Not As Crazy As I Seem

by George Harrar

  I put a big forkful of the omelet into my mouth and stuff in a wad of sourdough bread just to please her.

  CHAPTER 7

  I never took biology in Amherst, so I don't know why they stuck me in advanced biology at The Baker. Mom says, "Your reach should exceed your grasp." Or maybe it's "Your grasp should exceed your reach" that she always says. I can't remember. What she means is, a person should do something that's challenging, not take the easy path. She's probably the one who signed me up for advanced biology.

  So I take my seat again in the rear, just in front of jars full of dead things, such as frogs and mice and one small, coiled cat that looks like it has been shaved with a razor and then boiled. It's terrible seeing animals like that. I'd rather see dead people in jars than animals.

  I've seen plenty of actual dead people. I'm the only kid I know who has a father who embalms people for a living. He said I could watch him prepare a body anytime, that I'd learn a lot about human anatomy. I've helped out directing cars and carrying flowers at funerals, but I won't go near the embalming room. Dad's hoping I'll take over the business from him some day. I told him that the only way I'd become an embalmer was over my dead body. He just laughed like I was making a joke.

  Anyway, my teacher, Mr. Torricelli, starts talking with a big grin on his face, like some guy on TV trying to sell you a car. I watch his mouth so that I won't have to look at the crooked amphibians poster on the wall behind him.

  "Today, class, we're moving on to primates." He bends down behind his display table at the front of the room and comes back up holding a life-size stuffed chimpanzee. Some kids whistle. A few make gagging sounds.

  I can't believe what I'm seeing. A real dead chimp! He has this frozen, surprised look on his face that makes me wonder what he was doing when he died. Maybe he was heading up into the trees to be with his wife-chimp or kid-chimp. Or maybe he was a laboratory animal that they stuck with syringes full of HIV to see if he'd get AIDS.

  Mr. Torricelli holds up the chimp in one hand, like a huge puppet. "This is Charley..."

  I cover my ears, but I can't block out the booming voice of my advanced biology teacher. "Common yeast has a 30 percent overlap of genes with humans. Worms—40 percent. Cows—90 percent. Another human being has 99.9 percent of the same genes as you, and a brother or sister, 99.95 percent. You and Charley here share 98.6 percent of your DNA. That means there is only a 1.4 percent difference, genetically speaking, between him and you."

  I don't care about his genes. I want to know how this creature ended up here. What was he thinking when he was caught? What was he going to do next?

  Mr. Torricelli leans back on his desktop, with Charley on his lap. "Because chimps are so similar to us in biological terms, they make very good subjects in experiments when scientists can't use humans."

  Why not use humans, if that's who's going to benefit? I can think of plenty of people to experiment on.

  Mr. Torricelli lifts Charley next to him on the desk and pats him on the back. "We sent a chimp into space before humans, and we test drugs on chimps. They are very intelligent creatures."

  "This is terrible."

  "Mr. Brown, did you say something?"

  I guess I did, but I shake my head that I didn't. I meant only to think that it was terrible for him to be showing a dead chimp, but the words just popped out. Sometimes that happens to me.

  "This chimp was seven years old when he died, and—"

  "I hate this."

  "Mr. Brown, were you addressing me?"

  I shake my head again. "No, I wasn't addressing you. Idiot."

  Idiot? Did I just call my teacher an idiot?

  He comes to the head of the aisle, carrying the chimp in his two hands. "If you have something to share, Devon, say it loud enough for everyone to hear."

  I stand up. The other kids are looking at me.

  "I was just wondering how you can hold up a dead animal and act like it's all right to kill him for experiments."

  "This is how we learn about things in science."

  "Well, how would you like being stuffed and held up by a chimp teacher in a world run by chimps so that they could learn?"

  "Mr. Brown, your question is out of line. Please go out into the hall."

  Charley's staring at me. If I leave, he won't have anyone in the room who cares about him.

  "You're new in this class and not familiar with the use of animals in our teaching. If the sight of this chimp upsets you, you can go outside for air."

  I walk up the aisle, staring at the leathery fingers of this beautiful creature. Sure, I can leave, but what about him?

  "Devon Brown—King of the Monkeys!"

  I twist around to see who said that, but all the faces look the same to me, just stupid grins. "He's not a monkey. He's a chimpanzee."

  I feel a grip on my arm. It's Mr. Torricelli's hand curling around my wrist. The sight of those pale, hairless fingers on me almost makes me sick. I grab the stuffed animal and run.

  I don't get far. The hallways are empty, and I manage to duck past the physics and chemistry classrooms and then take the turn toward the front exit without being seen. But coming in the big glass doors are Coach Duffy, my gym teacher, and Felix the janitor, who always wears a jacket that says "Felix" on the back.

  I try to act casual. "Hey, Coach."

  "Hello ... Devon, right? You're the new sophomore?"

  "Yeah, I'm new all right."

  "What do you have there?"

  "This is a chimpanzee. Mr. Torricelli was telling us about how close they are to humans—it's like we're almost identical, you know?" I hold the chimp's face up to my own, side by side. "See the resemblance?"

  "Could be your twin brother."

  "Yeah, that's funny. Anyway, the thing is, we started noticing this smell in class, and it turns out Charley here's stinking up the place. Want a whiff?"

  I hold out the stuffed animal, and the two men lean back a little. "That won't be necessary."

  "Okay, well, I better be getting this guy outside for some fresh air, like Mr. Torricelli told me." I take a step toward the door.

  Felix laughs as I pass him. "Nice job they gave you."

  "You know how it is, Felix. They always stick it to the new kid."

  Outside, the winter wind is whipping snow across the broad granite steps of the old school. The sky is cloudless, and I feel like I could become unglued from the earth and float up and out over the big houses and thin, curving streets and just keep going wherever the wind would take me. Charley and I could sail away together.

  I've felt this way before. Like in Pennsylvania, when my grandfather died, I crawled onto the roof outside his room and waited for a storm to blow me away. I was only eight then. It wouldn't have taken much of a wind to carry me off somewhere I could forget about him. It's strange that to get over losing somebody you love you have to try not to think about him.

  The air settles down a little, and Charley and I are still standing on the steps. It's pretty obvious we're going nowhere. I prop the chimp against the wall, face out, but I can't stand the big, sad eyes looking at me, so I turn him toward the brick.

  Then I just wait for Mr. Torricelli or the headmaster or somebody to come find me.

  CHAPTER 8

  I guess The Baker Academy isn't one of those zero-tolerance places where you make one mistake and they toss you back to the public schools. I had to apologize to Mr. Torricelli for being rude to him, and they decided I wasn't ready for advanced biology, so they switched me to earth science. EnglishAlgebraEarthScienceLunchFreePeriodGymClassicsDone.

  The headmaster called Mom, of course, and suggested I see the school counselor once a week to discuss my "sensitivities regarding animals." She told him I was already seeing a therapist for other reasons, and she was sure Dr. Wasserman could handle that issue as well. I heard her side of the conversation on the phone. She was making a tuna casserole while she talked to him, with the phone stuck under her chin. That's how I knew this wasn't go
ing to be a big deal with her. If a mom stops doing what she's doing when the school calls, then you know you're in trouble.

  I'm not sure how I know this. There are just some things that sound so true that you know they must be. I certainly don't have much experience with trouble, at least the kind that gets adults really angry at you. My trouble is always the "we know it's tough on you" type, like when I flipped out in Amherst because a kid ate one of my M&Ms, or when I'm late for class because I'm in the boys' room washing my hands.

  That doesn't happen much anymore—washing my hands in the bathroom, I mean. Mom came up with a solution. It's a little bottle of antibacterial sanitizer that I can carry around in my pocket. I just squirt a drop on my hands under my desk and rub it in. I don't even need water.

  I used up the whole bottle in one day. Mom couldn't believe it. She doesn't remember what school's like. All day you have to sit in desks that other kids were sweating and sneezing in just a few minutes before. I try not to use the bathroom, but sometimes I have to, and then there are door handles and door latches and levers and spigots to deal with. It's pretty hard not to touch them, so I squeeze a few drops of the antigerm stuff on my hands. The directions on the bottle say that one drop kills 99.9 percent of all common bacteria. So I use four drops each time. I figure they should wipe out that last one tenth of a percent.

  Mom said she'd only buy me two bottles a week, so I've been trying to make it go a little further lately. I open doors with my shirttail, I turn on spigots with a paper towel, and some days in the winter I wear handball gloves. They're cool black leather, and they make me look kind of tough, which is pretty ironic since I wear them because I'm so wimpy about germs.

  "Free" period at school is supposed to mean that you can do whatever you want during it, right? Or even do nothing at all. At Baker it means you have to go to the library to do homework or research four days a week. The other day you must sign up for either art or music.

  Music would seem the logical choice, since I have perfect pitch, as I said. I can tell what any note is just by hearing it, and whether it's sharp or flat. Mom says it's a gift that only one of every ten people has, and I shouldn't waste it.

  Well, some gifts aren't worth the trouble of having them. It's like if your parents give you a fourteen-fret dreadnought Martin guitar for your sixteenth birthday. They're not buying it so you can sit at home in your room strumming chords to yourself. They expect you to be in class shows and play a song or two when relatives visit at holidays. So with my gift of perfect pitch, my parents expect me to join the chorus and be in school musicals. Imagine me standing in front of people, singing! All that breathing on the back of my neck—I'd probably faint and fall off the stage and crack my skull.

  That's why I chose art for my Friday class and I'm sitting in Mrs. Cohen's class after lunch, pinning a fresh sheet of white paper to my drawing table. Art you can do by yourself, and the worst that can happen is that the teacher tapes your painting on the wall for people to see when you aren't there. I'll save my perfect pitch for singing in the shower at home.

  The assignment today is to draw a structure, such as a house. That takes some planning. I open my metal tray of paints and moisten each little tub of color with a drop of water from my brush. I figure I'll do my old house in Amherst, which had six-foot windows in the front and a porch that went all the way around to the backyard. With my ruler and pencil I mark out where the horizon would be, about a quarter of the way up from the bottom. Then I block out my house on the right side of the paper, leaving room on the left for trees or cars or whatever I want. You never put your main object in the middle of your picture. You create tension by putting it to one side or the other, which I learned in art at Amherst. For some reason people like tension in pictures but hate it in their actual lives.

  After fifteen minutes I've got my house outlined. Mrs. Cohen walks by me, stops for the smallest fraction of a second, and moves on to this kid with purple hair two desks up on my right. He has already painted a huge house right in the center of his paper. Now he's dipping his brush into a blob of green and yellow on his mixing board, and then he swipes it across the bottom, under the house.

  Mrs. Cohen looks over his shoulder. "Grass isn't usually that bright. Try more green."

  The kid doesn't even look up at her. "Crabgrass is bright."

  "Houses aren't usually surrounded by crabgrass, Ren."

  At least, I think she said Ren. It could have been Den or Len or Pen for all I know.

  Mrs. Cohen walks on to the next student and tells her that her sunflowers, if that's what they are supposed to be, look more like black-eyed Susans.

  The boy with the crabgrass glances around and gives me an odd expression, like we're friends sharing a secret joke. Then he picks up his brush, jabs it into the yellow and paints his grass even brighter. He turns toward me again and I look away. When I look back he's brushing black paint all across his sky.

  Mrs. Cohen comes down our aisle again after a minute and tells me that this is a one-hour exercise, so I better begin painting right away. Then she stops at the purple-haired kid's desk. "This is supposed to be a realistic portrayal of a building, and realism doesn't include those colors for grass or sky."

  "I guess I misunderstood the assignment, Mrs. Cohen." He says her name like Co-hen. Then the hand holding his paintbrush reaches around the back of her and swipes her pant leg, just below her smock.

  She jumps out of the way, twists around, and sees the mark on her white pants. "What did you do?"

  It seems pretty obvious what he did—marked up the teacher.

  "Oh, I'm sorry, Mrs. Co-hen. It was an accident. I was listening to the interesting stuff you were saying about realism, and I forgot about the brush in my hand. I guess I kind of touched you with it."

  He's such a good liar, I almost believe him. She looks around and sees me watching. I could turn him in, but that's not the first thing you should do in a new school if you want the other kids to trust you.

  He winks at me. "You better wash that out right away, don't you think, Mrs. Co-hen?"

  She rushes toward the supply room, where there's a sink and soap. For the rest of class I can hear water running.

  When the bell rings, I hoist my backpack to my shoulder and wait to let everyone else leave first. I have Physical Torture next, and if I get there after the bell, Coach Duffy might send me off for a late slip. By the time I get that from the headmaster's office the period will be half over, and there'd be no use changing into gym clothes, right? I could just sit in the bleachers, reading, and Coach would probably forget about me. I don't like wearing gym shorts. My legs look like they belong on a chicken—skinny and hairless. Why do schools have the right to make you show your body parts to people?

  The art classroom is empty now, so I head through the door. There's Purple Hair waiting for me.

  "You saw me, didn't you?"

  He's wearing a brown leather jacket with some kind of writing on the arms. He's as skinny as me and shorter, so I'm not afraid of him.

  "Yeah, sort of. I mean, I saw your brush touch her leg, but it could have been an accident, like you said."

  I start walking down the hall, and he does, too.

  "It wasn't an accident."

  "Oh."

  "I can't stand the way she's always telling everybody what to do. She's like a Nazi art teacher or something."

  This doesn't sound right to me. "I think she's Jewish. You can't be Jewish and a Nazi."

  "Sure, you can. Being a Nazi is like a state of mind. Anybody can be one."

  We reach the door to the locker room, and the kid stops there with me. "You got gym now?"

  I nod.

  "I got English with Hite. She's another Nazi."

  I nod again, although actually, Ms. Hite seems pretty cool to me. She drives an old blue Beetle, not one of those phony-looking new ones.

  The kid punches me in the arm. "Maybe I'll see you after school, like at the buses or something."

&n
bsp; "I don't take the bus. I walk."

  "Me too, so we could walk together."

  "Yeah, maybe." That seems the safest thing to say to a kid like this.

  CHAPTER 9

  It gets kind of tiring standing for a whole hour in the middle of Dr. Wasserman's office, so today I think I'll lean against the wall. I squeeze myself between the vinyl chair and the floor lamp to the only free wall space in the room and wait for him to begin.

  It takes him eighty-three seconds to look up from his papers, which I know because that's how many beats of my heart I felt, and it beats exactly sixty times per minute.

  "You want to stand there today, Devon?"

  Want is a pretty tricky word, if you think about it. It should mean that you really feel like doing something. I don't really feel like leaning against this wall. I'm only leaning here because it's better than standing in the middle of the room. I only want leaning because I don't want standing today.

  "I thought I'd try leaning."

  "Okay. But the lamp is shining right in your face. Why don't you turn it off?"

  I reach down and pull the metal string. The light goes out, and I feel cooler right away. But now I can see that the lamp is tilted a little. I nudge the shade straight, but it's still not right. I lean over and look under the shade and see that the socket isn't screwed in tight to the base. With a few twists, I fix it.

  "Thank you, Devon. I see you're good at mechanical things."

  "Screwing in a socket isn't really very mechanical. It's actually kind of simple-minded, if you want to know the truth."

  He looks at me like I called him simple-minded, which I didn't. Although if you think screwing in a socket is being mechanical, maybe you are simple-minded.

  "Well, Devon, I understand you had a situation come up at school."

  I did? A situation? "What do you mean?"

  "The confrontation with your teacher in advanced biology."

  "Oh, yeah. I didn't know that was a situation. I thought it was just something that happened."