by Kurt Dinan
“You love how their outfits are short and tight,” Malone says.
“Right. Like I said, they’re awesome.”
The dance team stands at attention, hands on hips, asses out, chests forward, all with the same dumb duck face, waiting for their music to start. Trying to make the best impression I can with Ellie, I fake noninterest. I fail. Then the music explodes from the speakers, and I hear what song they’re dancing to—The J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold.”
“Oh no,” I half whisper to Ellie.
“What?” she says.
“Listen.”
Not only is “Centerfold” the best ’80s song ever, but it also just happens to be about a guy who realizes a girl in his homeroom is naked in a dirty magazine. So yeah, the Malone picture from last year. The dance team wiggles and thrusts and basically raises the temperature in the gym by twenty degrees. Once the chorus hits, they really vamp it up, grinding their hips and tossing their heads back ecstatically when the line is sung about the girl being the centerfold.
Two seats down, Malone isn’t moving, but she’s no dummy. If there’s any doubt that the song’s been chosen for her, proof comes halfway into the performance when the girls break from the floor and head into different sections of the stands. Libby prances up the aisle toward us, stopping a few rows away. When the chorus hits again, she points with the beat at Malone.
I’ll give her credit—Malone doesn’t take her eyes off Libby. She just stares back defiantly, her breathing steady. What I want to do is jump from my seat and flip Libby off with both hands. But Malone’s made it clear she doesn’t want me to stick up for her. And, man, I get that, I really do. But it isn’t easy to just sit here. Luckily, the song is short. It just feels like forever. I can’t imagine how long it was for Malone.
“Forget her,” Ellie says to Malone once the song ends and the girls return to the floor to thunderous applause. “Libby’s a total see you next Tuesday.”
Malone doesn’t move. But it’s not like she’s stunned and embarrassed into lifelessness. From her eyes, I can tell something’s going through her head.
“Seriously, Kate. She’s trash.”
Malone gives Ellie a thin smile. “No, I’m fine. That was actually sort of clever.”
A few seconds later though, I see Malone run her forearm across her eyes.
Chloe and Benz soon return to the floor to read the accomplishments of our fall sports teams. It’s a pretty damn short list. One of the girls’ cross-country team’s runners came in eighth at the state meet, but beyond that, our fall teams have done as sucky as they usually have. It’s only our boys’ lacrosse team that ever has any success, but that’s a spring sport, leaving the first three-quarters of the year an athletic wasteland.
Next on the agenda, the cheerleaders bounce spastically to the center of the gym in their black-and-yellow outfits. Joined by Becca Yancey in her Zippy the Golden Eagle costume, the cheerleaders flip and flop around, doing a lot of “We’re number one!” to a mostly disinterested crowd. They try again to raise some reaction from us by yipping a cheer about how awesome Asheville is. All of it makes me regret not falling to my death from the water tower. But then the five cheerleaders in the front row pick up the poster boards waiting for them on the floor. The girls point the cards toward the audience so everyone sees the single word on each one.
Holy shit.
Ellie, Wheeler, Malone, and I all look at each other bug-eyed while the rest of the student section starts laughing and clapping hysterically. The cheerleaders have no idea what they’re holding. From their smiles, they clearly think they’ve finally injected a megadose of school spirit into our veins with their magical cards. But they’re wrong. The squad goes into a call and response thing, holding up a card and shouting what they think the cards say.
“Asheville!”
“High!”
“Golden!”
“Eagles!”
“Rock!”
But what the cards really say, and what the students yell back is:
“The!”
“Chaos!”
“Club!”
“Is!”
“Coming!”
The entire student body leaps to its feet, actually showing some school spirit for once, even if it’s in support of what amounts to a terrorist organization.
“Is this one of you?” Malone asks.
We all shake our heads.
“Well, whoever did it, it’s impressive.”
I say, “We should watch for anyone acting weird.”
“In a crowd of two thousand going berserk?” Wheeler says.
“Do your best.”
On the floor, the cheerleaders keep shoving the cards forward at the stands. In return, the students shout back:
“The!”
“Chaos!”
“Club!”
“Is!”
“Coming!”
It becomes a chant, something you’d hear rising from a crowd of overly enthusiastic political protesters. I try to watch any student behaving oddly, but I can’t take my eyes off Stranko, waiting for the moment he realizes what’s happening.
And then he does.
He covers the gym floor in a blur and rips the cards from the cheerleaders’ hands to a wave of boos. Then Stranko gives Benz and Chloe a move it along motion with his finger. The confused cheerleaders walk off the floor, a couple of them looking on the verge of tears. An equally puzzled Benz and Chloe stammer through the first couple of lines from their script and announce that’s it time for a tug-of-war competition between senior football players and members of the lacrosse team.
“Really? A dick-measuring contest?” Malone says.
Ellie starts giggling. “Now that’d be a good pep rally.”
Some heavy metal song Boyd would no doubt recognize erupts from the gym speakers, and the guys from the football and lacrosse teams sprint into the gym from a side door like professional wrestlers entering the ring. No surprise, Stranko has the lacrosse guys all in identical black-and-gold lacrosse jerseys. Following them out is the assistant coach, Tim’s dad.
A rope with a red ribbon tied around the middle is laid evenly across center court, and out comes a table with a Gatorade cooler and a plastic bowl of powdered white chalk so the guys can better grip the rope. Most of the dopes do the LeBron James chalk toss, flinging it into the air where it floats like white smoke.
“There’s Tim,” Wheeler says, pointing down to Adleta. He’s chugging Gatorade with the others, who pound it down like it’ll help them ’roid-out in a few minutes. Some of them even have three cups. I’m convinced that in twenty years, they’re going to discover that energy drinks cause leprosy or blindness. When that happens, professional sports will be really interesting to watch.
The two teams move to opposite sides of the rope, with the three-hundred-pound Hugo King, the football team’s left offensive tackle and only hope of a football scholarship, anchoring one side, and Drew “Sully” Sullivan anchoring the undersized lacrosse team. I’m not sure whose idea this was, but it doesn’t take a professional sports analyst to see the lacrosse team’s going to lose. And I don’t just mean lose but get their arms ripped from their torsos lose.
After way too much arranging and rearranging of positions by guys on both sides, which in the case of the lacrosse players is sort of like straightening the deck chairs on the Titanic, Benz announces we’re ready to start.
“The first team to pull the ribbon past the black tape markers on either side wins,” he says. “Let’s countdown from five.”
“Can the football players count backward?” Wheeler asks.
“Shh, this is exciting,” Ellie says.
The crowd counts down, and before they hit one, both sides are leaning back on their heels, their faces red and strained, trying to yank the other team out of their shoes. After a full minute
of no give on either side, I realize I’m wrong about the lacrosse team, and I quickly see why. They’ve rooted their legs to the floor, hoping the football team will tire themselves out. The football team tugs at the rope, pulling only with their arms and not their entire bodies. It’s the perfect display of the immovable object versus the unstoppable force.
“Who’s going to win?” Ellie asks.
“Who cares? If we’re lucky, they stay this way forever,” Malone says.
But they don’t. It’s not that one team suddenly overpowers the other. It’s because almost simultaneously, guys on both sides drop the rope like it’s gone electric. A few jocks get caught up in the quick release and hit the floor. Others double over, some grabbing their knees, some with their hands out but heads down, like they’re trying to ward off some approaching enemy.
“What’s happening?” Wheeler says.
From the floor, Hugo King answers by grabbing his stomach, shaking his head hard, then puking all over the gym floor.
“Oh yuck!” Ellie yells.
Then other guys involuntarily follow Hugo’s lead, painting the gym with their watery guts. Their mouths are geysers, erupting orange-colored Gatorade into the air and onto the floor. They slosh around in the puke, clutching their stomachs, pointlessly trying to stop the never-ending torrent. It’s a galactic pukefest, a history-making vomitpalooza.
The student section breaks for the gym doors, pushing past teachers who are fighting to get out themselves. Because we’re up top, the four of us can do nothing but watch the chaos and wait for the stench to envelop us and disintegrate our faces.
“Everyone, remain calm,” Mrs. B says, standing closer to the puke party than I’d ever go. “It’s going to be all right.”
Yeah, tell that to the guys who can’t stop vomiting.
Stranko and Mr. Adleta stand on the edge of the team, watching in horror as the guys stumble about, their shirts, pants, and shoes drenched in vomit.
“Poor Tim,” Ellie says, pointing.
Like the others, Adleta’s covered in puke from the first one, two, or three barfings, but now, he has a hand over his mouth, his cheeks puffy as he tries to stop himself from spewing again. He turns his head—looking, looking, looking—his cheeks growing bigger, like a professional trumpet player—and then he begins staggering away from the team.
Right at Stranko and his dad.
And then I get it.
But it’s the coaches who really get it.
Stranko sees what’s coming and even puts up two hands, like that can stop the inevitable, but the fire hose stream of orange puke hits him square in face, filling his mouth and eyes. Then, like a sprinkler, Tim turns and pukes again, this time into his dad’s open mouth. Adleta drops to the floor, writhing around with his arms wrapped around his middle while Stranko and Mr. Adleta slough handfuls of vomit from their mouths.
“Did Tim…?” Ellie says.
“I think so,” I say.
“How?”
“I don’t know. But he did say he wanted something all his own.”
“Well, it looks like he got it.”
“I’m impressed,” Wheeler says.
“I’m nauseated,” Malone finishes.
Students continue rushing away from the toxic air of the gym and into the fresh air of the hall. Adleta’s still in the fetal position on the floor, but he’s turned away from his dad and Stranko and faces us as if he knew all along exactly where we were sitting. He’s far away, and his face is an orange-painted mess, but he gives us a look that is impossible to misinterpret.
It’s victory.
Chapter 13
In the two weeks following the pep rally pukeathon, three weird things happen.
The first occurs that night at the homecoming game, which, no surprise, we lose. I don’t have to be in the locker room to know the guys blame the loss on their mystery illness, a convenient excuse they can thank Adleta for. As for how Adleta pulled it off, he group texted us after school with the answer: ipecac.
If you don’t know, ipecac is syrup that causes you to throw up. Some girls have been known to drink it to simplify their eating disorders, so you have to be over eighteen to buy ipecac in a store. Online though, everyone is an adult with a few clicks of “Yes, I am over 18,” so it wasn’t hard for Adleta to get enough bottles to not only induce vomiting in twenty guys but also to speed up the process considerably.
In the packed nurse’s office, Stranko, Mrs. B, and Officer Hale interviewed the victims and dealt with angry parents, but beyond a lot of embarrassment and tired stomach muscles, everyone was fine. Not fine enough not to lose the homecoming game 49–6, but fine enough not to die.
But here’s the thing—the whole prank unnerved me. It’s not just that I can still smell the vomit as if microscopic, vile-smelling puke particles have permanently embedded themselves in my nostrils; it’s because, at its core, the prank was just plain mean.
Don’t get me wrong: Was the prank creative?
Yes.
Was anyone hurt?
Not really.
And did the prank do exactly what we wanted it to, which is make the Chaos Club look like assholes willing to injure people?
Yes.
So then why does Adleta’s prank make me uncomfortable?
Probably because when I think of the guys who were the victims…well, aren’t they feeling the same hatred and curl-up-and-die embarrassment I felt after the water tower? Is that something I really want to be responsible for? Is it possible to be Not Max without becoming heartless? I don’t know. Or maybe, just maybe, I’m being a baby about the whole thing.
Goddamn empathy.
Still, it isn’t my guilty conscience that’s the first weird thing that happens—it’s the theft of the school’s Zippy the Golden Eagle mascot costume.
According to the school newspaper’s website, Becca Yancey wore the costume during the homecoming game, flapping around like a dope as usual, then changed in the locker room before halftime so she could walk onto the field with the other popular kids/politicians-in-the-making who were nominated to homecoming court. When Becca went back to the locker room before the start of the third quarter, Zippy had flown the coop, as Mr. Watson might say. Becca’s impassioned plea during the morning announcements asking for Zippy’s return had me feeling so bad I considered initiating a Buy a New Zippy Kickstarter campaign, but one project a year is my limit.
The second weird thing that occurs isn’t a single event but a string of weirdness from Wheeler that lasts an entire week. Not only is Dave late to Weird Science every day, but he also leaves five minutes before the end of the period. Hansen never even asks for an arrival or dismissal pass. Wheeler just comes and goes as he pleases. He’s also absent from lunch, which he’ll freely tell you is his favorite class. Even when I text him about what’s going on, I get no response. He’s become Mr. Mystery.
On Friday, after a whole week of this bizarre behavior, Mrs. Hansen leaves a reminder on her classroom door to get our jackets and meet her on the football field for the Great Balloon Launch. Last week, the odds on Wheeler actually showing up for class after being given permission to leave the building were somewhere around 100 to 1, but today, Wheeler’s at the fifty-yard line with other students in our class, watching as Hansen, in her a white lab coat and aviator goggles, inflates a massive twenty-foot weather balloon with an air compressor. Painted on the balloon is the lopsided smiley face we added yesterday. This experiment has been two weeks in the making, and in that time, we’ve studied air currents, weather patterns, GPS tracking, and even Federal Aviation Administration guidelines. Fun, fun.
I stand beside Wheeler, who’s wearing a shirt with a picture of a woman holding a beaver covered in soap bubbles in one hand and, in the other hand, a razor blade. Her thought balloon reads, “My husband makes the strangest requests.”
“S
ubtle,” I say.
“Awesome, right?”
While Mrs. Hansen inflates the balloon, two students grip the metal ring at its base so the balloon doesn’t prematurely go off.
(Side note: prematurely going off is one of my biggest fears.)
Mrs. Hansen says, “And what are we filling Larry with, everyone?”
“Helium,” Wheeler says.
We all gawk at Wheeler, who’s just volunteered his first correct answer in two and a half years of high school.
“But why not hydrogen, Dave?” Hansen says. “Wouldn’t that work just as well for Larry?”
“Because the reading last night said hydrogen’s too volatile. The Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen.”
“It was, Dave, and there’s no need to kill Larry before he’s fulfilled his destiny. His death is coming soon enough.”
“Why is he named Larry?” someone asks.
“After my soon-to-be ex-husband,” Mrs. Hansen says. “Sending him into space has long been a dream of mine.”
If all goes according to plan, Larry will rise into the air carrying a small camera mounted inside an orange protective case to record the flight. At around ninety thousand feet, Larry—poor, corpulent, unsuspecting Larry—will burst from the atmospheric pressure, sending the case plummeting to the earth until its parachute engages. Hansen plans on tracking the GPS signal inside the camera after school, and on Monday we’ll watch the footage. It’s awesomeness like this that is precisely why everyone signs up for Weird Science.
“This is safe for birds, right?” Becca asks.
“Unless there’s a pterodactyl up there big enough to swallow this, then yes, Becca, no birds will be harmed.”
“But what will happen to Larry after? Are you going to recycle him?”
Hansen starts to answer, but Wheeler does it for her.
“Weren’t you listening yesterday? She’ll bring the balloon back Monday so we can inspect the remains. Sheesh.”
Whoever kidnapped Wheeler and replaced him with this Wheeler-bot will pay dearly.
After double-checking that the camera and GPS are working and after another review session of FAA regulations and the earth’s atmosphere just to drive home that this is an educational experiment, we do an enthusiastic countdown. At zero, Larry the Balloon lifts into the early November sky at more than thirty miles per hour with the orange case dangling from its base. It’s a holy moment with no one speaking as Larry grows smaller and smaller before finally disappearing into the clouds.