by Lubar, David
There was no answer, but about half of the kids at least glanced in his direction. One kid—I learned later that they called him Flying Dan—was running around at the back of the room with his arms spread out like airplane wings. Another was carving something on his desk with his pen. At least he was doing that until the pen snapped from the pressure. A couple kids stared out the windows. And I guess I was looking all around the room at everyone else.
Mr. Parsons cleared his throat. I faced forward and tried to escape his notice. Be cool, I told myself. Just sit back and get through it. That was my plan.
“Well, now, I see we have a new student,” Mr. Parsons said, glancing down at a sheet of paper he’d taken from his lesson book. He scanned the room until his eyes landed on me—not a tough trick to pull off, since I wasn’t a moving target like Flying Dan. “Martin, why don’t you tell the class something about yourself.”
I shrugged. “There’s really nothing to tell.” I hated the whole new-kid song-and-dance routine—stand up, stutter a bit, say something totally stupid, sit down. What did he think I was, a dancing dog?
“Come on, don’t be modest. Surely you have something interesting to share.”
I shook my head. At least I wasn’t the center of attention. In this class, there was no center of attention. I was just one bubble in a glass of cola, clinging to the side while a giant soda straw of a teacher tried to stir things around and suck us up.
Parsons shuffled over to me and smiled a thin smile. His upper lip was nearly the same pasty color as his forehead. The head reminded me of the belly of a dead fish. “Now, Martin, one of the basic things we’ve discovered at Edgeview is that the students must learn to be open and honest about themselves. Open and honest. That’s the key. Please, stand up and share something.” He leaned over and patted me on the shoulder, then returned to the front of the class and crossed his arms. His whole body said, I’m waiting.
It looked like there was no way out. I stared at him, standing straight ahead of me, acting all-powerful and filled with expert ideas and theories about what was right for us poor little students. Open and honest? As I rose to my feet, I realized that was the perfect description—I honestly had no idea what was going to come out when I opened my mouth.
“Hi. My name’s Martin Anderson, and I’m not bald.”
I sat back down.
Mr. Parsons’s face grew red. Even the top of his scalp, through the strands of combed-over hair, turned the color usually only seen in ripe garden tomatoes. His face wasn’t just changing color, it was also twitching, like in the monster movies right before a guy turns into a werewolf. I expected him to start shouting, but he whirled away from me, fumbled around for some chalk, and wrote the lesson on the board. He broke three pieces before he was finished.
I glanced over at Torchie. He held his finger up like a knife and ran it across his throat. Then he flopped his tongue out, closed his eyes, and dropped his head onto one shoulder. I guess that was his subtle way of telling me I’d probably not made a good first impression on Mr. Parsons.
“Way to go,” Cheater whispered.
Yeah, way to go.
The class itself was pretty strange. I guess it was some kind of experimental teaching method. The idea seemed to be that we could learn math better if we didn’t have to spend so much time memorizing stuff and just used numbers in lots of different ways.
I wasn’t sure whether it would work, but I was willing to give it a try, and I certainly didn’t want to get any further out on Mr. Parson’s bad side—if that was possible—so I paid attention. I even raised my hand once or twice, though he didn’t call on me.
Things didn’t stay peaceful for long. About halfway through class, Mr. Parsons handed back some tests. When Cheater got his, he shouted, “It’s not fair!” He jumped up, knocked over his desk, kicked his chair, and rushed from the room.
Nobody paid any attention. Not even the teacher. I glanced at the test where it had landed on the floor. On top, written in red pen, there was a large F. Then I looked over at Torchie.
“He’ll be back,” Torchie said.
Sure enough, Cheater returned a couple minutes later, acting as if nothing had happened. He put his desk back and sat down. The bell rang.
“Wow, you sure know how to blend in,” Cheater said as we were leaving for our next class. He raced ahead.
“Yeah,” Torchie said. “Parsons looked like he wanted to strangle you.”
I shrugged. “He’ll get over it. I didn’t really say anything all that bad. I hope the other teachers aren’t that sensitive. Is his class always like this?”
Torchie shook his head. “Parsons keeps trying different stuff. Last month, we had to learn a bunch of songs about fractions. There’s this one jingle I still can’t get out of my head.”
“You’re kidding.”
He shook his head. “I wish I was.”
Before I could ask him about our next class, someone punched me on the shoulder hard enough to knock me into the wall.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
THE EDGEVIEW EXPRESS
DATED FIVE YEARS AGO
A LITTLE MORE CLASS
“Hey!” I shouted.
Bloodbath, passing by in the other direction, glanced back and grinned. I guess the punch was his way of saying hello. It would have been nice to return the greeting with a baseball bat, but there didn’t seem to be one handy. I waited until he was out of sight before I rubbed the sore spot.
Torchie didn’t even seem to notice. I guess punches from Bloodbath in the hallway were as common as mosquito bites near a swamp—a pain in the butt at times, but nothing unusual. Torchie stopped in front of an open door decorated with a picture of Shakespeare taped to the lower half. “Here we are. English class. You’ll like Miss Nomad.”
I followed Torchie inside, where we grabbed the seats Cheater had saved for us. Between them, I felt like I was sitting in a box full of puppies.
As the bell rang, Ms. Nomad swept into the room, her long skirt brushing the floor, her long brown hair brushing past her shoulders and flowing all the way to her waist. She wished us a cheery good morning, smiling as if today were the most wonderful day in the world and we were the most fabulous students a teacher could wish for. She was so young, I figured she couldn’t have been teaching for more than a year or two. She zapped a huge grin in my direction and said, “Welcome to the class, Martin. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Feel free to join in the discussion.” Oh man, she reminded me of some kind of life-size talking animal from a cartoon. She beamed an even bigger smile in my direction. It looked like she had more teeth than anyone would ever actually need.
I waited for her to say, Tell us something about yourself. I would have bet a million bucks she’d do that next. But she just picked up a book and started the lesson.
Perfect. I relaxed and sat back. Maybe we’d get along just fine. Everyone groaned when she pulled out a book of poetry, but I sort of liked the first part of the poem she read to us.
Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me.
I actually felt a chill when she read that. I didn’t completely understand it, and I sure didn’t understand the rest of the poem, but those two lines sounded pretty cool.
“I told you she was nice,” Torchie whispered.
“Yeah.” Maybe this class would be okay.
Unlike math, English class went well for almost ten minutes. At that point, we were talking about writing. “Writing is such a wonderful way to express yourself,” Miss Nomad said. “And the best part is that anyone can write.” She had a habit of walking all around the room as she talked, as if she were weaving herself among our desks. It made me feel like I was part of one of those pot holders kids make in craft classes. I was getting a sore neck from watching her. At the moment, she was passing right by me. As she said the word anyone she gave me this look that seemed to say, yes, Martin, even poor little you can scrawl meaningful words. She almost seemed to expect a poem
to burst from my forehead.
Move on, lady, I thought.
She stayed where she was, her smile burning a hole through my face. All that talk about only sharing when I felt like it—that was obviously a pile of crap. She wasn’t going to budge until I spilled some warmth.
I raised my hand.
“Martin, you have something to contribute?” Miss Nomad asked. “That’s wonderful. I’m so glad you’ve chosen to participate.”
“Yeah. Maybe anyone can write, but won’t some people stink at it? I mean, anyone can paint, but most people really stink at that. I know I do. The last painting I tried looked like dog puke. And the same for playing the violin or making a chair. Have you ever heard someone who’s really bad on the violin? It’s not very pleasant. And I sure wouldn’t trust my butt sitting in any chair I’d made with these two hands.”
She sort of gulped. In my mind, I saw this human goldfish that suddenly found herself stranded on dry land. Then the smile returned. “But that’s the wonderful thing about writing. Nobody else can judge your work. As long as you think it’s good, that’s all that matters.” She leaned over and stared at me with those big eyes, giving me that I-may-be-a-teacher-but-I-understand-you look. “Can’t you see how wonderful a thing that is?” she asked.
Can’t I see that you’re a fruitcake?
I almost let it go, but I couldn’t. She was wrong. I had an uncle who was always trying to write books. He’d send them out and they’d come back three or four months later with a printed slip that said, No thanks. Not even Nice try, or Good effort. Just No thanks. Which I think really meant: your book truly sucks. Please leave us alone.
I tried to read some of his stuff once. It really stunk big-time. Talk about dog puke. Nothing ever happened. People just sat around and discussed life. Everyone drank coffee and felt bad about things they’d done in the past. I had a feeling Uncle Stan could write books for the next thousand years and he’d still stink. I looked up at Miss Nomad. She seemed so happy and eager for us to share the joys of writing.
“It matters,” I said. “People might say they just write for themselves. That’s a lie. Everyone wants to show off. And if you stink, you can’t show off, can you? Because nobody will buy what you write. So you’re just lying to yourself.” I stopped talking. Damn. I didn’t care either way. Why was I even bothering to say anything?
Miss Nomad gulped again, a bit louder, then said, “Well, thank you for sharing your thoughts, Martin.”
I had the funny feeling she didn’t like me.
“Bad move,” Cheater whispered to me a minute later. “She’s always trying to sell her poems. She keeps sending them to magazines.”
“She’s got hundreds of ‘em,” Torchie said. “Boxes full.”
“And?” I asked.
“Hasn’t sold a single one,” Cheater told me. He shook his head. “Sometimes she reads them to us.” He made a face and pinched his nose.
Yipes. I should have figured that out before I opened my big mouth. I could just imagine Miss Nomad, fountain pen in hand, sitting at a desk jammed in the corner of some small room, filling page after page with bad poetry. I didn’t think she’d hold it against me the way Parsons did, but I’d certainly made sure I wouldn’t be the teacher’s pet in this class.
Miss Nomad pretty much ignored me for the rest of the period. I’d become the invisible boy. Hey, that could be a nickname for me—Glassboy. See right through me. I’m not really here.
When the bell rang, I checked my schedule. I had gym next. That would be more like it. Gym would be fun. Gym would be nice and normal—just run around and sweat. No matter how modern they got in their teaching methods, I didn’t see how they could mess with something as simple as gym.
On the other hand, it’s amazing what adults can do when they set their minds to it.
SAND
PRISCILLA NOMAD
A MINDLESS EXERCISE
The locker room was just a hallway next to the gym with double doors on each end. There were two long rows of dark green lockers, and a couple of wooden benches that looked like they’d been borrowed from a cheap picnic table. The place smelled a lot like the cheese section of the supermarket.
I found a new pair of gym shorts and a shirt waiting for me in a paper bag that had Anderson written on it. I also found Bloodbath in the locker room, but he was busy horsing around with a couple of his buddies and stuffing one of the runts into a locker. I wondered whether he had some sort of checklist. If he did, Hit the new kid could be marked off for the day, along with Cram small kid in locker. The main thing was that I hadn’t become the focus of his attention.
I was definitely ready for some exercise. There’s nothing like a good sweat to make a guy feel happy. I followed the rest of the class out of the locker room and into the gym.
“That’s Mr. Acropolis,” Torchie said, pointing to a man standing in the middle of the floor. The guy looked like someone who used to lift weights but had given up exercise a year or two ago. His muscles were still there, but they were starting to drip.
I checked around the gym to see what we were going to play. There weren’t any nets up, so it wouldn’t be volleyball, and there weren’t any mats, so I figured we wouldn’t be wrestling.
Mr. Acropolis blew his whistle, then said, “Have a seat, class.”
Everyone dropped to the floor. I figured he was going to give us some sort of talk. Maybe he’d roll out a chalkboard and teach us football plays.
I wasn’t even close.
“Now breathe slowly and empty your minds,” he said. Then he stopped talking while we breathed slowly and tried to empty our minds. Mine kept filling up at first, but that was sort of cool, too, since I passed a good chunk of time imagining what I could do to Bloodbath if I had a laser cannon. I saved a couple of shots for Mr. Parsons, too.
“This is gym?” I whispered to Torchie after I got tired of slicing Bloodbath into convenient pieces for easy storage.
“Yeah,” he whispered back. “Kind of weird, but we get to do what we want for the last fifteen minutes.”
Actually, I hated to admit it but the empty-mind thing was sort of relaxing once I got the hang of it. Of course, Flying Dan didn’t stay still for long, and a couple of the others didn’t seem to enjoy sitting in one place. Every five minutes or so, someone would make a farting noise. A couple of kids would laugh and Mr. Acropolis would blow his whistle. Then things would settle down for a bit. Most of the farts were fake, at least, though Hindenburg let one loose that made everybody rush to the other side of the room. Bloodbath and his friends horsed around the whole time, but the teacher didn’t seem to care.
As we were finishing up, Mr. Acropolis went around telling all of us what a great job we’d done. Then he asked, “What do you want to play?”
A bunch of kids shouted, “Dodge ball!”
That was fine with me. I liked dodge ball. There’s a wonderful satisfaction in smacking someone nice and hard with a fairly harmless ball. Of course, it’s no fun getting smacked. But that wasn’t a big problem for me. I managed to see most of the hard throws before they could hit me, and I didn’t do too badly during the first game. I also made sure I was on the same side as Bloodbath. As I expected, he really liked to aim for the head, even though Mr. Acropolis kept telling everyone not to.
I got eliminated early in the second game, so I had to stand on the side of the gym and watch. Torchie was next to me. He was the first one to get out in both games. It’s like he was a ball magnet. I noticed one player on the other team was really good at dodging. “Who’s that?” I asked Torchie, pointing to a tall, skinny kid who didn’t seem to ever get hit.
“That’s Flinch,” he said. “He’s really good at dodge ball, but he’s pretty jumpy. He usually eats with us, but he went home for the weekend.”
I watched Flinch. Every once in a while, you run across a true artist. I’d known one kid, Stevie Manetti, who made the best card houses I’d ever seen. He could pile up three or four decks of card
s into these great castles. Nobody else I knew even came close. And there was this girl down the block from me—she could climb trees like she was born in the woods. And, of course, I’d run across kids who did other stuff like paint or dance or play the piano.
Those kids were true artists.
So was Flinch. He was the best dodge ball player I’d ever seen. He almost always managed to get out of the way. Even after the rest of his team was blasted off the floor, he kept going. One ball—no problem. Two at once—piece of cake. Even three. Flinch jumped and twisted and ducked. The balls shot past and smacked into the wall behind him. The cool thing was that he had his hair in dozens of little braids, like a rap singer, and every time he jerked or twisted, the hair flew out like a bunch of exclamation points.
Finally, in an unusual display of teamwork, about five kids on the other side threw at once. There was no way Flinch could avoid getting hit, but he gave it a good try. He leaped and twisted, like the star of a dolphin show, but one of the balls clipped his foot.
Mr. Acropolis blew the whistle again. Gym was over. Score one for me. I’d gotten through a whole class without pissing off a teacher. Of course, Mr. Acropolis had never even given a sign that he knew I was there.
It was time for lunch next. “They do anything strange during the meal?” I asked Torchie.
“Sometimes,” he said. “For a while, Principal Davis read to us while we ate. And sometimes they play music. But lunch is lunch, and there really isn’t too much they can do to mess with it.”
He was right. Lunch was pretty normal, except that the food was just as awful as it had been at dinner and breakfast. I guess that was normal for Edgeview. After lunch, it was time for science, which I was looking forward to, since I’d heard so much about Mr. Briggs.
THE FRACTION SONG
(TO THE TUNE OF MY DARLING CLEMENTINE)