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ISBN: 978-1-4431-2451-5
Text copyright © 1985 by Gordon Korman.
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first eBook edition September 2012
For the real Mike Otis, wherever he may be.
And for Marilyn E. Marlow, who helped me over the high fences.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
About the Author
Other books by Gordon Korman
“There are a lot of things at this school I don’t understand.”
Mike Otis
Student Body President
Don Carey High School
1
Mr. Morrison beamed at his homeroom class of twenty-eight students. “Okay, are all the autobiographies finished?”
A vague, indifferent hum rose from the group.
“Good. When you bring your papers up to me, I can also check your class schedules to make sure there aren’t any problems. I’m going to do the class in rows, starting from the left.”
The entire class stood and began a lackadaisical shuffle toward the front of the room. Paul Abrams looked around in bewilderment. He was the only student still sitting. Hadn’t the teacher said “starting from the left”? Maybe he’d heard the instructions wrong. He grabbed his schedule and his half-page autobiography and joined the swarm.
Mr. Morrison regarded the first person in line. “Well, where’s your schedule?”
The girl dug through her pockets. “I didn’t bring it. Maybe I didn’t get one.”
“But everybody got one. It was mailed to your house during the summer. You’ll have to go to the office after homeroom and have a new one made up.”
The girl looked dubious. “You think so?”
“Of course. How are you going to know what classes to go to if you don’t have a schedule?”
“I figured I’d just sort of wing it.”
Paul stared in disbelief. The second person in line didn’t have a schedule either. The third had a schedule but it was somebody else’s. The fourth was in the wrong homeroom. Paul was fifth, and the first to be checked through. He handed in his autobiography and returned to his seat, noting that Mr. Morrison was already covered in perspiration.
“What kind of schedule is this?” the teacher was exclaiming in agitation. “You’re supposed to have six classes and a lunch! You have six lunches and a class!”
“Yeah?” The boy looked vaguely pleased. “That’s pretty good.”
“And you!” Mr. Morrison was already on to the next schedule. “You have no lunch at all! And you’re going to the same Spanish class five times a day! You’ve had this for at least a month! Why didn’t you check it over?”
“Maybe I didn’t notice it.”
Before Mr. Morrison could go on to the next student, she announced, “Mine’s blank.”
By the time the exercise was over, less than half the class had been checked through. The others were instructed to go to the office after homeroom and stand in the Problem Line. Paul couldn’t believe the vacant, disinterested expressions on the faces of even those with serious class schedule conflicts, or no schedules at all.
Mr. Morrison had turned his attention to the autobiographies.
“Now we’ll all get to know each other. I’m going to read them out loud. This first one here is by —” he glanced at the paper “— it looks like Wayne Stitsky. Stand up, Wayne.”
In the very back row, a tall, slim boy with long blond, flyaway hair raised himself three inches from his chair and settled back down again. Mr. Morrison smiled and read:
“‘Hi. I’m Wayne-o. I’m in the tenth grade at Don’t Care High —’” Mr. Morrison put the paper down. He looked up sternly. “Now, this is one thing I want to get straight right here on the first day of school. This is not Don’t Care High. This is Don Carey High School. That awful nickname has been haunting this fine old school for years, and this is where it ends. We have pride and school spirit, and the maintaining of that self-destructive attitude of not caring is an insult to the memory of Don Carey, one of the most civic-minded public works commissioners this city has ever had. He was, as you all know, the designer and builder of our modern sewer system, and that is a remarkable contribution indeed.”
Another hum rose just like the first.
“Now,” Mr. Morrison went on, “we’ll read a paper that doesn’t have quite such a defeatist attitude.” He began to shuffle through the stack, his brow clouding over, his mouth hardening into a thin line. “‘Don’t Care’ ‘Don’t Care.’ Ah, here we go. ‘My name is Cindy Schwartz, and I’m fifteen years old, and it’s been seven years since I started shopping at Bloomingdale’s. I like Bloomingdale’s because…’” He stopped reading and skipped his eyes down the page. “All right, where’s Cindy? You didn’t mention a word about school. This is all about Bloomingdale’s.”
There was an awkward silence, then someone called, “She left.”
“Left? Why?”
“You told her to go to the office to get her schedule changed.”
“But I said after — Oh, never mind.” He returned to sifting through the autobiographies. “Here it is again. ‘Don’t Care High… Don’t Care… Don’t Care… It looks like this group is going to take a lot of deprogramming. Ah, here’s one. Paul Abrams. Where’s Paul?”
Timidly, Paul raised his hand.
Mr. Morrison beamed anew. “Okay, let’s see what you’ve got here. ‘My name is Paul Abrams, and I originally come from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. My family moved to New York over the summer, and I enrolled this morning at Don Carey High School. I’m in the tenth grade, and it’s my ambition to —’”
“Hey!” came a surprised voice from the back of the class. “Get a load of the guy with the ambition!”
The hum swelled again as Paul felt scarlet red creep up the back of his neck and flood his face.
Mr. Morrison rapped on his desk with a ruler. “Quiet down, everybody. I’d like to finish reading this paper. Then maybe you’ll find out what a real Don Carey student should be like. This is exactly —”
Just then the public address system came alive with a voice that resembled the lower register of a bassoon.
May I have your attention, please. Welcome to ano
ther year of school. Just a few announcements. As you may or may not have noticed, this year’s welcoming committee did not convene due to lack of interest.
A request from the cafeteria staff asks me to remind you that there are garbage cans strategically placed in the dining area.
It has been brought to my attention that, while some students must do without, some of you have as many as eight or nine lockers. This seems excessive.
Also, we’ll be accepting nominations for student body president as of today.
Normally this process would have taken place last spring, but again, due to lack of interest, no names were entered, rendering the election redundant. In a fit of optimism, we have decided to try again.
Finally, due to the disrepair of clocks in this school, I would ask that everyone synchronize watches. It is now fifteen seconds to first period. That’s all. Have a good day.
Paul watched as the class stood up and began to file out the door. He looked for a signal from Mr. Morrison that class was dismissed, but the teacher had returned to some paperwork. Tentatively, he rose.
“Hey, Ambition, aren’t you coming?”
Paul’s attention shifted to the doorway where a husky, sandy-haired boy stood watching him. Paul scowled. Only an hour into the school year, and already he was the butt of jokes.
The boy laughed. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m harmless. It’s just that anyone with ambition is going to need a guide around this place. At this time of the year, everyone’s ambition is Christmas vacation. After that, they wait till June.”
Still wary, Paul picked up his notebook and followed the other boy into the hallway.
“The name’s Sheldon Pryor.” He looked at Paul intently. “You do talk, don’t you?”
Paul grinned. “Yeah, I talk. I’m almost afraid to, though, in this place. What’s wrong with ambition?”
Sheldon laughed. “Seeing as how you’re new here, I’ll lay the cards right on the table. Morrison’s wrong. This is not Don Carey High School. This is Don’t Care High. It’s more than a nickname — it’s a concept. The school spirit here is so low that it’s off the scale. There are twenty-six hundred kids roaming around these halls, and I defy you to find me one of them who gives a hoot about anything school-related.” Paul looked dubious. “And it’s all contagious. The school doesn’t care about the community, so the community doesn’t care about the school, so the board lets the place get all run down because they know that nobody cares.”
“No offence,” said Paul, “but I don’t think I can believe that.”
Sheldon laughed. “You want proof? Look at that teacher over there.” He indicated a thin, cadaverous man standing in front of a classroom, a distant expression in his eyes. “That’s Mr. Knight. Five years ago he was teaching in the suburbs. They called him ‘Super Teacher.’ He was known everywhere as the guy who could motivate a rock.” Sheldon shook his head sadly. “But then, you know, you’re riding on top of the world, and you get cocky. Maybe he said the wrong thing to a school board member, or took someone’s parking place, but whatever the reason, they transferred him to Don’t Care High. Now he’s a zombie like everybody else. They say the only thing he cares about is his European bottle cap collection.”
Paul frowned. “How could he have changed like that? He might have found different kinds of kids here, but he should still stay the same kind of teacher.”
“Simple,” Sheldon replied. “His whole style was class discussion. He had to take all sides of every argument because no one else participated, and from this he developed a multiple personality. After a few years, he took some time off for psychiatric examination, and when he came back, he was like this. He picked up the bottle cap thing from a fellow patient.”
“Mr. Morrison isn’t a zombie,” Paul pointed out. “He seems to care.”
“You can’t go by Morrison. He’s the guidance counsellor, which makes him the loneliest guy in the building. He’s so desperate for someone to talk to that he sees some fancy high-priced analyst uptown who motivates him to motivate us.”
Paul laughed. “I thought guidance would be really busy in a big school like this.”
“Nope. No one wants counselling. Don’t Care has no problems — none worth caring about, anyway. We never even had anybody with ambition until today. Besides, the guidance office is three-quarters filled up with old, unused application forms.” Sheldon glanced at his watch. “We’d better start walking if we’re going to be ten minutes late. You’ve got English next, right?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“Most of the people from our homeroom are in that class. You see, we don’t have course selection here anymore.”
“But every school has course selection,” Paul protested.
“Yeah, well, not this one. Nobody fills out the cards. And they can’t force people to pick, so they just assign classes. They did it to you, didn’t they?”
“Well, yes, but I figured because I was registering late —”
“Oh no. It’s policy. The word is a couple of years ago they asked some girl if she wanted to take industrial arts, cooking or infrared astronomy, and she said, ‘What’s the difference?’ They dumped selection for the whole school right on the spot.”
As they navigated the hallways, Paul’s eyes examined the passing parade. His new fellow students were making their lethargic ways in various directions, drifting in and out of classrooms, to and from lockers, and scanning bulletin boards with great disinterest. There wasn’t a school jacket or school letter in sight. And, Paul thought, glancing at his notebook, he was apparently the only one who had bothered to bring something to write on. The people themselves were physically no different from the students at Kilgour Secondary School back home in Saskatoon — except for the eyes. The Don Carey students seemed to have their eyes focused on infinity, or at least on some place outside the walls of the school. Their behaviour was normal enough. They talked, moved, laughed. But if eyes were the windows of the soul, these people had their blinds drawn. All except Sheldon.
“How about you?” Paul asked, following his new guide through the shabby cream-coloured halls. “You seem to care.”
“Oh, I only came in halfway through last year,” Sheldon replied airily, “so I still care a little. I don’t know how long it’ll last, though. This morning I went into the washroom to visit Don Carey’s big invention — I figure as a student here it’s my duty to patronize the sewer system every now and then — and someone had written ‘Who Cares?’ on the wall. Underneath it — I counted them — forty people wrote ‘Not me’. So I was looking at it, and for one brief moment it seemed so right. Then the room went out of focus, and when I came back to myself, there were forty-one ‘Not me’s’ on that wall.” He smiled engagingly. “It’ll happen to you too, Ambition.”
Paul laughed nervously. “The name’s Paul. And I don’t freak out that easily.”
“We’ll see. Right turn.”
They entered English class right on time ten minutes late, and were among the first to arrive. The subject was Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and while Paul tried to concentrate, he found himself marvelling at how the teacher seemed unperturbed by the fact that her students were trickling in twenty, thirty, even forty minutes late, and in the case of Wayne-o from homeroom, a scant seven minutes before the end of the hour.
“… and these are some of the things I’d like you to keep in mind when you read the play,” the teacher was saying as Paul watched Wayne-o establish himself at a last row desk. “Any questions?”
Paul, who wanted to ask if the school library had multiple copies of Hamlet, raised his hand. A surprised hum swelled in the classroom.
“Bad move, Ambition,” came a whisper from Sheldon.
Paul felt the red returning to his face. Meanwhile, the teacher, who had turned away secure in the knowledge that there would be no questions, looked back to discover the source of the murmur.
“Yes? You have a question?”
“Oh… uh… n
o. Not me. No question.”
“Your hand’s still up,” whispered Sheldon.
Painfully aware that he was once more the centre of attention, Paul nonchalantly swung his raised hand over to scratch his forehead. The hum faded.
The morning progressed, and deep shock set in as the former student of Kilgour Secondary, Saskatoon, made his way through Don’t Care High, Manhattan. He walked through the alien halls feeling like a visitor from Mars, watching the natives drift about aimlessly and marvelling at some of the sheets tacked up on bulletin boards:
SIGN UP HERE TO HELP KNIT AFGHANS FOR BLITZ-TORN ENGLAND
It was dated 1941, and in its forty-four years of posting, had not managed to attract a single volunteer.
Underneath that:
MAYOR LAGUARDIA NEEDS YOUR HELP!
STUDENTS FOR A CLEANER NEW YORK
Paul sighed. Not only did no one care enough to sign up for these things, but no one could even be bothered to take the notices down when they became obsolete. What a place.
As he entered his geography class, he heard a voice call out, “Hey, Ambition. Over here.” There at a back row desk was Sheldon Pryor, smiling and waving. Paul joined him, grateful to see a familiar face.
Mrs. Wolfe began the class with what she called a geography game. “Now, I want everybody to participate.” The hum swelled. “You’ve each got a card with the name of a country and several clues describing that country’s industries. When I call on you, you read out the clues, but not the name of the country. That’s for the class to guess. For example, if I were to say that a country was the biggest producer of steel in the world, you would of course say the United States. You see?” Dead silence. “Okay, let’s start with —” she consulted her class list — “Dan Wilburforce.”
Dan concentrated on his card. “Uruguay.”
“No, no, no! I told you to read only the clues! We’re supposed to guess what country it is!”
“Oh. Okay. Woolen, cotton, and rayon textile manufacturing, meat processing, cement manufacturing —”