Adam Selzer (9 page)

When she finished, she gave Anna a “come on, don’t give me this crap” look. “Miss Brandenburg,” she said, “please remove the devil horns.”

“Nope,” said Anna, shaking her head. “It’s no different than wearing a cross necklace.”

“But what it signifies is different,” said Mrs. Smollet.

“Not to a Satanist,” said Anna.

“We’re all Satanists,” said Brian, raising his hand and making it into the devil sign. Most of us stuck out our tongues and tried to look all evil for a minute or two. Dustin, who was, at that moment, actually wearing a cross necklace, looked especially evil.

“You’re not Satanists,” said Mrs. Smollet, rolling her eyes.

“I know I’m not,” said Edie. “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”

Mrs. Smollet sighed and threw her hands up. “You guys, this is not the way to start out the year. This is the gifted pool, not the weirdo club. We’re trying to do this as something fun for you. We can take it away if you want us to. I can have you all go right back to your regular classes. And if you don’t get those horns off your head, Anna, I’m going to arrange for you to be sent to St. Julian’s instead.”

“I don’t think they take my kind,” she said. I don’t know if she meant that they wouldn’t take her because she was Jewish or if she was still pretending to be a devil worshipper, but she took the horns off. They were back on her head a minute later, though.

We all settled down for a moment; Mrs. Smollet’s threats to disband the program usually shut us up for a minute.

She spent the rest of the hour telling us about all the “great” activities we were going to be doing as gifted-pool projects. Like we’d research someone from history who “meant something” to us and give a presentation on them. I decided that I’d make up a whole bunch of crap about Noside Magwitch Harris, Esquire, like maybe he was an advisor to the Queen who ended up getting executed for daring to believe in evolution or something. Yeah, that was it. I’d say he’d been betrayed by someone named Smollet, and as he was being dragged away to have his head chopped off, he vowed that his children’s children would one day have their revenge. If she called me on it, I’d accuse her of mocking my heritage, and next thing she knew she’d be serving pie down at Baker’s Square for a living.

While she was yammering on, this guy named Marcus Clinch leaned across two desks and said to me, “I hear you just about got in a fight with some soccer knockers today.”

“Up shut,” I told him. “Don’t wanna talk about it.” He’d been in a class with me the year before where the teacher had a real thing about not letting anyone say “shut up,” so we’d all taken to saying “up shut” instead. It still ticked her off, but she was at least smart enough to know when she was beaten. That was one of the greater victories we’d scored over teachers through the years.

“What was that, Leon?” asked Mrs. Smollet, turning around. I thought for a split second that I should say that Marcus said his ancestors could’ve beaten mine up, but I knew that if I did she’d give him in-school suspension and maybe make him watch a video about being more sensitive to other cultures, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone, so I just said, “Nothing.”

For the rest of the class, whenever Mrs. Smollet turned her back to write something on the board, everyone in the room stuck up their middle finger at her, then quickly hid their hands when she turned around. We did a lousy job of not snickering about it, but she never caught on. She herself, apparently, was not really gifted pool material.

On one level, I sort of felt bad for giving her a hard time. But I knew that she had no intention of giving
us
an easy time, and anyway, taking my mood out on her was probably a safer way of handling it than punching a couple of soccer players.

However, for the last ten minutes of class, she gave us a lecture on family values and crap like that while we all wrote “I am not a Satanist” twenty times on notebook paper. We could, she pointed out, have been using the time to work on logic puzzles, but we just
had
to act like hooligans.

In all, I was very, very glad that it was the end of the day. It was time to go to Anna’s house.

Anna was the first person I knew who didn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, a habit that spread pretty rapidly. Not that she made a big deal about it or anything. I just noticed one morning in seventh grade that when everyone else was putting their right hand on their heart and reciting the Pledge in homeroom, she just stood there, not saying a word. Then she gave the flag a little salute with two fingers when everyone else was saying “with liberty and justice for all.”

I never asked her why she didn’t say it; I guess it was simply because she didn’t feel like reciting a loyalty oath to start her day. After a while, I stopped saying it myself. Not that I had anything against America; the country had my allegiance, but the more I thought about it, the more I didn’t want to pledge to be loyal forever. What if the government just decided that the whole Bill of Rights business was passé and Mrs. Smollet became the president? I don’t think they’d have my allegiance anymore.

Pretty soon, everyone I knew in the gifted pool was standing there and just giving a little salute during the Pledge, though none of us meant anything malicious by it—except for Edie, of course. Whenever someone tried to drill us on why we weren’t saying the Pledge, she’d tell them how it was written by some socialist guy back in the eighteen hundreds. Why this didn’t make her
want
to say it remained unexplained.

After the gifted-pool meeting, Anna just walked out of the room with me, and we started heading for her house, which was maybe a mile away. We got a bit stalled at the edge of the parking lot when Anna looked over at the school cop, whose job was to hang out at the edge of the parking lot, watching for any drug dealers who might be hanging around, and said, “Ooh! It’s a new cop!” She ran right over to the car and peered in at the guy. I followed, wondering what she was up to.

“Hi!” said Anna. “Are you a good cop or a bad cop?”

The guy neither smiled nor frowned; he was like one of those guards in England who aren’t allowed to react. “We’re all good cops,” he said, as if we would believe him.

“Have you caught any troublemakers yet?” Anna asked.

“Are you one?” He eyed her suspiciously.

She nodded. “Most definitely.”

The cop stared at her for a second from behind his sunglasses—and so did I. I had always been told in no uncertain terms to respect police officers. But then again, she wasn’t being disrespectful, she was just making conversation. Even when she said she was “most definitely” a troublemaker, he didn’t pull out the handcuffs or anything.

“So,” she said. “If you could slap any celebrity, who would it be?”

“We don’t slap people,” he said.

“She means hypothetically,” I said. I wasn’t about to stand around idly while she bravely interviewed the cop. She’d think I was a wimp.

“Well,” he said, “that’s a good question. Do I only get one slap?”

“Yes,” I said, hoping that was right.

“Hmmm…,” he said. “Do those lawyers who advertise on TV count as celebrities?”

“Sure,” said Anna. “They’re on TV.”

“Okay, then,” said the cop. “I’d slap Gordon Griffin.”

“The personal injury lawyer?” asked Anna. Joe Griffin’s father. I smiled.

“Yeah. He’s a jerk.”

“Excellent choice,” said Anna. “Have you ever met him?”

“Every cop in town has had to deal with him in court,” he said. “He’s an even bigger slimeball in person.”

I couldn’t believe that the cop had just called another adult a slimeball in front of us. I mean, was he allowed to do that?

“My dad says that he wouldn’t hire that guy to stick his head down our toilet, because he doesn’t want anything that gross going down there,” Anna said, and I had to cover my hand with my mouth—which did not look cool—to keep from laughing so hard as to attract attention.

The cop chuckled a bit, too. “Your dad’s a smart man,” he said.

“His son is a jerk, too,” I said. “He’s always saying that God disagrees with everyone he disagrees with.” I hoped Joe wasn’t close enough to be within earshot.

“I know the type,” said the cop, who was starting to go back to looking around the campus to see if anyone was causing trouble, which, after all, was his job. “Do you guys have someplace you need to be?”

“Yes,” Anna said. “We need to go buy some lighters.” This was just rubbing his nose in it; he couldn’t arrest us for conspiracy to buy lighters.

“You’re a little young for those, aren’t you?” he asked. This was all he could really say.

“I’m also too young to be appointed special environmental advisor to the mayor,” she said. “But I was.” I figured it wasn’t true, but I wouldn’t have put it past her. The girl knew her politics.

The cop stared at her for a second, probably making sure her shoes weren’t covered in plastic explosives or something.

“Anyway, we’d best be on our way,” Anna said. “There are young minds to corrupt.”

“Well…okay,” said the cop. “Stay out of trouble.”

“No promises,” said Anna. She walked away and I followed her.

“That was awesome!” I said. I was feeling better already.

“I always do that with cops,” she said. “For the record, if you ask them to get you a glass of water, because they’re a public servant, they don’t like it very much.”

I told her I didn’t doubt it.

As we walked along, I felt almost inhumanly better. Between the cop interview and the hour spent flicking Mrs. Smollet off, all the crap that was bugging me from gym, the note-passing battle, and those jerks in math class was just gone, like it had all happened a hundred years before. By the time we got to her house, I was feeling good.

On the outside, her house looked about like all the others in the area—just a normal white house. It was when you saw the inside that you realized that the people who owned the house weren’t your average denizens of Cornersville. The first thing you saw was a massive framed print of a skeleton with a cigarette hanging out of its mouth. All along the hallway leading into the kitchen were more weird prints like that. Melting clocks, hairy prostitutes, and all sorts of weird stuff, all by some of the great master painters. The smoking skeleton was a Van Gogh, for example.

Anna led me into the living room, which was more of a library. There were shelves everywhere, all crammed with books. None of them looked like crappy cookbooks. I checked.

“This is the best house ever,” I said. “You guys would be perfect for people playing ‘What Do They Have?’”

“We’re national champs three years running,” she said. “Anyway, we like it.”

It was the sort of house that made me want to make something of my life. I wanted to know all about the eighteenth century. I wanted art all over my walls, which, at the time, were covered mainly with posters for metal bands. Metal was cool and all, but the stuff around here was a whole different kind of cool. It was hip. It was intellectual. It represented the kind of lifestyle that accounting school would not get me ready for.

And, just as much, I wanted Anna. I wanted to watch her read. I wanted to hear the noises her throat made when she drank a can of Coke. I wanted to feel her fingers running through my hair. I wanted to know what her teeth tasted like. But the thought of saying that out loud almost made me physically ill.

“Well,” said Anna while I was looking at all the books on the shelves, “do you want to see how my movie came out?”

“Of course,” I said. I sat down on the couch while she cued it up, and a large brown tabby cat jumped onto my lap.

“Why, hello,” I said, stroking its ears.

“That’s Spinach,” she said, sitting down next to me. “He won’t bite. But he likes watching TV.”

My cat isn’t that friendly, especially around strangers. I think he’s been spooked by too many loud noises—and flooded basements—over the years.

So Spinach the cat and I stared at the screen as the movie came up. The title was
Smoking, Drugs, and Drinking: Three Ways to End Up Like a Dead Writer.
The whole movie consisted of a bunch of pictures of authors with Anna doing voice-overs.

First there was a picture of Mark Twain holding a pipe, and Anna’s voice said, “Mark Twain wrote
Tom Sawyer.
He smoked like a chimney.”

That was followed by a picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who “drank like a fish.” Then came Edgar Allan Poe, who “really thought opium was keen.” This went on for a while, until you became quite aware that you were spending most of your English class studying a bunch of junkies. Then there was a shot of that painting of the smoking skeleton, and Anna’s voice said, “All of these people ended up dead. Some ended up dead in the gutter. Many were dirt poor when they died, even though they were famous. Still wanna take drugs?”

And that was the end.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“It was great,” I said, though I wasn’t sure it made me less likely to take up smoking. It didn’t make it
more
likely, I guess.

Just about then, the door opened, and Anna’s father walked in. He was dressed in a brown tweed coat, the kind professors on TV always wear. I guess they wear them in real life, too. Not like inventors, who probably
don’t
really wear lab coats.

“Hey, Anna,” he said.

“Hi, Warren,” she replied. I knew she called her parents by their first names, but it still seemed weird.

“And you must be Leon,” he said, holding out his hand, which I shook. “We’ve met before, right?”

“Just briefly,” I said.

“How’s the avant-garde movie coming?” he asked. I guessed Anna had told him about it.

“We were going to work on it today,” said Anna. “Did you get that movie you were talking about?” Her father held up an old videocassette.

“Sure did,” he said. He turned to me. “I thought you guys should see this movie.”

“Is it avant-garde?” I asked.

He smiled. “Are you kidding? This one makes
La Dolce Vita
look like
Bambi.
It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“Sweet,” I said. “What’s it called?”

“Un Chien Andalou,”
he said. “It was made by these guys back in the twenties; one of them was Salvador Dalí, the guy who painted that picture in the hallway with the melting clocks. He was really a bizarre character. You two want some coffee? I’ll get some brewing.”

Coffee? No one had ever offered me coffee before; most people were still offering me Kool-Aid. I had only had coffee once, after a band concert in fifth grade, during the three or four months that I played the trombone. At the reception after the concert, I’d tried to have a cup, but I accidentally got some out of a pot that had been turned off hours earlier, and the coffee in it was cold and disgusting. Still, I said, “Sure, that sounds good,” not wanting to look like a wimp.

Anna and I followed him into the kitchen, where he fired up a coffee machine.

“How was school today?” he asked Anna.

“The usual bullshit,” she said. I tried to play it cool again, but I’d certainly never seen anyone say “bullshit” in front of her father. I’d always sort of imagined that if you cussed in front of your parents, a SWAT team would suddenly burst in through the windows and take you off to juvenile hall. But no one showed up, and her dad didn’t flinch.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll all be over in a couple of years. If you can get through junior high, you could go off to war and be fine.”

A minute later he poured three cups of coffee. “Cream and sugar?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. I was under the impression that that made it tastier, and figured I could use all the help I could get. The coffee with cream was a light tan color, and it wasn’t bad. I figured I could get used to it.

We all went into the living room, and Anna’s dad popped the movie into the player and turned on the TV.

Man, if you’ve never seen
Un Chien Andalou,
and I really doubt you have, then I’m here to tell you that it is seriously messed up. It’s all black-and-white and silent, because it’s so old, but I don’t think putting it in color or having people talk could have possibly made it stranger.

It turns out that “un chien andalou” is French for “a dog from Andalusia,” which has nothing to do with the movie. It opens with a shot of this guy sharpening his razor, like he’s going to shave, and then he uses it to slice his girlfriend’s eye open for no particular reason. Then he looks out the window for a long time, and spends a lot of time staring at his hands, which are covered in ants. Then, for some reason, a guy drags a grand piano, which has priests and dead donkeys on top of it, through the living room. Then, suddenly, after about fifteen minutes, it ends. Like I said, it was completely messed up. In a lot of ways, it seemed like a music video, but at least there’s a point to videos—they’re supposed to make you want to buy music. This seemed like it was just being weird for the sake of being weird.

Anna turned off the TV and I just sort of stared at the blank screen for a while. That seemed like the thing to do.

“That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.

“You know,” said Anna’s father, “when they first showed that movie, the guys who made it came with pockets full of rocks, in case the crowd rioted and they had to throw something at them.”