King Dork Approximately (34 page)

Try this one: “You know, honey, it seems like you’re always kind of mad at me, and it’s clear that you’re not happy with our relationship and my personality and how I think and behave—which is perfectly fine, I know I’m an acquired taste—and moreover we don’t like to do the same things and when we do each other’s ‘things’ neither of us has a good time, so maybe we should just acknowledge that we’re not the most compatible couple and move on to other relationships that might be more satisfying to us both.”

How’d that work out for you? I’ll tell you how it worked out for me. My girlfriend told me not to flatter myself, and that everything would be just fine if I would stop being such a dick to her friends and learn to have a little fun sometimes and not be so weird. Then, somehow, she made it into this thing about how if I thought I could do better then go right ahead if I don’t think she’s pretty enough for me. Well, I couldn’t look her in the eye and tell her she wasn’t pretty enough for me. I just couldn’t. And that was all that seemed to matter to her.

Sometimes she would say she didn’t want to be my girlfriend if I didn’t want her to, but she clearly was only saying that to sound reasonable, because it was obvious by how difficult she was making the whole thing that that was pretty much exactly what she wanted. Sam Hellerman’s take on it was that she probably wanted to be the one to break up with me rather than the other way around to avoid a loss of face, and that seemed pretty plausible, so I experimented with lying low and biding my time, waiting for her to give me the “it’s not you, it’s me” talk I’ve heard so much about, or simply to disappear to Cleveland, which, frankly, would have been my preferred option. But it never happened, not even close.

Admittedly, after all the stress of these conversations, it was a relief to back off from them, act like their failure was a resolution, pretend things were okay and that we’d “worked it out,” and just go back to making out. Sometimes it’s nice just to be able to stop talking.

It all came to a kind of head, if I’m putting that right, because of … well, I’ll show you a bit of the Robot’s letter that first alerted me to the matter. And yes, the Robot’s letters continued their function as a relationship facilitator even after Pammelah Shumway and her normal friends had shunted her aside. Indeed, it was almost as though providing me with passive-aggressive marching orders was the Robot’s one remaining use to her. Anyway, as to the relevant bit of the letter, it ran:

Now, “prom” is short for “promenade,” and I think it has its origin in the big debutante balls that slave owners used to
have for their stuck-up daughters in the South before we won the Civil War. In modern-day high schools, it is pretty much the ultimate normal institution, involving all the worst characteristics of Normalcy: Pointlessness? Check. Embarrassingness? Check. Cruelty? Well, in the sense that it is a huge competition designed to make those who lack the status or money to join in feel debased, worthless, and inferior? Check. You dress up in a rented tuxedo, and the girls make their parents buy them gazillion-dollar dresses, and they book limos and sometimes hotel rooms for the binge drinking, ecstasy, and cocaine use that happens after the so-called dance part. And parents take pictures of their daughters with their dates and say things like, aw, how cute, they’re acting just like grown-ups. (As if actual people ever behaved like that at any time since the War Between the States.)

Not only that, but it is also the ultimate staging area for, and possibly the origin of, the classic form of the traditional Make-out/Fake-out, with people being asked to go “as a joke,” or the nonnormal people who are foolish enough to dare to attend ridiculed and condescended to relentlessly by sadistic drunken normal people high on their own power. Just see the movie
Carrie
, if you want it spelled out for you.

I hope that I would never knowingly participate in any activity, particularly one involving jumping through multiple hoops, whose chief objective is to make adults and normal people look at me and say “How cute.” The only good I ever saw in the “prom” was that it gathered all the normal people in one convenient location if anyone wanted to blow it up or lock all the doors with psychokinetic powers and burn everyone inside to a crisp.

Now, it’s true, ramoning is part of the tradition as well, and
it should go without saying that I fully support ramoning’s rich tapestry. It’s one of the main reasons kids look forward to the “prom” with such intensity, and fair enough. Hence the promise dangled before me that Pammelah would “make it worth my while.” Well, despite my deeply held principles, that might possibly have swayed me once, but as you know, the most that would happen there would be a sort of warp-speed
Happy Days
, the usual schizophrenic teasing, but in an expensive dress this time. Plus, as much as I cherished the dream of ramoning a nice-looking girl one day, I actually think I might have drawn the line anyway. I’ll endure a lot of humiliation for love, as you well know, but the “prom” was a bridge too far.

I wasn’t going to the “prom.” No way in hell.

Nevertheless, my clear orders, transmitted from headquarters by means of its Robot messenger service, were to get off my ass and ask headquarters, that is, Pammelah Shumway, to go to the “prom.” As is my usual custom, I procrastinated and avoided the subject as long as I could, but the pressure soon escalated to the point where it was impossible to avoid it any longer.

I knew explaining the way I was feeling in an honest, sincere way and trying to make my girlfriend see my point of view enough to respect my wishes had no chance of success, but I tried anyway. She just ran circles around my logic, taking advantage of my nervousness and tied tongue and basically just wearing me down till I was so exhausted by the conversation that I had to back off and say we’d talk about it later. She took that as surrender, and it was, but on the big matter my resolve was firm, even if I couldn’t quite express my position, to anyone’s satisfaction, in words.

“But,” I said, trying one last time, “why do you even want
to go with me? You know I don’t want to, and you don’t even like me all that much.”

Even she couldn’t deny that very convincingly, but her attitude seemed to be that she’d invested so much time and effort in being my girlfriend that the least she was entitled to was to be able to go to the “prom,” even if, as was certain, we were guaranteed to have an absolutely terrible time. She repeated the promise to “make it worth my while,” but she said it in a quite remarkably angry tone, and even had I believed it, at this point, I have to say that the prospect was sounding increasingly gruesome. And yes, I still can’t believe I’m saying that.

So I tried explaining to the Robot why I didn’t want to go. Like this:

“Ever seen the movie
Carrie
?”

She hadn’t, and what was more, she wasn’t interested in trying to use the magic of cinema to decode my sentiments, which were, to her, incomprehensible. The Robot couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to participate, and I couldn’t make her understand. She just kept cajoling me, by letter and in in-person arguments, with the refrain: come on Thomas bone you know you want to just ask her Thomas just ask her.…

As my resolve became more apparent, my girlfriend and the Robot proposed a compromise: all three of us would go to the prom together, “as a joke,” just to mess with everybody. I could even wear my Chucks with my tux, and we would defy convention and be deliberately weird, and dance all crazy with each other. And the pictures would be cute. It was the closest any Clearview person had ever come to grasping something of the spirit that animated me, and I was well aware that it was a big concession on my girlfriend’s part. But it didn’t address the
issue. You can’t fight back by surrendering and joining in, even if you say you’re doing it as a joke. As I tried to explain:

“Ever seen
Revenge of the Nerds?”

The Robot just told me to stop talking about movies all the time.

“Well, why don’t the three of us do something fun together that night,” I suggested. “Can’t you ever do anything not sponsored by the school?” Like going to the beach and having a bonfire, or getting drunk by the tracks and talking about deep, important things, or going to a show in the city. Now, that actually sounded pretty nice to me, and I would have done it in a second. I looked fondly on those days back in the beginning, where it was just Pammelah, the Robot, and I, before my girlfriend turned evil and all the normal people came in and swamped our quirky, semihappy little world. “Why,” my eyes added, “does it have to be some contrived, humiliating ‘activity’ organized by the state in order to normalize and control everybody?”

This didn’t make any sense to either of them, not that I expected it to, and in fact, it just made them madder, not that I expected it not to. It had to be the “prom.” But it wasn’t going to be the “prom.” It just wasn’t.

On the day it happened, I was in a foul mood from all the tension. Everyone was irritated with me, it seemed, and it was certainly reciprocal, if “reciprocal” is the one where you do it right back at them.

I was coming out of third period when I saw Celeste Fletcher heading down the hall toward me, with Todd Dante, the jacket guy of her dreams, in tow. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to act around her, but since we’d had a couple of
conversations recently, I didn’t feel I could just pretend she wasn’t there, so I kind of nodded my head up in a cursory greeting as I walked past.

Todd Dante grabbed me by the shoulder and pushed me against the Language Lab door.

“This the guy?” he said to Celeste Fletcher, kind of sputtering.

“No,” said Celeste, just as Todd Dante’s fist slammed with inexpressible force straight into my nose. There was a cracking sound as my nose broke, a hot sensation in my face as the blood rushed up and out, a pounding sound in my ears from the adrenaline, and a feeling of being unable to breathe from just, you know, being unable to breathe. Rushing blackness subsumed my field of vision, and I was gone for a while.

I think all people, men, women, children, and otherwise, should get punched in the face at least once, just so they will know what it feels like so they can grasp how important it is to avoid placing themselves in situations where it might happen and make their plans accordingly. For instance, if I had had the experience before being hit by Todd Dante, I would have known as soon as I saw him and Celeste coming that the most prudent thing to do would have been to turn around and run, not walk, in the other direction. I’m sure there would have been a broom closet or an empty classroom in which I could have cowered till the danger had passed. But no, I naively thought that nodding slightly in the direction of Celeste Fletcher when her normal psycho jacket provider was around was sound policy.

I had, I realize now, been lulled into a false sense of invulnerability by the Clearview Badger Spirit. But there were limits, and nodding at Celeste Fletcher had crossed one of them.

When I came to, I was in the hospital, and it was déjà vu all over again. As my eyes and ears and brain took in my surroundings, I saw Celeste Fletcher, still wearing the accursed jacket, standing in front of my little bed thing, saying “Tom, Tom, Tom …,” trying to wake me up. Which was déjà vu all over again all over again. Was she going to ask me to sign her tits and give me a hand job? I kind of doubted it, but you know, one lives in hope.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, once she had my attention. “Todd thought you were Shinefield. But you really shouldn’t have said hi to me. Where’s your girlfriend?”

I ignored the question, because I didn’t know, and also because I kind of had an instinctive suspicion that I actually
didn’t have a girlfriend anymore. I told Celeste that she should tell her primary jacket provider that when you ask “Is this the guy?” it is customary to wait until hearing the answer before hauling off and pummeling the person in question in the face with your enormous frozen brisket fist.

“I know,” she said. “I keep telling him that.” Then she added, in a tone you might use to say someone has nice eyes or a dazzling smile: “He’s got a temper.”

Indeed. Isn’t he dreamy. Good old violence. The chicks have always loved it, and always will.

But there was to be no hand job or cleavage signing today. The world had moved on from hand jobs and cleavage signing, and we had moved with it, some voluntarily, some less so.

As nasal fractures go, mine wasn’t too bad, and I was told it would heal by itself, leaving no more than a bump. See what I got you, I told my centipede. A nice little bump to keep you company. The only reason I had wound up in the hospital rather than the nurse’s office at school was because I had hit my head when I’d fallen and then kept losing consciousness every time I came to and saw my own blood. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, wouldn’t you? My own blood, I mean.