by Larry Doyle
a big red ball caromed off J!m’s chest.
“Neck to waist,” Coach McCarthy instructed, taking two more balls from Lewis Seuss. “Neck to waist,” pegging J!m in the right shoulder and stomach. The boy was his demonstration model of choice, for illegal wrestling holds, clipping, high sticking, and many unsportsmanlike conducts of his own invention. J!m generally took these educational assaults with stoic disdain, but today he appeared in extremis, giving Lewis Seuss an insignificant erection.
Seuss’s blooming perversion was misguided, however, as J!m was unbothered by the bombardment, or even aware of it, instead preoccupied with a question, raised in his Early Manhood class three years ago, and only now personally relevant:
some of the girls were crying. Some of them were anxiously sketching the disturbing photographs in the viz, impatient for the bell, so they could run to the bathroom and compare what they drew with what was spreading on their thighs. Sandra Jane thought about lunch.
Marie was thinking about what Sandra Jane had told her, and about J!m, and about what kind of person she was, and about what on earth was that?
Dr. Kinsey shut the manila folder.
“And that was from over the sweater.”
“Gee, Dr. Kinsey,” Molly said. “I never knew that dating outside my species could be so dangerous.”
“Dangerous,” the doctor agreed. “And disgusting.”
He smiled indulgently at her, since it was her line.
“Oh,” Molly said. “But what about these eggs in my brain?”
Dr. Kinsey scribbled on a pad of paper. “I’m writing you a prescription for a DDT inhaler. Two sprays, day and night, for ten days, oughtta take care of those buggers.”
He placed the prescription in her palm, and cupped both of his hands around it.
“Thank you, Doctor!”
Dr. Kinsey peered down over his glasses. “Now, what are you going to do the next time an extraterrestrial asks you out?”
Molly was unsure. “Stay home and take care of it myself?”
“Good girl!”
They laughed. She tried to tug her hand away, but he clasped it more firmly, laughing for longer than she did.
The end credit appeared:
Produced, Written and Directed by
Doris Wishman,
for the U.S. Department of Education and Human Welfare in
cooperation with the Bureau of Alien Affairs.
The lights came up. Sandra Jane eyebrowed Marie, who, with a small dip of her head, betrayed J!m.
“So,” Miss Mantis demanded, “what are the questions?”
The girls had a lot of questions. They did not ask any of them.
“Yes, Miss Mantis, I have a question,” Sandra Jane said, in the wholesome voice she found so amusing. “I know it’s unhealthy and wrong to”—the word she knew did not go with this persona—“have shenanigans with aliens . . .”
“Yes,” Miss Mantis said. “And the mutants. And the robots.”
“But does that mean,” drawing the trap, “that it’s okay to do . . . that with human boys?”
Miss Mantis did not fluster.
“It is tedious,” she answered, “but not as bad.”
was it normal, this brainstorm, a new and awful stage of J!m’s development, another sundry agony? Or was this a portent of his imminent and non-imaginary demise?
J!m did not have the answers, though they were yes and yes, more or less. Sad, perhaps, but not pointless, as human mortality is, for all the howling that attends it, simply dead and that’s it. J!m’s oblivion would at least be useful, all part of, if not God’s plan, something equally divine.
The boy had scarcely faced his doom before sublimating it, eliding it with his other crisis, wondering if he would die before taking Marie to the dance and worrying about leaving Marie a widow with three small children, glossing over a string of high improbabilities in between, thus deserving that red rubber ball smacking him in the brain, knocking some nonsense out of him. It hit him square in the cranium, splattering oil and forming a shallow crater that did not, at first, look like it would rebound.
“That’s a penalty,” Coach McCarthy said.
The class paid close attention, as if they hadn’t learned the rules of dodgeball years ago. Lewis Seuss handed the coach another ball.
“And,” the coach emphasized, “I don’t want to see any of this”:
The ball rocketed toward J!m’s groin.
He made no attempt to protect himself.
He would be the last of his kind.
The extinction-level event was averted in Hollywood fashion, at the last microsecond, balua ex machina, a black hand snatching the killer elasteroid off the zipper front of J!m’s shorts.
Johnny tended to materialize whenever J!m was in trouble, a statistical fluke that would have bothered J!m if he thought about it.
“You missed the first four,” J!m said.
Johnny barked affectionately, then directed himself to the coach. He tossed the ball up casually.
“Or this.”
A red blur grazed Coach McCarthy’s crown, fluffing his widow’s peak into a cowlick, and hit the wall behind him.
The ball popped.
The coach removed the cliplex at his waist.
“Not dressed for gym, Mr. Love. That’s gonna be . . . ,” trailing off, “some demerits.”
His fingers rattled on the board’s surface, closing the class roster and bringing up a photo of Big Mac McCarthy from his bodybuilding days, lifting two twenty-five-pound weights, quite something when done with the nipples.
Johnny strolled off. “See ya at the game, Coach.”
“Right,” the coach swallowed hard, pressing the board against his stomach. “Let’s, uh, hit the showers,” twenty minutes before the bell. He added, “You, too, Anderson!”
J!m would not be hitting the showers, and the coach knew it. But he never missed an opportunity to mention:
“Hold on. You have a note from your mother.”
This made J!m mad at his mother, for some reason.
Chapter 7
Bare-Fisted Hate!
hot protein rods, hot and proteinaceous, lay in the tray like logs of, one hoped, something not yet digested. A pair of tongs reached in and grabbed two with bureaucratic grace.
The Mole Woman, her slavishness underlined by the smock and hairnet, dropped the rods on the plate and slid it over the grease shield.
“Be serious!” Jelly whined.
The Mole Woman grunted to herself and deposited two more rods on the plate.
Jelly’s eyes ballooned to pathetic, Keanian proportions, his voice shrinking into Dickensian waif.
“Please, missus, may I have some more?”
The Mole Woman tossed on four more.
Jelly, husky: “I love you.”
The Mole Woman grunted in animus.
J!m was next. The Mole Woman grunted excitedly and beetled over to the deep fryer, pushing aside Ted the Pinhead Mutant, who was useless. She dipped a soup bowl into the sizzling grease, shrieking a little, and hurried back.
“Anshargal,” she bowed her head, delivering fragrant oil to the boy king.
“Gitmalu,” J!m said. “Thank you, Ninsuna.”
Ninsuna looked away, grunting shyly.
j!m wandered across the cafeteria, lost in love and death.
Marie was at the far end, sitting under a MEET THE CANDIDATES banner. Taped to the front of her table was a plain sign: MHS FOR ALL. A gaggle of female juniors gathered around Marie, signing her petition and agreeing with her goals, which sounded nice.
Adjacent, Lewis Seuss was pressing one thumb down on the table with the other, undisturbed by a constituency. An elaborate viz played on the poster hanging in front of him, showing a hundred-foot-tall Lewis defending Manhattan High from incoming Ming missiles, catching them and biting the warheads off, a vignette meant to counter his image as a neurasthenic nerd, and not working.
J!m thought he might get in line behind
the girls, ask Marie there. As he pondered this, three freshman boys arrived, driving away the junior girls. The boys lined up in front of Marie, rhythmically bumping their crotches against the table edge, saying nothing. They would be awhile.
J!m stumbled. Grease slurped from his bowl, hitting the floor with a fatty hiss.
He looked back. A patent-and-chrome wing tip stuck out conspicuously.
“How was your trip?” Russ asked, running a thumbnail between his teeth.
Tubesteak went into his giggle, cuing the rest of the crew:
Lee “Toad” Hopper, a pocked and mottled goon who earned his nickname long before he resembled it, eating a live toad on a dare in the fifth grade, and every few months after that;
Charles “Ice” Tucker, a near albino psychopath who chewed Freemint lithium gum to keep from feeling bad about being so insane;
Bennie “Bennie” Scott, a glassy-eyed happiness vendor, whose given name worked as both cognomen and marketing tool;
Helen Long and Millie Sidney, known as Hel and Mil, interchangeably;
and Sandra Jane, who had yet to be told her nickname, which was based on an unattractive cut of meat.
They were all laughing, except for Bennie, who thought he was laughing.
J!m could have kept walking, but he never did.
“Bravo,” he addressed the head jester. “You can’t even see the hand up your ass.”
J!m waited for that moment, when Russ’s eyes would cross as he deciphered whether he had been insulted. Then J!m walked away, cockily, one step, before slipping on the spilt oil and landing on his tail.
This proved significantly more hilarious, well beyond Russ’s circle, first to those with a view and spreading to outlying tables, students standing for a better look at what was so uproarious, and on to the periphery, where some got up on the tables, knowing they were laughing at J!m but not knowing why.
Jim’s ears folded down and his cheeks burned Bunsen blue, lit from beneath by an amygdalal inferno of humiliation, as he absorbed oil and an object lesson: Why worry about dying sometime in the future—say, tomorrow night—when he was dying every second of his life?
Sitting there until the bell rang did not seem a terrific option, and so he grabbed his tray and got up.
“Now look who greased his seat,” Russ said.
It was funny because it was true. J!m’s seat was, indeed, greased.
J!m had no rebuttal.
his fellow travelers were waiting for him, Johnny salad picking and Jelly injecting hot protein, acting as if what had happened hadn’t.
Rusty ruined it, with her love.
She was Margaret Ford by birth, a twin to Russell in womb only. A giving girl with a lot of girl to give, Rusty had a heart as big as her face, which was quite big, a thousand freckles wide. Her big heart was bleeding for J!m, and her big face was feeling his pain, her freckles throbbing and her jade eyes brimming with co-agony.
“Save it, Rusty,” J!m said, “for when he kills me.”
Rusty pouted. She really was the best friend an alien could ever have, and a little appreciation would have been nice, or less scorn.
Several yards away, Bennie started laughing.
Johnny put his arm around J!m. “Enslave them,” he counselled gravely. “Enslave them all.”
J!m shrugged the big hand off his shoulder. Johnny barked in amusement and returned to his caterpillar salad.
the silence was ugly and awkward and would not eventually grow out of it.
Rusty had the least tolerance for conversational lacunae, into which she typically shovelled chipper non sequiturs, but she was in a deep sulk and wasn’t saying a single thing until J!m noticed she wasn’t saying a single thing and reached out to touch her hand, or smiled at her, or looked at her, or in her general direction. J!m was looking at his tray, ranking this latest ignominy in his lifetime top ten thousand, and would be a while.
A few minutes in, Jelly had a thought and, as was his custom, said it out loud. “Hey, why do they call these ‘protein’ rods?” indicating the one behind his eye. “Everybody knows they’re made from cows.”
Rusty’s pent elbow shot out, rippling Jelly.
“May-be,” she redirected her pique, “out of consideration for the”—lowering her voice—“Bovons.”
J!m could, but did not, resist. He looked up at Rusty.
“Moo.”
Rusty was, as intended, aghast. Beside her, Jelly grew a muzzle, sank his eyes, elevated and elongated his ears. “Merrrrooooooooo,” he lowed.
Rusty indignantly pointed to the other end of the table, where some underclassmen sat, in particular a Cowgirl from Alpha Tauri, looking back with large liquidy orbs.
“You made her cry!”
Jelly, unrepentant: “She always looks like that.”
“Aw, she doesn’t mind,” J!m said. “You don’t, do you, Clara?”
Clara swallowed her cud. “Noooooooooo,” she simpered, batting those brown betties.
“You boys are so evil,” Rusty said, with a flippancy not in her natural repertoire. “I can’t believe I’m letting all of you take me to the dance.”
This was news to all of them.
Rusty tossed her wild ginger hair like she had seen in an adviz for Chemoste, the gentle tumor remover. “I didn’t want you fighting over me.”
She chewed her lip.
“Gang date!” Jelly yelled.
Johnny watched a caterpillar cross his knuckles. “Only, Jim asked Marie Rand this morning.” He let the larva crawl up his tongue. “Right after Bio.”
J!m said nothing.
“It’s okay, Rusty,” Jelly said. “Johnny and me’d be happy to double-team you!”
He sloshed into her, undulating with unseemly purpose. She pushed back violently, shoving only his shirt and ending elbow-deep inside him.
Jelly’s head rolled back in carnal rapture.
“You taste like bacon, baby.”
Rusty recoiled, her arms covered with Larry Sweeney. She went berserk, flinging bits of him as far as four tables away. The millijellies instinctively returned to the mother mass, stopping to clean a plate or two along the way.
Rusty was an inexhaustible font of girlish disgust, stringing eee’s and eww’s and ayii’s together into a symphony of revulsion. Jelly did not take it personally, feeling this was a breakthrough of sorts.
J!m knew he shouldn’t laugh, but with Johnny pant-hooting and banging on the table, he thought a diverted murmur would be all right.
“And you,” Rusty turned on him, flicking the last drops of Jelly into his face, “are not going to any dance with Marie Rand. She and Sandra Jane Douglas are going with my brother and Tubesteak.”
J!m’s head tipped forward, the gravity of his universe infinitesimally but catastrophically greater.
“She’s going with Russ?”
“Or Tubesteak. I don’t know how they divvied them up.”
It was obvious, yet inconceivable. In no universe, even the one in which J!m was depantsed in front of the whole school and burst into flaming shame, did Marie end up with Russ. There it all was, happening before him, and he could still not imagine it.
“That Russ Ford’s got some big cajones,” Johnny said, tilting his head into J!m’s view, his play face. “Or some cajones.”
J!m pushed Johnny aside and made for Marie.
she was talking to steve simpson, president of the Calligraphy Club, who was giving Marie a tour of the osmiridium-tipped pens in his protected pocket. He should be easy to scare off. J!m’s jeans alone would do it, and if not, he would have to start breaking nibs.
That foot, this time at pelvic level, interceded. The chrome toe tapped at his fly.
“Who’s there?” J!m said.
Russ’s eyes crossed. He shook it off.
“I haven’t forgotten how you nuked me on that test, Blue Boy.”
“And it’s been more than an hour.”
J!m sidestepped Russ’s leg and made it as far as Toad. The sce
nt of wintergreen mood stabilization told J!m his retreat was blocked by Ice. Toad twisted J!m toward Russ, who remained seated, fascinated by his fingernails.
“If I end up on academic probation,” he said, “you know who I’m going to blame?”
“Your father’s seed, or your mother’s egg?”
That one was easy, as J!m knew it would be, and incendiary, more so than J!m predicted.
Russ leapt to his feet, seizing the lapels of J!m’s birthday jacket.
“My mother’s eggs were normal!”
J!m, coolly: “So rotten sperm, then.”
Russ whipped a Zippo from his waistband and held it under J!m’s chin.
“What’s that, Oily?” he overacted. “Could you speak directly into the microphone?”
Russ flipped the lighter open.
J!m’s nictitating membrane slid across his eyes, smarter than J!m himself.
“You won’t like the smell,” he said.
Behind them, Toad and Ice rose off the ground, to their evident surprise, and flew to the right. Next Johnny grabbed Russ’s wrist and, with his lightest squeeze, made the hand spasm and drop the lighter.
“Hey, there,” said Johnny, “let’s not go and cripple that golden arm of yours right before the game.”
Johnny released the wrist but Russ’s fingers convulsed a while longer.
The bell rang.
Russ massaged his hand as he marched off, not in retreat, since he had someplace to be, although not in the direction he first marched. His crew marched, and about-faced, behind him. Sandra Jane eyed J!m evenly as she left.
“I bet you woulda burned for a long time.”
J!m was about to make a dining suggestion when he saw Johnny waiting to say something.
“Y’know, Freak,” Johnny said, “if you don’t want to fight, you should stop starting them.”
Johnny punched J!m moderately on the shoulder and loped off, vaulting a lunch table and earning another detention.
Rubbing his temporarily broken arm, J!m turned to the candidates’ table. Marie was gone. Lewis Seuss remained at his station, showing his teeth to passing students.