” And she went back to calling the roll.