Adam Selzer Read online

  “Why?” asked the first jerk. “Is it because you’re gay?”

  “Who are you gay with?” asked the second. Damn. They were teaming up on me.

  Now, normally I might’ve said that they were probably the gay ones, but I didn’t want to get into it. I just muttered, “I’m not gay. And people with pudding-bowl haircuts don’t get a lot of room to make fun of anyone else!”

  One of them sort of shoved my shoulder. “Yeah, well look at your hair, retard!” he said, running his hand through my hair, which was already sort of messed up.

  “Hey,” I said. “You think I’m the gay one? You can’t keep your hands off me!”

  “Go to hell,” said the guy, though he stopped touching my hair. “I’ll bet you are gay.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll bet you’re a hermaphrodite. Go look it up.”

  The other guy shoved my other shoulder. “Brain,” he said. I wondered why he didn’t just say “Nerd.” Maybe that term is out of date.

  I stood up. I turned around to face them, and I got my hand into a fist. I was just about ready to use it, too; then I heard Keith Messersmith saying, “Hey, leave Leon alone. He likes metal.”

  “I’ll just bet he likes metal!” said Jerk Number One. “He probably listens to boy bands.”

  And that was it. My fist was all set to go, and I was about the closest I had come all through middle school to punching someone. But there were two of them, and I wasn’t about to get in trouble over them. So I just said, “Yeah? You probably listen to old folksingers who sing about rainbows all the time.” Then I slammed my book shut and announced that I had to use the facilities.

  “The gym facilities?” asked Mrs. Wellington, trying to be funny. “You can use those during gym class.”

  I grabbed my bag and threw my pencil against the wall with every ounce of strength I had, hoping it would shatter into a million pieces, though it just clunked against the painted cinder blocks and fell to the floor. She knew perfectly well which facilities I meant, so, figuring that it would be easier to get forgiveness later than to wait for her to quit screwing around and give me permission, I walked out of the room and headed for the boys’ room. No one followed.

  That wasn’t the worst encounter you could have with guys who had bowl cuts and thought they were hot stuff, but I just wasn’t in the mood for that kind of bullshit. If I had to listen to them rattling on like a couple of morons for five more seconds, I might’ve actually punched them or something. I was so mad I was practically seething as I walked along thinking about the soccer jerks and imagining how they were going to grow up. They’d probably major in financial management or something like that. Or they’d become gym teachers. I’d always wondered what kind of son of a bitch grows up wanting to be a gym teacher. That made me think about gym class and all that crap. I thought about not being able to have an explosion in the movie. Everything was bullshit—was this all the world had to offer? I imagined myself being shown the whole world by some angel, like in an old movie, and saying, “Well, I see that you’ve worked hard, but this sort of sucks. What else can you show me?”

  The very notion of going back to class and sitting through the rest of math just seemed absurd, so I sat there on the toilet, with my pants still up, for several minutes. God, I wanted to punch those idiots.

  Over on the wall next to me, which was covered in a thin layer or paint, I could still make out something Dustin had written the year before, back when he was still just doing limericks:

  There once was a kid named Dan

  Who got his butt stuck in the can

  But before you say “dumbass”

  Remember—he missed class

  (He was really a very smart man)

  Amen, brother.

  I stayed in the bathroom until math was a few minutes from over, making it the closest I’d ever come to skipping a class. One couldn’t get away with the ol’ bathroom excuse every day, and I figured I’d be lucky if Mrs. Wellington didn’t catch on, but being suspended would be better than sitting through the rest of that class. And anyway, the suspension if I’d punched those guys would have been longer than the one I could get for cutting a third of a class.

  I eventually got out and sneakily wandered around to the gifted-pool room. I was five minutes early, but I still wasn’t the first one there. Brian and Edie were already on the couch, making out. The gifted-pool room was supposed to be a more relaxed environment, but it still seemed about like a classroom; if I’d been in charge, I would have taken out the desks and put in some beanbag chairs. The thought of sitting in a desk again just then made me just about physically sick, so I went and joined Brian and Edie on the couch. Climbing aboard with a couple that was probably just a short jaunt from second base wasn’t something I’d normally do, but these were special circumstances.

  Dustin came in a few minutes later; Jenny Kurosawa, a girl from Japan who had already gotten some seriously high score on the SAT, followed him, and both of them got onto the couch, too. Then Anna came in, still wearing her devil horns, and then James and a few other various people who I hadn’t really seen all summer and weren’t in the advanced studies activity.

  Pretty soon the couch was full, but the people coming in got the idea that the couch was the place to be, so they just piled on top of those of us who were already there, until there were about ten or twelve people stacked up on the couch. Jenny’s butt was crammed into my arm, which wasn’t that bad, but between that and getting such a good view of Rachel’s bra in gym I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t have any luck left for Anna’s house.

  Mrs. Smollet finally came in, carrying what looked like an armload of crossword puzzles, and made a really disgusted face at us, like she was silently horrified that we weren’t acting more like kids from a sitcom set in 1956. She was one of those people who thought 1956 was America’s best year. Apparently, she didn’t know what awful food people used to cook back then.

  Right away, she ordered us all to get off the couch and I ended up back in a desk. Some relaxed atmosphere.

  “All right,” she said, “did everyone have a good summer?” According to scholars, no teacher has ever come up with a more interesting greeting for a first meeting with students after the break.

  We all sort of grumbled, and she began to call the roll.

  “Anna Simone Brandenburg?”

  “Physically here,” said Anna.

  “James Patrick Cole?”

  James belched; Mrs. Smollet rolled her eyes.

  “Dustin Michael Eddlebeck?”

  “He died in a car accident,” said Dustin.

  She was halfway to my name before I realized that she was using people’s middle names, like that would magically make us more intellectual. I started to panic.

  “Leon…,” she began.

  “Here!” I shouted, hoping she wouldn’t finish. But she did.

  “Leon Noside Harris, here?” she repeated. About half the class turned and looked.

  “What kind of name is that?” asked Jenny. She wasn’t being mean; she sounded like she was genuinely curious.

  “It’s, uh, some ancestor of mine. Noside Magwitch Harris, Esquire. He was a real big shot.”

  “That’s fascinating, Leon,” said Mrs. Smollet, who certainly couldn’t just politely let it go. “Maybe for one of your projects this year you could research his life!”

  “Well, I’m pretty busy with projects right now,” I said, going for evasive action.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Yes,” she said. “You mean the advanced studies project?”

  “Yeah. I’m doing an art film.”

  “Well,” she said, “as I understand it, you’re doing a porno film.”

  “No,” I said, narrowing my own eyes. “It’s art. And it’s educational.”

  “Well, just so you know,” she said, “I wouldn’t push my luck if I were you. You know the limits.”

  “Sure,” I said. And we stared each other down for a minute or so. “But isn’t this program suppo
sed to encourage our young minds to push the limits of what we can do? So we don’t end up as stupid as everybody else in this town?”

  “Just watch it, Leon,” she said. “The last thing the school needs is to spend all its money on a lawsuit. It needs that money for fixing up the gym.” And she went back to calling the roll.

  When she finished, she gave Anna a “come on, don’t give me this crap” look. “Miss Brandenburg,” she said, “please remove the devil horns.”

  “Nope,” said Anna, shaking her head. “It’s no different than wearing a cross necklace.”

  “But what it signifies is different,” said Mrs. Smollet.

  “Not to a Satanist,” said Anna.

  “We’re all Satanists,” said Brian, raising his hand and making it into the devil sign. Most of us stuck out our tongues and tried to look all evil for a minute or two. Dustin, who was, at that moment, actually wearing a cross necklace, looked especially evil.

  “You’re not Satanists,” said Mrs. Smollet, rolling her eyes.

  “I know I’m not,” said Edie. “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”

  Mrs. Smollet sighed and threw her hands up. “You guys, this is not the way to start out the year. This is the gifted pool, not the weirdo club. We’re trying to do this as something fun for you. We can take it away if you want us to. I can have you all go right back to your regular classes. And if you don’t get those horns off your head, Anna, I’m going to arrange for you to be sent to St. Julian’s instead.”

  “I don’t think they take my kind,” she said. I don’t know if she meant that they wouldn’t take her because she was Jewish or if she was still pretending to be a devil worshipper, but she took the horns off. They were back on her head a minute later, though.

  We all settled down for a moment; Mrs. Smollet’s threats to disband the program usually shut us up for a minute.

  She spent the rest of the hour telling us about all the “great” activities we were going to be doing as gifted-pool projects. Like we’d research someone from history who “meant something” to us and give a presentation on them. I decided that I’d make up a whole bunch of crap about Noside Magwitch Harris, Esquire, like maybe he was an advisor to the Queen who ended up getting executed for daring to believe in evolution or something. Yeah, that was it. I’d say he’d been betrayed by someone named Smollet, and as he was being dragged away to have his head chopped off, he vowed that his children’s children would one day have their revenge. If she called me on it, I’d accuse her of mocking my heritage, and next thing she knew she’d be serving pie down at Baker’s Square for a living.

  While she was yammering on, this guy named Marcus Clinch leaned across two desks and said to me, “I hear you just about got in a fight with some soccer knockers today.”

  “Up shut,” I told him. “Don’t wanna talk about it.” He’d been in a class with me the year before where the teacher had a real thing about not letting anyone say “shut up,” so we’d all taken to saying “up shut” instead. It still ticked her off, but she was at least smart enough to know when she was beaten. That was one of the greater victories we’d scored over teachers through the years.

  “What was that, Leon?” asked Mrs. Smollet, turning around. I thought for a split second that I should say that Marcus said his ancestors could’ve beaten mine up, but I knew that if I did she’d give him in-school suspension and maybe make him watch a video about being more sensitive to other cultures, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone, so I just said, “Nothing.”

  For the rest of the class, whenever Mrs. Smollet turned her back to write something on the board, everyone in the room stuck up their middle finger at her, then quickly hid their hands when she turned around. We did a lousy job of not snickering about it, but she never caught on. She herself, apparently, was not really gifted pool material.

  On one level, I sort of felt bad for giving her a hard time. But I knew that she had no intention of giving us an easy time, and anyway, taking my mood out on her was probably a safer way of handling it than punching a couple of soccer players.

  However, for the last ten minutes of class, she gave us a lecture on family values and crap like that while we all wrote “I am not a Satanist” twenty times on notebook paper. We could, she pointed out, have been using the time to work on logic puzzles, but we just had to act like hooligans.

  In all, I was very, very glad that it was the end of the day. It was time to go to Anna’s house.

  Anna was the first person I knew who didn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, a habit that spread pretty rapidly. Not that she made a big deal about it or anything. I just noticed one morning in seventh grade that when everyone else was putting their right hand on their heart and reciting the Pledge in homeroom, she just stood there, not saying a word. Then she gave the flag a little salute with two fingers when everyone else was saying “with liberty and justice for all.”

  I never asked her why she didn’t say it; I guess it was simply because she didn’t feel like reciting a loyalty oath to start her day. After a while, I stopped saying it myself. Not that I had anything against America; the country had my allegiance, but the more I thought about it, the more I didn’t want to pledge to be loyal forever. What if the government just decided that the whole Bill of Rights business was passé and Mrs. Smollet became the president? I don’t think they’d have my allegiance anymore.

  Pretty soon, everyone I knew in the gifted pool was standing there and just giving a little salute during the Pledge, though none of us meant anything malicious by it—except for Edie, of course. Whenever someone tried to drill us on why we weren’t saying the Pledge, she’d tell them how it was written by some socialist guy back in the eighteen hundreds. Why this didn’t make her want to say it remained unexplained.

  After the gifted-pool meeting, Anna just walked out of the room with me, and we started heading for her house, which was maybe a mile away. We got a bit stalled at the edge of the parking lot when Anna looked over at the school cop, whose job was to hang out at the edge of the parking lot, watching for any drug dealers who might be hanging around, and said, “Ooh! It’s a new cop!” She ran right over to the car and peered in at the guy. I followed, wondering what she was up to.

  “Hi!” said Anna. “Are you a good cop or a bad cop?”

  The guy neither smiled nor frowned; he was like one of those guards in England who aren’t allowed to react. “We’re all good cops,” he said, as if we would believe him.

  “Have you caught any troublemakers yet?” Anna asked.

  “Are you one?” He eyed her suspiciously.

  She nodded. “Most definitely.”

  The cop stared at her for a second from behind his sunglasses—and so did I. I had always been told in no uncertain terms to respect police officers. But then again, she wasn’t being disrespectful, she was just making conversation. Even when she said she was “most definitely” a troublemaker, he didn’t pull out the handcuffs or anything.

  “So,” she said. “If you could slap any celebrity, who would it be?”

  “We don’t slap people,” he said.

  “She means hypothetically,” I said. I wasn’t about to stand around idly while she bravely interviewed the cop. She’d think I was a wimp.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s a good question. Do I only get one slap?”

  “Yes,” I said, hoping that was right.

  “Hmmm…,” he said. “Do those lawyers who advertise on TV count as celebrities?”

  “Sure,” said Anna. “They’re on TV.”

  “Okay, then,” said the cop. “I’d slap Gordon Griffin.”

  “The personal injury lawyer?” asked Anna. Joe Griffin’s father. I smiled.

  “Yeah. He’s a jerk.”

  “Excellent choice,” said Anna. “Have you ever met him?”

  “Every cop in town has had to deal with him in court,” he said. “He’s an even bigger slimeball in person.”

  I couldn’t believe that the cop had just ca
lled another adult a slimeball in front of us. I mean, was he allowed to do that?

  “My dad says that he wouldn’t hire that guy to stick his head down our toilet, because he doesn’t want anything that gross going down there,” Anna said, and I had to cover my hand with my mouth—which did not look cool—to keep from laughing so hard as to attract attention.

  The cop chuckled a bit, too. “Your dad’s a smart man,” he said.

  “His son is a jerk, too,” I said. “He’s always saying that God disagrees with everyone he disagrees with.” I hoped Joe wasn’t close enough to be within earshot.

  “I know the type,” said the cop, who was starting to go back to looking around the campus to see if anyone was causing trouble, which, after all, was his job. “Do you guys have someplace you need to be?”

  “Yes,” Anna said. “We need to go buy some lighters.” This was just rubbing his nose in it; he couldn’t arrest us for conspiracy to buy lighters.

  “You’re a little young for those, aren’t you?” he asked. This was all he could really say.

  “I’m also too young to be appointed special environmental advisor to the mayor,” she said. “But I was.” I figured it wasn’t true, but I wouldn’t have put it past her. The girl knew her politics.

  The cop stared at her for a second, probably making sure her shoes weren’t covered in plastic explosives or something.

  “Anyway, we’d best be on our way,” Anna said. “There are young minds to corrupt.”

  “Well…okay,” said the cop. “Stay out of trouble.”

  “No promises,” said Anna. She walked away and I followed her.

  “That was awesome!” I said. I was feeling better already.

  “I always do that with cops,” she said. “For the record, if you ask them to get you a glass of water, because they’re a public servant, they don’t like it very much.”

  I told her I didn’t doubt it.

  As we walked along, I felt almost inhumanly better. Between the cop interview and the hour spent flicking Mrs. Smollet off, all the crap that was bugging me from gym, the note-passing battle, and those jerks in math class was just gone, like it had all happened a hundred years before. By the time we got to her house, I was feeling good.