Slob (2 page)

I don’t think I was the only one who was nervous about this gymnastic stuff, though. I had enough presence of mind to look around at the faces of the other boys. A lot of them were eying the gymnastic apparatus apprehensively. One really skinny kid named Justin Esposito was actually clutching at his stomach as though he were going to be sick. I felt so bad for him that I almost forgot to feel bad for me. Nima would have liked that. He would have thought it was very Buddhist of me.

I’ll tell you more about Nima later.

Mr. Wooly explained about all the apparatus and what we were going to be doing on each one in the next few weeks, whether we liked it or not. We’d be flipping and flying in the air. We’d regularly be defying the law of gravity. But first . . . He paused and looked around at all our faces. We stared back at him, waiting. He loved it, you could tell.

“First, we are going to learn how to do a somersault properly.”

A lot of the boys groaned, including Andre. I, on the other hand, felt like I had been handed a death sentence reprieve from the governor. Justin Esposito actually smiled.

Big mistake.

“We’ll start with Mr. Esposito, since he is so overjoyed at the thought of doing somersaults. Gather around the mat, gentleworms.” Hardy har har.

We stood on either side of the long blue mat, while Mr. Wooly guided Justin Esposito to the front of it. Poor Justin looked like he was about to vomit. I was actually wishing that he
would
vomit so he’d be spared. A vomit exemption. But seeing someone vomit makes me want to vomit, so I took back the wish. I didn’t think I’d tell Nima about that, since it was less than empathetic.

“Get down on all fours, Mr. Esposito,” Mr. Wooly commanded.

Justin did. “Now put your head down two inches in front of the line of your shoulders,” Mr. Wooly said. “Legs hip width apart, toes tucked under, tailbone down.”

Justin Esposito’s ears were turning crimson, and he looked like he was in pain.

“Push your left hip out a little. Now tuck your head down and push with your toes. Now! Push! Now!”

Justin’s right leg kicked up and he toppled over to his right side. People laughed. I did too. I’m not proud of it. I almost didn’t tell you. I definitely will never tell Nima.

Mr. Wooly could not have been more pleased. He didn’t even have Justin try again. It would have ruined the moment if he’d actually managed to do a somersault on the second try.

The next boy up managed a decent somersault. The one after that did too. But then came a kid who was one of the lousier basketball players, and he failed miserably. What I noticed, though, was that when the athletic boys were on the mat, Mr. Wooly hardly gave them any instruction at all. However, when one of us nonathletic types came to the mat, Mr. Wooly would bark out all these instructions about where to put their head and how to adjust their hips, and by the time the kid was all situated he looked as stiff and unnatural as if he were playing a game of Twister. When he pushed off into a tumble, he’d fall in this cockeyed way, which would make everyone laugh. Except for me. I wasn’t laughing any more. It was becoming clear to me that Mr. Wooly was setting these kids up. The way he had them place their bodies, they were bound to fall in some weird way. It was pure physics.

It made me so mad I wanted to rat on Mr. Wooly. I didn’t, though. I’m very nonconfrontational. But I wouldn’t laugh anymore.

“And next comes Mr. Birnbaum! Show us how it’s done, Mr. Birnbaum.” Mr. Wooly was already snickering. A pre-guffaw snicker. He was really looking forward to this. The fattest kid in class, flopping on the mat like a giant ravioli. Hysterical.

I walked up to the edge of the mat, avoiding the faces of my classmates. I could hear them laughing already.

“This is going to be so excellent,” I heard someone say.

“All right, Birnbaum, down on all fours.” Mr. Wooly started yelling his instructions at me. “Arms shoulders’ width apart. Head tucked. Rump to the sky. The birds will think the moon has fallen.” Everyone laughed at this. He waited till the laughter died down. “Okay. Now push your right hip out slightly.”

That was it. Wooly’s little trick to get me to fall funny.

“Come on, Birnbaum. Push out your right hip,” he said.

I wouldn’t do it. And you know what? It was less about not wanting to fall funny than it was about Mr. Wooly thinking he was smarter than I was. He really thought no one knew what he was up to. That just deep-fried me.

“If I push out my right hip,” I said, my voice sounding strangled because of the odd angle of my head, “I’ll topple to the side when I tumble.”

“Don’t whine,” Mr. Wooly snarled. “Just do what I tell you to do, Birnbaum. There are other people waiting their turn. Now, push out your right hip and shove off from your toes.”

“It won’t work that way. It can’t. It’s obvious. I mean, it’s just simple physics.”

I probably shouldn’t have said that. Mr. Wooly is pretty stupid. You should never let stupid people know that
you
know they’re stupid. Particularly when they are your gym teacher.

Mr. Wooly went very quiet then. My head was still tucked under my chin, so I couldn’t see Mr. Wooly’s face, but I could see the faces of some of my classmates. They were looking in the direction of Mr. Wooly, their eyes wide. I started to get scared. Untucking my chin, I rolled back on the balls of my feet.

“Freeze, Birnbaum,” Mr. Wooly said.

I froze. I was in roughly the position of a frog about to leap.

“Stay . . . right . . . there.” He wasn’t shouting now. He sounded, in fact, like he had an idea. I was close to terrified.

I heard his sneakers squeaking against the polished gym floor as he walked away. Then I heard the squeal of the equipment door opening. There was some murmuring among the class as everyone wondered what on earth he was doing.

“Hang in there, Flapjack,” I heard Andre say.

You see what I mean about him?

My thighs were beginning to burn from holding the awkward position. I didn’t move, though. I heard the sound of clanking in the equipment room, as though Mr. Wooly was rummaging around for something. How bad could it be? I reasoned. He can’t really do anything to physically hurt me. He’d get in too much trouble for that. And there were witnesses.

But then I remembered that Mr. Wooly was a few fries short of a Happy Meal. That was when my heart started pounding so hard I thought it might stop.

The thing that he brought out of the equipment closet had buckles and straps and some nasty-looking hardware. I couldn’t tell what it was exactly, though, because I was staring at it between my knees, upside-down. Also, it was all jumbled up in Mr. Wooly’s ape hands and parts of it were dragging on the floor.

Not good, I thought.

Someone said a word that I won’t repeat, except to say that it had an “Oh” before it and an exclamation point after it. Mr. Wooly didn’t even bother to yell at the kid for saying it. In fact, he smiled a little bit as if to say, “You got that right, pal.”

“Keep still, Mr. Birnbaum. This will only take a minute,” Wooly said. Suddenly, I was tangled in a web of heavy straps and Mr. Wooly was clacking buckles and clicking hooks. When it stopped there were a few seconds of dead silence. Then the snickering began.

“Woof,” someone said.

It took me a moment to realize what had happened. I saw Mr. Wooly step in front of me and then back up. He was holding a long strap. He gave it a quick yank, and I felt a tug from the straps that were secured around my torso. He had put me in a halter, like a dog, and he was holding my leash.

“Okay, Birnbaum. Since you can’t manage to do a simple somersault on your own, I’ll have to help you do one.”

For the next ten minutes I was yanked across the mat and forced to flop around in the most degrading way. I caught fleeting glimpses of my classmates’ faces as I tumbled around. Most of them were pink with hysteria. And of course there were the comments. They didn’t even bother to lower their voices, knowing instinctively that Mr. Wooly wouldn’t care.

“Time to cut back on the puppy chow, Owen!”

“That’s the fattest poodle I’ve ever seen!”

And so on.

It was Justin Esposito who bothered me the most. His hand was pressed against his mouth and his eyes were wide. It was exactly like one of those faces you see in the horror movies, where the Boy Scout wakes up to see a man with no nose and ten-inch iron claws tearing a hole in his pup tent. I was that vision of horror for Justin Esposito. That’s how bad it all looked.

My friend Nima told me about these Tibetan monks who built a stone wall on a cliff by levitating huge rocks eight hundred feet into the air. During moments like these I sort of lift out of my body, rising up out of the situation, like a levitating rock. I’m there but I’m not there. It’s my way of dealing. But Justin’s face was holding me down, making me feel the full awfulness of what was happening.

“There now.” Mr. Wooly dropped the leash suddenly. “I think that helped you get the hang of things.”

He had a funny look on his face, as though he had suddenly become a little scared about what he’d just done.

“Unbuckle him, Mr. Esposito!” Mr. Wooly ordered angrily, like the harness had been Justin’s idea.

Justin rushed over and fumbled with the hooks while I sat back on my haunches, my face burning, my eyes focused on an indent on the mat where my head had been. It was slowly filling out, erasing what had just happened. When Justin undid the final buckle, he jumped up and away from me. The other kids were looking at me kind of funny too. They seemed nervous, like Mr. Wooly. I think they expected me to snap. It was a strange sensation. For a moment I felt really powerful. I felt large, but not in a fat way.

The spotlight was on me. I smiled. First at all the kids and then at Mr. Wooly. They didn’t know what to do. They all stared at their sneakers in shame, including Mr. Wooly.

That’s not true. That’s not what I did. That’s what Nima would have done. Here’s what I did:

1. Turned red as shrimp cocktail sauce

2. Lost control of all the muscles in my face

3. Cried

4. No, sobbed

5. No, bawled like a three-year-old in Wal-Mart

Mr. Wooly looked scared and also disgusted. Most of the other kids just looked disgusted. I had the opportunity to snap, to have a volcanic eruption of pure outrage, but I had botched it. Mr. Wooly told me to go to the locker room and collect myself. As I passed Andre, he slapped the back of my neck. I think it was meant to be reassuring, but then again he may just have taken the opportunity to slap me.

By the time lunch rolled around, I had collected myself, though my eyes were still swollen. I looked around the lunchroom for Izzy Shank, the kid I always sit with. He wasn’t at our usual table. It didn’t take a genius to see why. Mason Ragg was sitting there, all by himself, of course, since no one else would dare sit near him. More about Mason Ragg later.

When I sat down by Izzy, he looked at me carefully, noting the swollen eyes, I’m sure. He didn’t ask me about it, though. That’s one reason I like Izzy. He doesn’t make a big deal about things. He’s the least dramatic person I know.

I opened my lunch sack and pulled out my shredded-tofu sandwich (there’s not enough mayo in New York City to make that taste better than it sounds) and my bottle of pomegranate green tea. That was when I noticed that the recycled shower curtain eco-container was empty. It was even sealed back up, and those recycled containers are tricky to seal. They don’t snap closed nice and easy like Tupperware. You really have to work at it.

Anyway, the Oreos were gone. I stared and stared into the empty, sealed container and shook the sad black crumbs that were lying on the bottom. I couldn’t believe it.

“I can’t believe it!” I said.

“What?” Izzy asked. Izzy’s voice is as deep as a forty-year-old man’s talking into a bullhorn, by the way. I think it’s because of some glandular condition. I forgot what it’s called, but basically he’s huge. Six foot five, and still growing.

“Someone stole my Oreos!” I shoved the empty container at him and he took it in his hands, which happen to be the size of Jeremy’s whole face. He gazed into the cloudy-looking container like he was staring into a crystal ball. In a way he was. My future lay in that empty container.

“They sealed the container back up,” he said.

“I know!” I was momentarily pleased that Izzy had noticed too. That little fact had struck me as totally perverse. Who is so cool and collected while stealing that they take the time to seal a difficult-to-seal eco-container back up?

I looked around the lunchroom. Everyone looked suspicious but no one was eating any Oreos as far as I could see. I watched carefully all through lunch. Izzy did too. Nothing.

“Check teeth!” I hissed at him.

We paced through the lunchroom, trying to look inconspicuous as we searched for someone with black stuff caught between their teeth. Honestly, I don’t know what we would have done if we found someone who did. It would be hard to prove that it came from Oreos rather than a Ho Ho or something like that. Besides which, neither Izzy nor I are what you would call confrontational. Yes, Izzy is the biggest person in the school, but he’s more of a pacifist than I am. And I’m only a pacifist because I’m terrified of getting hurt. My sister, Jeremy, on the other hand, is always happy to pummel someone, especially if it’s on my behalf. But Jeremy’s grade has lunch before ours, so she wasn’t around.

My eyes fell on Mason Ragg, who was sitting at our usual table. He was placed in my class a week and half ago. He’d been transferred from one of the other public schools. The word around school was that he’d been transferred because he was “unmanageable.” That was another thing about the Martha Doxie School—they prided themselves in enrolling kids who didn’t fit in at mainstream schools, including bona fide psychopaths, like Mason Ragg. People said that he carried a switchblade knife in his sock. They said in his last school, he had tried to strangle one of the girls in his class with her Molly Wildchild necklace (you’ve probably seen the commercials for the junk, but if you haven’t, it’s this lavender-haired cartoon character that girls just go insane over. Not Jeremy, though, of course). The girl’s older brother threw an M-80 firecracker at Mason’s face in retaliation. That was the story that went around school anyway. It was certainly possible. One whole side of his face was badly scarred. The skin was all bumpy and puckered, twisting up the right side of his lips so that he looked like he was always sneering. He resembled an evil character out of a comic book, no kidding, and he always looked like he was trying to catch someone staring at him.