No Sad Songs

by Frank Morelli

  “Then we’d better get moving.” I wink at him. He doesn’t look pleased.

  “No, Ga—”

  I punch the gas pedal and John doesn’t finish his sentence until we’re three intersections away. When I next look in the rearview I’m pretty sure I see a mushroom cloud rising from John’s house. Then I get one of those feelings like I forgot something. And those feelings never lie.

  “My lunch,” I say under my breath.

  “What’s that?” John sounds agitated. I guess he’s not looking forward to dealing with his mom after my little shenanigans. Whatever. It’ll make him stronger.

  “Oh. Nothing. Just forgot my lunch.”

  “Buy some.”

  He’s still pretty pissed. But he can’t stay mad. Not John. He cares too much. Not like me.

  “No money.”

  I can feel the tension release as soon as I say it. John loosens his grip on the dashboard. He takes a few breaths and his mouth starts to move like he wants to say something but the words keep stacking up on him like cars on the interstate.

  “We’ll meet up,” he says finally. “I’ll take care of it.”

  I knew it. I told you the kid’s aces. Makes me feel kind of bad about leaving an inch of burnt rubber on his driveway. But I don’t have time for sympathy because the clock’s ticking.

  The last few minutes of our morning drive always looks like something from a NASCAR highlight reel. Or like being on a roller coaster run by a deranged circus clown, where it was all too possible to crash into other cars, people, even buildings. Not very pretty. Definitely not legal. And obviously not the best way to start your day—unless you’re a professional stunt man or a crash test-dummy.

  I bank the Trans-Am hard into a curve and we’re somehow in the student parking lot with less than a minute to spare. Lots of cars. Not many people. Probably because they’re already inside avoiding detention. The Schuylkill High School student parking lot is probably the closest thing you’ll ever get to a full demographic report on all the cozy, suburban developments that crash up against the Philadelphia skyline—and without having to spend half your life in the public library paging through census data. You have your front row parking spots, the ones so close to Franklin Gymnasium you could watch a game of hoops from the back seat of your car. These are always claimed by the late-model Beamer set, wealthy Main Line kids who seemed to get the same perks as their wealthy, Main Line parents—including a sweet deal on a hand-me-down ride. Then there are all the other spots, melted into a sprawling mass of concrete and divided into no less than a hundred rows. It is a no-man’s land that bubbles and oozes in one asphalt blob from the crest of the school all the way down to Clarke Football Stadium, home of the mighty Schooners, which oddly enough is built in an old cow pasture that floods out if a deer sneezes in the woods.

  When all these spots fill up before the school day, the lot kind of looks like the Island of Misfit Toys. You have old Ford Broncos hand-painted black with single, green fenders. You have your Hyundais, your Datsuns and Gremlins, and your Honda hatchbacks all huddled together on a ten-foot section of cement in solidarity against the bigger, meaner cars. You have your pick-up trucks and your Jeep Wranglers with two hundred thousand miles on the tickers, still raring to go. And then you have your dreamers. Like me and the Trans-Am. The ones that don’t really fit comfortably in any of the spaces. Not refined enough to be a front-of-thelot import, but too fast to park with the punch-buggies. Jeez. I guess that kind of sums it all up for me and John here at Schuylkill High.

  I snag a spot in the back of the lot near the stadium, and the relay race commences before the car is in park. John sprints off without more than a grunt. I’m off in the opposite direction since our homerooms are in different corridors of the sprawling building.

  I hit the door at exactly eight o’clock, but it’s too late. Not because I’m legitimately late. That’s debatable. It’s because Coach Foley is patrolling the entrance. Just my luck.

  “Late again, LoScuda,” he says without raising an eyebrow from his clipboard. Suddenly there’s a detention slip dangling in front of my nose. “You’re showing me a lot so far this year.” There’s a twinge of sarcasm to everything he says, like he has to hide behind a bullshit armor of authority because he bucked up a fifty-spot for his gym teacher’s license. “Your baseball career’s looking mighty promising about now.” Like he knows anything about baseball. Dude couldn’t coach his way out of a paper bag. His teams haven’t finished above .500 since I’ve been at Schuylkill High.

  “C’mon, Coach. The bell wasn’t—”

  “Can it, LoScuda. We don’t have time for a one-act play here. Just take the slip.”

  I grab the slip and stuff it in the pocket of my jeans. There’s no sense arguing. Freaking Foley. A detention from him was permanent, like the kind of stuff you’d chisel on stone tablets. Figures. He’d use any excuse to cut my ass at spring tryouts.

  “LoScuda.” I look over my shoulder and Foley’s motioning me back with a discreet wag of his finger. What the hell could he want now? “Give me the slip,” he says under his breath as I approach.

  “What?”

  “The slip, LoScuda. Hand it over.”

  I’m confused, but I stuff my hand into my jeans pocket and hand him the wrinkled piece of paper.

  “Trade me.”

  He hands me a late pass and I’m sort of stunned.

  “I know things are tough right now, LoScuda. But life doesn’t make pit stops.”

  There it is. The pity.

  “Thanks, Coach,” I say, but I’m not all that thrilled about the trade.

  The homeroom bell rings and students file into classrooms like fire ants. I’m in no rush. I have the pass in my pocket to prove it, so I hang-dog it to my locker. Students push past me like I’m some first-time concertgoer fighting my way to the stage.

  A group of freshman girls sidle up to me like a gang of paparazzi. “How are you today?” says the leader of the group, a pudgy redhead with no less than a million freckles. I’ve never seen them before, but all of a sudden they want to get close enough to use a rectal thermometer on me.

  “We’re all very much behind you, Gabe.”

  The worst. Fake sympathy

  I nod politely and walk faster. Nothing bothers me more than having a bunch of people fawn over me just so they can look like the world’s greatest missionaries. Like them telling me they’re sorry is somehow close to living out Gandhi’s hunger strike. Like they know what it feels like to be me. And they’re probably the same people who’d pin one of those shitty “kick me” signs to the back of my t-shirt if I wasn’t such a charity case. Man, I doubt Gandhi ever pinned anything to anyone’s t-shirt. Probably never owned a t-shirt either.

  What’s worse is the people I want to talk to never say anything, even though we’ve been going to school together for over a decade. Since way back in elementary school. But I don’t care. I’m used to it by now. I guess when you’re popular you don’t say hello to the weird kid with the dead parents and the mental-case geezer yapping at his heels. It just doesn’t happen. I get it. Maybe they’re worried that I’m contagious or something.

  Then suddenly I’m like Moses and I’m parting the waves with only the power of my mind. That’s how things look to me sometimes when I see her. Marlie. Trust me, the three or four barely-visible freckles she has on her nose are enough to give any guy tunnel vision.

  So, I push a group of snorting tech geeks against a bay of rusty lockers with the powers of my eyes alone, and I jack another staggered grouping of stoners, in their assorted band t-shirts, into the darkness that is the shop-class hallway. Two perky cheerleaders strut right through the depths of the sea and I catapult them out of my vision because they don’t matter. Right now, only she matters. And I could spot her if a school-wide riot broke out around her. If she would have been the character in those stupid Where’s Waldo? puzzles I used to do with Grandpa—when I was a kid and he wasn’t an alien—maybe I wouldn
’t have thought they were so stupid.

  She’s walking in my direction, stepping over abandoned textbooks and weaving around open lockers, but she might as well be tiptoeing down a runway or floating on a pillow of clouds. I should say something to her. Not like the crap I piled on her at the grocery store, either. Like something smooth. Something that will make her notice me. But what?

  She’s only a few feet away now. Better start thinking. You look nice? No. I love you? Definitely not. Here she comes, Gabe. Maybe I’ll go with … oh boy … it’s now or never.

  “Hey, sorry about the sardines,” I say.

  Wow. Really, Gabe? Freaking sardines? When did a sardine ever win a girl’s heart? I bet you can search through the annals of history and never find one case.

  “Oh. Yeah,” she says.

  Boy, I’ve got her now.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s Gary, right?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “Thanks.”

  Wow. Way to go, Gary.

  “No problem,” she says.

  And that’s it. I don’t even have a chance to respond. She’s already half a mile down the hallway, and the waves are crashing in on me again

  Since the day is off to such a promising start, I stop screwing around in the halls and grab my books from the old locker. I figure if I spend any more time out here there’s no telling how much more humiliation I can inflict on myself. Who knows? I could split my pants, or start involuntarily dancing the Macarena, or end up on an episode of America’s Most Wanted— or all three at once. My goodness. I could split my pants while dancing the Macarena in an effort to evade police. Trust me. I’m “Gary” LoScuda. It could happen.

  But as I push through the door into Mr. Mastrocola’s homeroom I think, “That’s pretty cynical, Gabe. Don’t look at it that way. Maybe you’ve faced the worst of it for today. I mean, what else could possibly happen?” And that puts a smile on my face. Maybe I can at least hold on to it for the time it takes to get to my seat.

  Mastrocola is taking roll when I slip in and try to close the door without it squeaking or bouncing off the jamb. I’d rather not disturb him because I have already heard enough soapbox lectures for the day. But you’d have to be freaking invisible to sneak past old Mastro. Even then I think he’d be able to smell you or something.

  “James.”

  “Here.”

  “Jenson.”

  “Here.”

  “Kinkaid.”

  “Here.”

  “LoScuda, so very nice of you to join us today,” he says without raising an eye from his roll book. “You actually made it before dusk. That’s an achievement.”

  “I had a rough morning,” I start to say, “My grandpa, well—”

  “No need to explain, Gabe. We all have lives outside of this classroom. Even me.”

  There’s a twinkle in his eye that tells me he’s enjoying this little bull session.

  “Sorry to disappoint. I know you guys think they roll me out of a box and switch on my circuits each morning.”

  There are a few muffled laughs from the back of the room.

  “As dark as it is, this is coffee in my cup. Not motor oil.”

  Good old Mastro. He taught English and served as a bookend, meaning he was the first smiling face you met as a freshman and the one who’d boot your ass out the door as a senior. Kind of cool how it goes full-circle like that, especially since Mastro is the best teacher I’ve ever had. He’s funny. He’s not super-old like most English teachers. You know the ones. Not only do they act like they’re authorities on guys like Shakespeare, but they may have actually grown up with him. But not Mastro. The dude actually listens to your thoughts and opinions about literature instead of sniping at people because they ask “can” instead of “may” I go to the bathroom. That kind of stuff always pisses me off. But it’s not Mastro’s style.

  He is the reason I like poetry. He is also the reason I’m keeping a diary. He makes a big show of calling it a “personal essay portfolio,” which I guess sounds more scholarly—and definitely more manly. But let’s be real for a second: it’s a freaking diary. And I’m actually kind of into the thing. Don’t ask me why. Mastro claims it’ll help us make connections between our own experiences and the poetry we are studying and that it might even yield a potential college application essay. I don’t know about any of that, but it sure feels good to have someone who will listen to all of my crap—even if that someone, in reality, is me. It’s a good thing the portfolio is a pretty painless assignment because Mastro tells us our deadline is in freaking May. Guess he actually wants us to spend some time on it.

  “You can sit down now, Gabe,” he finishes with a smirk on his face. “Unless you plan to sing for all of us. Whaddyasay?”

  I file to my seat before the razzing of my classmates makes me feel obliged to sing freaking “Hot Cross Buns” to them or something. Man, Mr. Mastro. Always pulling that kind of garbage—which is exactly why we love him so much.

  I grab the only open seat in the room, a wobbly chair/desk combo the school board probably excavated from an archeological dig. It squeaks like a baby chick each time I shift my weight, but at least I’m sitting. At least nobody’s in my face about how crappy a kid I am, and at least I can just sit here for a few minutes and zone out while the A/V geeks read through morning announcements. At least I can have some peace before I have to plunge back out into those hallways and start swimming again.

  That’s when the door swings open and I realize my peace and quiet had already come and gone. The doorknob crashes against the cinderblock wall and it’s like a needle screeching across a vinyl record. Mastro cranes his neck above his newspaper as a disheveled-looking older gentleman half-walks, half-staggers to the front of his desk. His white t-shirt has a hole on the back of the left shoulder and the pit stains are so thick and brown it’s like he’s been wearing the darn thing since birth. His hands are shaky as he clutches at the handles of a plastic shopping bag.

  I slap my palm across my forehead and cover my eyes. It’s not that I’m alarmed by the mere sight of a man you could easily mistake for a common hobo. That doesn’t bother me. It’s just, this particular hobo happens to be Uncle Nick. What the hell is he doing here?

  “Can I help you, sir?” Mastro asks with a slight waver in his voice. And who can blame him? A seedy-looking old dude crashes his classroom holding an unidentifiable bag? I’m surprised the bomb-sniffing dogs and the damn SWAT team hasn’t dropped through the air ducts yet. All I know is I have to put a stop to this. And fast.

  “Yeah, I’m looking for—”

  “It’s for me, Mr. Mastrocola,” I say. I’m already out of my seat and half way to the front of the room before the last word comes out. There’s no way I’m about to risk another second with Uncle Nick staggering and running his mouth at the same time. That’s a lethal concoction built on strange chemical reactions I doubt even Nick could explain. The toxic byproduct? That’s easy: the end of my life at Schuylkill High. Death by embarrassment. I didn’t have to live with the guy to learn that lesson—but I had. Learned the lesson. Repeatedly.

  I think, maybe I’m not too late to stop him from ruining my life today. But Uncle Nick’s eyes are already bulging with recognition and he has the same stupid grin on his face little kids get when you hand them an ice cream cone.

  “GAAAAABE!” he shouts before I can hop a stray backpack and spin-kick him out of the classroom. “What up there, broseph?!”

  Oh, God. Please stop talking, Nick. You’re not cool or hip or whatever your generation of geezers wants to call themselves—and you never will be. Mastro rises from his desk. He takes a few steps toward Nick and I see his mouth start to open. I can tell he’s searching for the right words to combat the outburst of a true idiot and save me from embarrassment at the same time. But I know that’s just a waste of time.

  “Don’t worry,” I whisper to him. “He’s my uncle. I’ll take care of it.” I mean, I’m already mortified. The last thing I need is for th
e teacher to step in and save the day for helpless, little Gabey-pooh.

  I grab a handful of rancid t-shirt and drag him toward the door. Maybe it’s still not too late to save this.

  “You forgot yo’ lunch, homey!”

  Oh, God. We’re almost to the door. It’s not too late. It’s not too late.

  “I cut off the crusts for you there, my skillet!” Too late. Much too late. My life is over and now we’re finally in the hallway. Nice timing, Gabe. Nice work, Nick.

  Freaking Nick. He’s still wearing the goofy grin and his eyes are glazed like old-fashioned doughnuts. My stupid, plastic lunch bag is hanging from two of his fingers. He smells like whiskey again and I just stare at him with a look that says, “you’re disgusting,” “you’re a loser,” and “I hate you” at the same time. He doesn’t notice.

  “I even tossed in an old Ho Ho I found in—”

  “Nick! Quiet!” The words come out of my mouth in a hush and Nick looks surprised. I still have a hand full of t-shirt, so I lead him off through a set of doors and into the stairwell “What are you doing here? How’d you even get in?”

  “I … I kinda slipped in with a few maintenance guys.”

  I can see the resemblance. There’s black grease under his fingernails and a thin smudge of it caked in the stubble of his beard. And he seems proud of himself, rocking back and forth like he’s waiting for me to congratulate him or something. Like I’m supposed to throw a parade because he realized that, somehow, without even getting off the couch, he looks like a guy who toils in a boiler room all day. He’s so excited it almost makes me feel bad to put an end to this and any future visits.

  “Nick … please … don’t come here anymore,” I say. “I don’t care if the whole school disappears into a sinkhole, or if the Earth itself is about to explode. Just stay away.”

  Nick’s eyes flash to the ground. They look soft and sad, like strips of brown velvet.

  “I was just trying to—”

  “I don’t care, Nick. This is embarrassing.”