Bottled Up (2 page)

Authors: Jaye Murray

BOOK: Bottled Up

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I pulled myself up onto the sixth step of the bleachers. I was getting ready to do my Invisible Man trick and finish my nap.

Fredericks blew the whistle. “Downs.”

“What?” I was on my back with my hands behind my head. My kind of sit-upâlie down and stay down 'til lunch.

“Mr. Giraldi wants you in his office now.” He blew the whistle even harder. “Get moving. He probably wants to give you that student of the year award.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” My eyes were closed and I was hoping he'd just get lost.

But he got louder. “Downs!”

A basketball slammed into the bleacher next to my head.

“Move it!” he was yelling at me. “Don't keep the principal waiting.”

“Screw him,” I said to myself. Or I
thought
I'd said it to myself, but I guess after all the weed I smoked, by sixth period I didn't know what was coming out of my mouth or how loud.

“If that's what you want to do, Downs. But you may have to buy him dinner or bring him flowers first.”

He wasn't going to let up. Most of the guys on the floor were still doing sit-ups, but some of them had fallen back holding their stomachs. They all looked pretty stupid to me with sweat dripping off their heads. They should be like meâforget all this phys. ed. crap and chill out.

That would never happen in my almost-middle-class school of suck-ups. Nobody's got any guts in my high school.

I stood up, got a good stretch with one hand on my butt and the other over my head.

“Sometime today, burnout,” one of the guys yelled from the floor.

I jumped off the bleachers and looked to see which idiot wanted my foot up his ass. No one said anything else. Like I saidânone of these guys have any guts.

“Get out of my gym, Downs.” Fredericks pointed to the door. I walked over to it and pushed it open with my butt. The metal rod on the door rattled when it slammed shut behind me.

I heard Fredericks still yelling at me. “Don't forget to bring Giraldi some flowers.”

Yeah, bite me.

I remember my father asking me, back when I was eight, why I didn't like the name Phillip.

“It's dumb,” was all I told him.

“Pip's any better?” he asked.

I said something like,
Duh
.

“That's okay,” he said. “Maybe you're just a Pip off the old block.”

I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but I remember hoping he was wrong.

When I got out of the gym Giraldi was stomping down the hall at me.

“Let's go, mister.” He turned right around on his heel like some military dude and stomped back the other way again.

I took my time.

“I told you to move it, Phillip.”

I stopped. “My name is Pip.” I shoved my hands in the pockets of my jeans and figured if he couldn't get this much straight we had no place to go.

Nobody calls me Phillip. Nobody.

“Maybe you should stick to being called Phillip instead of answering to a dog's name. Or maybe we should start calling you Pup instead.”

Or maybe he should shut the hell up.

Nobody would believe me if I told them my principal talks like this. Nobody would believe Fleming was poking at me with her nail either, or that the coach tossed a basketball right next to my head.

That's all right. People wouldn't believe half the crap
I
pull either.

He could call me a dog if he wanted to, he just couldn't call me Phillip. That's one of
my
rules.

“Come on, Pup,” Giraldi said, heading for his office. “And tie your shoelaces.”

“Why?”

“You're going to fallâtrip and break your neck.”

“What do you care?”

He looked past me for a second, then behind him like he was looking for his answer.

“I don't want you scuffing my floors. Tie your shoes.”

I stopped and bent down like I was going to tie them. As soon as he turned around to stomp off, I stood up and left my shoes the way I like them. Untied.

He had to hear my laces hitting the floor. I know he did. I was letting them slap hard.

He slowed down when we were almost to the main office. I figured he was going to tell me to tie them again.

“We need to have a man-to-man talk,” he said with this serious look on his face.

“Or man-to-dog,” I told him.

He stopped at the door with his hand on the knob and looked at me. For a second he didn't look like a principalânot like forty-something-year-old Giraldi, who's waiting on his pension. He looked like a person. Or maybe he was looking at
me
like
I
was a person. But that only lasted a second.

“I don't understand you,” he said, looking over my head, then back at me again. “Why would you want to spend the rest of your life being an uneducated, drug-taking wiseass?”

“What are you talking about?” I put on my best
I'm confused
look. “I'm not a wiseass.”

He rolled his eyes and opened the door. “That's all you can say?” he asked, stepping into his office.

I answered him the only way I knew how.

“Woof.”

I remember this one time when my father took me out for ice cream.

After the second lick off my strawberry cone, the scoop fell right onto my shoe.

I stood there holding the empty cone in my hand and watched my father lick his ice cream.

After a minute of me doing nothing to help myself, he handed me his cone and took mine. Then he bent over, picked the scoop off my shoe, and shoved it on top.

He ate that one.

Giraldi sits right down at his desk and tells me, “Shut the door.”

So I shut it.

“Sit,” he says.

Shut the door, sit, roll over, play dead.

I plop into my regular chair right across from him. I've sat there so many times, I think my butt is making its own groove. I stretch out my legs in front of me and let my laces slap on the floor again.

“Ms. Fleming sent you to my office last period and you didn't show. Why not?”

“I came by but you weren't here.”

“You didn't wait.”

“I had to study. I went to the library.”

“You've never stepped foot into the school library.”

I stared at a spot right behind him. I wasn't really looking at anything. I just picked a spot, stared, and blocked him out. I didn't even blink or move my face or nothin'. I acted like I couldn't hear a word he was saying.

He moved some papers around on his desk. I figured it was my file. It always comes back to my file with Giraldi.

“I've got more disciplinary forms on you than anyone else has ever gotten in the history of this school.”

How the hell would he know that?

“You ever going to get a haircut?” he asked me, like he figures if I'd just tie my shoes and keep my hair short, I wouldn't end up in his office.

“If you're so desperate to play dress up,” I said, “why don't you get yourself a friggin' Barbie doll?”

I went back to staring in front of me. I wasn't listening to him anymore. He was going on about how he was sick of me, tired of wasting his timeâsame old stuff.

Then he said, “No detentions. No suspension. No long talk. You're out of here.”

He moved some more papers, then I heard him lift the phone receiver.

I still didn't look, because I'm too cool for that.

He dialed, then waited.

“May I speak with Mr. Michael Downs, please? Yes. I'll hold.”

My head snapped from where I was staring. He could see the
oh crap
look in my eyes.

He didn't blink.

I jumped up out of my seat. “What the hell are you doing?” My heart was pounding so hard under my shirt, it made my armpit hurt.

“I'm calling your father to let him know you're being expelled and to recommend some good rehab programs.”

I reached across the desk and slammed my finger on the phone button.

“What do you think you're doing?” he asked me with the receiver still in his hand. I've pulled a lot of crap, but hanging up his phone was a new one.

I just stared at him. I blew the hair out of my eyes and watched to see if he was going to dial the phone again.

“Sit back down,” he said. I couldn't move. I was stuck in that spot and I needed to be close enough to click the phone again if he dialed.

He was staring at me. Hard. Not like he was mad, though. It was the way he looked at me outside in the hallâlike I was a person. And he saw something. He must have, because he put the receiver back down.

“Sit,” he repeated.

I sat, but on the edge of the seat. I was ready to jump up at any time.

I didn't go back to staring at the spot behind him. I looked right at his face. I'd never noticed that the guy had green eyes.

“I have no choice but to expel you. You cause more trouble than anyone else, and you take up too much of my time and your teachers'. I can't keep chasing you, talking to you, trying to get you to shape up. You're beyond helpâmy help, anyway. I have enough disciplinary forms here to wallpaper my office.”

“You can't.” I think my voice even cracked then. I'm sure I sounded like an idiot.

“Tell me one reason why not.”

I nodded toward the newspaper on his desk next to the phone.

“You read the paper?” I asked him.

“Yes. Why?”

“You call my father, tell him I'm expelled, and you'll be reading about me on the front page tomorrow.”

“I don't understand.”

“Father Kills Teen Sonâ”

“Phillipâ”

“You don't get it.” My voice was shaking. “You make that call and I'm a dead man.”

He sat back in his chair, picked a pen up off the desk, and started twisting it. We sat there for I don't know how many minutes.

I waited. What else could I do? Waiting him out was my only shot.

He finally spoke up. “I said before that you were beyond my help. Now I'm thinking that maybe there is one other choice we have. I'm thinking that you need someone to talk to. With the right guidance maybe you can learn to use the brain you've got hidden under all that hair.”

He pulled a little white card out of his desk and handed it to me. “Call her by the end of the day. Have an appointment set up for tomorrow and I'll hold off speaking to your father.”

It was a business card:
Claire ButlerâJensen Family Counseling Center.

“I don't need counseling.” I put the card back on his desk.

“Just your saying that to me is proof of how badly you need it. This is your only ticket off the front page of the paper and you're not even giving it a moment's thought.”

He shook his head and kept talking. “You need to learn that the things you do and don't do have repercussions. If you're this afraid of your father, you should stop getting into so much trouble and make some right choices. Start with this one.”

“I don't have any money for counseling.”

“It won't cost you money.”

He was holding the card out for me. I took it from him.

“Your parents don't have to know you're going. The services are confidential.”

I shoved the card in my back pocket.

“Make the right choice. Go to counseling and attend all your classes or I'll expel you. According to your story, that means you die. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.”

All I wanted to do was get out of there. I needed a joint. I needed to smoke Giraldi outâblow all this up into the air.

I needed a bone. I needed it bad.

Fetch.

I want to be six years old againâjust for a day. It's not that things were so much better back then. They sucked. But I was the kind of kid who knew how to laugh about it all. That's what I want. I want to laugh.

My brother's name is MikeyâMichael Downs, Jr., really. But I call him Bugs because that's what he does to me.

People say I've got an answer for everything. I don't think so. But my little brother has a
question
for everything.

Why do they call them Band-Aids and not Cut-Covers?

Why does Ronald McDonald have a white face?

Do the Yankees wear blue-pinstriped pajamas?

And he has eight million questions about everything you'd never need to know about M&M's.

How do they get the shells around the chocolate?