Mainly it made for a busy morning for me. I showed up stupidly early to see how things would play out, and there were already some kids staking out their ground. These tended to be representatives of Benson’s more dicked-upon groups.
INT. HALLWAY IN FRONT OF THE LIBRARY — MORNING
JUSTIN HOWELL is hovering nervously near the door to the library, hoping to claim it for the theater kids. He is pacing back and forth humming THE THEME FROM RENT OR MAYBE CATS. With visible relief, he notices GREG approaching.
JUSTIN HOWELL
clearly relieved that it is not a jock or gangbanger or anyone else who will immediately call him a faggot
Oh hi Greg.
GREG GAINES
Justin, good to see you.
JUSTIN HOWELL
Good to see you. Greg how was your summer.
GREG
It was hot and boring, and I can’t believe it’s over already.
JUSTIN HOWELL
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
OH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA HA.
This seemingly innocuous JOKE has caused Justin Howell to completely lose his shit. Perhaps it is the MIND-DESTROYING ANXIETY of being back at school.
Meanwhile, this was not quite the response Greg was hoping to get. He had intended to say something bland and unmemorable. Now he is SHRUGGING and FIDGETING AWKWARDLY and attempting to avoid EYE CONTACT, which he usually does when people are laughing at a thing that he has said.
JUSTIN HOWELL (CONT’D)
turning his eyebrows into a weird shape
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA.
MRS. WALTER, the librarian, arrives. She is glaring at both of them. She is almost definitely an ALCOHOLIC.
JUSTIN HOWELL
Hi Mrs. Walterrrr.
MRS. WALTER
with dislike
Hhngh.
JUSTIN HOWELL
Greg that is too funny.
GREG
All right man, I’ll see you later.
I was obviously not gonna go into that library and have a lengthy bro-hang with Justin Howell, for reasons I’ve already explained to you. It was time to move on.
INT. HALLWAY IN FRONT OF THE BAND ROOM — MORNING
LAQUAYAH THOMAS and BRENDAN GROSSMAN have not been let into the band room yet. Despite not having instruments, they are poring over some SHEET MUSIC. You can sort of tell that they are doing this to show everyone that they are good enough at music to just casually sit around reading sheet music.
BRENDAN GROSSMAN
Gaines. You doing orchestra this year?
GREG
apologetically
Couldn’t fit it in.
BRENDAN GROSSMAN
Whaaaaat.
LAQUAYAH THOMAS
incredulously
But you woulda got timpani this year! Now who’s gonna play timpani?
BRENDAN GROSSMAN
mournfully
It’s gonna be like Joe DiMeola.
GREG
Yeah, probably Joe. He’s a better percussionist than me anyway.
LAQUAYAH THOMAS
Joe gets the sticks all sweaty.
GREG
That’s because he’s so focused.
INT. AUDITORIUM — MORNING
Two senior gothy dorks, SCOTT MAYHEW and ALLAN McCORMICK, are camped out in some seats near the back playing Magic cards. GREG enters cautiously, his eyes darting from side to side. The auditorium is perhaps the school’s most valuable real estate. It is highly unlikely that this little goth colony will survive the WAVES OF JOCKS, THEATER KIDS, AND GANGBANGERS that will doubtless arrive later this morning.
GREG
Hello, gentlemen.
SCOTT MAYHEW
Good day to you.
ALLAN McCORMICK
blinking rapidly and forcefully for probably no reason
Yes, good day.
The gothy dorky kids are very low in the social hierarchy, but at the same time they are almost impossible to infiltrate. Maybe it’s because they’re so low in the hierarchy. They’re insanely suspicious of everyone who tries to talk to them. This is because pretty much all of their characteristics are targets of ridicule: their love of elves and dragons, their trench coats and long un-groomed or maybe-too-well-groomed hair, their habit of striding around way too fast while breathing really hard out of their noses. Getting them to accept you is difficult without becoming a gothy dork.
Actually, I feel kind of a soft spot for them because I completely understand their worldview. They hate high school, just like I do. They’re constantly trying to escape it and instead live in a fantasy world where they can spend all their time striding around in the mountains, jabbing people with swords under the eerie light of like eight different moons or something. Sometimes I feel like, in an alternate universe, I could have been one of them. I’m pasty and chubby and completely insane in social situations. And if I’m being honest, attacking people with swords is awesome.
That was what I was thinking a little bit, crouching there with them in the auditorium. But then I had a realization.
SCOTT MAYHEW, after much deliberation, plays a CARD entitled “Horde of the Undead.”
ALLAN McCORMICK
Curses.
GREG
Scott, great horde.
My realization was that I could never actually live a life where I had to be constantly doing things like praising a dude’s horde.
So that made me feel better about myself.
It did not take me all that long to respectfully get the hell out of there.
INT. AREA IN FRONT OF THE SOUTH STAIRWELL — MORNING
All four members of MIDDLE-CLASS AFRICAN AMERICAN JUNIOR SUB-CLIQUE 4C are positioned near the doors. Meanwhile, a lone sophomore church kid, IAN POSTHUMA, has spread his stuff farther down the hall and is grimly waiting for REINFORCEMENTS.
This is a classic situation in which you try to engage people as little as possible, because if you look like you’re part of one group, the other group will take notice and ostracize you. I mean, being ostracized by sophomore church kids would not be the worst thing in the world, but my one goal in life was to not be ostracized by anyone. Were there times when this goal seemed like the goal of a moron? Yes. But honestly, name one life goal that does not occasionally seem like the goal of a total moron. Even being president would completely suck, if you really give it any thought at all.
GREG gives IAN POSTHUMA a low-key head-nod greeting. Then the RUBBER BALL that JONATHAN WILLIAMS has been flinging against RANDOM SURFACES ricochets into one of GREG’S TEETH.
In previous years, there would have been no dignified way to deal with this. The ball-throwing group would have burst into raucous laughter, and my only course of action would have been to stride briskly away, probably while being further pelted.
But pretty quickly, it became clear that this year, things were different.
Instead of glorying in the fact that his ball has bounced into GREG’S TOOTH, JONATHAN WILLIAMS tucks his head into his shirt with embarrassment.
DARNELL REYNOLDS
visibly annoyed
I told you you would hit someone.
DONTÉ YOUNG
Dude’s a senior.
JONATHAN WILLIAMS
mumbling
Sorry.
GREG
It’s all good.
DAJUAN WILLIAMS gives Jonathan Williams a shove.
DONTÉ YOUNG
cleaning a fingernail
Can’t be throwing shit.
Basically, being a senior means that when people throw things at your teeth, it’s accidental. In other words, being a senior is awesome.
All morning before school, and then all day, that was how things went. It was kind of a perfect day in that regard. I spent a few minutes in the parking lot with a gaggle of ill-tempered foreign kids led by Nizar the Surly Syrian, then exchanged some hellos with the soccer team, and this year no
ne of them tried to grab and injure my nipples. Dave Smeggers, noted stoner, began telling me a long and excruciatingly pointless story about his summer, but was soon distracted by some birds, at which point I made my escape. Vonta King tried to get me to sit with him across from room 318, so I pretended I was on my way to a meeting with a teacher, and he accepted it without argument. And so on and so forth.
Also, at one point I almost walked into one of Madison Hartner’s boobs. Her boobs are about at eye level for me.
For the purposes of this god-awful book, I have to talk briefly about girls, so let’s see if we can get through that without me punching myself in the eyeball.
First things first: Girls like good-looking guys, and I am not very good-looking. In fact, I sort of look like a pudding. I am extremely pale and somewhat overweight. I have kind of a rat face, and my mediocre vision makes me squint a lot. Finally, I have what has been diagnosed as chronic allergic rhinitis, which sounds interesting but basically just means a constant booger problem. I can’t really breathe through my nose, so most of the time my mouth is hanging open, which gives the appearance of major stupidity.
Second: Girls like confident guys. With that in mind, please reread the previous paragraph. It’s hard to be confident when you look like a chubby, squinty, mentally defective rodent-human who picks his nose.
Third: My girl tactics need work.
Failed Girl Tactic #1: The Non-Crush. In fourth grade, I realized that girls were desirable. I had no idea what you were supposed to do with them, of course. I just sort of wanted to have one, like as a possession or something. And of all the fourth graders, Cammie Marshall was definitely the hottest. So I had Earl go up to Cammie Marshall on the playground and say: “Greg doesn’t have a crush on you. But he’s worried that you have a crush on him.” I was standing about five feet away when Earl did this. The hope was that Cammie would say, “Secretly, I totally have a crush on Greg and want to be his girlfriend.” Instead, she said, “Who?”
“Greg Gaines,” said Earl. “He’s standing right over there.”
They both turned to look at me. I took my finger out of my nose to wave. That was when I realized that I had had my finger in my nose.
“Nope,” said Cammie.
Things did not really improve from there.
Failed Girl Tactic #2: The Nonstop Insults. Cammie was obviously out of my league. But her best friend, Madison Hartner, was also pretty hot. In fifth grade, I figured Madison would be starved for attention, given that Cammie was so hot. (Note: In retrospect, at seventeen, it’s hard to understand how a ten-year-old could be hot. At the time, though, this made perfect sense.)
Anyway, with Madison I used a tactic I had seen work for other fifth graders: insults. Constant vicious insults. Insults that didn’t even make any sense: I called her Madison Avenue Hartner, not knowing what Madison Avenue was. Bad-ison. Fat-ison. It took me a while, but eventually I discovered Madison Fartner, which made some other kids giggle, so I used it all the time.
The thing was, I was relentless. I went way too far. I told her she had a tiny dinosaur brain and a second brain in her butt. I said her family didn’t have dinner, they just sat around and farted at each other because they were too stupid to know what food was. At one point I even called her house to tell her that she washed her hair with barf.
Look, I was an idiot. I didn’t want people to think that I had a crush, so I decided to give everyone the impression that I truly, honestly hated Madison Hartner. For no reason. Just thinking about this really makes me want to punch myself in the eyeball.
Finally, after about a week, the day came when I made her cry—something about Booger ChapStick, I forget the specifics—and the teacher gave me the elementary school equivalent of a restraining order. I quietly accepted it and didn’t speak to Madison again for like five years. To this day, it remains an unsolved mystery: The Week Greg Was Filled with Unexplained Hate for Madison.
Christ.
Failed Girl Tactic #3: The Diversion. So, Mom made me go to Hebrew school until my bar mitzvah, which was a colossal pain in the ass and I don’t want to talk about it. However, Hebrew school had one thing going for it: a terrific boy-girl ratio. There was just one other boy in my class, Josh Metzger, versus six girls. The problem: Only one of those girls, Leah Katzenberg, was hot. The other problem: Josh Metzger was sort of a stud. He had long bleached-out frizzy hair from swimming. He also was sullen and untalkative, which made me afraid of him and at the same time made him very attractive to girls. Even our teachers used to hit on him. Hebrew school teachers are all women, mostly unmarried.
Anyway, in sixth grade, it was time to throw some game at Leah Katzenberg. In order to win her over—get ready for record-setting stupidity—I decided that I would try to make her jealous. Specifically, by flirting with Rachel Kushner, an average-looking girl with big teeth and hair even frizzier than Josh Metzger’s. Rachel Kushner was also not especially exciting to talk to, because she talked really slowly and never seemed to have anything to say.
The one thing going for her was that she thought I was the funniest guy in the entire world. I could make her laugh by doing literally anything: impressions of teachers, going cross-eyed, Dance of the Pigeon Man. This was awesome for my self-esteem. Unfortunately, it was not awesome for my chances with Leah Katzenberg, who rapidly came to think that Rachel and I were a cute couple, and one day after Hebrew school told us exactly that.
Suddenly, I had a girlfriend. And it was not the girlfriend I wanted.
In the words of Nizar, the surliest and least-English-speaking of Benson’s ESL kids, “Fuck dick shit ass.”
The next day, I informed Rachel over the phone that I wanted to be Just Friends.
“That’s fine,” she said.
“Great,” I said.
“Do you want to come over?” she asked.
“Uh,” I said. “My foot is stuck in the toaster.” It was idiotic, but needless to say, this got a huge laugh from her.
“Seriously, do you want to come over,” she asked again, after literally thirty seconds of helpless giggling.
“I have to sort out this toaster thing first,” I said. Then, knowing that there was no going forward with that conversation, I hung up.
This joke went on for days, then weeks. Sometimes when she called, I said I was glued to the fridge; other times I had accidentally welded myself to a police car. I started branching out to animals: “I have to fight some angry tigers,” or “I’m digesting an entire wombat right now.” It didn’t even make any sense. And eventually, Rachel stopped thinking this was so funny. “Greg, seriously,” she started saying. “Greg, if you don’t want to hang out, just tell me.” But I wasn’t able to tell her for some reason. I would have felt too mean. The stupid part was, what I was doing was way more mean. But I didn’t realize this at the time.
I just punched my own eyeball.
Hebrew school became incredibly awkward. Rachel stopped wanting to talk to me, but this didn’t help things with Leah at all. I mean, obviously. She thought I was a huge jerk. Actually, I may have helped convince her that all boys were jerks, because she became a lesbian not long after the whole Rachel fiasco.
Failed Girl Tactic #4: The Boob Compliment. In seventh grade, Mara LaBastille had a terrific pair of boobs. But it’s just never a good idea to compliment a girl’s boobs. I had to learn this the hard way. Also, it’s somehow worse to draw attention to the fact that there are two boobs. I don’t know why this is, but it’s true. “You have nice boobs.” Bad. “You have two nice boobs.” Worse. “Two boobs? Perfect.” F minus.
Failed Girl Tactic #5: The Gentleman. Mariah Epps’s family moved to Pittsburgh in eighth grade. When she was introduced to us on the first day of school, I was so fired up. She was cute, she seemed smart, and best of all, she was completely unaware of my history of dickhead behavior around girls. I knew I had to move quickly. That night, I broke down and asked Mom what girls really wanted.
“Girls like gentlemen,??
? she said. She was being kind of loud. “A girl likes to get flowers every so often.” She was glaring at Dad. It was the day after her birthday or something.
So the second day of school, I wore a suit and brought an actual rose to school, which I gave to Mariah before first period.
“I would be honoured and delighted to escort you to an ice-cream parlour this week-end,” I said, in a British accent.
“Would you,” she said.
“Greg, you look like a fruit,” said Will Carruthers, a nearby jock.
But it worked. Unbelievable! We actually went on a date. We met at a place in Oakland, and I bought us some ice cream, and we sat down, and I thought, from now on, this is how my life is going to be, and that kicks ass.
That’s when The Talking began.
My God, that girl could talk. She could go for miles. Invariably it was about her friends back in Minnesota, whom I didn’t know. It was all she wanted to talk about. I heard hundreds of hours’ worth of stories about these people, and because I was being a gentleman, I wasn’t allowed to say, “This is boring,” or “I already heard that one.”
And so the problem became that the gentleman tactic worked too well. The expectations were ridiculous. I had to wear my nicest clothes to school every day, pay for stuff constantly, spend hours on the phone every night, etc. And for what? Definitely not sex. Gentlemen don’t get to fool around. Not that I really knew, back then, what fooling around was. Plus I had to keep talking in that stupid British accent, and everyone thought I was brain-damaged.
So I had to put a stop to it. But how? It obviously wasn’t an option to be honest and say, “Mariah, if spending time with you means paying lots of money and listening to you talk, then it’s not worth it.” I considered a campaign of freaking her out by suddenly only talking about dinosaurs, or maybe even pretending to be a dinosaur, but I didn’t have the courage to do those, either. It was a major quandary.