“Thanks for nothin’,” she hissed as Miss Mathews began her speech on the ninety-eight toxic chemicals in secondhand smoke.
CHAPTER TWO
The Remains of the Tray
Lunch at Pelican View Middle School was a very busy time for me. It may come as a surprise that this had nothing to do with eating. A great deal of my lunchroom time was devoted to what I call “blending.” Caring about what others thought was a completely new sensation for me, but in middle school I quickly discovered that fitting in with my peers was as important to health promotion and risk avoidance as washing one’s hands regularly and obeying the WALK indicators at busy intersections.
Why? Because sitting alone in the lunchroom marks you as easy prey. Tommy Williams, who was quickly developing a reputation as the practical joker of the sixth grade, routinely snatched the chairs out from underneath students who sat alone. A student on her own was also far more likely to have her lunch scavenged by a roving athlete.
Where were the caring adults who prevented these incidents? Except for Mr. Fiegel, our social studies teacher, they were closeted away in the teachers’ lounge, enjoying adult conversation, filtered spring water from the office cooler, and the use of private bathroom facilities. That’s where.
But Mr. Fiegel, it was rumored, had his eye on the assistant principal’s job, so he volunteered to “maintain order” in the lunchroom. At the beginning of the lunch period, he pulled a stool up next to the condiment table. Tall and thin, with an Adam’s apple that rivaled Ichabod Crane’s, Mr. Fiegel perched on his stool and used a bullhorn to keep misbehaving students in line.
When a student broke a rule, Mr. Fiegel would flick on his bullhorn with a screech and bark into it: “Williams” or “Norton” or even “the gentleman in the soiled red T-shirt.” If there was any doubt about the perpetrator of the crime, Mr. Fiegel would mark him with the ray of his infrared pointer pen, an instrument more commonly found in executive board-rooms during PowerPoint presentations. He would then refer to a cryptic list of lunchroom rules, such as: “only two cheeks to a seat,” “no roving allowed,” or “backpacks must be stowed securely.”
I have repeatedly requested a written list of these lunchroom rules so that I might follow them. Every time I do this, I am told by Miss Rhonda, the school secretary, that they are in the process of being typed up. I am beginning to think Mr. Fiegel is flying by the seat of his pants, as my mother would say, with regard to these lunchroom rules. The clear lack of instructions, plus the fact that there was only one adult supervising almost two hundred sixth graders, added up to this: every boy for himself (or girl as the case may be).
So each time I entered the lunchroom, my primary goal was to band together with the only two students I knew who might be willing to shield me with a lunch tray during a food fight. The first was Bernie Lepner. Bernie was my next-door neighbor. Up until last year, Bernie was in the grade below me; but due to a battery of intelligence tests he took in the spring, he had been encouraged to skip fifth grade entirely. My mother calls Bernie dreamy. Absentminded seems a more appropriate description. Bernie’s mind is always on the characters he reads about in books or the epic medieval fantasy he is creating for future serialization. If you ask him about it, he will suddenly come alive and recall for you a recent battle or plot of murderous revenge, describing in detail the next chapter in his “quatrillionology.”
Since we pack our lunches, Bernie and I usually meet at the entrance to the cafetorium, which is how everyone refers to our lunchroom since it also doubles as our auditorium. While Bernie is willing to take whatever seat is available, I prefer to look around a little first. In fact, I am often forced to reach out and grab Bernie’s collar before he puts us in danger.
“Not there!”
“What? Why?”
“Bernie.” I gestured in the direction he was heading. “Look at the aisles. Nothing but giant legs. This is where the football players sit.”
“The football players? Where?”
Honestly, if Bernie were a rabbit, he’d cross open fields under a full moon. While it was true that they didn’t have on the jerseys they wore on game days, it was hard to mistake a football player.
“Right over there. Next to the food-dispensing line, with its easy access to seconds. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Bernie, look at them. They’ve been drinking hormone-laden milk since infancy. They could bench-press you.”
“Okay, okay.” Bernie turned in another direction and headed for a table in the corner.
I rushed to cut him off. “No, sorry. Not there, either.”
Even he couldn’t fail to see the reason this area was off-limits. The girls wore dark makeup under their eyes; the boys had chains dangling from their pockets, and hair that stood up in jagged rows. The entire table was wearing black.
Bernie sighed. “Why don’t you pick, Franklin?”
“I’d be happy to.” There was just one other location, aside from the football players and the future juvenile delinquents, that I wished to avoid. And that was the table that included boys who had not survived Coach Dilemming’s summer basic-skills camp and, therefore, did not make it onto the football team. While I’ve no doubt they spent hours of their free time playing “first-person shooter” video games, these boys had no outlet for their anger during school hours.
Among them was Marvin Howerton, a student with whom I had a long history of entanglement, dating back to kindergarten. There was something about sensitive, asymmetrical guys like me that incited Marvin Howerton to violence.
I located Marvin’s table and then, using a quick geometric calculation, found a table in a low-traffic area that was farthest from the three points I most hoped to avoid. Keeping my elbows tucked close to my body, my lunch box in front of me, and a close eye on Bernie, I reached the table safely. Sliding into my seat, I stowed my backpack securely beneath it and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Hey, Bern. Hey, Franklin.” Sarah Kervick slapped her tray down across from me.
Sarah was the second of my lunchroom partners. Despite the incident in homeroom earlier and her lack of etiquette in general; despite Bernie’s lack of focus and his tendency to speak with his mouth full, Sarah and Bernie were my people. And I was grateful for them.
“Hello, everyone,” I said cheerily, and lifted the lid on my insulated lunch box.
Without a word of explanation, I set a wrapped sandwich in the middle of the table before fanning the lid of my cooler back and forth to redirect the scent of Sarah Kervick—a mixture of stale secondhand cigarette smoke and tuna-noodle casserole. Bernie, too, set out a bag of chips, a deli pickle, and a corn dog between us. Our mothers had begun competing to make sure Sarah remained full until the end of the day. Most of these items would be scooped into her backpack for later consumption. Sarah had a fondness for school hot lunch that I could not fathom.
“Don’t forget,” I said to Sarah, “my mother wants you to remind your dad that she’s taking you to get your skating costume this week.”
Sarah flipped her hair back over her shoulders. She was wearing a white blouse, a V-neck sweater, and a pair of green corduroy pants, all purchased by my mother at the beginning of the school year. I could just see her trying to formulate an excuse.
“My mother said to tell you, and I quote: ‘We’re really pushing it. We have to go this week unless Sarah wants to make her first public skating appearance in the nude.’”
Even though it was a direct quote, the word nude still made the blood vessels in my cheeks dilate.
“I could perform in my warm-up suit,” Sarah offered, as if we hadn’t been over this a thousand times.
“And the judges would think you didn’t care and give you low marks.”
“What about…”
“You have to wear a skirt or a dress. All the girls do.”
“Your mom doesn’t.”
“That’s how much you know. She’s going out to buy a dress tonight.”
“Is not.”
; “Tree nymphs are always nude,” Bernie said, biting down on his own deli pickle and releasing vinegar fumes into the air.
“At least in my story.”
Sarah hunched over her casserole and stabbed it with a fork. “Where were we, Bern?” she said, as if our conversation was already over.
I knew she’d heard me.
“In the Malogon Forest,” Bernie replied, mouth full of pickle. “At the edge of the Jun Dun Plain. The Sandroheens, a small band of Dorgon Trolls, are making their way through the forest, hacking at the undergrowth with their double-broad tonken blades—”
“They were looking for the queen,” Sarah broke in. “They knew she was captured somewhere nearby.”
“Right.” Bernie rewarded Sarah with a big grin. “Dorgon Trolls have a very keen sense of smell. They were tracking her.”
While the two of them crashed through the underbrush of the Malogon Forest, I stayed behind in the lunchroom, continuing with a quest of my own. I found the third long lunch table and traveled along it with my eyes—noting infractions along the way that included a blob of mustard launched from a plastic spoon and condiment packages stuffed into backpacks. It seemed that Mr. Fiegel was falling down on the job today.
I kept this up until my eyes alighted on their prize. Glynnis Powell. A creature of habit, Glynnis always sat at the near end of table number three.
She was surrounded by girls I did not know, since they’d come from other elementary schools. It was a mystery to me why Glynnis sat with these girls, who seemed more like a flighty bunch of sparrows than serious students the way they always laughed at the same time and covered their mouths in shock, whispering furiously. I could tell in an instant that she was not comfortable there. Her excellent posture was a little stiff, her smile a bit forced. Only a boy who had chosen her as the object of his affections would notice these things, I told myself. Only I, Franklin Delano Donuthead, understood her distress.
I watched her politely touch the corners of her mouth with her napkin and imagined that I was a Dorgon Troll, distinguishing her clean, Ivory-soap smell from Bernie’s deli pickles, from the odor of Mr. Kervick’s smoke that clung to Sarah’s hair, from the combined stench of a dozen mayonnaise-slathered sandwiches that had been sitting unrefrigerated in poorly ventilated lockers for at least four hours, and I sighed happily.
As if to make my bliss complete, Glynnis’ eyes met mine, and she smiled before looking down at her lap. Did this mean that the events of this morning had been understood in their proper context and I was forgiven?
Suddenly a hand was thrust in my face.
“C’mon, we gotta get to the john,” Sarah said, snapping her fingers.
CHAPTER THREE
Positive Rewards, Positive Results
We chose the bathroom by the gym because it was on the opposite side of the school from the lunchroom and less likely to be populated during those hours. As we reached the entrance, she pushed open the swinging door and glanced inside.
“Uhhh…anybody here?” she asked. When no one answered, she dropped her backpack on the floor and tilted her head to indicate that the coast was clear. Knowing there was no safer place to stow my backpack, I was forced to hand it over to Sarah for safekeeping.
This I did with my head down. After all, I’d just had a mature moment with Glynnis Powell. What would Glynnis think if she knew I required Sarah Kervick as a “lookout” and the senseless waste of tap water to make it possible for me to pee?
I had to put this behind me.
Pelican View Middle is the oldest building in the school district. Rather than urinals with dividers between them—as some more modern facilities use to give the appearance of privacy—the creators of this building had constructed what could almost be called a fountain in the middle of the room. The wall opposite the door was flanked by sinks with metal mirrors above them. Two stalls had been constructed in the far corner, clearly meant to handle bathroom needs no sane middle-school boy would even attempt. There were also a few urinals along the wall to our left. But it was clearly this huge porcelain bowl with twelve trickles of water running into each of its twelve drains that was meant to handle most of the bathroom traffic.
Normally, I just used the stall. But today, for some reason, I felt a surge of confidence. Today, I would add my stream to The Bowl.
I approached it in a relaxed manner and unzipped my pants. Closing my eyes, I focused on the faint sound of trickling water. Everything was fine. Things were going, on the whole, quite well. I even allowed myself to visualize the moment just after I’d successfully concluded my business at The Bowl and was washing my hands thoroughly under a gushing faucet.
“How long is this gonna take?” Sarah Kervick had pushed the door halfway open, and I caught a glimpse of her head in the mirror. I bent double to cover myself.
“It’s not like I can see anything, Franklin,” she said. “Plus, I’m not interested.” Her gaze fell on the sinks.
“What did I say about the water? Will you listen for once? I gotta get to my locker!”
“Your tone of voice is not helping,” I replied, zipping up again.
She banged through the door into the room. “Just get in the stall, okay?”
I walked with dignity through the open stall door and slid the latch into place.
Sarah Kervick proceeded to turn on every faucet in the room, simulating a trip on the cruise boat Maid of the Mist as it went directly under Niagara Falls. Not that I have ever been. I did stand a safe distance away from the falls on a concrete embankment in the care of a nice Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer once while my mother and her best friend, Penny, took the trip.
Even at the time, I wanted to wet my pants as Mother and Penny disappeared into the clouds of churning foam. I was picturing life in some Canadian orphanage, competing for sunlight through barred windows with homeless urchins and street toughs.
Thus, Gloria’s advice worked like a charm. I was just zipping up for the second time when I heard Sarah’s voice again.
“What are you lookin’ at? Never seen a girl before?”
“Uh…not in the boys’ bathroom.”
“You got a problem with that?”
“Uh…no.”
“I could maybe nail your eyelids to your cheekbones and give you a problem.”
“That’s okay….”
I heard the sound of feet beating it, and I peeked out the stall door.
“You better hurry up, Franklin. I’m warning you, just one verse or I’m dragging you out of here.”
I soaped up and began humming the “Happy Birthday” song to myself. I used to go through it three times—two if I added the “how old are you” verse—to completely clean and disinfect, but Sarah Kervick, middle-school bell times, and the desire to catch a glimpse of Glynnis Powell in the hallway had me soap-lather-and-rinsing in record time these days.
As Sarah pulled me out into the hall, we practically tripped over the giant feet of Marvin Howerton and Bryce Jordan, who stood over us, examining our backpacks, which—to my disgust—Sarah had tossed on the floor.
Sarah tried to ignore them, hunching her shoulders and bending at the knees to pick up our packs. Despite her tough-talking ways, Sarah Kervick does not like to fight.
But Marvin put his foot on her hand.
“Me and Bryce got a bet on what you were doing in there,” Marvin said. “Spill it, so he can pay up.”
Sarah Kervick weighed, maybe, one-half a Marvin Howerton. She yanked her hand out from under his shoe and straightened up.
“You wanna square off, that’s fine,” she said, squinting up at him. “But I’m keepin’ my nose clean at school.”
She tried to sidestep him but he boxed her in, pushing her back into a row of metal lockers.
When will Marvin Howerton learn? If you value your life, you should never push Sarah Kervick and remain in striking range. Her countermove was quicker than the eye could register. Before Bryce and I could react, Marvin was bent double. With
in seconds, she had ahold of our backpacks and was yanking on my long arm.
Over her shoulder, she said, “So make an appointment.”
In our haste to get away, we almost bumped into Mr. Herman, the school custodian, who rounded the corner with a cavernous waste can on cast-iron wheels. He was, no doubt, heading for the Dumpster just outside the utility entrance. My fear of Marvin Howerton was replaced by my fear of lunchroom remains, and I instinctively set a new course as far away from Mr. Herman as I could.
But when he saw Sarah, he stopped. Reaching out his hand, he placed it on her shoulder. They looked at each other for a long while.
“Okay?” was all he said.
Not okay, I thought. Nobody touches Sarah Kervick without her permission. I cringed and arranged my arms so that they could protect my body from flying garbage.
But nothing happened. Sarah used her chin to indicate Bryce and Marvin behind us. Mr. Herman nodded in a way that suggested Marvin’s condition was regrettable, but he understood it had been necessary. The hall began to fill with students.
“What was that about?” I asked as we were sucked into the stream, girls darting back and forth like dragonflies in their attempt to communicate as much as possible in the four-minute time frame.
Sarah shrugged. “I know him, that’s all. He and my dad worked for the same roofing guy last summer. He lives near us.”
“Well,” I replied. I had no idea what else to say. You would think it worth mentioning that Sarah was on a shoulder-squeezing level with our school’s custodian. “Don’t forget about Thursday after school,” I called out as she headed off to her locker. “My mother is leaving a note for your dad about it today.”
Normally, when the parents of middle-school students arrange an outing for their children, they communicate with one another via the device known as a telephone, invented in 1897. Ninety-eight percent of American homes have at least one phone. Over 70 percent have computers. The Kervicks had neither. To make arrangements with Sarah Kervick, we had to actually go to her home. You might think her father would welcome us warmly, given the time, attention, and money my mother has lavished on his daughter. But this was not the case. He often pretended not to be home, even when it was obvious by the blaring television that he was.
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