Going Bovine (2 page)

I don’t remember a whole lot after that, just fuzzy memories filled in by other people’s memories. The story goes that my dad dove in and pulled me out, dropping me right beside the igloo, and administered CPR. Official Disney cast members scampered out along the narrow edge of EskimoSoontoBeInuit, yammering into their walkie-talkies that the situation was under control. Slack-jawed tourists snapped pictures. An official Disney ambulance came and whisked me away to an ER, where I was pronounced pukey but okay. We went back to the park for free—I guess they were afraid we’d sue—and I got to go on the rides as much as I wanted without waiting in line at all because everybody was just so glad I was alive. It was the best vacation we ever took. Of course, I think it was also the last vacation we ever took.

It was Mom who tried to get the answers out of me later, once Jenna had fallen asleep and Dad was nursing his nerves with a vodka tonic, courtesy of the hotel’s minibar. I was sitting in the bathtub with the nonskid flower appliqués on the bottom. It had taken two shampoos to get the flotsam and jetsam of a small world out of my hair.

“Cameron,” she asked, pulling me onto her lap for a vigorous towel-drying. “Why did you jump into the water, honey? Did the ride scare you?”

I didn’t know how to answer her, so I just nodded. All the adrenaline I’d felt earlier seemed to pool in my limbs, weighing me down.

“Oh, honey, you know it’s not real, don’t you? It’s just a ride.”

“Just a ride,” I repeated, and felt it sink in deep.

The thing is, before they pulled me out, everything had seemed made of magic. Like I really believed in this crazy dream. But the minute I came to on the hard, glittery, spray-painted, fake snow and saw that marionette boy pulling the same plastic fish out of the hole again and again, I realized it was all a big fake. The realest thing I’d ever experienced was that moment under the water when I almost died.

And in a way, I’ve been dying ever since.

CHAPTER TWO

Wherein the Cruelties of High School Are Recounted, and the Stoner Dudes of the Fourth-Floor Bathroom Offer Me Subpar Weed and a Physics Lesson

“Who the heck is Don Quicks-oat?” That’s what Chet King wants to know.

It’s early February, six weeks into the new semester, and we’re in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works—groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless—have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary. For the record, our friend Chet King has read exactly three books in his life, but I’m not sure that sitting through The Happy Bunny Easy Reader twice should count. The other book was, no doubt, about football.

“That’s Don Quixote,” Mr. Glass says, pronouncing the “x” as an “h,” the proper way.

“Don Key-ho-tay,” Chet repeats, exaggerating Glass’s somewhat effeminate enunciation. The other jocks snort in laughter, like backup singers on steroids. They’ve got their jerseys on. Chet does too, though he won’t be playing today or any other day. Ever since a bad slam on the practice field cracked two vertebrae near his neck, our former all-state quarterback has been permanently sidelined. Another guy might’ve gone out drinking over the loss of a big-time sports career. Not our guy Chet. He went to the other extreme, claiming that the accident must have been God’s will, a way to steer him toward a new direction in life. He gives this little motivational speech, “God took away my football scholarship but I’m still happy, happy, happy,” at Kiwanis club dinners, pep rallies, churches, youth groups, any place that will clap and cheer for him. I guess when your drug of choice has been applause and adoration from the stands it’s kind of hard to give that up.

Anyway, it gets him laid, I hear. Doing the horizontal mambo with sympathetic cheerleaders is, apparently, a-okay in God’s book, and it doesn’t upset your spine like football. Of course, now he’s dating my sister, Jenna, so I’ll just be flipping on the denial meter for that one.

Mr. Glass is undisturbed. “Okay, settle down. I haven’t dismissed you yet.”

You dismissed us on day one, I think. It’s the kind of sardonic comment that would be good to share with a mate, a pal, a sidekick and coconspirator. If I had one.

“¡Hola! ¿Quién puede decirme algo sobre Miguel Cervantes?” It’s Mrs. Rector, Calhoun High School’s Spanish teacher, to the rescue. This year, the administration has decided to have coteachers on certain segments. The idea being that we need to cross-pollinate our educational experience with tidbits from history and literature, social studies and foreign language skills, chemistry and home ec, which might prove valuable if we get the urge to make a highly volatile banana cream pie.

Mrs. Rector translates some of the text from Spanish, adding the proper “r” rolls and flourishes. She’s got a reputation as the town lush. ¿Quanto costa una grande margarita, por favor? The fluorescent lighting is zapping out its periodic Morse code of odd sounds: We are hungry. Send us more of your bug kind. All in all, I’m ready to ride out the class under the radar. Just another ten minutes till I can blow through Calhoun’s front doors, past the school buses lining the drive for the away game, past the phalanx of cars and trucks ready to follow them anywhere Texas sporting loyalty demands, and hotfoot it downtown to Eubie’s Hot Wax—half-price CDs and old vinyl.

“Is Don Quixote mad or is it the world that embraces these ideals of the knight-errant that is actually mad? That’s the rhetorical question that Cervantes seems to be posing to us. But for our purposes, there is a right answer, and you need to know that answer when you take the SPEW test,” Mr. Glass says, pointing to the board, where STATE PRESCRIBED EDUCATIONAL WORTHINESS test is underlined twice. Mr. Glass’s monotone is lulling me into slumber. Zap, buzz, goes the overhead lighting. I’ve put my head on my desk, where I can hear the minute hand ticking hard in my ear. My eyelids are heavy. Almost … Asleep …

The room is on fire. A row of flames shoots up into my field of vision. I leap out of my chair, knocking it over. It hits the ground with a loud thwack.

“Mr. Smith? Are you okay?” Mrs. Rector asks.

When I look up to the front of the room, everything’s fine. No fire. Nothing but every pair of eyes trained on me, which is a strange sensation. Usually, I’m famous for being looked through or over or some other preposition besides at.

Mr. Glass crosses his arms. “Yes, Mr. Smith?”

“Uh, no. Sorry. It was a … um …”

Mrs. Rector’s pursed lips seem to be holding back the words “Usted está un pendejo.”

The silence is filled by the ego-pulverizing laughter from the gaggle of gum-popping girls on the right. Somebody singsongs, “Fuh-reak …”

“It was a cockroach on my desk,” I blurt out. “A big one. Like, SUV big.”

A few of the girls scream and pull their legs up. Our resident class clown makes slurping sounds, which grosses out the Korean exchange student next to him.

“Nice going, Smith,” one of Chet’s doughy football buddies says, laughing. Steve or Knute or Rock. One of those muy macho-sounding names. A name that says “I can waste you on the Astroturf.” Not like Cameron, which sounds like the person who gets wasted on the Astroturf.

Mrs. Rector claps for attention. “Mi amigos, silencio, por favor. Settle down, please. Señor Smith, I will give you un pase de pasillo so that you can find el conserje to come spray.”

“The rest of you,” Mr. Glass pleads, “please turn in your SPEW test prep books to Chapter Five: Why Thinking Can Cost You on Test Day.”

I take the Get Out of Jail Free pass and head right to the men’s bathroom on the fourth floor. The Conspiracy Theory & Gaming Society—Stoner Kevin, Stoner Kyle, and Part-time Stoner Rachel—is in residence. Technically, girls aren’t allowed in men’s bathrooms, but since only the losers, present company included, ever use this one, it’s a nonissue. Besides, Rachel’s five ten with six tattoos and seven piercings. Nobody gives her shit.

I guess we’re sort of friends. If getting high in high school bathrooms and occasionally sharing a table in the caf counts as friendship. We exchange “heys” with limited eye contact—my preferred greeting—and they offer me some of the weed they’re using their bathroom huddle stance to try to disguise, as if the smell isn’t a dead giveaway.

“Thanks, man,” I say, getting in two large hits to take the edge off. I’d toss off the bizarre flame vision I’ve just experienced as an acid flashback except that I’ve never done acid, finding it hard to go willingly to a place that could be frightening, hellish, and totally beyond my control. A place much like high school.

Stoner Kevin starts in like a TV program suddenly coming off pause. “I’m just saying, the cat is either dead or alive. It can’t be both.”

Rachel snorts out the hit in her mouth. “You’re wrong, dude. The cat’s both alive and dead until you open up the box and take a peek at it. Until then, all possibilities exist. You create the result.”

“Look, my friend.” Kevin sticks his head under the faucet, takes a drink from the tap, and wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his Frank Zappa tee. “I don’t make up the rules of quantum mechanics; I just play by them.”

Rachel passes me the joint, looks at me. “You know about Schrödinger’s cat, right?”

I shrug.

“Awww, dude!” the three of them say in unison.

Kyle’s eyes are bloodshot slits in his grinning face. “This will blow your mind! Okay, so this scientist guy, Schrödinger, did this trippy thought experiment in quantum mechanics where he was all, ‘Hey, what if you’ve got a cat in a sealed box along with, like, a radioactive substance …’”

“Not that you should put your cat in a box with poison; that’s why it’s a thought experiment …,” Rachel points out.

“… and the atom either decays and kills the cat—or it doesn’t. Until you open up that box and observe, everything’s a probability.”

“Wrong,” Kevin says. “You’re hung up on the observer effect. You don’t control the outcome. You don’t create the reality. Face it—the cat’s either alive or it’s dead.”

Rachel blows her nose on a paper towel. “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

“I thought it was ‘If a bear shits in the woods,’” Kyle says.

“You can’t hear a bear shitting in the woods,” Kevin insists.

“How do you know? Have you ever heard a bear shit? Maybe they’re loud.”

“Dude, you’re missing the point.” Rachel tosses the wadded paper towel. It misses the trash can and rolls under the sink. “The point is probability and reality. And that’s where parallel universes come in. Reality splits into two possible outcomes—one where the cat lives; another where the cat dies. From every choice you make, another world is created where a different reality happens.”

“So you’re saying if the kitty dies in our reality—boom!—there’s another reality born where Whiskers is alive and well and chasing mice in the garage?” Kyle tucks his long, stringy blond hair behind his ears.

“Totally.”

There’s a flush from one of the stalls. Weird, because I didn’t hear anybody come in, and I didn’t see another pair of feet under the doors. The door bangs open, and a really small dude with a huge ’fro comes barreling out, pushing up his sleeves. It takes me a minute to realize he’s a dwarf. He pumps the soap dispenser hard several times.

“There’s no soap? Are you kidding me? That’s a health code violation—totally unsanitary.”

Stoner Kyle waves his hand in front of his nose. “What’s unsanitary is what you just did in the stall, Gonzo.”

The Gonzo guy toddles over to the ancient window and cracks it. “You guys mind not smoking that shit around me? I’ve told you I’m asthmatic.”

Rachel shrugs. “Dude, designated smokers’ lounge. Find another bathroom.”

Little Dude catches me staring at him and I can feel my face reddening. I hope I haven’t pissed him off; it’s just that I’ve never seen a dwarf before.

Kevin makes introductions. “Gonzo, Cameron. Cameron, the Gonz-man.”

Gonzo walks straight up to me, folds his arms over his chest and sizes me up like knives are going to be drawn, positions taken, and the orchestra is tuning up for the big fight-at-the-gym musical dance number. “You a gamer?”

“Sometimes.”

“Huh,” he says, still checking me out.

In the mirror, Kevin puts drops in his eyes. “Gonzo’s gonna try to beat the Captain Carnage high score at the arcade today.”

“Oh,” I manage. “Cool.”

“Yo, what’s that?” Gonzo nods toward the floor at a slab of balsa wood covered in what look like weird sand-art formations. It’s ugly as hell, whatever it is.

“This? This is the social sciences project that’s gonna keep me from doing summer school.” Kyle holds it up for examination.

Gonzo cocks his head to one side. “What the fuck is that?”

Kyle snorts. “Hello? It’s Stonehenge?”

“Looks more like Shithenge to me,” Gonzo says, turning away.

Rachel and Kevin bust out laughing.

“Oh my God! That’s it! Dude, that is totally Shithenge!” Rachel says.

“Shut up, you guys,” Kyle mumbles.

“Hey,” Gonzo says, slapping his hand against the door just as I’m trying to slip out. “You should game with us today. ’S gonna be insane.”

“Gonzo rules at Captain Carnage!” Kevin shouts between snorts of giggling.

“It’s ’cause I always grab the ticket that protects health. You grab that ticket and you’re golden for a few levels.”

“Sorry, man. Can’t go,” I lie. “I’ve got this … thing I gotta do. After school. You know.”

He knows I’m full of shit but he nods. I nod. And there we are.

“Shithenge,” Kevin snickers. “Dude, you are so screwed!”

“I said shut up, man!”

Gonzo takes his hand away. “Sure. No problem. Catch you next time.”

He goes to give me a fist bump, a token of bathroom stoner etiquette. I give a sort of wave that looks more like I’m holding up a stop sign. Our hands slide off one another in an awkward fist bump/wave collision. And then I’m out the door.