Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie (11 page)

He looked around the room again. “So, who can at least tolerate poetry?”

All the hands went up.

“Let’s visit Xanadu.” He gave us a page number in our textbooks. “Read ‘Kubla Khan’ to yourself. Listen to the music. Let Coleridge speak to you.”

I started reading, and was hooked by the fourth line.

Mr. Franka read us another poem, called “To Augusta.” This one was sort of mushy, but even so the words sounded pretty cool. They flowed, like good music.

“Byron,” Mr. Franka said, closing the book. “You’ve all heard his work, whether you realize it or not. ‘She walks in beauty, like the night.’ You can’t tell me that line doesn’t kick butt. Byron even wrote a poem filled with ghosts and vampires.”

That caught my attention. Before I could ask about the poem, he said, “I won’t tell you the name. If you really want to find it, you’ll have to hunt it down. Or should I say, haunt it down?”

From there, he skipped around to some of his other favorite poets. Not once during the whole class did Mr. Franka utter those deadly words, “Now, what does this line mean?” He actually let us enjoy the poems without analyzing them to
death. As he told us, sometimes a dying snake is just a dying snake. Sometimes a leafless tree is just a tree.

At the end of the period, he said, “April is national poetry month. That’s why we’re reading poetry in October.”

I couldn’t resist. I raised my hand and asked, “So what are we going to study in April?”

He flashed a smile at me, and I felt doom approaching. I knew that smile. It’s the one you get when a fish that’s been nibbling at your bait for five minutes finally gulps it down. “Thank you, Scott.”

“What for?”

“I usually let the first person who asks that question make the decision about what to study in April. Congratulations. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. Let me know your choice by mid-March.”

Great. Just what I need—a chance to get an entire English class pissed at me. At least the typical honors English student was a bit less threatening than the typical defensive lineman.

Go, team, go.

Yeah, right.

Another Friday, another football game. Our team scored a touchdown. The crowd was so surprised, nobody even cheered. Their mouths just hung open like measureless caverns. The other team scored eleven times. Final score, 76 to 7. They should have had seventy-seven, but they missed one of the extra points. Not because of our defense. I think their kicker was getting tired. It was hard to tell for sure from up in the stands, but I suspect he might also have been laughing so hard it threw off his aim.

I figured I could concentrate on our small moment of glory for my article. Since it took us thirteen plays to get down the field, I’d have plenty to write about. I didn’t want to think about any other part of the game. Julia spent the whole second half standing by the fence behind the players’ bench.

Kyle didn’t come, but Patrick hung out for a while.

I played around with doing the article as a poem, but it didn’t feel right. I wasn’t worried. I had extra time since we’d get Monday off for Columbus Day. I ended up writing it like it was an infomercial for the greatest hits of the Zenger Panthers. I was pretty happy with the way it came out.

We voted on Tuesday in homeroom. It felt weird to vote for myself. Sort of like cheating. Kyle and Patrick voted for me, too. So did Mouth. He told me so. Five times. Maybe six. That is—he told me five times. He didn’t vote five times. But even if he had, it wouldn’t make a difference. I voted for him. But I didn’t tell him.

On the way out of homeroom, the new girl—her name was Lee—said, “Your speech moved me to tears. I voted for you. You owe me ten dollars.” She held her hand out.

I stared at the black fishnet sleeve that covered her arm.

“Duh,” she said. “Joking.”

She turned and walked off before I could say anything clever.

“Good luck,” Patrick said at the end of the day.

“Thanks. But I don’t have a prayer.”

“Come on. You’ve got to at least kind of think that you could possibly win.”

“I guess.” Maybe he was right. Even though I knew for sure that I wouldn’t win, I also sort of thought I might. It didn’t make
sense, but that’s how it was. Everyone who was running probably thought the same thing. Which meant six of us were wrong.

I’d find out soon enough.

Friday afternoon, I could see Patrick’s grin from all the way down the hall.

“Now what?” I asked when I reached him and Kyle.

“We have to go,” he said.

I looked at the poster he was pointing to. There was a harvest dance next week, right after the game. “No way.”

“You have to go,” Kyle said. “Unless you’re planning to spend the next four years with your nose in a book.”

“No argument,” Patrick said. “We’re going. It’s for your own good. Someday, you’ll thank us for dragging you out into the world.”

I reached inside my backpack. “I’ll tell you what. While we’re doing each other favors, let me do one for you.” I handed him my copy of
Ender’s Game
.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Just read it. Trust me.”

“Weird title.”

“That’s not a bad thing.”

“I’m sort of busy.”

“With what? You told me you aren’t getting much homework. Just give it a try. Okay?”

He shrugged. “I’ll see.”

“What about the game tonight? You going?”

He shook his head. “I think I’d rather read a book.”

Back at home, I found myself facing another interesting weekend. Mom suddenly realized that we didn’t live in a house—we lived in a baby-mauling machine. My God, the horrors that surrounded us. Electricity running through the walls. The horror! Deadly poisons behind the cabinets. Beware! Sharp tools.
Heavy objects. Zillions of plastic bags. Mold spores by the billion! It’s a wonder Bobby and I survived the sharp-edged, smothering, high-voltage death trap we called home.

Mom went on a mission to remedy the situation. She drafted Dad to help. I suspect that eventually there’ll be nothing in the house except foam-rubber furniture and rodent decals.

m
onday, in English, Mr. Franka said, “My friends, allow me to introduce you to Percy Bysshe Shelley.”

After we’d stopped laughing at his name, we spent the period reading his poems. While I wasn’t super thrilled by his stuff, Mr. Franka mentioned that his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wrote
Frankenstein
. He also told us that the two of them were friends with Byron. And they all hung out with this other guy named Polidori, who’d written a vampire story. Now I knew I had to get my hands on that ghost poem.

Tuesday, we studied haiku. Wednesday, we got our school pictures. I had no idea that my hair was that weird after gym class. I looked like a chipmunk. Mom went all gooey when she saw the picture, like she doesn’t see me live and in person every single day. But she’d been pretty emotional the last couple weeks. She cried a lot when she watched movies on TV. Even during funny shows. I think there’s more going on inside her than Dad and I will ever understand.

I got cornered by Mouth on Thursday at the bus stop. “Hey, ready for the dance?” he asked.

I glanced over at Julia and tried to think of some reply that
would lure her into the conversation. But Mouth didn’t leave me an opening.

“What are you planning to wear? I bought a new shirt. It’s got stripes, so it makes me look taller. Girls like tall guys. Your brother is real tall, isn’t he? I don’t know if I should wear shoes or sneakers. What are you wearing?” He actually paused long enough for me to slip in an answer.

“Sneakers,” I told him.

“That’s what I thought. But what if everyone else is wearing shoes? Maybe I can put a pair of shoes in my locker. Extra shirts, too. Because I sweat a lot. Mom says I have a fast metabolism. I go through deodorant like crazy. I tried a roll-on, but I think a stick works better for me. I don’t want to use a spray because you can breathe it in, which is a big waste since lungs don’t sweat, right? I mean, there’s no way they could, because then we’d all drown. Imagine that. Drowning in your own sweat.”

At that point, I stopped listening and passed the time composing couplets. Such as:

Me dance
?

Fat chance
.

I went to the dance right from the game. I wore old sneakers and an old shirt. It didn’t matter. I could have dressed in a tux or wrapped myself in aluminum foil. The result would still have been the same. Patrick, Kyle, and I stood near the wall the whole time, drinking store-brand soda and eating those
really cheap potato chips—the ones that are so thin you can read through them and so greasy they almost slip out of your fingers.

We had a contest to see who could whistle first after eating a handful of chips. We usually did that with crackers, but sometimes you need to improvise. Patrick won. The floor lost.

As I looked around the gym, I had this scary thought that I couldn’t help sharing. “What if this is as good as it gets? We might look back years from now and think how great life was when we were freshmen.”

Patrick shook his head. “Don’t say that. It has to get better.”

Kyle glared at Mitch, who was dancing with his girlfriend. “Hey, if a loser like him can get a girl, so can I.”

I nodded as a show of support, but didn’t bother to lie out loud.

None of us danced. We just kept pushing one another and saying, “Ask her.” “No, you ask her.” “No,
you
ask her.”

Mouth actually asked a bunch of different girls to dance. It was painful to watch. The scene reminded me of a bee trapped in a window. He’d buzz over and explore a spot, discover there was no opening, drop back and hover for a while, then try another spot. The bees never find a way out. Their dried corpses litter the windowsills.

But maybe I shouldn’t feel sorry for him. He didn’t seem to feel any pain. In a way, he was better off than the rest of us.

Julia was there. Dancing with Vernon. She was a great dancer. Vernon, on the other hand, moved like a cardboard robot from a really cheap science-fiction movie. When I
watched them together, I felt like someone was cutting small holes in my lungs with a sharp knife.

Saturday afternoon, Patrick called to tell me he was halfway through the book and really enjoying it.

Sunday, he called again.

“Finish the book?” I asked. I wondered what to give him next.

“Yeah.”

“Wasn’t it great?”

“Yup.”

He sounded weird. “What’s wrong?”

“We’re moving.”

“Where?”

“Texas. My dad got transferred. We’re leaving next month.”

“Crap. That’s halfway across the country.”

“Yeah. Crap.”