Adam Selzer Read online

  “So,” he continued, “I’ve made a little bit of progress so far. I just need to find ways to make it a lot less dangerous. And, as part of your punishment, you’re going to be helping me on Monday night.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  “And,” he said, “you’re also going to help your mother cook dinner before that. But I was going to make you do that anyway, so it’s not really a part of your punishment.”

  I nodded and headed upstairs to my room and lay down in my bed, hoping to get the night over with. I let everything from the day run through my head. Self-lighting matches. The Monks. Anna walking away from the house alone in the dark and not caring, not even worrying that she might get in trouble, since her parents trusted her. All the faces of the kids from Fat Johnny’s. Wendt on the table. Edie and Brian making out. Anna grabbing my Coke. Jamie cheating at Skee-Ball. I tried to remember everything everyone had said. Pretty soon it felt almost like I was in a trance, and I thought maybe if I concentrated hard enough, I might be able to have one of those out-of-body experiences where you turn into a ghost and float around a bit, with your body still lying in bed. If that happened, I’d float over to Anna’s house and take her by surprise, assuming that having ghosts show up wasn’t a regular occurrence at her house. But both of us—me and my ghost, if I had one—stayed put.

  Anna once told me that the word for the state of being not quite awake but not quite asleep is “hypnogogic.” That’s what I was, lying in bed that night. Hypnogogic. I was awake but still having dreams. After the images of the pizza place faded, there were dreams about the old woman in the painting, who all of a sudden scared the crap out of me. In the dreams, she was following me around with that pissed-off look on her face, haunting me as punishment for laughing at her. Eventually I forced myself to get out of bed, looked out the window, and tried to see if I could find the house where the painting was. I know it’s stupid, but I was very relieved when I didn’t see it.

  So, feeling a little less frightened, I got back into bed and fell asleep. Not just half asleep, but really asleep.

  The dreams were better that way. One of them was about Anna.

  There’s this feeling I always get on Saturday afternoons, sitting around in the living room, watching the dust blow around in the sunlight that beams in through the blinds. Like there’s nothing going on, and I ought to be bored, but I’m just not, and things are only going to get better over the next day or so. Like being excited and bored at the same time. I don’t think there’s a word for it. At least, not in English. Maybe they have one in Japanese.

  After I woke up I watched TV for as long as I could stand it, which, on Saturday afternoon, wasn’t all that long. There wasn’t much on besides golf tournaments, and I think you have to be in a coma to watch golf on television. You might just as well watch people knitting. Actually, if people used those knitting needles as swords in between working on pot holders, knitting might be a good thing to see on TV. A little violence can go a long way; imagine how much more fun figure skating could be if they had two figure skaters duking it out on the ice. Combat figure skating. I’d watch that.

  Still, bad TV or not, I never did venture out of the house, not for the whole weekend. Since the first two weeks of school were over, the unofficial grace period had passed and teachers would be giving homework right and left. I knew I had to relax while I still had the chance.

  By eight-thirty on Monday, it was quite apparent that everyone else knew that the year had started in earnest, too. When the principal went on the intercom to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance, I noticed that a bunch of people were saying joke pledges, like “one nation, under pants, in the vestibule, with silky see-through garters for all.”

  That was just the start. By the end of homeroom, it was clear that the whole “well-behaved” facade was over. Jerks were throwing paper around and thinking it was the funniest damn thing ever. Kids were having contests to see who could say “penis” the loudest without getting caught by the teacher. Danny Nelson was going around with a clipboard, collecting money and laying two-to-one odds that Nick Malley and Jenny Levin would be broken up by the end of the week. Classes were loud and obnoxious, and the general attitude was not one of maturity. As much as all the jerks in class drove me crazy from time to time, it was good to know they hadn’t all gone soft.

  I had this guy named Coach Wilkins for history. Now, it was a strict rule of mine never to trust a man who insisted on being called “Coach,” but at least Wilkins knew his stuff, and he really got into his history lectures. Watching him teach was like watching a preacher on one of those Christian Big Hair channels. He’d get all excited, shouting and waving his hands around and even jumping up and down when the mood struck him. I wasn’t sure what exactly he coached.

  “People in the 1830s believed that it was America’s destiny to expand all the way to the Pacific Ocean!” he shouted. “Can anyone tell me what the name of this concept was?”

  “Manifest Destiny,” someone muttered.

  “Manifest Destiny!” he roared, raising his fist in the air like he was imitating either the Statue of Liberty or Malcolm X. “Expand America’s territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean!” He pounded his fist hard on his desk for each of the last few words; he did that so often that it was a miracle his desk hadn’t cracked. I suppose we were lucky that he wasn’t teaching in some sort of costume, though I figured that that couldn’t be far off. I’m not sure what movie it was that convinced teachers that dressing up like a cowboy made you a great teacher, but more than one had tried it over the years. One had even stopped calling us students and started calling us “varmints.” Even after he stopped wearing the costume.

  Had he been alive during the Revolutionary War, I’m sure Wilkins would have been the guy grabbing his musket and running toward the British army screaming, like he was having the time of his life, while everyone else was marching in formation. Then, when they were all huddled around the fire, tending their wounds and trying not to starve or freeze to death, he would have been saying, “Come on, you guys! Let’s all sing ‘Yankee Doodle’ for the three hundredth time!” He would probably have been hanged from the highest tree early on. I pictured this series of events in my mind fairly often; maybe after La Dolce Pubert I could make a movie called Wilkins Goes to War. Or maybe The Road to Cornersville, like all those war movies with Bob Hope that my grandfather has on video.

  I didn’t really go in for the paper-throwing or “penis”-shouting matches, but I still sat in the back row. Everyone knows that not only are classes more exciting in the back row, but the back row is also better for grabbing a nap or for working on a drawing instead of taking notes, which is what I was doing. I had this great thing going where every few classes I’d do a drawing in the top corner of a sheet of notebook paper, and some of them weren’t half bad. I had a good drawing of a knight on a mountain and one of the back of a guy’s head, as he was staring down a road at a UFO. Every now and then I’d fantasize about collecting all of them into a book called Corner Drawings that could maybe set the art world on fire.

  About midway through class, Coach Wilkins looked up and noticed that there were a handful of students in the front couple of rows and the rest of us were in the back. The middle rows were like a little gulf of empty desks.

  “Can all of you in the back move up a few rows, please?” he asked. “I’d like to have everyone sitting up close.”

  “It’s Manifest Destiny!” I shouted, raising my fist toward the ceiling. “We’re going to expand our classroom all the way to the back wall!”

  You don’t have to be smart to be a smartass. But it helps.

  He stared at me for a couple of minutes. Well, it seemed like a couple of minutes. It was probably just a couple of seconds.

  “Well,” he said, “at least you’re paying attention.”

  I wasn’t really.

  When my corner drawing—a Picasso-style abstract portrait of a cowboy—was finished, I started scribbling dow
n ideas for the video. We were all supposed to turn in outlines of our movies in activity period the next day. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to manage the whole “sperm cell flying over Rome” sort of thing, but there was a lot I could still probably do on no real budget. Pretty soon, I had it together.

  The opening would be a whole bunch of pictures of famous paintings of naked people, along with a whole bunch of weird stuff that didn’t seem to make sense. Like if I showed a bunch of tadpoles swimming around. It would seem weird, but then someone might notice that tadpoles looked sort of like sperm, which would make it all make sense. Sort of.

  There would be rock music in the background the whole time, plus a narration about how everyone changes, everyone thinks about sex, everyone jacks off, and it’s all totally normal, even if the movie itself wasn’t normal at all. That was a nice touch, I thought. Having the movie not be normal to show kids that they were. Then, of course, I would end it with a kiss scene, then an explosion. Avant-garde art was always showing things like that—an act of love followed by an act of pure destruction. It made some sort of point.

  Yeah, that looked like a pretty good start to me. I knew I would have to find ways to get a bit odder, and maybe a bit more explicit, but I was off to a good start. I would still have to write a script for voice-overs. I was relying on the fact that Mr. Streich had said we could find a way to blow something up to get the explosion in there. That was really the make-or-break moment of the film, the ending that would determine whether the kids who saw it cheered and clapped or just said, “Well, the nudity was okay.”

  I finished off the rest of my morning by scribbling, in letters too tiny and light to be visible to the naked eye, “Anna likes Leon…. Anna: Ask Leon out…,” and trying to send a psychic message in her direction, which I knew wouldn’t work, but which certainly couldn’t hurt anything.

  At lunch I wandered over to the table where Anna and most of the rest of the advanced studies gang was sitting. If she was going to follow my psychic advice, she didn’t indicate it at all when I sat down. She just said “Hey.”

  James Cole, the French-speaking pot smoker, was wearing sunglasses, probably trying to cover up having been stoned or wasted the night before. Or maybe he’d been stoned a month earlier and was afraid that it might still be showing. “Bonjour, assmonkey,” he said. I knew he didn’t mean any offense; it seemed like he came up with a different thing to call people every Monday. “Assmonkey” was just his vocabulary word of the week.

  “Voltaire was the best French-language playwright of the eighteenth century,” said Dustin Eddlebeck. James shrugged. He had learned French as a toddler, when his dad was stationed in the south of France; just because he spoke French didn’t mean he went around reading French plays all the time.

  “Voltaire’s plays sucked,” said Anna, who should know, what with her parents being scholars of the era and all.

  “Maybe,” said Dustin, “but they had a lot of sex in them, right?”

  “Not really. You should read some of them,” said Anna.

  “There’s sex in them,” he maintained. “You just have to read between the lines.” Dustin would not be satisfied until he’d read every sex scene in classical literature, and he was pretty sure that just about every character in every classic book was having sex with every other character if you read between the lines—the writers just had to be sneaky about it in the old days.

  Now, I don’t wish to imply that I don’t care about sex or that I don’t think about it; hell, if I dedicated all the time I spent thinking about sex to working on, say, learning to speak Italian, I would have been fluent by the end of seventh grade.

  Dustin Eddlebeck, however, was just plain sick. In seventh grade, part of sex ed was showing us a video of a baby being born, and though this indeed meant seeing actual nudity in the classroom, and I’m talking full-on shots of parts you don’t normally even see in Playboy, it was entirely too disgusting to be arousing. However, whenever they show that sort of thing, there’s always one kid who sits there grinning and going, “Whoa, mama!” or something like that. Dustin Eddlebeck was that kid. You could show him a picture of a shaved camel and it would turn him on, if he had ever been turned off to begin with. Which I doubt.

  Brian slid into the seat right next to Edie and flipped his hair out of his eyes.

  “I think I might get to see Dr. Guff today,” he said, smiling. “Coach Hummel caught me drawing band logos on my jeans with a permanant marker and said he was going to recommend that I get counseling.” Brian’s jeans were regularly decorated with logos of every metal band known to man.

  “He’s probably just joshing you,” said James.

  “Yeah,” said Brian. “But I can dream.”

  A couple of people from the gifted pool had been sent to talk to Dr. Guff, the school shrink, for one reason or another, and they’d all come back with wild stories about what they’d told him. James Cole swore that he answered every question by singing a few bars of “Alice’s Restaurant,” by Arlo Guthrie, which I’d never heard, though Anna told me she’d play it for me sometime. Dustin saw Dr. Guff once and claimed to have told him he’d lost his virginity at nine to a female truck driver in South Bend, Indiana.

  Personally, I wasn’t sure whether to believe a word of it—no one knew much about Dr. Guff, not even where his office was, and there were no pictures of him. I couldn’t find a single mention of him on the Internet. I sort of suspected that he might just be a legend, like Bigfoot or the giant mutant spider some kids in my first-grade class claimed to have found in a drainage ditch one day.

  Whether these stories were true was irrelevant; we spent lots of time thinking of funny things to say to Dr. Guff, like claiming that we were pretty sure that our parents were cantaloupes or that we thought God was a space alien.

  Anna turned to me and said, “Do you have your outline for the video ready yet?”

  “You bet,” I said. I dug it out of my backpack and handed it to her. She looked at it critically.

  “This is a good start,” she said. “But you should really have some people painting each other with their tongues.”

  “Can we work that in?”

  “Maybe. And let’s lose the tadpoles—the sperm symbolism is too obvious.”

  Dustin Eddlebeck looked up from his lunch. “Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “Are you guys doing the sex-ed video together?”

  I stopped myself from blushing, which took a great deal of effort. “Well, sort of,” I said.

  “I’m letting him use some of my parents’ equipment,” said Anna, doing a good job of covering things up. If word got around that we were doing the video together, we’d never hear the end of it. Ever. It was good to know that she recognized this and didn’t want to deal with it, either.

  I turned back to Anna and said, a little more quietly, “So when should we get going on it?”

  She took a sip of her Coke. “What are you doing tonight?” she asked.

  “I’ve gotta stay home,” I grumbled. “I have to help my mother cook dinner, then help my dad in his…garage.” I was going to say I was working on an invention with him but decided against it. Better not to dwell on these things.

  “How about tomorrow?” she said. “Wanna come over to my place? We can dig through my parents’ books and look for ideas.”

  “Sure,” I said. Across the table, Dustin fixed me with a goofy grin, as though I’d just been invited to go over to her place to have a shower with her or something. Not that I didn’t wish I had been. But I gave Dustin a look back indicating that I would have no problem with hiring a couple of the football players to kill him. There were plenty who were just smart enough to know that their best chance for the future was a career as a hired goon.

  “Hey, Leon,” Brian, who was a few chairs down, chimed in. “I keep forgetting to ask you…did you ever hook up all those speakers?”

  “Crap! I forgot to tell you guys!” I said. “I hooked them up last weekend.”

 
“Did you have a whole wall?”

  “Just about half, but it was a start.” Everyone had leaned in; this project had taken up discussion time every day at the table the year before, and now that I was getting to the story of how it came out, I had everyone’s full attention.

  “You used AC/DC, right?” asked James.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, come on! Did it work?”

  “Yeah, for about one second. Then I blew a fuse.”

  “But how did it sound for that one second?” asked Dustin.

  I smiled. “It was the loudest thing you ever heard,” I said. “If I’d finished the song, my family probably would have been kicked out of town.”

  “Rock ’n’ roll, my friend,” said Dustin. “Rock ’n’ roll.”

  “Holy corn bread,” said James, resurrecting one of his favorite expressions from the year before. “That must’ve kicked ass!”

  “Dude,” said Brian, shaking some of his hair out of his face and starting to get worked up, “all you need are some resistors, and a couple of potentiometers, maybe.” He started getting really into it, spouting off a bunch of technical stuff that might as well have been Greek. You could tell he was getting excited, because without even thinking about it, he’d pulled out his lighter and was flipping it around in his fingers.

  Brian was one of those mechanical-type kids who were always getting stuff at Radio Shack to make their flashlights bright enough to blind their enemies or something like that. I was convinced that if he died in school, it would be from holding a minifan he’d modified to spin so fast that it lifted him off the ground, causing him to fly through the ceiling headfirst. But I was also convinced that there were few more memorable ways to die. It should go without saying that a kid who is into both mechanical things and fire is destined to do great things.