Out of Whack (4 page)

       “Hey, why don’t you ask her out?” I said. (Making The Suggestion)

       “‘Cause she’d stomp me like a boll weevil.” (Reality Rears Its Ugly Face)

       “So what?” (Adopting The Carefree Attitude Of One Who Isn’t Putting Himself In Danger Of Being Stomped)

       “What do you mean, so what?” (The Stupid Question)

       “So what?” (The Stupid Answer)

       “Fine, I’ll do it.” (The Surprise Decision)

       “Really?” (Shock, Awe, And A Bit Of Doubt)

       “Yep.” (Confirming The Decision...Or Blatantly Lying?)

       And so, Travis walked across the hallway to where Marcia was fixing her hair in the mirror attached to the inside of her locker door. He was a brave man, that Travis. A true hero. As he strode over toward her, toward the unknown charms and unknown dangers of the female of our species, I felt an admiration like nothing I’d ever felt before.

       Until I heard his question.

       “Marcia, Seth wants to know if you’ll go out with him Saturday night.”

       Fortunately, I wasn’t drinking anything, because I would have sprayed it all over the place. Though at the time I would have enjoyed choking on it and dying.

       Marcia glanced over at me. Considering the plethora of stupid things I could have done at that moment, it’s amazing that all I did was drop my books. It’s also amazing that despite the dreaded 890 page hardcover tome
Introduction to Biology
landing corner-first on my foot, I didn’t scream. I smiled in pain.

       That temptress Marcia then proceeded to lean over and whisper something in Travis’ ear. Travis grinned the grin of one who knows something that his best friend will pay out the nose to learn. My deodorant instantly disintegrated.

       As my life began flashing before my eyes, Travis walked to me, still grinning. Marcia closed her locker and walked down the hall without a backward glance. Or maybe she did glance backward and I just didn’t see it because my vision was so blurry.

       “Well, that was fun,” said Travis. “You wanna come over after school?”

       “What did she say?” I demanded.

       “Who?”

       This was not the first time I’d confronted the dark side of Travis’ personality. It was not to be the last, by a long shot. But I still wanted to throw him to the ground and jump on his head eight or nine times.

       “Marcia,” I said, through clenched teeth.

       “Marcia who?”

       “Come on, Travis! What did she say?”

       “Ooooh, you mean Marcia
Levay!
That girl I was just talking to. Tall, dark hair, orange sweater...her?”

       “Yes. That would be her.”

       “Come to think of it, she did say something to me. She whispered it in my ear, even. You’d like her perfume. It’s a lot like what you wear.”

       I curled my fists. “I could kill you right now and go to the electric chair a happy man.”

       “Stop it, you’re distracting me. I’m trying to remember what she said. It was kind of garbled, you know, like when you play that game where you whisper something into somebody’s ear and they whisper it into the ear of the person next to them and you go down the line until the last person says something out loud that’s completely different from what the first person whispered. But I think I can remember if you give me enough time.”

       “Come on, Travis. This isn’t funny.”

       “You’re distraaaaacting me,” said Travis in a singsong voice.

       I really, really wanted to grab him and slam the jerk against my locker, hoping that the combination dial would break a vertebrae or two, but something like that would probably have delayed the transfer of information. So I remained calm.

       “I’m trying to think of what it was. I mean it.” Travis squeezed his eyes shut in exaggerated concentration. “I seem to have this lingering memory of her not saying anything and just sticking her tongue in my ear, but that might have been somebody else. Let me think...think... think...think...damn this unreliable brain of mine!”

       I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t have spoken without screaming.

       “It’s really weird, you know? I can’t remember what Marcia Levay whispered into my ear just a minute ago, but I can remember the entire lyrics to the Brady Bunch theme song. Maybe if I start singing it, it will help me remember.
It’s the story, of a lovely lady, who was bringing up three very lovely girls...”

      
I’ll spare you the rest of the musical interlude, even though that bastard went through the entire thing, including the previously unrevealed erotic verse. After he finished humming the musical riff at the end, he closed his eyes again and fell into deep concentration.

       “Okay...it’s coming to me...it’s almost here...almost...”

       My mouth went dry and my knees felt weak.

       “She said...that...”

       I’m pretty sure my heart literally skipped a beat, which can’t be good for the circulation.

       “...you can ask her yourself.”

       My relief that it had finally been revealed was short-lived. Because now a greater mystery stood before me. If I asked her out, would she actually say “Yes?” Were her words to Travis an invitation, or a dismissal?

       What a cruel, cruel world!

       “So, you gonna ask her?” Travis wanted to know.

       “Uhhhhhh...” I replied, which, in my mind, meant both “Hell yeah!” and “No freakin’ way!” at the same time.

       “Do it,” Travis prodded.

       “Uhhhhhh...” I repeated, though this time I had no idea what it meant.

       It’s situations such as these that make arranged marriages sound like a great idea.

       It wasn’t long before I came to a decision. Yes, I was going to ask Marcia Levay out. I was going to break down the thick stone barriers between myself and the opposite sex.

       This was a fairly easy decision to arrive at, actually, since Marcia was nowhere in sight.

       “Yeah, I am,” I said.

       “Great! We better catch up to her!”

       That certainly wasn’t my intention. But as Travis took off, I followed, my legs feeling like they had turned into Slinkys. We hurried outside to the front of the school and did a quick search, but Marcia was nowhere in sight. She hadn’t been waiting by the door with open arms, ready to breathlessly proclaim “Oh, my Knight, these past minutes waiting for you hath seemed an eternity! Please taketh me to your castle of red hot loving!”

       She was gone. Did this mean she really didn’t want me to ask her, or was she playing hard to get? What did this mean? How dare she toy with my emotions like this? Was she not human?

       “Hey, Seth?” asked a voice that was too feminine to be Travis. I turned around and saw Heidi Kurson, easily the tiniest eighth grader in school, with long blonde hair and glasses. Definitely cute. Definitely a bit nervous.

       “Yeah?”

       “My friend Michelle...” Heidi pointed over to Michelle, who was leaning against the flagpole and reading a textbook in a fatally flawed attempt to look casual, “...and I have passes to a sneak preview of that horror movie
Splat Goes The Weasel.
We wanted to know if you and Travis wanted to come with us.”

       Marcia who?

       Coincidences. Gotta love ‘em.

       “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to see that.” I’d never heard of it, actually, but it never hurts to lie in the interests of romance.

      
(NOTE: This is not a self-help book. Statements such as “it never hurts to lie in the interests of romance” are not to be taken seriously. Don’t lie to your spouse or lover. I mean it. Down that road lies nothing but trouble. Respect them as you want to be respected, and you’ll all be happier people.)

       The sneak preview was Saturday night, which gave Travis’ and I plenty of time to plan for/fantasize about/freak out over the upcoming date. We would eat dinner at Zort’s Cafe, followed by the movie, followed by a wildly unfair eleven o’clock curfew. We both knew Heidi reasonably well, but Michelle was an enigma, a fact that disturbed Travis.

       “What if she’s a psycho?” he kept asking.

       “That’d be really cool,” I kept saying.

       The excitement continued to build like a snowball rolling down a hill. By Thursday the snowball was the size of a house, by Friday the snowball was the size of a school, and by Saturday afternoon the snowball was the size of a skyscraper. Little did we know that on Saturday night the snowball would roll into a nearby town, wiping out the populace, bringing death and destruction to everything in its path.

       Saturday night arrived. Here, presented in sequence, are all the things you missed by not being there:

       5:00 p.m.: Travis and I start getting ready, as we have only two hours before we’re supposed to be at Heidi’s house. Clothing selection is fairly simple, since we see no reason to progress beyond jeans and sweaters. Then we decide that the peach fuzz we’ve been proudly cultivating on our upper lips should come off.

       5:05 p.m.: Our initiation into this manly ritual is delayed by a shaving cream war.

       5:10 p.m.: Travis makes a genuine attempt to apply the shaving cream and gets a big blob up his nose. Makes hilarious noises for a minute as he tries to wash it out.

       5:11 p.m.: Annoyed by my amusement, Travis tries to apply shaving cream to the inside of my nose as well. The shaving cream war resumes full force.

       5:30 p.m.: The bathroom and upstairs hallway are clean again. Travis and I are informed by my parents that we are behaving like children, and that my dad would much rather watch television than drive us to the movies, and so we damn well better shape up.

       5:35 p.m.: We try to shave.

       5:36 p.m.: We start to bleed.

       5:40 p.m.: Our faces become the toilet paper capital of Ohio.

       5:45 p.m.: The peach fuzz satisfactorily removed (as far as we can tell beneath the toilet paper coating), we retreat to my bedroom to write another page of “Travis & Seth’s Story.” In our last exciting page, our fearless hero was about to be engulfed by the horrific Death Goo, with no escape in sight! How will our hero survive? What can he possibly do to get out of such a dire situation? What, I ask you, what? What? What?

       6:00 p.m.: We still can’t agree on what.

       6:10 p.m.: We finally reach a compromise. Travis is allowed to have Trychen use his superhuman dining abilities to eat the Death Goo if I’m allowed to have the Death Belch afterward take on physical form and attack.

       6:30 p.m.: The page has been written, with less debate over semicolons than usual. We check on the progress of our cuts. They look presentable.

       6:35 p.m.: The ol’ stomach cocoons hatch into demon butterflies on speed.

       6:40 p.m.: We inform my dad that it’s time to go. He’s heavily involved in a
That Wacky Orangutan
rerun, but finally relents.

       7:00 p.m.: We arrive at Heidi’s house. The butterflies nearly break their way out of my stomach lining. We sit in the car for a moment, working up the necessary courage. My dad does his part in ensuring that the evening goes smoothly by telling us to “Get a move on, dammit!”

       7:02 p.m.: I try to ring the doorbell but miss. Travis looks at me like I’m an idiot. I am forced to come to terms with the fact that females truly scare the hell out of me.

       7:03 p.m.: We are invited inside by Heidi’s dad, who seems to regard us as representatives of some roving pervert brigade. The girls aren’t ready yet, so we sit down and withstand an in-depth questioning on our plans for the evening in terms of wholesomeness of activities and number of witnesses present.

       7:15 p.m.: Heidi and Michelle come downstairs, ready at last. They look...well,
ugly.
Apparently they spread six pounds of makeup into a pan and then slammed their faces into it. The words “hideous,” “grotesque,” and “EEEEEEK!!!” all apply. Heidi’s dad, viewing this as the start of vixens in training, immediately sends them back upstairs to hose off.

       7:25 p.m.: Heidi and Michelle come downstairs, ready again at last, but in rather foul moods. Their exit is cleared with Heidi’s dad, and we leave the house.

       7:26 p.m.: We realize that my dad has been waiting in the car for almost half an hour.

       7:27 p.m.: We begin the drive to the movie theater, during which we hear a great deal about how my dad was waiting in the car for almost half an hour.

       7:40 p.m.: As we speed along the freeway and listen to my dad’s gripe fest, the rear tire explodes. The car careens out of control, eliciting a scream from Heidi, Michelle, and Travis. Travis’ less-than-manly response would normally provoke some sort of comment from me, except that my own response was to wet my pants. While there are more inconvenient times for the bladder to give up its treasure (when performing a baptism, for example), during one’s first date ranks high on the list.

       7:43 p.m.: With the car safely on the side of the road and my dad making something resembling an attempt to change the tire, we wait. The girls are huddled together, whispering. I’m not wearing a jacket, which could be used to hide the unstylish addition to my jeans. Travis is. My goal at this point is to borrow the jacket without revealing how absolutely necessary it is for me to have it. He resists, because, well, he just wouldn’t be Travis if he weren’t a pain in the neck.