One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy

by Stephen Tunney

  Schmet stared at the robot and saw his own unpleasant reflection in the slab of shiny metal where a face could have been constructed. He had one brown eye and one blue eye. They moved in unison, but not quite, as one was real and one was false. His real eye shifted to the boy with the goggles, and he made an intensive mental note to remember this one, this fish that got away.

  That afternoon, Hieronymus was sent to his next class: ancient literature. He sat with his fellow students and entered into a class discussion on White Jacket by Melville and how it compared with Credolpher’s Rhythm of the Scron. The teacher was immensely pleased with Hieronymus. And the other students, so adult-like, so respectful, were astonished by his on-the-spot analysis of these old classic works as well. Slue was there — she was in all the Advanced Honors classes. She always felt a strange, suppressed pride in her fellow One Hundred Percenter whenever he started speaking of these dead authors and the relevance of their ancient words and how they tied in with one another and how they tied in with the current social and political and cultural spectrum of their own lives, today, on the Moon. Hieronymus even quoted, verbatim, lines from White Jacket in its original language, free of translation, and when he finished it, he explained what it meant, and some students were so moved they went through great lengths to hide the moisture in their eyes.

  No one thought of the dead boy on the other end of the school who was at that moment getting transferred to the Sea of Tranquility central morgue. No one ever found out about it. It was a non-event, just like the non-color.

  The next day, when Hieronymus returned to remedial math, the incident was completely forgotten. But the other students, despite their ever-rambunctious behavior and destructiveness toward everything, avoided him. They feared him. He was a demon, or some kind of ghoul who could kill with a glance.

  Hieronymus didn’t even have to touch them if he wanted to kick their ass — he did it by just looking at them.

  Two years went by. In all that time, nobody knew of his double life. Of his extreme academic schizophrenia. He dreaded someone would find out. Especially Slue. He was a master at avoiding the subject of wait, what math class are you in? Or wait, where do you go for half the day? Or the trickiest question of all, wait, what were you doing on the second floor hanging out with those Loopies?

  Loopies.

  Everything in the teenage world has a derogatory name. Always a put down. People categorized, given a label that, no matter what, stays and stays and stays.

  Was that you I saw walking down the corridor with those Loopies?

  Is it true that you have a twin brother who’s a Loopie?

  I passed by the Loopie class and I couldn’t believe it — I thought I saw you in there with them.

  The Loopies were what everyone else called them. If you were in that class, you were a Loopie. Even the teachers used the expression. While visiting the main office, Hieronymus once heard a substitute teacher being told that sorry, today you get the Loopies, and the sub just sighed and cursed and complained that it is going to be a long day today, I can’t believe that I’m stuck with the Loopies again, those kids are really horrible, oh innacaws it, on second thought I’m not doing this, no way and the sub stormed out and the payroll secretary had to make a few more phone calls to find another substitute teacher. Hello, this is Lunar Public 777, we have a call for a last-minute substitution, are you available. Yes? Good. Well actually, you will be subbing for section 241…yes, uh, that is correct, that is the Loopie section, but — wait, you just told me that you were available…

  Nobody wanted to teach the Loopies. Some teachers did not even last a day. Substitutes never wanted to come back. That troubled class full of troubled kids went through at least fifteen teachers a year. Not counting the endless times substitutes had to be called in because teachers simply walked out.

  —

  Luckily, most of the students at Lunar Public 777 were not of the Loopie persuasion. Hieronymus was aware of this fact, but for half of every school day it seemed to him he was living in a world of Loopies. Their highly vocal concerns and reactive behavior over every tiny detail in front of them, their need to shout constantly about inane things that would never matter in a middle-class setting, their extreme physicality, their inability to stay seated for more than thirty seconds, their abusive name calling, all of it, the rudeness and the anarchy and the idiomatic expressions he failed to understand, the whole Loopie experience began to take a strange place in his heart. He was quietly becoming a part of their existence. Sitting in that crowded class placed him in a very privileged spot: he could observe, only because they left him alone — and they left him alone because he was a killer and a demon.

  He took advantage of the easy work and he was the only one in class who bothered to do any assignments. He scored very well on the remedial exams and quizzes. With time, the students gradually stopped ignoring him, and through the ear-aching chaos, he found out he had some friends. Many of them had qualities he found lacking in some of the kids from the Advanced Honors class. None of the Loopies were pretentious, for example. They were all brutally, horribly honest. They never pretended to like you. Beneath the shifting waves of illogic and anarchy and cruelty and sentimentality was a code — the Loopie Code — and after his first few months among them, he began to understand the basics of it and how to communicate with them. It was fun. He became "the smart one" in class, and slowly, ever so slowly, some of the Loopies actually put the occasional schoolwork question to him. Once that started to happen, he almost became a type of liaison between the students and whoever the teacher happened to be at the time. He became one of them. He even had a Loopie name. The Loopies, in line with Loopie reasoning, simply dropped the first three syllables from Hieronymus. He simply became Mus. He was the Loopie who proved the schoolwork in remedial math and remedial science was not the problem, the problem was with the goddamned way the innacawsing wrackball teacher was looking at my EEE shoes, what, does he think he can find foot houses that can crimp his pan-handle like that?

  As his social status in the Loopie world rose to new heights, he was a little worried his cover might be blown — that he was not fully a member, that he was only there for half the day. They had no idea he was in the Advanced Honors class. Would his carefully cultivated status, his rise from victim to demon to semi-tutor, be compromised were they to discover his secret?

  The concept of extreme academic schizophrenia was outside the understanding of the Loopies. But indeed, what would they do if they found out? Nothing, of course, because they had a million other concerns, like avoiding their abusive stepfather or getting the same pair of massively wicked Chromo-cufflinks that Blonzo Clangfor of Alphatown United wore. But that was not the question. Would the Loopies stop trusting me if they knew...that I was also...a Topper?

  A Topper. Among other Toppers.

  A dreaded, hated group. Total snobs. Brainy. The polar opposite to the Loopies. Perfect students, extremely adult-like in every way, logical, and not ashamed to quote poetry at the snap of a teacher’s finger. Obedient, but ready to challenge a teacher if the teacher said something stupid. They were loved by the faculty, and the substitutes fought over the rare assignment to teach a Topper class — and indeed, that was a rare thing, because the teachers of Toppers never called in sick.

  They were the Advanced Honors class. Hieronymus was a star among them.

  Mus! Was that you I saw in the auditorium yesterday with all those Toppers?

  I heard that Mus has a twin brother — in the Toppers class! Can you believe that?

  The expression Toppers was not their own invention any more than the moniker Loopies originated from the Loopies. These labels were the work of all those students in the middle, the overwhelming bloc of boys and girls who were neither Toppers nor Loopies. Hieronymus never got to know any of these — he only befriended those on the fringe.

  The kids in the middle, the big fat majority of average Joes and Josephines, had equal contempt for the Topper
s and the Loopies. They felt physically threatened by the Loopies and intellectually threatened by the Toppers. To them, Hieronymus Rexaphin was an inexplicable phenomenon — they were not sure if he was even a student. Because of the scheduling of his classes, he often had to run through the crowded halls of Lunar Public 777, his goggles fixed to his face, sprinting from one academic end to the other, from Toppers to Loopies or Loopies to Toppers, dodging all the average kids, the non-crazies, the non-geniuses, the non-criminals, the non-prodigies. They called him names sometimes. They knew all about his extreme schedule simply by watching where he ran to and ran from and he didn’t care if they knew, they all lived in the purgatory of teenage existence. He ran through them every day, several times a day, and they insulted him, hey goggle-freak are you a Loopie or are you a Topper, but he smiled and he wore their insults as a badge of honor because he knew their animosities were based on a peculiar kind of jealousy: There was no nickname for those in the forgotten, mediocre middle.

  By the time he was sixteen, after two years of living the extreme academic schizophrenic dream, he had accumulated quite a number of friends from both worlds, and among them, he had two absolutely excellent friends. Slue, of course, was his excellent friend from the Toppers, who, like himself, also just happened to bear lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis. On the other end of the spectrum, there was Bruegel, his excellent friend from the Loopies. Bruegel had no idea what lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis was. In fact, it did not even occur to him that Hieronymus wore those goggles for any reason at all except that they looked cool.

  Bruegel was a type of prince among the Loopies. He had as many social problems and family miseries as any of the others in that den of frazzled youth, but, unlike most, he never chose violence as his first or second option to solve anything. Which is not to say he was never kicked in the face after breaking a classmate’s nose with his hammerlike fists — Bruegel never followed violence, but violence had a way of following Bruegel. He was big and burly and with his unkept mop of dirty blond hair, maintained a peculiar joviality among the swirling chaos around him. His expression was always perplexed, amused, and, most of all, innocent. He was dirty, but never in a repulsive way — indeed, his dishevelment was more like that of a knight who fell off his horse and landed in a pool of mud — and if an aristocratic Loopie could even be imagined, complete with an aristocratic sense of naïve ragtag splendidness, it was Bruegel.

  He failed every subject, every year.

  He was very, very easily distracted.

  He often exploded into remarkable bouts of enthusiasm for things or ideas in direct contradiction to the teacher’s plans.

  Some teachers thought he was a lousy student but a brilliant and likable fellow nevertheless — other teachers thought he was just the worst thing to ever walk into their classrooms. The girls could never decide if he was handsome or horrible.

  Hieronymus liked him immediately.

  Every time Bruegel walked into a classroom, the room became smaller, and his voice, naturally several decibels above the din, dominated all sound. He was constantly being told to shut up! or to lower the volume of your noisy trap! but it failed to register. In the world of the Loopies, Bruegel and his way of speaking transformed whatever classroom he entered into a tempest of cacophony — with himself at the center.

  “Hieronymus!” he shouted across the crowded room. Bruegel was the lone member of the Loopies who never called the One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy "Mus.” He found shortened names to be somewhat beneath him. “Hieronymus, you would not believe what happened to me today on my way to this den of un-learning…”

  “Bruegel!” shouted the exasperated teacher, already overwhelmed by the waves of noisy disrespect.

  Non-plussed, Bruegel continued.

  “A woman came up to me on the subway — I think she was from some kind of religious organization. She rang a bell and she wore this really bizarre hat and she wanted me to give her money. She waved a book at me.”

  “Bruegel!” the teacher shouted.

  “She was good looking, but too old for me — and she was really weird. She was talking about Jesus and Pixie.”

  The teacher, whose name was Mr. Flustegelin, who had only been with the class for two weeks, and who was already completely burnt out and close to quitting, shouted at Bruegel again.

  “Bruegel, you are late and you are disrupting this class!”

  This was both true and untrue. Bruegel was indeed incredibly loud. And if the teacher had been successful in controlling the class, the accusation that Bruegel was disrupting the class would have certainly been a legitimate complaint. However, as the noise level had already crossed the acceptable limit before Bruegel’s arrival, it appeared the teacher was picking on him unfairly. And most likely because Bruegel never attacked teachers — he was a safe reprimand.

  “My dear sir!” Bruegel shouted. He never bothered to learn any of the names of the teachers — he only addressed them as my dear sir or my dear madam, and because he was aware of his own limitations in vocabulary, he often made up words to make himself sound smarter than he thought he was. “Your quadrangulations on the vobis articulations exiting from my oral sector are most excrustinghating! I am not the solitary sens-being-boy in this room who is a torrent-builder of volume! I suggest you punish my classmates first before you rally your aquizations and stolligahazen against me!”

  The class roared. Some students felt the teacher unfairly did not notice their own uncontrolled contributions to the general din of noise. Bruegel’s pseudo talk only acted as a type of volume switch for everybody, suddenly shifting the cacophony into an upward direction.

  “Bruegel, you are the loudest in this room!”

  Bruegel ignored the teacher, and before he could continue shouting across the room to Hieronymus about his inane encounter that morning on the subway, he turned to a girl named Clellen, who sat a couple of meters away from him. His voice was just as loud as it had been when speaking to Hieronymus.

  “Clellen, did you watch Sweaty Servants last night? I thought the girl who played Roxanne looked just like you.”

  “Shut up, Bruegel!” Clellen shouted, obviously insulted. “I look nothing like that sling-shot! You got your typhoon sucking backwards again, penguin buster!”

  “I meant it as a compliment,” Bruegel yelled back, laughing with both mockery and affection. By the time he finished his sentence, there was an altercation on the opposite side of the room, with one Loopie already smashing another in the face with a huge metal belt buckle he was using like a pair of brass knuckles. Mr. Flustegelin ran over to the fight in an attempt to break it up, but instead tripped over a student’s foot. The student, despite having his whole leg jutting out, sitting in the most improper fashion, actually did not intend to cause Mr. Flustegelin to fall, but was still, nevertheless, outraged the teacher did not see his leg. The minuscule bit of pain that momentarily flashed through his toe caused this student to roar and scream the worst accusations at the poor embattled teacher who lay on the floor, his own skull throbbing from slamming onto the hard surface. The crying student, seizing a moment of self-righteous outrage, hopped over to the teacher’s table, picked up the tablet screen that the wounded adult had been using for his lesson plan, and smacked the stunned Mr. Flustegelin directly in the face just as the man was getting up.

  “You abusive, student-hitting monster!” he shouted. “You broke my toe! You broke my toe!”

  With every shout of the word toe, he smashed the tablet down on the man, who lay in a fetal position, covering his head with his arms to shield himself from further blows. Within seconds, other students joined in on the assault, surrounding their teacher, whom they hardly knew because he was new and could never control their class even for a second, and kicked him as if he were a bag of diseased rats.

  Bruegel took no part in this attack, but instead smashed open the lock on an old closet with a hammer he had smuggled into the school, and within moments was tossing all kinds of small plast
ic tools and data cards and student tablets all over the room, singing a popular song. Someday it will rain on the Moon and when it does, I’ll reign on you.

  Hieronymus hid under his desk. Soon the security guards would arrive as they always did, nearly every hour, it seemed, as scenes like this were common in the Loopie class. He quietly took out his own secret mini-tablet, where he was preparing an exposé on The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau for his philosophy class. He had just finished reading it, and in its original language no less. He wanted to sprint out just as the guards showed up with their batons and nets and stun-gas. He hated to be late to class because of this kind of thing.

  Moments later, like a sailor arriving in a calm port after a swirling tempest at sea, he would arrive in philosophy. Or history. Or literature. No one in those classes had any idea of his other life among the mad. And the mad had no idea of his other life among the intellectuals. He stepped in and out of both worlds seamlessly. He belonged in both, and his eyes bore the color that belonged nowhere.