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II. Me banana you banana me you give

The first day of school it’s still summery. Because it was the first day my mom gave me a ride, and because it was the first day I jumped at the alarm and we pulled up to the school with twenty minutes to spare. The school was squat and brick just like before. We all crowded through the front door and I watched for old faces with new haircuts. We were ninth-graders now, at the top of the junior high. In seventh grade the ninth graders were big and hairy, but I didn’t feel big. The new kids looked like elementary schoolers.

Everybody I knew ended up in the same homeroom except me. The printout on their schedules had “Schloticker 204” where mine had “Flatworth 208.” I’d long since torn the feeders off the sides of the schedule and wound the strips of paper into springy rolls. Somewhere there was a whole landfill of those rolls, along with spiraled tubes and accordions.

I’d seen Mrs. Flatworth in the halls for two years. She was always trying to be friendly with one of the ninth graders, but she didn’t have a friendly face. Her face was molded in a permanent scowl, patched up with putty and starting to droop at the corners. She had dull skin and dull brown saggy hair, and I could tell I didn’t like her even without hearing her speak.

I walked to the classroom on the second floor, pushing past all the kids catching up with their friends. The girls squealed like they’d been locked in the basement all summer, and the guys took turns tripping each other. I could see through the glass that the lights were off so I didn’t go inside. I went back down the stairs and through the lower hallway in the opposite direction. The school had five or six loops that you could walk if you didn’t want to arrive anywhere. They’d painted the lockers gold instead of gray, and with no locks half of them hung open.

It was still early. I went to the bathroom. I stood in front of a urinal until I heard someone else coming in, then I pretended I’d just finished.

The next time around the loop there were people in the classroom. There were a couple clusters of twos or threes and some loners—nobody I really knew. I sat by myself at the far right, halfway back. I was hoping she’d put us in alphabetical order or something.

She came in and sat against her desk and she tried to chat us up. Her voice was tinny, with a drawl. It matched her baggy face.

“How was your summer?” Nobody said anything. “Just kind of ok? Not bad, not great?” There were a couple nods.

Jenie Berman and Ericka Anderson came in together. Ericka said “Hi everybody!” and Jenie laughed. Ericka started toward the back of the room but Jenie pulled her hand and said, “Let’s sit up in the front. We want to pay attention.” Mrs. Flatworth looked skeptical but Jenie kept smiling. They sat in the first row—Ericka in front of me, Jenie one desk over.

Jenie had huge new breasts. She and Ericka tugging at each other made the breasts bounce back and forth, and when she sat forward in her seat the breasts pushed her tie-dyed t-shirt against the desk. The elite kids always seemed to have the brightest and best-looking tie-dyes, on down to the losers wearing one faded color over white—baby blue or sorry magenta.

It was past seven thirty but people were still coming in. Drew Mullins and Todd Spade walked through the door and Todd said, “Let’s sit by Chesty.” They took the seats between me and the two girls—putting me in the middle of the elite kids. Drew Mullins turned in his chair to face me.

“How was your summer man?” The skin on his forehead was rough and shiny.

“It was ok.”

“Yeah? That’s cool man. Cool.” He checked that Mrs. Flatworth wasn’t watching him, then he whispered to me. “What do you think of Berman?”

I caught her glance, but she pretended she hadn’t heard. I didn’t have to answer because Todd laughed. “Dude, why would he care?”

Mrs. Flatworth was standing in front of the class trying to get us to be quiet. “I’m Mrs. Flatworth, and this is World History, so if it doesn’t say that on your schedule, you’re in the wrong—”

Then Ken Duffy came running in. He stopped at the front of the class, looked around and shouted, “It’s ok everybody! I made it here!”

Drew Mullins’ voice boomed, “Duffy!” I probably could have made a voice like that, but I would never have tried it at school.

“Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt the class. Let me just go and quietly take my seat.” He sat next to me. “What’s he doing here?”

Ericka laughed. “God, you guys are so mean.”

Mrs. Flatworth was half-trying to look impatient. She gave handouts to the people at the front of each row. “Now, everyone here should be ready to learn about World History.” She said “World History” like an annoying little song. “But first we need to go over some basic rules and regulations. Mr. Duffy, why don’t you read this handout for us.”


1. The teacher is always right.

2. When the teacher is wrong, see rule 1.

Mrs. Flatworth smiled after that. Nobody else bothered to pretend that it was funny. There was a list of supplies. Every year we were supposed to get colored pencils, but we never used them. We were supposed to fill out index cards with our names and numbers and things, and she passed those out, too.

Jenie and Ericka were whispering. “Did you hear about Lili?”

Todd and Drew answered her, both talking at once:

“I heard about Lili.”

“I read about Lili in the bathroom.”

Ericka made a disgusted face. “I can’t believe her. Maybe she’ll get a STD—”

All three of the guys laughed.

“—I mean ... Not a dying one. Like Herpes or something.”

Mrs. Flatworth collected the index cards and started laying them out to match our desks, but then she stopped.

“Do you guys want me to assign seats, or do you want to stay like this?”

“Stay like this.”

“Like this.”

Anyone who spoke up always wanted to stay where they’d sat, with their friends.

“Ok, we’ll stay like this, but remember where you’re sitting because I’ll take attendance by your seat.”

I could never learn names either. I don’t know what the teachers did, but I made up nicknames for the people I didn’t know. Usually the names were about each kid’s own special style of ugly: Leukemia Boy, Mugger, Earhead, Harvard Jr. Then there were kids you didn’t have to name: Black Kid.

Here there was Chin Man and No Chin Man and a girl I called The Fang-Toothed Fiend because she needed braces so bad. I always wondered whether the teachers did the same thing—I imagined Mrs. Flatworth making little notes on her index cards, like “red hair,” or “fat.”

I had my own problems this time of year. “Here’s an interesting one. Mr. ... Sick-zit-gel?” People laughed and turned to look at me. “Oh, did I say that wrong?”

“It’s Szczygiel.”

“Shtick-you?”

“Szczygiel.”

“Well, you’re going to have to help me out with that one. What kind of name is that?”

“Polish.”

“Oh, that’s interesting. Does it mean something?”

“It means goldfinch.”

“Oh, what a pretty name.” She said “Oh” in the same way both times, still singing the “World History” song.

I got more xeroxes in other classes and filled out more index cards. I got a locker and textbooks to fill it, and they gave us a week to make covers for the textbooks.

Lunch was the first place I saw people I knew. We sat at the same table we’d used the year before. I was done with my sandwich before the school lunch people got out of the line. Their lunch was pizza the first day. That made them happy.

Gabe was talking to Scott about Mr. Schloticker, the physical science teacher. “I told my sister that I had Mr. Schloticker and she told me that her friend saw him eating at IHOP with another man once.”

“So? Maybe it was some teacher meeting.”

“No, I mean she said they both looked like they just woke up, and they were playing footsie and stuff.”

Nobody said much to Gabe’s news.

“I’m telling you. He’s like a serious gay sex magnate.”

“I just don’t like his glasses or his weird combover. But I’m at the back of the room, thank God.”

I said, “Thanks, God!” Except for telling Drew Mullins how my summer was and telling Mrs. Flatworth how to say my name, that was the first thing I’d said all day.

Gabe laughed. “Yeah. You’re the best God ever!”

Lunch was fifty minutes. Nobody said anything for a while—they were eating their pizza. There was a red-haired kid Timothy Meigs who always sat with us. He’d get school lunch and then play with it. He was winding cheese around his fork until it looked like a mummy’s arm. After a while, he said, “Has anyone seen Cafeteria Harrison yet?” We all looked around for the lunch monitor but he wasn’t there.

Cafeteria Harrison had been a student at my school once. He would have been one of the stoner kids. Now he had shoulder-length hair and a lip-liner mustache, and aside from the skateboarding assistant principal he was the only adult that favored the stoner kids instead of the elite kids. I don’t know what kind of kids we were. Nobody favored us.

“I heard some of the teachers talking about him earlier, but I couldn’t hear what they said. I don’t think he’s coming back.”

“What happened to him?”

“They were talking about it like it was some big secret. I was trying to listen but then they noticed me. I don’t think he’ll come back.”

“Do you guys want to go outside?”

“No.”

There was an eruption of shouting at one of the crowded tables. We all turned to look but nothing was happening. Lunch went on like that until it was time for sixth period. Mr. Schloticker had tinted sunglasses and a combover that reached all the way to where his bangs should have been. It looked like he’d gone at it with a glue stick three or four days ago and slept with a bath cap ever since. He had the look of a solid child molester.

Gym was last. The gym teacher for the ninth graders was Mr. Forman, a stubbly bald guy who always had on a sweatshirt and a pair of shorts that showed his swollen calves. Except for the bald parts, the gray stubble was the same length all over his head. He took us on a tour of the equipment, and he told us what would happen to us on it if we misbehaved.

He showed us the locker room, where the floor was dark brown tile with a white tile every so often. “Run on the tile and you’ll crack your skull.” There were benches for changing, with two heavy wooden beams separated by a fist-width space. “See these benches? If you goof off in here and you jump up on one of these benches and you fall, your foot might get caught in here, and your calf will splinter right in half from your weight. Your shattered bone will tear out through your skin. We had a kid once, the edge of his bone was sticking through the middle of his leg. I had to hold him down while the ambulance came.”

He told us we were required to change clothes. “You guys, you know, you get to a certain age, you start to stink. I don’t want Mr. Ludovich coming in here and complaining to me because you stink. I better not see anybody wearing the same clothes during the day as they are in my gym class. If I catch you, you’ll have to sit the day out and you’ll get an unexcused absence.”

It didn’t take that long and there wasn’t anything else to do, so he told us we could just wait around in the gymnasium. Some people talked to their friends. The guys shot baskets.

The ceiling panels zigzagged up and down and the south-facing panels had windows. There were girders underneath the panels, and the panels and girders were covered with fluffy, brownish-white stuff. Sometimes chunks of it would float down from the ceiling, and sometimes people would argue about whether or not it was asbestos, but it couldn’t have been asbestos.

After the bell rang I could leave straight away because I had all my stuff with me—nobody had a lock for their locker. I went slowly so I might run into somebody I knew, but that didn’t happen. The kids who lived far away got into buses or cars, and everybody else walked. Even moving slowly I was one of the first to reach the sidewalk that led away from the school. I looked back a couple times to see if there was something going on that was holding people up—something I didn’t know about—but I don’t think there was.


chapter 3 - a mysterious phone call?

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