Sorta Like a Rock Star (5 page)

I know my window is tiny, because once the game starts my boys are gone, so I say, “Franks, we doing a Marketing Club announcement today?”

Marketing Club is basically an extension of Franks’ marketing classes. Only once a year we compete against other schools in these debates about marketing strategies and also we do these marketing presentations in front of judges for points. My boys and even Franks wear suits to the competitions and I usually wear one of Donna’s killer business skirt suits. Pretty wild stuff. If you get enough points, you can win and go on to the national competition. We’ve never made it past regionals.

Franks is always trying to get more people to join M.C., because his job is always on the line when it comes to district budget cuts. His marketing classes are electives, and while they are usually full—because he teaches classes like Marketing Video Games, Make and Market Your Own Movie, and my personal favorite, The Business End of the Rap Game—he’s not exactly a PTA favorite, nor do many of the Childress parents take him all that seriously.

Franks is maybe only five-six, he weighs close to three hundred pounds, and he hasn’t cut his hair in years—sporting the gray ponytail look. To make matters worse, he wears these little photosensitive glasses that make him look sorta like a cross between Buddha and Lennon. (John—like, of The Beatles—not to be confused with that Russian dude, Vlad.)

“You write it, and I’ll read it,” Franks says, his eyes locked onto the screen ready to do space battle with teenage boys.

“Cool,” I say, sitting down at Franks’ teacher desk near the whiteboard.

“You can have half of my Sausage Egg McMuffin. It’s in drawer number two,” Franks says to me. “I’m watching my figure. And the top drawer is filled with peanut M&Ms, as always.”

“Donna fed me,” I tell Franks.

“Cool,” he says.

Aside from the occasional curse words muttered and the post-killing taunting, it’s easy to write when the boys are playing Halo 3, because the game distracts them and keeps them all pretty quiet.

Ricky never kills anyone in the game, and no one kills him, because he is diagnosed with autism and just likes running around in the virtual world, stimming out. And I have to say I love that my boys are cool with this—I love their letting Ricky play Halo 3 in his own pacifistic way. My boys are good people. Word.

So I write up the ad for Marketing Club, trying to make Franks sound hip, but also trying to write something that he won’t read over the morning announcements, because I’ve never stumped him yet. There is an art to this, because I know he isn’t going to read curse words or anything like that, so writing profanity into the ad would just be cheap and pointless and the opposite of urbane.

I’m halfway through the writing of the ad when I look up at the big-framed picture on Franks’ desk. His little mean-looking redheaded wife is on the beach surrounded by Franks’ six little redheaded children. Franks’ head is sticking out of the sand by their feet—big head, little glasses. They buried him to the neck and then had someone snap the photo. I think about what would happen to Franks’ kids—who are all less than ten years old—if he got canned.

“Yo, Franks!” I say, but he doesn’t answer me, because he is playing the dumb video game, but I know he hears me, so I say, “You going to the school board meeting tonight?”

Silence.

“Franks?”

The sound of buttons being pushed rapidly by boy thumbs.

“FRANKS!”

“It’s of this world,” Franks says, which is what he says about everything. He means that he only worries about what will happen after this world, when God takes him to heaven, because he’s a Catholic like me, and he has a super faith in JC.

Now I have faith in JC too, but I also know what it’s like to live on a school bus.

“Maybe you should go, Franks. Think of your children, bro,” I say, because tonight’s when they are deciding whether to cut the marketing department’s funding and if they do that, Franks will lose his job at the end of the year. But no worries. Me and The Five are not going to let that happen. We have a killer plan. We’re doing a mission.

My boys, all except Ricky, shoot me nervous glances, because they don’t want Franks to know what we are doing for him—they prefer to be anonymous do-gooders. So I flash them a thumbs-up to reassure them I know what the hell I’m doing.

“My family’s never missed a meal,” Franks says, like a man who has never missed a meal, because he doesn’t know what it’s like to be homeless. But it’s all good in the hood, because I’m not going to let any bad hooey happen to Franks or his redheaded kids.

“Can I give you a hug today, Franks?” I say, because I’ve always wanted to hug Franks ever since we met in his The Art of Marketing Junk Food class.

“Against school policy,” he says.

“Someday, I’m going to give you a big old hug. Teddy bear–style.”

“Maybe when you graduate,” he says just as Ty and Jared start moaning again. “Undefeated Halo 3 champs! Our streak is still alive, brother!”

From his wheelchair, Chad says, “Who’s your poppa?”

Chad and Franks slap hands and then touch elbows before slapping hands again. Man stuff.

Just as I finish the last line of the MC ad, the five-minute warning bell sounds, so I stand by the door and, as they exit, I hand each one of my boys a piece of paper folded into a swan—origami style. Inside all of the swans are coded instructions regarding where to meet and at what time, plus their individual speeches for tonight, written by yours truly. Jared made up our code two years back and we all have it memorized. (It’s just each letter plus 1, so that
A
s are written as
B
s and
B
s are written as
C
s and so forth. Not overly secure, but it stumps most of the morons in our school. True.) And as they walk through Franks’ door, I give each of my boys a pat on the butt too, like I am a football coach or something. The pat on the butt makes my boys blush and smile. I have to pinch Chad on the cheek because he’s in a motorized wheelchair and all, but I get him blushing too.

“Ricky Roberts wants a paper swan–coded message like everyone else in the—”

“How does Ricky Roberts receive information?” I ask him.

“On a need-to-know basis. Yes.”

“You only have five minutes to get to homeroom,” I say, and then Ricky is off.

Back inside of his lair, I hand Franks the Marketing Club ad and say, “Read that over the loudspeaker—if you dare.”

“Cool,” Franks says with a smile.

“Hug?”

“Homeroom,” Franks says, raising his chubby hand.

I slap his red palm, and then I’m on my way to homeroom.

“Rub-a-dub-dub, it’s Marketing Club! What’s the rub, bub? Nada. MC for real, with plenty of zeal—and that’s the appeal! Do you have what it takes—to slake—the growing desire for marketing and advertising fo’ hire? We meet in the basement every day, hey, so what do you say? Drop on down, give Franks a pound. Become a Marketing Club man or woman today. Peace out, homies! And keep hope alive!”

Sitting in homeroom, I smile to myself. Franks read my announcement verbatim, just like he promised. He’s an honorable man, a man of his word, which is rare in this world, or at least that’s what I’ve observed after seventeen trips around the flaming ball in the sky. (That’s the sun, sucka!) Everyone around me is talking and totally not paying any attention to the announcements; not even my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Lindsay, listens or gives a crap, but I know that there are at least four teenage boys sitting in homerooms hysterically laughing at my advertisement and Franks’ awesome delivery—and I know that it might be the only laugh they get today. Franks Freak Force Federation will get a little fuel from this, and maybe that will be enough for them to make it through the school day. “Keep hope alive.” I’m pretty sure Jesse Jackson said that when he was running for president back in the 80s. Yeah, we learned that hip catchphrase in my U.S. History II class a few months ago.

The day passes uneventfully—boring Spanish III, lame-ass gym, boring pre-calc, boring chemistry—and since Mondays and Tuesdays are Ricky’s socialization days, we don’t eat our lunch in Franks’ room, but in the cafeteria, because the special education department thinks that Ricky should interact with the student body more. Great idea, special education people who have no idea how evil the student body can be to special people like Ricky Roberts.

When I’m in the lunch line, watching over Ricky, protecting my boy, Lex Pinkston elbows me in the back and coughs out a disgusting single syllable word for a woman, which I’m not even going to repeat. He pretends to cover his mouth and cough, because he is a moron, but it is clear that he is calling me this worst of all words, so I say, “Like you’d even know what one was.”

“I’ve seen your mom’s,” Lex says, five moronic football players standing behind him. “Everyone in this town has.”

I slap his face hard enough to turn his head—
SLAP!
—and it makes me smile, even though I’m a Catholic and JC is not down with violence.

And then Lex’s hand is on his face. He cannot believe that I frickin’ slapped him.

The football morons are shocked as hooey—their pieholes wide open, like their eyes.

Ricky is screaming, “Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!”

The lunchroom monitors show up, get between us, and the next thing I know I’m in Prince Tony’s office, waiting for him to finish some stupid phone conversation. When he finishes, he looks at me from across his battleship-size desk and says, “What now?”

“Your quarterback called me a disgusting single-syllable word for a woman—which I’m not even going to repeat—and then implied that he had sex with my mother, so I slapped his kisser,” I say, and then add, “Prince Tony.”

“It’s Principal Fiorilli to you, young lady.”

“Come on, Prince, we’re behind closed doors. Just us here,” I say to the tiny man, because he is weak and can be swayed if you flirt with him the right way—not in a sexy way, but in a father-daughter sorta way.

He turns red, and I know I have him.

“I heard you kicked him in the shin yesterday. His father called to complain and—”

“Lex Pinkston is an evil boy who—”

“I know exactly who Lex Pinkston is and his father—”

“I prayed for you last night, Prince Tony.”

“You did?” He doesn’t know how to react to this one. Church and state and all. This is a public school. “Why did you
pray
for me?”

“I pray for you every night. True.”

“Thank you,” he says, blushing again.

“When are you going to start protecting the good people of Childress Public High School?”

“What would you have me do?”

“Expel Lex Pinkston.”

“For what?”

“For being evil.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“So you are admitting Lex Pinkston is evil?”

“
I said
it’s not that easy.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“First, Mr. Pinkston is a school board member and we have to be delicate when—
why am I explaining myself to a seventeen-year-old girl?
”

“I’m going to say one thing to you, Prince Tony, and then I’m going to walk out that door.”

I stare into his eyes, and I see him swallow once. He digs me, and he knows that Lex Pinkston needs to be kicked in the shin and slapped every so often, if only to maintain the balance of power within the student body so that evil doesn’t get out of control; the boss man sees this because deep down, Prince Tony is a good man—even if he is a wimp who plays both sides of the political fence—and like Billy Budd, Prince Tony needs a Captain Vere to protect him from the evil people in the world. I fancy myself a more adroit and less dreamy, less starry Captain Vere. Captainess Appleton, at your service. Word, all you lime-suckers.

“You’re a good man, Prince Tony,” I say, “and I believe that you will eventually clean up this school and protect the common students from the selfish interests of school board members like Mr. Pinkston. My money’s on you, Prince Tony.
My money is on you
.”

I get up and start walking out of his office.

“You simply cannot assault students in my building, Ms. Appleton. I will not endure your vigilante approach to—”

“Search your heart, Prince Tony. You know what’s the right thing to do. I believe in you. And I’m praying for you. Every night.”

I walk out of his office, and his ancient wrinkly secretary Mrs. Baxter—who wears the reddest lipstick I have ever seen on any woman, and looks like a patriot with blue hair and white skin—asks me, “How’d it go in there?”

Mrs. Baxter is pretty nice, and I think it’s safe to say she’s an Amber Appleton fan.

“I’m praying for your boss,” I tell her. “He has the ability to turn this school around.”

“If he only had the chutzpah,” she whispers, with her hand shielding her ancient lips so that only I can see.

“Viva la revolution, Mrs. Baxter,” I say as she writes me a pass, and then I jog up two flights of stairs so I can check out Doolin’s Accelerated American Lit class, where I learn all about civil disobedience and that cool cat Henry David Thoreau, whom I admire a whole bunch, because he represented hard-core and even went to jail for his beliefs, which is saying something. True? True.