Adam Selzer Read online

  People who thought a kid might ask that, even in an anonymous pamphlet, clearly didn’t know a thing about whether we were actually normal. They were just doofuses.

  Or is the plural for that “doofi”?

  I was on a roll at that point, so I called up Anna to ask her to play cello on the sound track, then had a pretty weird experience calling Jenny Kurosawa to ask if she’d jam along on her clarinet. Her parents really gave me the third degree until I convinced them that I was calling in regards to a school project. They were known to be pretty strict; Jenny was the only person I know who was ever discouraged from reading. She had to hide her science-fiction paperbacks under her bed because her mother was known to throw books that weren’t assigned by a teacher into the trash. But after some arguing, they let her on the phone, and she was more than eager to get involved in the project, provided that I never even hint to her parents what kind of movie it was.

  And Brian, who had a lot of recording gear and microphones and stuff, said he could record the music and narration.

  Everything was set up for the movie—all I needed was the kissing scene, which Brian and Edie were all set to do, and the explosion.

  I didn’t care what Mr. Streich said—one way or another, there was going to be an explosion.

  This was not about getting a good grade.

  This was about making a film that would wake the kids out of their stupor and tell them once and for all that all the things they were worried about were perfectly normal.

  This was about art.

  When I got to school the next morning, I was riding high. I bummed my way through the morning scribbling ideas into my notebook, not paying a word of attention to any of the teachers. That was nothing new.

  At lunch, Dustin handed me a sheet of paper and said, “How’s this for the narration?”

  “You’re done already?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t very hard,” he said. “I wrote it during social studies.”

  I looked down at it. It was written in the form of a sonnet.

  La Dolce Pubert Narration

  by Dustin Eddlebeck

  We were weirdos once, and young, Naked against the dawning of our teen years, with thoughts we’d never express with a tongue, about lust, and doubts, and dreams, and fears. But all was normal, everything, every change, every thought that kept us up, feeling like hell, and even though at first it felt strange, all of the whacking was normal, as well. Renegade pituitary glands controlled our minds like the school system only wished it could, but as we grew older, each of us would find that it was totally normal, and generally good. We stood against adulthood’s door, trying to comprehend, and hoping to score.

  “That’s totally bizarre,” I said. “It’s perfect.”

  “Renegade pituitary glands?” asked Anna. “That’s an odd metaphor.”

  “It works,” insisted Dustin. “Wanna hear the second one?

  “Of course,” I said.

  He cleared his throat and began.

  “Everybody lost sleep thinking of size. Hair was growing. Our bodies were growing, sometimes too fast, or too slowly to rise, and it scared us to death, even though knowing that all was quite normal, nothing was wrong with the thoughts in our heads in the night like the chorus and riffs of our favorite songs, which led to the whacking-—it was normal and right. Our bodies slouched toward sweet maturity to be fully grown, developing more with each breath as one day our minds would tip toward senility and finally pull us to the cold night of death. Feel, while you can, the sweet kiss of your youth that brings forth the blissful explosion of truth.”

  The entire table was silent for a second while we figured out what to make of the whole thing. Anna spoke first.

  “Blissful explosion of truth?” she asked. “How does youth bring forth a blissful explosion of truth? That’s cheesy.”

  “It rhymes,” Dustin said defensively.

  “I like how you end with a line about a kiss and then one about an explosion,” I said. “I should read those two lines very slowly underneath the kissing scene and the explosion at the end. But it is sort of cheesy.”

  “Underlining the creation and destruction dichotomy,” Anna said, nodding. “That works.”

  “You know you mentioned that whacking off is normal in both of those, right?” asked Brian.

  Dustin snickered. “Some kids probably need to hear that as often as they can, man.”

  This was true. I wished I’d heard that from another kid in sixth grade—I just still wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to be the one to tell the others. It was sort of a loud admission that I did it myself. But I put that out of my mind for the time being.

  “That’s vulgar,” came a voice from behind. I turned around to see that Joe Griffin had been standing behind us, probably the entire time.

  “What’s vulgar about it?” I asked.

  “All that talk about masturbation. It’s vulgar. Plus you use the h-word.”

  Joe Griffin was probably the last kid in the world who thought “hell” was a serious cuss word.

  “What’s your point?” asked Anna. “That kids in middle school don’t do it?”

  “You shouldn’t be telling them to do it,” he said, shaking his head a little.

  “What are you going to do, Joe?” I asked. “Have your dad sue me for spreading pro-whacking-off propaganda in the schools? Get Mrs. Smollet to beat me up?” She probably would.

  “It’s sacrilegious,” said Joe.

  “This isn’t a Catholic school,” said Anna.

  I knew from previous religious arguments with Joe—which was about the only kind of conversation I ever seemed to have with him—that he thought Catholics were sacrilegious, too, for some reason, but I couldn’t remember exactly why.

  “You still shouldn’t try to corrupt kids,” he said. “It’s better to be tied to a millstone in the ocean than to turn children against God.”

  “So I’ll be going to hell for this, then?” I asked. “You get to decide that?”

  He shook his head. “God does,” he said.

  “Hell is only for those who believe in it,” said Edie.

  “Well,” said Joe, “I believe in it.”

  Oh, man, I thought, just hoping no one would beat me to the joke. Verily, God had delivered him unto my hands.

  “Well then, off you go!” I said. “I hope you’ll send us a postcard.”

  Everyone laughed, and Brian gave me a high five.

  Joe walked away at that point, apparently unable to think of a good comeback for that one. In a way, I almost felt sorry for the guy. His heart was in the right place—you could say that he just didn’t want us to go to hell and was concerned. In reality, though, it always seemed more like he just thought he was going to heaven and assumed that we weren’t, and wanted to rub that in our faces. I wondered how he’d react if he got to heaven and found all of us already there? Maybe he’d apply to move to Valhalla.

  “Anyway,” I said, getting back on topic, “those are perfect.” I dug into my backpack and retrieved four plastic bottles of ketchup, which I gave to Dustin, per our agreement.

  “I have an idea for something else we could do, a new scene,” said Anna, after he was safely gone. “And I’ll bet we could get out of sixth period to do it.”

  “Then I’m game for anything!” I said. I didn’t care if what we were doing was filming ourselves scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush and singing show tunes, if it got me out of sixth period.

  So we left lunch early to go to the office, where we explained that we needed permission to leave sixth period for work on a project for the advanced studies class, and got permission right away, as we usually could. You could almost always get permission to get out of a class if you mentioned something to do with the gifted pool. I think they were afraid that if they said no, we’d use our gifted intellects against them or something. And they were right.

  Anna and I met back at the office before sixth period and signed out to do “advanced studies wo
rk.”

  “You still haven’t told me what we’re doing,” I said as we walked out of the office.

  “Well, first of all, we’re going to check out a camera from the media immersion room,” Anna said.

  “What about after that?”

  “You’ll see!”

  We checked out the camera in her name; then I followed her down the hall toward the gym, and we walked up to Coach Hunter, whose powers were useless against us, since we weren’t there for gym class.

  “We’d like to borrow the CPR dummy,” she said. “It’s for activity period.” She showed him the pass the office had given us.

  Old Coach Hunter rolled his eyes a bit; he tended to do that whenever he was confronted with a school issue that didn’t involve throwing balls or doing push-ups. But he led us to a little utility closet and dug around until he found the dummy.

  The CPR dummy was a mannequin with no legs that we had used the year before, when we’d all had to take a day-long CPR course. We used it for practicing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which could hardly have been very sanitary; if one person in the class had had mono, all of us would have gotten it. It seemed to me that a course in something like CPR should be, well, safe, but the whole class had an air of irrationality about it. The people who taught it were always asking us weird worst-case-scenario questions, like “What do you do if you walk into the garage and find that someone has swallowed a bottle of acid, and, in the confusion that followed, cut off one of their arms with a chain saw?”

  I really should have paid attention, because, knowing my dad, the idea that that sort of thing might actually happen wasn’t out of the question. But I replied, “Steal their wallet, because they’re probably already dead, and try to get a head start on the cleanup.” I ended up failing that course.

  Anna grabbed the dummy from Coach Hunter and thanked him; then we walked off to the room where the gifted pool met. Mrs. Smollet was sitting there, doing paperwork and eating something out of a little cardboard carton.

  “Hi, Mrs. Smollet!” Anna greeted her, using all the phony cheer she could muster.

  “Oh, hello!” she said, looking surprised to see us. “Can I help you?”

  “We’re just doing some work for the movie,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Is that why you need a naked dummy?”

  She really said that. I’m not making that up.

  “Well,” I said, “they don’t really make CPR dummies that wear clothes.”

  “I could take off mine and loan it to the dummy,” Anna offered. I was sure she didn’t mean it and had just said it to see the look of horror on Mrs. Smollet’s face. She couldn’t have been disappointed; Mrs. Smollet looked like she was about to have a coronary.

  “Well, you’re not doing anything…untoward…with it, are you?” she asked. “Because I can’t let you do anything obscene.”

  “Well,” said Anna, “okay, but we might just have to edit some things out, because this dummy has a really dirty mind.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The poor girl has been choking to death so long she’s forgotten about the power of positive thinking.”

  Mrs. Smollet sighed. “Okay. Just be careful,” she said, and she went back to her paperwork and food.

  Anna laid the dummy faceup on the couch, arranging the arms as well as she could.

  “Okay,” she said. “Now we just have to make it look weird. Help me out.”

  We spent the next few minutes digging around the room looking for stuff to put around the dummy. In the end, the dummy had a marker sticking out of its mouth, a pencil stuck in each ear, and a sign on its chest that read U R NORMAL. Then I got the idea that we could take a few shots of it, with a different sign each time. So, by the time we were done, we’d filmed the CPR dummy holding signs that said U R NORMAL, USE A CONDOM, I GROW HAIR, and I AM A DOG FROM ANDALUSIA. None of them really made much sense, except for the one about the condom, which was good advice, but all of them were fairly avant-garde.

  The whole time, Mrs. Smollet sat there doing paperwork, though she couldn’t resist turning to stare at us now and then. She never said anything; she was looking at us like we were plotting some sort of raid on the school.

  And we were. In a way.

  The next morning I was in the media immersion room fifteen minutes before the bell, using the editing machine to splice everything together into a rough draft of the movie—though it wouldn’t have music or the narration. Just a rough cut of the shots I had. Like a demo version. I kept working all through activity period, and fifteen minutes before the bell rang, I had a cut ready to show to the class—it would just need sound, the kiss scene, and the explosion before anyone outside the class could see it. The kiss/explosion thing would make or break the whole movie, honestly. It had to go out with a bang.

  It was only when I got up to tell Mr. Streich I was ready to show the movie to the class that I noticed that Mrs. Smollet had been sitting in the room the entire time.

  “Finishing up, Leon?” she asked, trying to seem friendly and doing a lousy job of it.

  “It’s a rough cut,” I explained. “It still needs a couple of important shots, but I’m going to show this version to the class today.”

  “Mind if I watch it with you?” she asked, as though I had a choice.

  “I can’t stop you,” I said. Mrs. Smollet had a weird sort of position. Since she was just a program director, not a regular teacher, she really didn’t have as much power as most of the people in the school. But what power she did have followed her everywhere she went, unlike some teachers, whose power was greatly diminished outside of their classrooms. Mrs. Smollet’s even stretched to the high school, where she ran a couple of other programs.

  Mr. Streich wheeled a TV to the front of the room, and everybody gathered around to see how my movie looked. Despite the fact that I knew I was going to have a lot of explaining to do to Mrs. Smollet, possibly including the very facts of life, I had rarely been more excited in my life. I was a filmmaker!

  The movie started with just a few seconds of the words “La Dolce Pubert” on a plain screen, and I started to read the narration aloud. Then the first shot of naked artwork came in. There were a few paintings in a row, followed by a shot or two of bad-looking food, one shot of the dummy, then some footage I’d shot the night before of boiling water, which represented hormones that were about to go out of control. I was surprised by just how much it still really needed the music and the kissing and explosion scenes; those would tie it all together.

  Everyone thought it looked pretty cool, though, whether it was tied together or not.

  “Right on!” said Brian. “I wish they’d shown that to me when I was in sixth grade!”

  “It’s not really done yet,” I said, for the second or third time. “It still needs those two last scenes, and then I’ll probably change a bit more when I edit it again. Then there’s the music.”

  “Still,” said Edie, “it looks great the way it is! I can’t wait to film my scene!” She grinned at Brian like a cat in heat.

  Even Mr. Streich was about to say something nice when he was interrupted by Mrs. Smollet, who had been taking notes the entire time, only occasionally looking up at the screen.

  “I’m going to need a copy of that,” she said. She didn’t seem happy. Then again, unless she was making some kid dress up like a famous composer or something as part of a project, she never seemed all that happy.

  “What for?” I asked. She started to fumble around a bit.

  “I’ll need to submit a copy of it to the school board before they can show it to the younger kids,” she said. “That’s all. It’s just a formality. And I’ll need a copy of the text you’re using for the narration.”

  It was clear from her tone that that certainly wasn’t all, but I had no choice but to give her the tape.

  “I’m not sure I know about that policy,” said Mr. Streich. “Are you sure that’s standard?”

  “With sex ed it is,” said Mrs. Smoll
et. “The board reviews every sex-ed film before it gets shown to make sure there’s nothing that’ll get us sued.”

  “I’ll need it back tonight, if that’s possible,” I said as politely as I could manage.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  I took the narration over to the copy machine and ran off a duplicate for her.

  As she walked out of the room with the tape and the text, I ran over to the editing board to grab the master tape. I didn’t know what the hell Mrs. Smollet really wanted a copy for—maybe it turned her on or something to see all the paintings of naked guys—but I was certainly glad that all she had was a copy. If I never got that one back, I could make another from the master in no time.

  The whole thing about having to have the video reviewed by the school board didn’t please me much, though the image of all of them sitting around eating popcorn and watching every sex-ed movie under the sun to decide what was appropriate and what wasn’t sort of amused me. I’d hoped they’d just have an assembly where they’d pop the student-made movies in, one after the other, and I’d take them by surprise. If I had to be approved by a board, I knew that I might not make it. If I didn’t, would that affect my grade?

  It didn’t matter. I’d manage to show it to the kids somehow.

  Two hours later, while I was in history class, one of the kids who worked in the office came in and handed Coach Wilkins a note, who handed it to me.

  I was to report to the office immediately. It seemed I was being suspended.

  Getting suspended in middle school is not the sort of disaster than can genuinely ruin your life. A lot of kids worry that getting suspended will go on their permanent record, but that’s a bunch of crap. Even by the end of elementary school, I knew that there wasn’t really any such thing as a permanent record, and further knew that no prospective employer or college was going to call up the school asking for a copy of my record and then decide to reject my application because I once got in trouble in eighth grade. I mean, really! How would that work? If there was some great folder of everything I had ever done in school, which I could never access or see, why would some McDonald’s manager be able to get a copy on demand? It’s all just silly, if you think about it. I suppose they probably keep a record of your grades, address, and all that in their filing cabinet, in case you get famous and people in the future need proof that you went to school, but that’s all.