Last Meeting of the Gorilla Club

by Sara Nickerson

  Josh passed the gym doors and thought about the PE shorts in his backpack. He remembered the Friday tour with Ms. Yoshida, when she’d pointed out the lockers in the locker room. He’d missed PE on Monday, but knew he’d have to show up today. And it was the running unit. Just thinking about it made his chest tight.

  The Hello Walk was crowded with kids talking and laughing and sharing their early-morning energy. He kept his eye out for Big Brother and thought he saw him leaning against a wall, talking to a girl, but when he got closer no one was there. He did see Liddy, the classmate who had volunteered to show him the ropes. She was in a corner with a group of kids, but she didn’t see him, not even when he passed by. It was like his old school. Once he’d learned to be invisible, he didn’t know how not to be.

  Josh turned the corner and glanced at the place he’d eaten lunch the day before. Dead Melanie’s bench was so hidden behind the giant rhododendron that, if Big Brother hadn’t shown him, he would never have known it was there.

  He wondered about the dead girl. About her name on the bench. The spot made him sad, but not for her, really. When he tried to figure it out, his sadness, it was like a math problem he had no idea how to solve.

  The first bell rang but Josh continued to stand and stare at the tiny spot of bench where he’d probably end up eating his lunch again that day. Already everything felt exactly the same.

  Except Big Brother. That was different. That was a mystery. Like another impossible math problem in his head.

  INVISIBLE GORILLA

  During the first week of school, when Mr. K had introduced the Marvelous Mysteries project and was giving examples, he told the class about an experiment with a bunch of dogs and a guy named Pavlov. The dogs learned that when a bell rang, they would get food. For several weeks Pavlov would ring the bell and then give them food, so after a while they learned to expect food every time a bell rang. He knew this because of their saliva. When he stopped giving them food, they still drooled every time a bell rang.

  This was one of those things that made Lucas love Mr. K’s classroom. Because with a lot of teachers, even if they told him something interesting, he wouldn’t think about it the rest of the day, and especially not three weeks later. But things that Mr. K taught them, like Pavlov’s dogs, stayed with him. So on Wednesday when Mr. K walked into the room, clapping his hands in his rock-star way and everyone in class sat up straight, Lucas thought, That’s it. We are just like Pavlov’s dogs.

  While Mr. K took attendance, the kids got busy with their morning work packets. But when he told them to take out their math workbooks, they shuffled their feet impatiently. “What’s up?” he asked.

  The whole class spoke at once: “You said you’d present your Marvelous Mystery project!” “We’ve been waiting!” “When are you going to do your Marvelous Mystery?”

  Mr. K smiled and held up his hand. “Ready-set?”

  “You-bet.”

  “Okay, put away those math books and get out your Marvelous Mystery notebooks. Has everyone finalized their topic?”

  Most of the class said yes and a few said maybe. Lucas didn’t answer. He studied his brainstorm sheet. His list was long and he really was interested in every single topic. How would he ever choose?

  “Don’t forget,” a voice whispered. “The marvelous mystery of Maxie Moon.”

  Lucas jumped. He glanced sideways but didn’t see her. He did see the boy in the red raincoat, and that startled him for a moment. He’d sort of forgotten about him.

  Josh Duncan was looking down at his paper. He appeared to be drawing instead of writing. Lucas thought back to Monday, when he’d first seen him running through the narrow space between the two buildings, along with the shadow boy.

  He twisted to see the very back corner. Maxie wasn’t there, but instead of feeling relieved, he worried. When would she pop up next? What would she ask him to do?

  “Add me,” she whispered. “Add me to your list.” Was she really speaking or was it just in his head?

  “Stop!” he said.

  He hadn’t known he was going to say it. He wasn’t even sure he said it out loud until Mr. K said, “Lucas? Are you okay?” Mr. K looked at the students sitting closest to Lucas. They all shrugged.

  “I’m fine, Mr. K.” He picked up his pencil and pretended to write.

  Mr. K clapped twice. “Okay! Let’s do this. Are you all ready for Mr. K’s Marvelous Mystery?”

  Everyone shouted that they were. Lucas closed his notebook.

  “Now, remember,” Mr. K said, as soon as the class had settled down, “this is not how any of you need to do your projects. This is my project. And I chose it because I’m interested in human perception. I want each and every one of your projects to reflect your unique visions. Your interests. Your biggest questions and greatest mysteries.”

  Liddy raised her hand. “Should we take notes?”

  “No,” Mr. K said. “You’ll need to focus your attention. I’m going to ask you to count basketballs.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. Just count basketballs.”

  Mr. K got the computer and the screen ready. He gave his instructions using his slow and scientific voice. He told the class they were about to see two groups of basketball players: a team dressed in yellow and a team dressed in green. “Your job,” he continued, “is to count how many times the yellow team dribbles the ball. Got it?”

  The whole class nodded. Got it. When Mr. K turned off the lights, everyone leaned forward, ready to count. “Remember,” he said, as he hit the button. “Focus on the team in yellow.”

  Lucas thought there would probably be running around and confusion, a blur of yellow and green, maybe like a quarter-under-the-cup trick, which he was freakishly amazing at. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was just two teams, one yellow and one green, standing in a circle, calmly bouncing a basketball ball back and forth.

  So Lucas locked his eyes on the yellow team. And he counted. One, two, three, four . . . but then . . . five, six . . . something strange happened.

  A gorilla happened.

  A gorilla—actually a person dressed in a gorilla suit—stepped into the middle of the circle. And the gorilla, he just stood there. He pounded on his chest a few times and then walked away.

  Through it all the basketball players just kept bouncing.

  Lucas lost track of the bounces. Because the gorilla! That was funny! That was a good one! He even started to laugh, but stopped when he noticed that no one else was laughing. He took a quick glance around the room. No one was doing anything but counting balls, just like Mr. K had told them to do.

  What?

  When the last ball bounced, Mr. K turned on the lights. “Well?”

  Kids called out numbers.

  What?

  Mr. K held up his hand. “One at a time, please.” He pointed to Carmen, sitting in the front row.

  “Nineteen!”

  He pointed to Rashid. “Seventeen.”

  Point, point, point. Owen, Sam, Angelo.

  Sixteen, seventeen, twenty.

  Mr. K said, “Did anyone see anything unusual?”

  Silence.

  “No one?”

  Um, yeah . . . THERE—WAS—A—GORILLA!

  But Lucas didn’t shout it out like he wanted to. Because, well, was there a gorilla? Really? If no one else had seen it, was it actually there?

  “Interesting,” Maxie Moon whispered in his ear. “Very interesting.”

  Lucas put his head in his hands.

  “We’re going to watch it one more time,” Mr. K said. He turned off the lights. “And this time, I want you to just watch the video. Don’t worry about counting balls.”

  Lucas raised his head. Again, it was the same basketball players wearing yellow and green and again, they bounced the ball back and forth. Halfway throug
h, just like before, the gorilla walked in.

  The gorilla.

  Only this time, everyone saw him. They shrieked. They called out “There’s a gorilla!” When he beat his chest, just like before, everyone laughed.

  They shouted, “That’s not the same video, Mr. K!”

  He turned on the lights and said calmly, “It’s exactly the same.”

  “The gorilla was not there before, Mr. K!”

  “It’s the same video.”

  The class erupted. Except for Lucas. He was frozen.

  Mr. K sat on the edge of his desk and leaned forward until all the talk and laughter stopped. “There’s a name for what just happened,” Mr. K said in his serious scientist voice. “It’s called inattentional blindness. Can anyone guess what that means?”

  Lucas picked up his pencil and wrote, It means I am not losing my marbles.

  Liddy said, “It means we maybe can’t see something that we should be able to see. Something right in front of us.”

  “But why? What was different between the two times we watched the video?”

  “We were counting the balls?”

  “Exactly! You were focusing on something else. Your brain was told you’d be seeing something else.”

  Lucas wrote, I saw it. I saw the gorilla.

  Several kids called out, “You switched the video.” And everyone went nuts again, shouting about the gorilla being there or not being there the first time.

  Mr. K held up his hand. “It’s easy to miss something you’re not looking for. We do it all the time. Each one of us, every day.”

  He then talked about brains and vision. How every moment the brain has all these decisions to make about what to pay attention to and what to ignore. How a person can’t possibly see everything that is right in front of them, so the brain has to choose what to see. And often, when people expect to see things a certain way, that’s exactly how they’ll see them.

  “Things that don’t fit with our expectations will often be ignored,” he said. “Even a gorilla.”

  Even a gorilla.

  The fluorescent light flickered and hummed overhead. Lucas suddenly noticed it and thought of something: It was there all the time, the fluorescent light, flickering and humming. So why did he only notice it sometimes?

  He looked down at his pencil and paper.

  Mr. K was going on about how drivers hit bicyclists in broad daylight because they don’t see them.

  And how lifeguards could be staring at a person in front of them and not recognize that person is drowning.

  “What?”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “How can that be?”

  Mr. K clapped twice and the class fell silent. “How many times have you been looking for something, like in your sock drawer or your locker, and you can’t find it. But then someone else points out that it’s right there, in front of you. And it’s been in front of you the whole time. Raise your hand if that’s happened to you.”

  Nearly every kid put up a hand. Then the chatter started again.

  “The world is full of invisibles,” Mr. K said, raising his voice to be heard. “Simply because of our focus or attention or beliefs or perceptions. What we miss, every moment of the day—it would just blow your mind.”

  He said more things and gave more examples. And everyone kept talking. But the world had frozen for Lucas after one sentence. The world is full of invisibles.

  He felt a fluttering in his ear, and then a whisper. “Capiche?”

  PE

  Three minutes. That’s all it took for the world to turn upside down. That’s how it felt, anyway, when Josh realized he was the only one who had seen the gorilla walk into Mr. K’s Marvelous Mystery video. Upside down. Inside out.

  They were all supposed to be counting basketball bounces. Josh had been doing it perfectly. Bounce, bounce, bounce.

  Until the gorilla.

  And then when Mr. K asked everyone how many bounces the yellow team had—or was it the green?—it didn’t matter, because Josh had stopped counting when he’d seen the gorilla. But no one else had seen it. No one.

  “The world is full of invisibles,” Mr. K had said. “Simply because of our focus or attention or beliefs or perceptions. What we miss, every moment of the day—it would just blow your mind.”

  He said more things and gave more examples. And everyone kept talking. But Josh had flipped to a new page in his notebook. What was in his mind seemed to show up on the paper. And there were so many things!

  He saw Big Brother and his mother and his father and inspirational posters tacked to his wall. He saw a carved wooden bear and a skeleton house. A SpongeBob bicycle, alien-ship library, and a murder of crows. He saw a girl with two different-colored shoes, the one he’d seen the day before. Her shirt was the same, with the sparkling rainbow. He saw a volcano, erupting all over everything.

  So many thoughts were like bumper cars in his brain, crashing into one another with questions about atoms and ants and an old pirate ship captain with a wooden leg.

  Well, well, well.

  When Josh looked up, the classroom was nearly empty. Mr. K was still in front of the projector, talking to a boy with the name Hernandez printed on the back of his shirt. He grabbed his notebook, shoved it in his backpack, slipped out the door, and headed to the gym.

  The world is full of invisibles, he told himself. Like Big Brother. Like me.

  Josh went straight to the empty corner of the locker room, passing a bunch of kids changing into different T-shirts. He was still thinking about the gorilla when he took out his new combination lock, the one Ms. Yoshida had told him to bring. He fiddled with the combination.

  15-17-5

  He’d been practicing at home and it clicked open right away. He snapped it shut and twirled the dial again.

  15-17-5

  Was it someone’s job to come up with different combinations? That would be an interesting job. Probably, he thought, a computer did it. But back before computers, did a person come up with them? Could combination locks be his Marvelous Mystery project? No. People would laugh.

  And that was the problem with Marvelous Mysteries, Josh realized. Anything he thought was interesting would probably seem pretty dumb to most other people. Or worse—it would be weird. Especially to his classmates. Even back in kindergarten and the book about the bear in his den. While the other kids were looking at the picture of the den and the bear and the other forest animals, it was the shadows in the corners that had made Josh lean forward—lean forward and crawl into the circle.

  Josh slumped. Then he sat straight up. Because something was weird. Something was wrong. It took him a moment to understand that the weird thing was not a sound. It was a lack of sound. The talking and laughing and lockers banging and toilets flushing—all of it had disappeared. Josh had been sitting there so long, just thinking about the kindergarten bear book, that everyone had already changed and headed out the doors to the big high school track across the playfield.

  Like in an old-time movie, the fluorescent light flickered above his head, made a buzzing sound, and then a pop. The corner went dark. Josh stood up. He sat back down.

  “Hello?” he called softly. No one answered.

  He could hear his heart pounding in his ears—that’s how quiet it was. So what if—what if he just didn’t go? What would happen?

  He played it out in his head. He imagined the very worst thing: that the PE teacher would alert Ms. Yoshida. She’d call his mom. Maybe she’d come pick him up and he would tell her—he would tell her what? The truth?

  It didn’t matter. Because after a while of sitting like that, Josh’s heart went back to beating like normal. He heard drops of water from the faucets. He heard the creaks of cement walls and the clock’s sharp snap every time another minute passed. He stood. Walked around the locker room. Each meta
l locker looked identical to the one next to it, and inside were the things supposedly worth locking up.

  Josh thought, Would it really matter if I ended up with a green T-shirt instead of a blue? Would it make any difference? He stopped in front of the giant poster, the one with the muscled runner guy breaking the victory string. Josh stared at his bulging arms that were raised in triumph.

  The champion pushed forward with his chest. “You don’t even get a participation ribbon for this day,” he said. “You know that?”

  “Well,” Josh said finally, “you’re just stuck there. No one even looks at you.”

  “You are. You’re looking at me.”

  “Only because there’s nothing else to look at.”

  “Yeah? Well, at least I’m stuck like this”—the poster champ puffed out his chest even more—“you’re stuck like that, buddy.” He didn’t say it in a mean way. He actually winked at Josh when he said it, then threw back his head and crossed the finish line in the pretty awesome infinity loop that was his life.

  Josh said, “That’s not very inspirational. Maybe you are winning the race but you aren’t really doing your job.” Then he spun around quickly, so he could have the last word, and went straight back to his locker in the dark corner.

  That’s where he sat, twirling his combination lock, until voices, real voices of his classmates, filled the space again. Feet pounded, doors slammed, lockers clicked. The air smelled like sweat and grass and rain.

  Josh slipped his arms into his backpack. He waited until he heard his classmates start to leave the locker room. He stood and walked out with them.

  Nothing bad had happened. No one seemed to notice.

  Except the poster guy. As Josh walked past, he extended his bulging arm in a friendly high-five position. But Josh pretended not to see.

  EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

  It was the usual lunch table and the usual friends, but for Lucas right then, nothing felt usual. For one thing, Maxie Moon was doing some sort of weird dance in the middle of the cafeteria. No one else could see it, but still—it made Lucas so nervous his hands started to sweat.