The Misfits

by James Howe

JoDan:

  Attitude is what it’s all about. Trust me, Addie, I know about stuff like this. I speak celebrity

  Addie:

  Stop, JoDan. It scares me how shallow you are. Anyway, who I’m thinking of is DuShawn.

  JoDan:

  DuShawn Carter?

  Skeezie:

  No, DuShawn Feingold. How many DuShawns are there?

  Bobby:

  But how do you know he’d want to run for president?

  Addie:

  I don’t. We’ll have to convince him.

  Skeezie:

  Oh, this will be good. The four biggest misfits in school are going to convince one of the most popular kids in school—not to mention the High Exalted Emperor of Spitballs—that he should be our candidate for student council president. This is not going to happen.

  Addie:

  I contend it will.

  Skeezie:

  What’s going to convince him, if you don’t mind my asking?

  Addie:

  The truth, that’s what will convince him. That, and the opportunity to be taken seriously. Nobody takes DuShawn seriously. I don’t know if he takes himself seriously. He’s smart, but he acts like a goof-off.

  Skeezie:

  That’s because he is a goof-off.

  Addie:

  Well, we’re giving him a chance to be more than a goof-off.

  Skeezie:

  But you’re picking him because he’s popular and, excuse me for pointing it out—again—because he’s black.

  Addie:

  Both of which factors will help advance our cause.

  Bobby:

  Which is?

  Addie:

  Freedom. Truth. Justice for All.

  Skeezie:

  You forgot salt.

  Addie:

  What? Oh, no, don’t you dare! Skeezie, put that saltshaker down!

  Skeezie:

  Justice for all, Addie, justice for all!

  7

  ONE OF the nice things about living in a little town like Paintbrush Falls is that you can walk or bike just about anyplace you might be of a mind to go. If it so happens you’re not of a mind to go someplace, well, there are only so many long-ways-around before you end up there anyway. It may also be the last town in these United States of America where nobody bothers much about locked doors or wondering where their kids are. If they’re not at home, you can bet on a stack of pancakes that they are within yoo-hooing distance of somebody who knows them.

  For characters like Skeezie and me, a town this size is a perfect fit; at least, that’s the way it feels to me at the age of twelve. For others—Addie and Joe coming to mind—Paintbrush Falls is a tight squeeze at best, and the more years that go by the more that characters like this will be eager to try on something bigger. I have my suspicions that both Addie and Joe will be looking for something a lot bigger, something that will give them plenty of wiggle room while they try and figure out who they are and what they want to do with the rest of their lives.

  Well, as I am on my meander home from that last Forum meeting, of which the topic was “Popularity versus Principles,” I am in a philosophical frame of thinking. But it isn’t small-town living or even popularity versus principles that occupies my mind, so much as it is justice. Justice for all.

  Addie feels that everyone should be entitled to everything. That is the American way, she says. But I look all around me and I see people wanting just a little piece of something, not the whole pie, and coming up shortchanged even then, and I do not see them being cheated out of their rights. I just see them being dealt a hand. Some people get a royal flush and some get a pair of deuces. And some people get nothing but a string of cards that no matter how they’re played will never add up to a winning hand.

  I guess who I am thinking about mostly is my dad.

  When I walk in the door I can smell the onions frying and I know my dad is making one of his whatever’s-on-the-bottom-shelf-of-the-refrigerator stir-fries. These are not bad and besides anything goes with ketchup.

  “Hey, Skip,” he greets me with, and I do not mind this, despite the fact that this nickname originated in the same era as “Fluff.” As I told you way back on another page, I was called “Fluff” because of my fondness for peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwiches. My dad, feeling sorry for me at the time, gives me the at-home nickname of “Skippy,” in honor of my peanut butter of choice. Over time, I prefer “Skip” to “Skippy,” and “Skip” it is. But this is just a nickname between my dad and me, not for the outside world, in the same vein as my calling him “Hammer.”

  “Hammer” is on account of him liking detective stories and his name being Mike, and when I discover that Mike Hammer is his detective of choice at the time I am about seven or eight, well, I give him that moniker and it sticks.

  I am recalling that at around that same time is when he also starts in reading me Damon Runyon stories every night at bedtime and this has a lasting effect on me. Like, for instance, the way I just used “moniker” for “nickname.” If you don’t know who Damon Runyon is—and why would you, seeing as how your dad was reading you The House at Pooh Corner while mine was dishing out “All Horse Players Die Broke”—well, he was this fellow who wrote stories about these great low-life characters with monikers like Harry the Horse and Milk-Ear Willie and some of these characters made it into a musical called Guys and Dolls— and surely you have heard of that

  My dad was a bit of a low-life character himself in those days. I remember more than once his having a glass of scotch in one hand whilst he was reading me from a book with the other. Those were hard days and hard nights. My dad almost did not survive them, I think, and when I get that thought going in my head, it gives me the willies, and I have to do something fast to wake up to the here and now and see that he did survive, and he no longer has a glass of scotch in his hands or any other kind of liquid poison that will cause him to be crying out in the middle of the night with me sitting up in my bed on the other side of the wall, listening and shaking so hard I think I’m going to be sick, but all it is, is I’m scared.

  “How was work, Skip?” he asks me before he inquires about school. I think he is nervous I am going to hate my job so much I won’t want to stick it out. And, like I say, we need the money. We are not dirt poor, but we do not live in a fancy house, not that the house we lived in before my mom died was so fancy or anything, but it was a few rungs up the ladder from the trailer we have called home for the past few years. We are saving what we can to fix this place up or maybe even get a house again, but it’s only been a couple of years that my dad has been working nice and steady, so I do what I can to help out.

  Do not get me wrong. I am not a snob. I have no problem with living in a trailer. I figure it is just one of the cards my dad and I have been dealt.

  I tell him work was fine. I do not go into particulars, such as that I did nothing but stand around for two hours, except for maybe fifteen minutes of helping Mr. Kellerman rearrange tie displays that did not need rearranging. “Fine” is all I say, and “fine” is all it is he needs to hear.

  “How was work for you today?” I ask then, and “fine” is what he gives back. I can tell that he has had a hard day at the nursery so I settle into doing my homework, leaving further discussion to a time when he has a mind for it.

  My dad wanted to have his own nursery once, but all he does is work in one. He’s lucky to be doing that, as he reminds me every time, my guess is, he needs to remind himself.

  At dinner that night, which is so good I do not even reach for the ketchup, he asks me, after we do the dishes and play a couple of hands of cards, do I want to watch The Godfather Part II, which he has rented from the local video establishment. I say sure thing, on account of the first Godfather being one of my all-time favorite movies and also because watching old movies with my dad—the classics, he calls them—is one of my all-time favorite things to do.

  Still, I can’t help pondering how my dad never—wi
th a capital NEVER—goes out. So right then and there, without even thinking about it, I up and ask him if he would like to be a chaperon for the middle-school dance, which is coming up in a few weeks, the same Friday as the student council election. I do not tell him about the election or Addie’s plan to start a new party at school and run DuShawn Carter for president, because I know he will start in on Addie’s liberal politics and how she is too much of an idealist, like her parents. I am not partial to hearing my dad talk that way, because once he was an idealist and a liberal, too, and he and my mom and Addie’s parents were best friends and always working together for one cause or another. But all that changed after my mom died and my dad hit the bad times.

  “Hm, chaperon,” he says. “Well.”

  “Yes. Well?”

  “I don’t know, Skip.”

  “Aw, come on,” I say. “Don’t you want to keep your eye on me and my peers as we venture forth into the wonderful world of puberty?”

  This one gets a smile out of him.

  “What a way with words you got,” he says. “Like your mother.”

  “Yeah, well,” I say. “Come on, Dad.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he says. “I went to that school, you know.”

  “Duh.”

  “I feel funny going back, is all. Not that I haven’t been back, but to a dance and all. I don’t know, I’ll think about it. You really planning to go? You and your friends don’t exactly seem the dance-going type, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  “Types change,” I go, feeling a little embarrassed because, truth to tell, I’d have to agree with him. But it seems like we do want to go, so maybe I did tell the truth. Maybe types do change.

  “Game of casino?” I hear. “We can do the dishes later.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  I clear the table. He gets the cards.

  “Skip,” he says, shuffling.

  “Hammer,” I give back.

  Two tough card sharks squaring off. I can almost picture each of us with a glass of scotch sitting at our right hands. Except that we’re both lefties and in about a half hour he’ll be saying, “Oreos?”

  And we both know there’s only one drink of choice with Oreos—and it isn’t scotch.

  8

  BACK AT school, Ms. Wyman is having a hard time going along with Mr. Kiley’s instructions to leave Addie be, so long as she stands up with the rest of us. This is because Ms. Wyman is big on rules, which will not surprise you, and one of her rules is: Everybody says the Pledge. I see her giving Addie the evil oculus every morning as Addie stands there, silent as dandruff and every bit as annoying. By Thursday, it looks to me like Ms. Wyman is doing everything she can to keep from hurling herself across the room, scattering innocent seventh graders to the four corners of the earth, and tearing Addie’s liver out with her bare teeth.

  An exaggeration? I don’t think so.

  “Ms. Wyman is not a happy person” is all Addie has to say when I point out the effect her actions are having on the teacher formerly known as IF I REACH FOR THE STARS I JUST MIGHT TOUCH THE MOON. (This sign was retired after Ms. Wyman got tired of Kevin Hennessey making jokes about the word “moon.”)

  It occurs to me that Addie may have a point, which, when I add this to what I know about Mr. Keller-man and even my own father, gets me to wondering if “not a happy person” is part of the definition of “adult.”

  Ms. Wyman and Addie are also going head-to-head on this third-party business, of course. I suspect that Ms. Wyman would not care so much if she didn’t already have it in for Addie on account of the Pledge.

  “There is no need for a new political party,” Ms. Wyman states flatly Thursday morning in homeroom. “Work within the system, Miss Carle.”

  “But a third party will give new blood to the system!” Addie protests. Kevin, who is sitting to my right, adds a third drop of red ballpoint blood to the two already oozing off the end of the knife he’s drawn on his binder. I try to picture Kevin’s future. What comes to mind is a row of numbers across his chest.

  “Let’s all rise for some deep yoga breaths,” Ms. Wyman announces, her voice all of a sudden dripping maple syrup.

  Addie goes, “But—” and is cut off by Ms. Wyman intoning, “Breathe innnn.”

  “Looks like she left you with your ’but’ hangin’ out,” DuShawn cracks, which I am sorry to say I find pretty amusing and get to laughing on account of it right along with Kevin and Jimmy Lemon and the rest of the goofballs.

  At lunch that day, Addie says, “Ms. Wyman may hate me, but she can’t stop the democratic process.”

  We’re sitting there—Skeezie and Joe and Addie and myself—debating the reason that Skeezie’s mother continues to put boxes of raisins in his lunch even after she has been informed that the only purpose they serve before being tossed is to spark debates on the reason she continues to put them in his lunch, when Addie ups and announces, “I am going over there to ask DuShawn to run for president.”

  And she goes. But not until she says, “Bobby, will you go with me, please?”

  I figure she needs my support.

  “DuShawwwn,” Joe drawls in this dreamy way he gets sometimes. “I never thought about his name before. It’s like mine. And RuPaul’s. You know—RuPaul, JoDan, DuShawn. Do you think I’m trying to be black?”

  “Eat your raisins,” Skeezie tells him, tossing the box at him as Addie and I set off on our journey to uncharted territory: the center of the cafeteria.

  DuShawn is there, at his usual table in the middle of the action, and with him are Kevin Hennessey, Jimmy Lemon, Royal Wilkins, and Tondayala Cherise DuPré, who most times will be referred to as Tonni, but every once in awhile, I just have to haul out her whole name, because I happen to agree with Joe on this one: A moniker like that is like a peacock with its tail feathers open. You’ve just got to see it in all its glory.

  DuShawn, Tonni, and Royal are the only black students in the seventh grade, and they are partial to hanging out together for this reason. As for Kevin Hennessey and Jimmy Lemon, well, Kevin is a friend of DuShawn’s, probably on account of they are both wise guys—as in “Ha-ha,” not “Aha!”, because there they part company: DuShawn’s cranium is by far the superior of the two. And Jimmy, well, Jimmy is the kind of guy guys like DuShawn and Kevin need around them. He’s the audience.

  “DuShawn, I need to talk with you,” Addie says.

  DuShawn raises an eyebrow about a millimeter. I am impressed by the precision of this and am wondering how long he has practiced it, when he says out of the corner of this mouth, “I’m listening.” The theme song of The Godfather starts playing in my head. Or is it The Godfather Part II?

  “Well,” says Addie. Nobody invites us to sit. I am just thankful I haven’t been called a name yet. “You know that I am starting a new political party. And, don’t worry, I’ll convince Ms. Wyman. It is my hope to create a voice that will speak to those without a voice, to speak out on behalf of the injustices that riddle our society—and P.F.M.S., in particular. Injustices with which I am sure you have personal acquaintance.”

  “What makes you think that?” DuShawn asks.

  Royal giggles. Tonni, who possesses the humor of a clenched fist, stiffens noticeably.

  Not picking up on the reaction of the two girls, Addie shrugs and lets out a little puff of air. “Well, I don’t mean to be obvious ...”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” DuShawn goes on. “You can be obvious with me. Me and my friends here, we’re not too bright.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Kevin says, indicating he may have missed the discussion on irony in Language Arts class.

  Addie slumps slightly and leans her head in toward DuShawn’s. “Being a minority,” she goes on, articulating the words dangerously, “you have certainly seen your share of injustice.”

  DuShawn nods. I back away from the sparks I can feel starting to shoot off the top of Tonni’s head. I want to pinch Addie or slink back to my table in the corner, but it is too la
te. Addie presses on.

  “So would you run for president of the student council, DuShawn? On the Freedom Party ticket?”

  DuShawn gets this gleam in his eye. “Interesting,” he says. “Kind of like me representing freedom. Like freedom from slavery, maybe.”

  “That’s a good point,” Addie says. I am beginning to think she may have missed that discussion on irony, too.

  “So I’d be, like, a symbol,” DuShawn goes on. I am waiting for Tonni to ignite. It will happen, do not worry about that. “I mean, of course I would be myself, me, DuShawn Carter, human being seventh-grade student and all, but I would also be like a symbol of oppressed peoples everywhere, of, like, all those who are still in bondage, waiting to be freed. Yeah, I could be like the image of, you know, the po’ old plantation slave and Abraham Lincoln, all wrapped up in one.”

  Oh, he is good. He may be the High Exalted Emperor of Spitballs, but this guy has been staying awake in class.

  Addie, at last, is starting to get it.

  “Well, you may be getting a little carried away, but that is the idea, I guess. So will you do it? Oh, and I was thinking maybe I would run for vice president. And, well, the rest of the slate is still open. We could talk about that.”

  DuShawn rubs his chin. “Well, ah dunno,” he says, dropping his voice so low we might have to go looking for it under the table. I see how he’s puffing out his lips, and I have a feeling I know where he’s headed, so I tap Addie on the arm, just to give her a little warning.

  “Ah’m thinkin’ dat might be mighty fine, Miz Addie,” DuShawn drones. He’s really getting into it, pulling at his chin and nodding his head up and down like it belongs on the back window ledge of somebody’s car. “Soon’s I get in from de cotton field, ah’m gwine to hawa give dis a little cogitatin’.”

  I am impressed. Especially that he remembers a vocabulary word from sixth grade.