Planet Tad
Page 4
Today was a very bad day. My math teacher, Ms. Bolton, came in with a Band-Aid on her cheek, and Chuck passed me a note that said, “What’s with the Band-Aid?” And I wrote a note back that said, “I don’t know. Maybe she cut herself shaving?” But as I passed it to him, Wendy Gilman (who’s been mad at Chuck ever since he accidentally gave her a bloody nose in a kickball game) grabbed it and raised her hand and said, “Ms. Bolton! Tad and Chuck were passing this note!” So Ms. Bolton took it and read it, and then she got really quiet, and her mustache got a little quivery, and then she said that she was done teaching our class for the day and we should quietly read our math books for the rest of the period.
I think it would probably be a really good idea if Chuck and I did well on the standardized test, because I don’t think we’re getting good grades in math this semester.
Ms. Bolton gave everyone an oral pop quiz today. She asked most people what 2 plus 3 is, or what the square root of 9 is. She asked Chuck to explain the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. She asked me for pi to 25 digits.
Yep. We’re in trouble.
Ugh. I spent last night working on practice problems, trying to get ready for the math exam. On the plus side, if I ever find myself on a train heading east at 90 miles an hour, and learn that there’s a train 500 miles away, heading directly toward me at 75 miles an hour, I’ll know exactly how much time I have left to live. So that’s nice.
I wonder how it is that the X-Men all got their names. Like, did they get to pick their own? I’m sure that Storm wasn’t named “Storm” by her parents, and, coincidentally, wound up being able to control the weather. I bet there was some time for all of them where they tried out different names to see if they would fit. Like, for a couple of weeks, Cyclops had everyone calling him “Bright Eyes,” and Wolverine went around practicing signing his name as “Slicey-Hands,” just to see if that seemed like a good fit for him.
I think a better show than Deal or No Deal would be Deal, No Deal, or Eels, where one of the briefcases is full of angry eels.
If sphere n has a radius of 2 inches and is placed within cube z, which measures 4 inches on each side, who will care?
A) Tad
B) None of the above
(Answer: B)
Here’s what I wonder about the Legend of Zelda: Every time they come out with a new game, it’s all about how Zelda got kidnapped again, or frozen, or sent back in time, or whatever. And I’m beginning to think that, at a certain point, she should rescue her own dang self. It’s not like I don’t enjoy the games. It’s just that I think that there should be a button you can push so that, when you reach the end of a game and she’s thanking you, you can go, “What’s your problem? Seriously—getting kidnapped once or twice, I can understand. But I’m beginning to think you just like having people rescue you.”
Well, today was the big math exam. I don’t want to get my hopes up, but I think I did really well. (If nothing else, I did better than Doug Spivak, who got really angry when he found out that, while it was multiple-choice format, the test wasn’t like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and he wouldn’t be allowed to phone a friend on any questions.) After the exam, I talked to Todd Ross, who’s the biggest math geek in our class, and he and I had the same answers for almost everything. So I think I might actually do okay this semester. Which is good, ’cause I can’t wait to forget all the stupid math I just had to learn.
This morning in homeroom, while pledging allegiance to the flag, I had an awesome idea for a horror movie: What if a flag became possessed with the soul of a serial killer? And then all these kids pledged allegiance to it, so they had to do whatever the flag told them to do? It’d be sort of like Children of the Corn, only with a flag. It would be called Pledge of Darkness.
OK, now that I’ve written it out, it looks sort of stupid. But I swear, it seemed like a really good idea this morning.
I’ve been thinking more about the pledge. I think a really good prank a country could pull on America would be changing its name to Forwichistan, because then it’d sound like kids were saying, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic Forwichistan.” If I were the president of, like, Luxembourg, I’d totally do that.
My results from the standardized tests came back today. The good news is, I did OK in most subjects. The bad news is, I got only 18% of the questions right on the math test. Ms. Bolton gave us back our answer sheets, so we could check them against the actual answers and figure out what we did wrong. And that’s when I saw that I’d accidentally started filling in ovals on the second question, so all my answers were off by one.
And if that weren’t bad enough, Ms. Bolton announced to the class that everyone did OK on the tests, except for one student, who finished in the “dull-normal range,” who did “worse than a monkey filling out the form randomly,” and who was, according to the exam, “brain damaged.” And then she stared right at me.
After class, Doug Spivak came up to me and said, “Don’t feel so bad, man. ‘Dull-normal’ is still half-normal, right?” It was nice of him to try and make me feel better. But I wish he hadn’t.
May
Sophie’s reading The House at Pooh Corner right now. I liked those books when I was a kid, even though it bothered me that they never explained what two kangaroos were doing in the middle of England. Did they escape from a zoo? Are they runaway circus animals? I always sort of wished there was a whole book just about how Kanga and Roo got to the Hundred Acre Wood.
OK, this is weird. After math today, I came back to my locker and found this note had been stuck in it:
I have a secret admirer! Which is kind of cool, and kind of creepy. I don’t know who it could be. I showed it to Kevin and Chuck. Kevin wants to be a forensic investigator like on CSI, and he suggested that we put it under a black light or dust it for fingerprints. But I don’t have a black light, or fingerprint dust. (We tried rubbing regular dust on it, but it just got all smudgy.) Then Kevin said it was too bad the note wasn’t written in blood, ’cause then we could do a DNA match. I pointed out that we don’t have a DNA-matching machine, either. Also, as Chuck said, it’s probably a good thing that my secret admirer doesn’t write her notes to me in blood.
Today I found another note stuck in my locker:
I showed it to Kevin. He asked if he could see the first note, and he looked at them side by side for a while, then said, “I think it’s definitely from the same person who sent you the first note.”
Kevin can be a little slow sometimes.
At lunch today, Kevin actually had a good idea: He’d brought in last year’s yearbook, and we went through our class and crossed out every girl who’d ever told me she didn’t like me, or that I was grossing her out, or to stop talking to her. That got rid of a lot of them. Then we crossed out every girl who already was dating somebody, which got rid of a lot more. And Chuck pointed out that we could also cross off every girl in an advanced English class, ’cause my secret admirer doesn’t know the difference between you’re and your. And then he had to spend five minutes explaining the difference between you’re and your to Kevin.
Anyway, now we’re down to just twenty-eight girls. On Monday, I’m going to go down the list and try talking to each of them, to see if I can figure out which one it is.
My parents just started reading the Harry Potter books to Sophie—last night, I heard them reading the beginning of the first book to her. Here’s what I don’t understand about Hogwarts: Okay, so the school has a sorting hat that can figure out each student’s true nature, and assign him or her to the appropriate house, right? But there are four houses. Three of them—Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw—are full of normal people. And then there’s Slytherin, which has NOTHING BUT EVIL PEOPLE. If I ran Hogwarts, when the sorting hat assigned a student to Slytherin, I’d send him home, or maybe to, like, wizard reform school. I mean, duh.
Ugh. So today I managed to talk to six of the girls on my list. I don’t think any of th
em are the one. I asked Julie Kahn how she was doing and she said, “Who wants to know?” I asked Samantha Scanlon if I could borrow a pen, and she sighed and made me give her a dollar as a deposit, so she could be sure to get it back. Three different girls, when they saw me coming, pretended their cell phone had just rung and they had to answer it, which was really obvious when Violet Paterson did it, because she doesn’t even own a cell phone, so she used her calculator instead. And Nina Liu was really friendly to me, which I took as a good sign, until she asked me, “Do you think your friend Kevin likes me?” Which is good news for Kevin, I guess, but doesn’t help me.
OK. I give up. I tried talking to three more of the girls on my list. I asked Kate McLean, “How’s it going?” and she told me, “None of your business.” When I asked Sara Jacobsen what time it was, she said, “Time for you to stop bothering me.” And Deb Chang just stared at me as I talked to her, then turned to one of her friends and said, “Did you hear something? It’s like someone was speaking, but I didn’t see anyone.”
That’s it. I’m done trying to figure out who it is. I’m going to spend my time doing other stuff. Like figuring out what you call a Hot Pocket when it gets cold. Is it a cold Hot Pocket? Or just a Cold Pocket?
Well, the secret admirer mystery’s solved. I got another note in my locker today:
So I went down to the bleachers, and I waited, and I waited, and I waited, but nobody showed up—the only person there was Stu Lawrence, who also seemed to be just waiting around. So we started talking, and he asked me why I was hanging around, and so I told him about my secret admirer. And he got sort of pale and asked to see the note, so I showed it to him. And he said, “Is your locker near Tara-Ann Dillon’s?” And I told him, yeah, I had the locker next to hers. And he said, “Aw, crap,” and he turned super bright red. And then neither of us said anything, but he just took the note out of my hand.
So I guess Stu Lawrence was accidentally my secret admirer. He asked me not to tell anyone about the whole thing. I told him that’d be fine by me.
In art today, Mrs. Sweeney gave us each a canvas and told us to paint “something that feels very familiar to you.” Which seemed like kind of a dumb assignment, because why would anyone want a picture of something they see every day? “Boy, it’s a good thing I painted that picture of my shoes! It saves me the trouble of looking down!” But Mrs. Sweeney’s kind of weird and artsy like that. (She’s a sculptor, and I remember one time, she showed us one of her sculptures and said it was called “Reclining Woman,” but to all of us, it just looked like a pile of rusty metal. Chuck leaned over and said, “If she’s in there, I hope that woman has a tetanus shot.”)
Anyway, I decided to paint a picture of our fridge at home, and I’d gotten pretty far along when Chuck looked over at it and said, “Why are you painting a robot?” Once he’d pointed it out, I realized he was right: It totally looked like a robot. In fact, it looked a lot more like a robot than a fridge.
So I tried starting over, and painted over it with white paint, but everything started smearing and running together and turning gray. I was worried I’d have to ask for another canvas, until I had a great idea: I’d paint over it with black paint, and put a yellow line down the middle of it, and then paint in a dead opossum. Which is totally familiar to me, because it’s something I see from the school bus all the time. I’d painted it black and was just adding the yellow line for the divider when Mrs. Sweeney came by and said, “My, Tad! This looks interesting! What’re you painting?” And I said, “The dividing line.” And she said, “A dividing line? That feels familiar to you?” And I said, “Um, yeah.” Then she got excited and said, “You feel divided? Torn? Ambivalent? Torn between two worlds?”
I could tell from the tone of her voice that there was only one right answer. So I said, “Yes. That is exactly what I feel.” She got even more excited, and said, “This painting is the only one that truly fulfills the assignment!” Which is weird, because it just looks like this:
I still think it’d look a thousand times better with a dead opossum in the middle of it.
We went to the grocery store tonight, and I saw a little kid riding around in the shopping cart, in the backward-facing seat near the handle. I don’t even remember the last time I sat in one of those. I mean, I know that there was a time when I was really little, and I used to sit in there and just chill out for the whole shopping trip. Then there was a time when I stopped, and I had to walk all the way around the store while my mom tried to figure out which of her coupons hadn’t expired yet.
I kind of wish my mom had told me when I was taking my last ride in that shopping-cart seat. I think I would’ve enjoyed it more.
Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, so Chuck and I went to the mall to find presents for our moms. I found a really good book for her, called Drop 15 Pounds in 30 Days!, because she’s always talking about how much she wants to lose weight. But I showed it to my dad when I got home, and he took me back to the bookstore to exchange it. I asked him what I should exchange it for, and he said, “Anything else.”
Today was Mother’s Day. Sophie and I got up early to make my mom breakfast in bed. We decided to make her French toast, and I think we did OK. I mean, the only bread we had left in the house was rye bread, so we had to use that. And we were out of milk, so we just mixed together some some non-dairy creamer and water. And we didn’t have any vanilla, so Sophie crumbled up some Nilla Wafers and stirred them in. But my mom seemed to really like it—when we brought it up to her, she said that she wanted more maple syrup, and by the time we’d gone downstairs and gotten it and brought it back up, she’d eaten everything. I asked her if she wanted us to make some more, but she said no, she was full.
Big news: Chuck and I were walking home from school this afternoon when this dog started following us home. (Well, I guess it didn’t start following us until Chuck gave it some of his leftover nachos.) Anyway, after we got to my house, the dog kept sitting outside and whining. At first, my mom said to leave it outside, and it’d get bored and find its way home. But it just sat there whining, and my mom said to let it in, because it was really distracting her from watching So You Think You Can Dance (which, by the way, is a stupid name for a show. It’s like if, instead of American Idol, they’d called it Nice Singing, Jerkface).
Tomorrow, we’re going to put up signs saying that we found the dog, to see if we can track down its owner. But if we can’t, my mom said maybe we might keep it. I might have a dog! Here is a picture of it:
His name is Rex. It’s short for Dogasaurus Rex.
Here is the first thing I have learned about having a dog in your house: Don’t feed them nachos. Not ever.
Anyway. After spending the morning cleaning the living room rug, my dad and I went to the store and put up signs with a picture of Rex on it. I really hope nobody calls. (I tried leaving one digit off our phone number, but my dad noticed.)
You know what I bet would suck? If you died and went to heaven, but really hated harp music.
Well, it’s been five days, and nobody’s called to claim Rex. I think my parents are growing to like him, too. We’ve figured out that he knows how to fetch, sit, roll over, and stay. My mom says that means he probably has an owner, but I think it just means he’s a really smart dog.
This morning was a little exciting. We got a brand-new school bus for our ride to school. Rocky, our school bus driver, was super psyched about it. He said, “I’ve been asking the district for a new school bus for three years now.” And then he whispered, “I wasn’t supposed to say anything, but the brakes on our old bus were shot. It was just a rolling death trap.”
I kind of wish he hadn’t told me that.
Anyway, it’s nice having a brand-new bus. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in a school bus that didn’t smell just a little bit like vomit mixed with orange-scented disinfectant. I wonder how long it’ll last.
Well, this afternoon, I got an answer to my question. A school bus can go approximately thirty-one hour
s without smelling like vomit. Becky Keeton had a bad tuna-fish sandwich at lunch, and lost it just before my stop. When I was getting off the bus, Rocky was sadly getting out the paper towels and the sawdust and the disinfectant. I looked at him and said, “It was nice while it lasted,” and he sort of smiled and said, “Yeah, it was.”
Hooray! Rex has been with us for eleven days now, and nobody’s claimed him, so my parents said we’re gonna keep him! Tomorrow, we’re going to take him to the Lakeville Cat & Dog Hospital to get him checked out. Sophie got really excited about the idea that we were going to the Cat & Dog Hospital, until my mom explained that that just means “veterinary clinic,” and not “a hospital where all the doctors are cats and dogs.”
Great news about Rex: The vet said the dog seems healthy, he just needs to be fixed. (Sophie asked what fixed means. My mom said it means a dog needs to be repaired. I said, “Yeah, repaired by cutting off his—” but then my mom asked me whether I liked having my Wii, and whether I’d like to have it taken away for a month, and I stopped talking.)