“Sure. So listen.” I have to refocus the conversation; Michael can go on and on. (On TV, the Dismissed threesome frolics in a hot-air balloon.) “Did you see the announcements for the Halloween Dance?”
“Nope. Do I care?”
“They went up late today.”
“Yeah. And?”
“You think we should go?”
“Are you asking me out?”
“C’mon, Michael. Seriously. Why don’t we go to a dance?”
“You should go. Christine will be there, right?”
Jeez, I didn’t even think of that! Of course! “Yeah, she will!”
“So go. Good luck.”
“What—am I supposed to go by myself?”
“Whoa! Whoa!” On TV, the Dismissed girls have taken to wrestling in some sort of oatmeal in their hot-air balloon. One of them has her top fuzzed out; anytime anything gets fuzzed out on TV, Michael turns to his—
“De-Fuzzer time, baby!” My friend whoops—really, he can whoop; I picture him walking across his living room with the whoop-grin on his face to man the De-Fuzzer box. The De-Fuzzer is something that you can only attach to digital, flat-screen televisions and it costs $400 to get from some guys in New York. The quality of the unpixelation is really bootleg—it makes breasts look blocky and weird—but it works as advertised. Every time Michael turns it on, I’m understandably jealous.
“Daaaaaamn,” he says. “Nice nipples. Dark.”
“C’mon man, focus.” I watch my boring, non-titty television. “I’m tired of this crap, looking at nipples or listening to you look at nipples. We have to get some real girls.”
“No shit,” Michael says. “But you know, it’s not a good environment, evolutionarily, right now. Like, humanity is currently at its genetic peak. Did you know that?”
Michael’s full of crap like this. I just wanted to talk about the dance.
“I read about it. Theoretically, we’re all able to date whoever we want, whether they have bad eyesight or they’re prone to disease or whatever. If you’re a midget, you’re still going to be able to find another midget and have good midget sex and breed, so we’re not evolving anymore. No natural selection is taking place. In that sort of ‘flat’ climate, scientists think that instead of survival of the fittest, it’s just survival of whoever’s out there and uninhibited, you know. Confidence prevails. So we might be screwed.”
“Thanks, man. I always knew I was screwed.”
“No problem. Hey, I’m gonna watch the rest of this Dismissed by myself, cool?”
“Yeah, it’s cool. Don’t use Vaseline. See you tomorrow.”
“See ya.”
And I go into my room (wop wop wop)…to enter the Internet. I use it like most teenage boys do—exclusively for sex.
Next morning I am determined to sort out who started the rumor about me and Christine and the letter.
Before that, though, I go to the bathroom to do an Appearance Check. I’ve been doing a lot of Appearance Checks lately. I’ve noticed that I’m kind of ugly. I mean, I have brown hair and brown eyes—good, right?—but under a critical light, which is how the world views you, I can see how I might resemble someone with palsy. My face is too long and the sockets that my eyes sit in are off-kilter size-wise, as if I were meant to have a larger eye on the left. My hair might be thick, but it’s full of dandruff like a snowstorm. (Michael and I used to have dandruff battles, actually, ruffling our hair violently in a sunbeam to see who had more glittering scalp waste.) My lips are drawn back and ghoulish. My earlobes are huge. When I get enough money for plastic surgery, I’m going to start with—
“Goood morning,” Dad says, ushering himself into the bathroom.
“Uh, hey,” I say, breaking my stare with the mirror, turning the water on so it looks like I was washing my face. Dad is completely naked, as is usual before 10 A.M., except for his black socks. “Um, could I, um, get a little privacy in here?”
“Son, you’re catching me midstream,” Dad says.
“Yeah, I can hear that.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. Pretend we’re in the army. No other heads available. Ten-hut.”
“Dad, you were never in the army.” I turn toward him, then regret it because his naked butt looks weird. It always looks like it’s pressed up against a sheet of glass.
“How’re my two boys in there?” Mom asks from outside in a singsong voice. “I’ve got to take a sho-wer!”
“Ho pippity pum pum!” Dad says, shaking his penis—
“Jesus, what is wrong with you people?”
“Jeremy?”
“Can you finish the second bathroom? Please?” I plant my hands on either side of the sink and close my eyes.
“Jeremy?” Mom asks, cracking the door open. Then, hissing at Dad: “Put a towel on!”
“It’s not like he’s a girl,” Dad retorts. “We never had a girl.” I hear a soft ruffle as he grabs a towel and gets it around his wide body. Mom comes in and puts a hand on me. “What’s wrong, Jeremy?”
“Nothing.” I open my eyes and look at the mirror image of me and Mom, with her face slightly wrinkled before she gets the makeup in the creases, and Dad on the right, a naked fat face with a naked fat body, hands securing his towel like a happy Buddha. We look like an example of people who shouldn’t breed and what their offspring would be.
“Humuckuggg…” I say. Then I stomp out of the bathroom, put on clothes, grab a fresh Humiliation Sheet and walk to school.
I almost forgot about the walking to school. I live very close to Middle Borough—there’s just one big field between it and my house and a gravel driveway that no one minds if I walk across and then seven trees and a pile of garbage and I’m there—so I walk.
It’s weird to walk to school in Metuchen. Nobody walks to school. If you’re a junior or a senior, you should absolutely have your own car and drive to school every day, and it had better be a shiny car with a multiple CD changer. If you’re a sophomore and you’re Cool then you should ride with one of the aforementioned juniors or seniors (it helps to have an older sibling—that’s like an automatic Cool Person); if you’re a dorky, weird, or impaired sophomore, you ride with your parents. If you’re a freshman, you’re forgiven for riding with your parents, but it’s your job to find peers who will give you rides when you hit sophomore status. If you’re poor, you ride the bus.
I walk, though, this morning like every morning, and once I get inside, Christine is at her usual spot at the front of math. I give her a look as I pass by; in fact I stare openly at her, apologetic, terrified, but she doesn’t notice. I move to my seat.
Guess who Jenna is talking about today: “Then Elizabeth was like, ‘But I don’t know how to do it!’ And the guy was like, ‘All you do is take this resin and this chopstick—’”
“Be quiet,” I say. “Everybody is sick of hearing about ‘Elizabeth.’” Only I don’t say that. Instead, I sit and look at Christine.
“There he goes again,” Jenna says halfway through; I try not to notice.
“What?” Anne asks.
“The stalker, look at him.” She nods her head at me the smallest bit.
“Oh, yeah.” Anne turns around as if she’s trying to pop the joints in her back. She looks at Jenna; Jenna gives a smiling look back; Anne looks slightly sad and pleading for me; Jenna responds with a withering look. I didn’t realize girls could communicate like this, with their eyes, like evil monkeys.
“Don’t say anything, he’ll put it on one of his sheets,” Jenna says.
Jenna knows about the Humiliation Sheets?
Fuck. The pit that forms in my stomach stretches down quickly to suck/tear at my bladder. If Jenna knows about the Humiliation Sheets, thirty other people do too. Cool People are like termites; for every one you see, there are thousands back at the hive with the same basic nervous system and worldview. I stare forward, as I usually do in times of crisis, not daring to note this particular offense on my sheet. Not yet.
“What’s the
deal?” Michael asks as I leave math. “You okay?” Michael’s sitting cross-legged in the hall; I’m looking for a place to update my sheet.
“Yeah.” I stoop down. I try to slap his hand, but miss.
“Redo,” he smiles. We connect.
“All right. Take a seat.”
“Why? I hate sitting on the floor.”
“You should.”
“Why?”
“Trust me.”
I do.
“Anything new happen with Christine?” Michael prods.
“Nope. Today’s been really crappy.”
“Well it’s about to get good.” Michael absently picks at his headphone cord. “Take a look.”
We are in the absolutely choicest position for spying girls’ knees and calves in the hall. I figure that’s what Michael plans to do, and then, across the way, a particularly fine parade of knees and calves emerges. They belong to Katrina, Stephanie, and Chloe—the Hottest Girls in School.
Michael is admirably calm as the three of them slink out of whatever class they were in (Human Sexuality, I think—seriously) in triangle formation with Katrina at the lead. I’m the one with the motor control problem, sitting like a tormented puppet, my wrist twitching and my neck grinding against itself as the legs pass by. My heart tightens and the whole lower half of my body aches in a sudden, silly way that reminds me of last night on the Internet.
“Guh…”
It’s unfair that I should have to go to school with Katrina, Stephanie, and Chloe. They cover all the bases of things that you might possibly be attracted to if you think girls are attractive in the slightest bit. Katrina is blond, Stephanie is brunette, and Chloe is a redhead (dyed). Katrina wears bright, preppy stuff; Stephanie wears Goth things with collars; Chloe does raver clothes. All their outfits are tight and imaginative, as in: it’s easy to imagine them not being there. The Hottest Girls in School came to Middle Borough together in my grade and have been inseparable since, a force to be reckoned with, discussed, analyzed, and penetrated by the upper echelon of Middle Borough men.
They do not react to Michael or myself in any way as they pass.
Then again, we are on the floor.
“You should go for one of them, man,” Michael suggests.
“Shut up.” Then: “You think I could?”
“Sure…You could do whatever you want. I mean, you’re still going to that dance, right?”
I hadn’t thought about the dance. I’d just been kind of talking about it the night before, in the abstract. Here in the light of day with real females present, the dance is more terrifying. I have not had good experiences with dances. I wasn’t even good at those super-hippie modern dance “movement” classes I took in fifth grade. I couldn’t be a spider right.
“I was kinda…”
Christine walks out of math. Maybe she was in there talking to Mr. Gretch, or one of her friends. She strides past me and I’m at eye level with her legs and calves and I think they might just be the most beautiful calves I’ve ever seen, better than the Hot Girls’. Then I think about how when computer imaging guys are making special effects for movies, one of the hardest things they have to do with CGI light is to get it to reflect off complex surfaces the right way, but if any of those CGI guys ever needed a model for how light should bounce off a girl’s leg, pixel for pixel, this is it.
And the two forces that battle for real estate in my brain—fear and lust—they reach an agreement and I turn to Michael.
“Yeah, I’m going,” I nod.
“Really?” He stands up.
“Yeah. You still not going?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Then could you give me a ride at least? After school or something? After play rehearsal, actually, down to Halloween Adventure sometime. So I can buy a costume.”
“You’re getting a costume and the whole deal? Who are you gonna bring to the dance?”
“I guess nobody. But”—I watch Christine fade—“I have to get there somehow.”
I grab the seat next to Christine’s for our second Midsummer read-through. (A girl named Jessica gets Mr. Reyes’ Hot Pocket today, while we males construct a haphazard circle of chairs.) I don’t know why; I’m just setting myself up for heartbreak, but I have fast reflexes and go with my instincts.
My arm shifts as we begin the reading. It inches so close to Christine’s that static electricity pulls our armhairs together, my dark ones vs. her sunburned ones. If we both were to sweat, the beads would join up and form a little Bering Strait for microbes to swim across from her skin to mine. All I have to do now is pull a phrase out of the air, a phrase among all the trivia and trends and hot items in the world, that’ll make her start talking to me like she did yesterday. A phrase like, Wow, I heard this thing about Tupac’s mom or I really like Picasso over Matisse, but that might not be it. When I think about it, probably only one tenth of one tenth of one seventeenth of things are it.
“Hey, Christine, I heard this thing that human beings aren’t evolving anymore.”
“Wheh?” She turns with a mix of annoyance and bafflement. But what could I expect? It’s a start.
“Yeah, seriously…” I glance over at Mr. Reyes; he’s dozed off. “I heard about it on, uh, the Discovery Channel. We’re totally evolutionarily stagnant.”
Christine turns her pupils toward the sheet of paper on her lap. “‘Through the forest have I gone But Athenian found I none, On whose eyes I might approve…’”
Right, I forgot. She has lines. When she finishes, she turns to me and says the most wonderful thing: “Actually, I heard that too.”
“Really?” I almost forget to whisper.
“Of course not, Jeremy.” Her lips curl beautifully. “Only you would know stuff like that. But it, uh, sounds interesting.”
There’s conspicuous silence around the circle. Christine pokes me (with her pen, not her actual flesh): “Your line.”
“Mrph…‘Fair love, you faint with wand’ring in the wood.…’”
“Talk when rehearsal is over, okay?” Christine says.
I smile so wide that I check myself, because I know wide smiles make me look bad. Christine flicks her pen back and forth between her teeth.
I brush my arm against hers. Now that I’ve rebroken the ice, I knew I could rebreak the ice.
When the read-through is over, Christine and I chat. We put away chairs together. I give her the rap about people not evolving pretty much exactly as Michael gave it to me the night before.
“…And so it’s like we’re evolutionarily flat.”
“Wow, that’s crazy.” She’s not betraying much. Her lips are pursed and that’s a good word for it, because they look like a purse, an upside-down pink purse designed for a kangaroo rat or vole. “Don’t you think that people are evolving to become smarter?”
“I think,” I pontificate, “that women are naturally selecting males who are more successful and rich, but that has not much to do with whether they’re smart.” Heh-heh.
“Oh, no,” Christine says, motioning with her hand for me to follow as she gathers her things. “Successful people are always smart.”
“My dad’s pretty successful. He’s an idiot.”
“That’s not nice. What’s he do?”
“Divorce lawyer. What’s yours do?”
“Executive ride supervisor at Great Adventure.”
“Oh, well, that must be a great adventure for his career!”
“Um…funny. He got fired, okay. He used to work for AOL—”
“No! No…I was just, you know, trying to think of something witty to say, like a pun or whatever.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sorry.” Pause. “I’m not a great conversationalist.”
“But you were just having a conversation. We were.”
“Yeah. Well. We’re not. Now.”
“This is true.” Christine scrunches up her face. “You know what? I hate boys who are bad conversationalists.” She shakes her head. “It??
?s insurmountable.”
Dur. Now she has her bag in her hands, but something’s missing from it that perturbs her. She bends over a theater seat looking at the floor. I want to find the missing item desperately and be helpful. I think I’ve spotted it—a padded, white nub of material by her ankle. I reach down to pick it up; she leans back at the same time, sitting on my neck.
“Ow!”
“Hey!”
“Gimme that!” Christine streaks down, pushes me away and grabs the item off the floor.
“Sorry.”
“Hgggg,” she chortles, putting the thing in her purse. Then she looks at me as if under a new light (an angry light, not a good light). “Jeremy, you shouldn’t touch girls’ stuff.”
“I was just trying to help.…”
Christine walks away, so I walk with her; we pass through the doors of the theater together, separated only by the metal doorframe. “So I guess if your dad works at Great Adventure you don’t have to worry about lines, right? I mean, lines at the rides. Not lines in the play. Heh-heh.”
“Well…” Christine says. “First of all he’s a ride supervisor, not a ride operator. Which means he works in an office, not on the ride.”
“Okay.”
“But yes, they do have this policy, if you’re employee connected, where you walk up to the back of a ride and show them the special Great Adventure Friends and Family Card and then they give you this slip of paper that tells you the approximate ride wait time—”
“So?”
“So don’t interrupt. So instead of waiting in line for forty-five minutes, you can do whatever you want for forty-five minutes and then come back and get right on.”
“That’s awesome! How do I get one of those cards? Do I have to marry you?”
Oh, shit. What did I just say?
“Uh…” Christine looks at me like I grew out of the base of a tree. “You could develop leprosy and lose half your face—that would work. Then you could get a handicapped pass.”
We’re halfway down the hall, heading toward the exit. I’m thinking of some witty final statement to make up for the marriage thing (did she say something about leprosy?) when I spot a figure at the doors: Jake Dillinger. He looks all Czechoslovakian-model-banging and student-governmental. He cups his mouth.