You Don't Know Me

by David Klass

  I do not understand how sleep can make me tired. Sometimes I suspect that while my mind thinks it is asleep I have actually been transported to an alternate universe where I was forced to run laps all night, or to march with alien armies over rough terrain.

  I also wake up afraid. The fear increases as I get out of bed and begin pulling on clothes. I barely manage to hide the growing dread as I sit at our table that is not a table dredging up soggy flakes of cereal.

  I am afraid because I have no doubt that in some way or other Glory Hallelujah will respond to my note today, and I fear the worst.

  Last night, while I was making up my list to try to figure out her behavior, she was probably telling all her friends about my note. Perhaps there was a mass meeting of the secret sorority of pretty fourteen-year-old girls, and Glory Hallelujah stepped forward. “Sisters,” she said, “you won’t believe what happened to me this morning in anti-math class. I was passed a note so stupid and pathetic that I had to eat it. And here is what the note said. And you’ll never believe who had the nerve to give it to me.”

  I am afraid as I walk to school. Every time I see a member of the secret sorority of pretty fourteen-year-old girls I look the other way.

  I walk past Billy Beezer’s house and see no sign of him. Besides his being suspended and grounded, it would not surprise me if Mr. and Mrs. Beezer have also chained him up in the basement. They have high hopes for their young Beezer. They believe that he will graduate first in his class from our antischool, go to Harvard, become President, and also discover a cure for old age.

  They cannot have been too thrilled about his egg-roll-stealing caper. I believe that the full wrath of the disappointed Beezer parents has descended on my friend who is not a friend. I look for his face in the window, but the curtains have all been pulled closed as if out of a deep sense of shame.

  I arrive at school two minutes early. My locker is on the third floor, in a fairly remote corner. I turn the dial on the combination lock three to the left, four to the right, five to the left, but there are no hopeful clicks and the door remains sealed tight. This does not surprise me. My locker does not work the way other lockers do. It is not at all impressed by correct combinations. My locker is far tougher and meaner than that.

  I do not dial the combination again right away. “Open up,” I whisper. “I am in no mood for this today. If you give me trouble, you will regret it.”

  My locker does not respond, because it has no mouth, but what it is thinking is “Take your best shot, doofus. My grandfather was a vault at Fort Knox and I don’t open for the likes of you.”

  I kick my locker so hard that I dent it. It is possible that I also fracture several of my toes. I begin to hop around in pain. And then I lower my injured foot and the pain vanishes because I see Glory Hallelujah herself in all her glory walking toward me, and she looks relatively happy, although she appears slightly baffled at something she has just seen. “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “Oh, yes,” I say, suddenly dizzy as the full force of her bright blue eyes is turned in my direction. Forgive me for being dramatic, but it is like standing on a high hill, looking into a sunrise. “Fine,” I gasp, “just fine.”

  “You kicked your locker.”

  “Just practicing a soccer move.”

  “I didn’t know you play soccer,” she says.

  “I play all sports,” I tell her. And then, because I have been rendered giddy by looking into the mountain sunrise of her blue eyes, I am able to blurt out, “Why did you eat my note?”

  She smiles. The lights of the universe blink on and off. Matter and antimatter nearly come together. She is smiling at me. At me! “I was hungry,” she says.

  So she is a goat. Well, no matter. Goat or girl, she is still my beloved. Her secret is safe with me. I will bring her pieces of paper and tin cans. I will tie a bell around her neck and lead her to green and grassy pastures.

  “That was a joke, silly,” she says. “What else was I going to do with your note? I mean, you passed it to me right at the end of class. Mrs. Gabriel was about to turn around and catch us. I couldn’t risk having her find it.”

  I am smiling back at her, and nodding at her response, and I am thinking, “Of course. It makes perfect sense. Eat the evidence. If Billy Beezer had swallowed the egg roll, he could have denied everything. He would be a free man now.”

  “And I was a little bit surprised,” she says. “I didn’t know you even liked me.”

  “Well . . .” I start to say, and run out of words.

  “I mean, I kind of thought so. But you never said anything.”

  “But . . .” I try to point out, and don’t know how to finish the sentence.

  “I thought maybe you might say something to me after math class yesterday, but every time I saw you after that, it seemed like you were embarrassed, and hurried away.”

  “No . . .” I try to explain, but how can I begin to describe such a complex case of mutual misunderstanding.

  Glory Hallelujah is watching me. “I guess you’re a little shy,” she says. “Is that it?”

  I nod.

  “Shy is good,” she says. “I have a horse, Luke. Well, actually I just own half of Luke. Isn’t that weird, to just own half a horse? Anyway, Luke is real shy. If he doesn’t know you, he won’t take an apple from your hand. Even if he’s hungry. But once he gets to know you, he’s the friendliest horse in the whole world.”

  I am trying to follow all this, but I am still a bit dizzy and the words are flying thick and fast. I know that I am being compared to half a horse. Usually this would not be a good thing, but in this case it sounds just fine. I am quite willing to be either the front or even the back half of a horse if Glory Hallelujah thinks I am the friendliest horse in the world. I would eat an apple out of her hand. I would eat a pineapple from the crook of her elbow. If necessary, I believe I would be willing to eat a guava, skin and all, from between her feet.

  The bell rings. We have to be in homeroom in three minutes.

  “Oops, I better go get my books,” Glory Hallelujah says, and takes a step away.

  I am surprised to hear myself say, “Wait a minute, Gloria.”

  She turns. Waits.

  My heart is going Ka-wang! Ka-wang! “Do you want to come to the game with me or not?”

  Once again, I feel the intensity of her friendly smile. Not to be overly poetic, but I believe it is akin to the shaft of heavenly light the shivering polar explorer sees that cracks apart the treacherous ice floe, and opens a safe route home. “Of course I do, John,” she says. It is the first time she has ever spoken my name. I did not know until this very instant that she even knew my name. But apparently she does. Because her lips have just uttered it, more musically than it has ever been spoken before. “I love basketball. And I think we should get to know each other better. Do you mind picking me up at home?”

  “No,” I say.

  “You know where I live? Beechwood Lane, all the way down at the end.”

  “Sure,” I say. I am thinking: “Of course I know where you live. There is nothing about you I don’t know, Glory Hallelujah! I know the different pairs of your white and yellow and pink socks, and how high they stretch up your delicate ankles, which you are in the habit of crossing and uncrossing beneath your chair during anti-math class. I have counted the tiny blond hairs on the side of your ear, and I am also intimately familiar with the pattern of freckles on your left elbow.”

  “And do you think we should get something to eat after the game? Maybe at the Center Street Diner?”

  ‘Absolutely,” I say, and hear myself babble, “Dinner. Diner. Done!”

  “Great. See you in math class,” she says. “Bye, John.”

  She walks away down the corridor. I turn to my locker. Dial three to the left, four to the right, five to the left. The door swings open.

  My locker is now aware that it is dealing with someone who can’t be messed with. It has listened to my entire conversation with Glory Halleluja
h, and it has seen that I am a player. It knows that if it gives me trouble I can have its door removed from its hinges, melted down, and reshaped at a foundry into gardening tools or toilet paper holders.

  My locker practically places the correct textbooks in my hands. It does not have a mouth, so it cannot speak, but my locker is thinking, “I did not know who I was dealing with. You were traveling through this school incognito. I mistook you for a doofus. But now I see who you really are, and it is a great honor to serve such a scholar and gentleman.”

  I close my locker door and head down the hall. Now, this is a very strange thing, but the school corridor itself looks markedly different. It takes me a few seconds to figure out what has changed. For the first time in my life, I am actually seeing the tops of the rows of lockers. Either I have grown a foot taller, or I am floating on air. It is also possible that the lockers themselves have shrunk.

  Indeed, my entire anti-school and everyone in it seem to have decreased in size, relative to me. The doorways seem smaller. The water fountains seem lower. I pass several guys in football team jackets, standing and talking loudly, in a kind of pre-school huddle. They have a way of filling up the entire hallway with their squared shoulders, so that I normally have to squeeze by on the side or scamper and weave my way through them like a bug scuttling, terrified, across a kitchen floor, all the time saying, “Excuse me, pardon me.” Today they don’t look nearly so big in their silly white jackets. I saunter right through the midst of their huddle, like John Wayne through a saloon, brushing shoulders with them.

  As homeroom period yields to first period, and then to second, I notice an even stranger thing. The school day is unfolding in real time. The mysterious and wrathful God of school clocks—who normally tortures me by slowing down each period of my anti-school day so that five minutes of anti-math class can take five hours—has vanished. All of the different hands of all of the different school clocks are turning at their correct speed. Teachers are teaching in real time. Students are studenting. Radiators are radiating.

  I am also noticing many attractive features of our antischool that I have for some reason never observed before. One of the second-floor hall windows looks out on a corner of a grassy field, in the center of which a maple tree spreads its branches in a most picturesque fashion, as if it is embracing the sky. I also spot, hanging on the wall of our chemistry lab, next to the equipment closet, a small print of Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, which I have never noticed before. In this important work of portraiture, Dr. Bunsen is shown holding up one of his Bunsen burners with obvious pride. It is, I’m sure you will agree, surprising how we are practically surrounded by beauty and great works of art, and yet oblivious to them.

  Good old Mrs. Moonface is waiting for us at the front of anti-math class, ready to spout algebraic gibberish as always. She gives me a perplexed look, because I am always the very last one to squeeze into the room just as she is starting her lecture, and today I am two minutes and twenty-seven seconds early.

  I return her perplexed look with a nonchalant nod of the head—one might even say a fearless nod of the head. “Yes, I have come early and of my own free will, Mrs. Moonface. What is more, I refuse the blindfold. Line me up against the wall and fire away with your most deadly algebra. I have arrived with a smile on my face, and if I must die, it will be with the same brave smile. For I will see the face of my beloved before I expire.

  I sit down at my desk. Mrs. Moonface is still throwing me perplexed looks. She can tell that something has changed. She can see that I have lost my fear of algebra. On this day, I have more important matters on my mind than any concept in the entire history of mathematics. I am waiting for Glory Hallelujah—my Glory Hallelujah—to arrive.

  Believe me, if Archimedes ever had the grand entrance of a girl as pretty as Gloria to look forward to, he would never have spent so much time calculating the value of pi. He would have been baking her a pie! If Euclid had ever beheld a vision of loveliness like the one I see walking into my anti-math class, he would have forgotten all the geometry of lines and planes, and concentrated on the sweet simplicity of soft curves. If Pythagoras had ever had a girl look at him the way Gloria’s blue eyes fix in my direction, he would have given up his calculations on the hypotenuse of right triangles and run for the hills to pick a bouquet of wildflowers.

  Yes, that’s right, Gloria walks into anti-math class and looks right at me, and gives me a little smile. She passes in front of a bank of windows and is backlit by a heavenly radiance. The lovely lines of her long legs and perfect thighs are gilded, as if by a worshipful artist, by the noon sunlight. Her perky breasts press against her T-shirt as if reaching out to greet me through the flimsy cotton material. With each step her hips swivel and she seems to toss her head slightly, so that her golden hair glitters.

  Among the Lashasa Palulu, there is no word for God. When speaking of divine things, they merely point at the sun. When they are indoors, they must do this with their feet, since they walk on their hands. If you have never seen a group of Lashasa Palulu praying indoors, with their toes pointed skyward, you have missed something. As Glory Hallelujah enters my antimath class and smiles at me, I am tempted to spring onto my hands and point my feet skyward in a prayer of thanks, but I restrain myself.

  Then we are sitting side by side, sharing the delicious secret of our Friday night date. I know she is thinking about it, even though she manages—no doubt through a huge effort of will—to give no outward sign that anything unusual has taken place between us. She appears to be listening carefully to Mrs. Moonface, but she is, of course, thinking of what our life will be like together, henceforth.

  I am also pretending to listen to Mrs. Moonface. I have long ago perfected the technique—invaluable in anti-math class—of not being noticed by being noticed. Let me explain.

  I hold this truth to be self-evident: No one wants to be called on to answer a question in algebra class. Everyone in our class is, in effect, trying to hide in their seat. Some are using camouflage—dressing to blend in with the walls. Some are attempting to throw her off with the old blank poker face or the old dead-fish gaze, as if to say, “Don’t bother calling on me, Mrs. Moonface, because I am brain-dead.”

  Others are using the more advanced but equally foolhardy technique of trying to appear eager, smiling and copying down her lecture enthusiastically, as if to say, “There’s no need to call on me, Mrs. Moonface, because I’m right with you.”

  I have combined elements from all of these approaches to arrive at the one, true method of not being noticed by being noticed. This highly sophisticated technique for not getting called on involves just enough head movement, facial expression, and note-taking enthusiasm so that Mrs. Moonface will not think I am trying to hide from her, combined with just enough of a blank poker face and a dead-fish gaze so that she will also not think I am trying to trick her by appearing overeager.

  So I am now sitting at my desk, watching her teach and thinking about my date with Glory Hallelujah. Of course, I do not understand the slightest syllable of algebra gibberish that Mrs. Moonface is uttering, but she cannot tell that from my appearance.

  I am applying my technique with masterly precision. After every second sentence from Mrs. Moonface I nod my head, each time she finishes writing down an equation I move my pencil as if jotting down a few key ideas, and twice every three minutes I meet her eyes and smile knowingly, while at the same time allowing the slightest spark of understanding to creep into my dead-fish gaze.

  My technique is working perfectly. I am invisible. When she turns from the board and does her quick death scan to decide who will fail at answering her next impossible question, there is nothing about me to trigger the slightest firing of neurons in her brain. Her death scan sweeps on, past me, past Karen Dirigible, who has dressed so perfectly to blend in with the walls that I myself cannot distinguish girl from painted plaster, to Norman Cough, who attempts to deflect it with a pathetic retching sound from his bronchial repertoire, as if to
say, “Don’t call on me—can’t you see that I’m dying of tuberculosis?”

  “Norman,” Mrs. Moonface says, “I’d like to ask you to answer this very simple problem,” and she taps the chalk on the board for emphasis. “An automobile radiator contains 20 quarts of a 40 percent antifreeze solution. How many quarts should be drained and replaced with pure antifreeze if the final mixture is to be 50 percent antifreeze?”

  Norman squints his eyes and makes a face like there is antifreeze rolling around in his eyeballs. He looks at us, his classmates, for help, but we have seen him get the death question and are all looking away from him, as if he has just been diagnosed with leprosy. He looks back at Mrs. Moonface for mercy, with eyes that are as big and panicked and pleading as a deer’s suddenly caught in a sixteen-wheeler’s headlights. “Please,” Norman’s eyes are begging, “I have a miserable enough life as it is, merely being Norman Cough. There is no need to humiliate me with this algebra question from the lowest level of hell. I stand less chance of answering it than I do of levitating myself out the window. I humbly beg of you, Mrs. Moonface, as one human being to another, in accordance with the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Convention, withdraw your question.”

  Mrs. Moonface smiles back at him. But the message buried in her smile is: “Norman, you are dead meat. Since I will never be a movie star and get my own trailer and have a sandwich tray delivered every hour by a handsome man named Jacques, I have declared war against the entire human race, and the most potent weapon in my arsenal is the unanswerable mixture equation question. You have been selected from all of the students in this anti-math class by my random death scan to be destroyed and forever branded a doofus by this particular question. There is no way out. Abandon hope.” But what Mrs. Moonface actually says is: “Norman, we’re waiting for your answer.”

  Norman realizes that he is trapped. There are animals that nature has provided with multiple weapons and defenses. The flying squirrel, for example, has sharp teeth and claws, a bristly coat, and a membrane that enables it to glide through the air. But there are also less sophisticated life forms that, when tracked by a predator, have one and only one trick to try to escape. There are, for example, worms that roll themselves into tight balls, and squid that squirt black clouds of ink to try to blind their attackers. Norman Cough is such a one-trick organism. Nature has furnished him with only a single defensive weapon to try to survive in the battle of evolution—a repulsive hacking cough.