King Dork (15 page)

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My first impulse was to run like hell in some random direction, but for some reason, instead, I sat down very deliberately on a big stone over on the other side of the path and read the last couple of blood-spattered pages of
Brighton Rock,
tuning out the sound of Paul Krebs’s gentle moaning. Then I paused and stared off into space. It was a great ending, the best ending of anything, book or movie, I’d ever experienced. Then I closed the book reverently and walked back toward the campus, because I needed to get myself cleaned up and fifth period was about to start and I didn’t see any reason to be late.

P OD H I P P I E S

It was a day or two after I accidentally beat up Paul Krebs that two very, very surprising things happened.

The first was that Pierre Butterfly Cameroon, the diminu-

tive, flute-playing, hippie-parent-stunted, relentlessly picked-on PBC, my brother in dorkdom, started “going with” Renée

“Née-Née” Tagliafero. For real. I mean, eating together, having third parties deliver notes to each other, and spending lunch period walking in a circle around the perimeter of

Center Court, just like all the normal freshman and sopho-

more couples did. (I’ve never really understood why couples do the joined-at-the-hip lunchtime laps. They stop doing it junior year because once you’re a junior you can leave during lunch and go to the Burger King instead.)

Now, when I say that Pierre Butterfly Cameroon is my

brother in dorkdom, I mean that we are both at roughly the same low level of the social structure. The Untouchable level.

I don’t mean brotherhood in any other sense. I mean, I don’t know him. Hanging out with each other would just make us

both look even more pathetic. Sam Hellerman is kind of

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friendly with him, as he is with everybody who isn’t a dangerous normal psychotic. I’m more of a loner. Still, if I’m the king of hearts in the dork deck, PBC is definitely one of the other kings.

But Pierre Butterfly Cameroon was no longer Untouch-

able, or so it appeared from where I was sitting when I first saw them walk by. Née-Née Tagliafero was touching him quite frequently, in fact. They looked weird as a couple because he was not much more than half her height. But more than that: such things just didn’t happen. It was inconceivable.

Née-Née Tagliafero was pretty and popular, with no

handicaps or defects except, perhaps, for a very slight mustache, which she was able to bleach into insignificance. And she had pretty big breasts, too, which counted for a lot. I’d never seen her picked on by anyone. She had a kind of punky hair and thrift-store clothes thing going on, but that was fashion rather than true alienation, like it always is. I mean, she was definitely one of “them,” that is to say, mostly normal, not actually one of society’s unwanted. I would classify her as subnormal/drama. She’d had several normal boyfriends before.

What the hell was going on around here? It was mind-

boggling.

The other thing that happened was hardly less surprising.

Sam Hellerman suddenly started hanging out with the

Hillmont High fake-hippie drama crowd. I swear to God.

This came without warning. I walked out of fourth period

expecting our paths to converge at around locker number

414, as usual, and to continue on to our usual lunch-period routine of eating at the cafeteria and trying to remain unob-trusive and unharassed till the bell rang. But I walked past locker number 414, and he wasn’t there. I backtracked,

looked around, and finally saw him sitting on the lawn near the drama hippies. No, not near
—with
them. I can’t remember 110

ever having been so surprised. He must have known I’d be

looking for him, of course. I tried to get his attention, but he deliberately avoided looking up to the exit of building C and locker number 414, where he had to have known I’d be.

God only knows what they were talking about. He didn’t

seem to be doing much talking, but it was hard to tell.

Somehow I couldn’t see him actually becoming a faux-hippie drama person himself—that would be too bizarre. But how

would I know? Maybe that’s how it always begins: you sit

with them on the lawn during lunch; then, later that night, a pod grows under your bed with a little fake-hippie version of you inside; then the fake-hippie you hatches, kills the original you, and takes your place. Before you know it you’re embroidering your jeans, singing “Casey Jones,” smoking pot

from a pipe you made out of an apple, and playing Motel the Tailor in the class production of
Fiddler on the Roof.

Could that really happen to Sam Hellerman? Ordinarily

I’d have said no, but after witnessing the courtship rituals of Pierre Butterfly Cameroon and Née-Née Tagliafero, I had to admit that my sense of what did and what did not constitute a believable thread in the fabric of reality suddenly didn’t seem very adequate.

I wasn’t about to barge in on that groovy Happening, I

can tell you that. Instead, I went on alone to the cafeteria, semidazed, with a lot on my mind.

TH E BAD DETECTIVE

Channel two was showing two horror movies back to back

every Wednesday and Sunday night for the whole month of

October. I was in my room brooding over this and that—Fiona, my dad’s library, Paul Krebs, and the whole weird Sam

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Hellerman pod-hippie situation that had erupted earlier that day. Strangely enough, the first movie on channel two that night was
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
which has pretty much the same pod-oriented story line. It almost made me feel as though I was on the right track with the pod-hippie theory. I put on
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
and turned the TV

volume almost all the way down, watching the movie while listening to the music, and thinking things over.

I know it doesn’t make much sense, but somehow the

puzzle of my dad’s teenage library and the mystery about his death had become connected in my mind. I would decipher

part of a cryptic notation in
Catcher,
CEH 1960, or be struck by something in
Brighton Rock,
CEH 1965, and it would somehow feel like I’d gotten somewhere on the “accident” issue, too. At weird moments, like that night, I’d also have this crazy sense that the other puzzles in my life, like Fiona and Sam Hellerman’s increasingly odd behavior, were somehow

connected to my dad and
The Catcher in the Rye
as well. I mean, they all got muddled together sometimes.

I’d always wondered why the police, at least to judge

from the newspaper articles, appear to have put so little into the investigation of my dad’s death; usually when a cop is killed, they turn the world upside down to see justice done.

Maybe it was obvious to them that it hadn’t been a murder, and the newspaper had just played up the ambiguity. They

hadn’t found the car that hit him, which was weird, too. Or possibly they had found it, and it just hadn’t been thought newsworthy? I wished there was someone I could ask about

it, but I wouldn’t have known where to begin. The reporters who wrote the articles? Hmm. I would also have given quite a lot to know what he had been working on when the “accident” happened. I’m sure that played a role in the investigation, but if it had ever been mentioned publicly, I had missed 112

it. I even dared to try to ask my mom once, but all she did was cry. And what was Fiona doing tonight? And what the

hell was up with Sam Hellerman anyway?

But what this all had to do with tits, back rubs, and dry

cleaning, I hadn’t the barest clue.

I’m a bad detective, though, really. I let my emotions and prejudices dictate what I choose to investigate, rather than trying to look at the whole picture with an objective eye. I hadn’t looked at
A Separate Peace
and
Lord of the Flies
very carefully because they hadn’t been obviously marked up and pummeled like
Catcher,
CEH 1960, but mostly because I had something personal against them. And because of that I had missed something pretty important.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers
had ended, and
Rosemary’s
Baby
had begun. I put on
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
and turned to look at my dad’s books on my desk. I was reaching for
The
Journal of Albion Moonlight,
CEH 1966, which I had decided would be next on the agenda of my one-man book club,

when I accidentally knocked the stack of books to the floor.

A Separate Peace,
CEH 1962, fell in such a way that it was open under the bed, and when I went to retrieve it, I noticed a slip of paper that had fallen out. It was half a sheet of graph paper that had itself been folded in half. On the inside of the folded paper was this weird clump of letters, neatly written in the graph paper’s squares in dark blue ink:

q

f f q g a r f q q f a s u

x q d f q j g u q y e u m d

q y u m V e q x x u m d q z

g r j g m g f e m H q d h u

g e m e x u m f q P o q e q

q z a y m d u m x q v f q d

u a e d q u t F Y g h u m V

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And on the other side, in black, and hardly less weird:

Mon cher monsieur,

The bastard is dead. Thrown into the

fire. Long live Justice and the

American Way.

Regards,

Tit

So Tit was a person? “Tit lib friday”—an appointment at

the library with Tit? And someone was dead? And it had

something to do with Superman?

The note was dated 6/31, but the six was heavily and

awkwardly inked and clearly had originally been a five.

My first thought, influenced no doubt by having been

watching
Rosemary’s Baby
with a Black Sabbath sound track, was that the little parallelogram of letters might be a magic charm or spell of some sort. And maybe “thrown into the

fire” alluded to the burning of witches or something like that?

Or perhaps the charm was an element of some kind of death

spell, a spell that had apparently worked, if the reference to the “dead bastard” was any indication. You send this magic parallelogram to someone, innocently disguised as an ordinary note, and soon after seeing it, the person dies. Except that that would mean that my dad would have been the one

who died. But of course he had died, only not for thirty years or so. Maybe he’d received the note as a kid but hadn’t actually looked at the evil parallelogram till six years ago. Or the death spell had a built-in delay, a kind of long fuse.

And now I had seen it, too. I started to calculate, wondering how long I had. . . .

I got a little creeped out. Then I realized that was nuts.

Getting a grip, I looked at it again. Perhaps it was the

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kind of puzzle where you search for words and circle them.

But all I could find were things like “fux” and “yum,” and none of them were even in a straight line like they’re supposed to be. There was “mmmmm” running diagonally from

the upper left to the lower right. All that stuff reminded me of Fiona somehow. But that was the only intelligible thing about it.

It didn’t take me too long, though, to realize that it was probably a code. Then it took about twenty minutes of staring at the note and thinking about the CEH library to de-

velop what I thought was a pretty good theory about what

sort of code it was, and how it might work. But several solid hours of scribbling yielded only gibberish. Either I was totally on the wrong track or I was missing something. I even swallowed a bit of my pride and phoned Sam Hellerman to see if he had any ideas. But there was no answer at Hellerman

Manor.

I eventually had to admit defeat. I closed my notebook

and settled into an uneasy, half-asleep night of fretting about Tit, the dead bastard, zombies, pod-hippies, Halloween, witchcraft, my dad, my mom, murder, Sam Hellerman, Mia Farrow,

Little Big Tom, Amanda, Black Sabbath, Paul Krebs, Roman

Polanski, Anton and Zena LaVey, Matt Lynch, Nostradamus,

Mrs. Teneb, Superman, Dr. Dee, Elvish, Klingon,
Brighton
Rock,
Fiona, and Jane Gallagher. It was exhausting. When I finally dropped off, I had a dream that I solved the code and that the revealed message suddenly made it clear how it all fit together perfectly as part of a single story that explained everything. But when I woke up, I couldn’t remember what

it was.

Ordinarily, I’d have immediately run, not walked, to Sam

Hellerman with Tit’s mysterious note. He hadn’t been too in-115

terested in my dad’s teen library when I’d told him about it.

He only liked science fiction and fantasy. Basically, if a book didn’t have a map of somewhere other than earth in it, he

couldn’t see the use. He had a point, but then, he didn’t have a mysteriously deceased dad to investigate. I had tried to tell him how great
Brighton Rock
was, but he had just rolled his eyes.

Tit’s note would have been right up his alley, though, and I’m sure he would have been able to help. He’s a clever guy.

However, things were a bit strained between us because of

the Fiona situation, and because of—well, something was going on with Sam Hellerman, something hidden from me. It

wasn’t just that he was being a dick about Fiona and hanging out with hippies. He was also acting weird toward me in general, kind of distant and secretive.

Calling him had been my first impulse upon finding the

note. But of course, he had been out. Later, when I asked him where he had been, he said, “Visiting my grandma,” which I didn’t believe for a minute.

A thought struck me.

“Hey,” I said. “If you ever happened to be somewhere like

another party or something and you happened to see Fiona

there, you’d—you’d tell me, right?”

He just looked at me like I was the most pathetic creature he had ever seen. Which was well within the realm of possibility, especially since Sam Hellerman didn’t get out much.