So maybe that’s why no one tried to glue me to anything in Humanities while we were working on the Peace Collage.
Someone did, however, glue some stuff from a gay porn magazine on Bobby Duboyce’s helmet while he slept peacefully in his seat. Peace indeed.
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As for Paul Krebs, I figured he still had a few concussions coming to him. I have heard, though, that if you fall asleep with a concussion you can die, so I was relieved when I learned that he was back in school a couple of days later. And not to be all Bad Seed and everything, but just to be on the safe side I got some new Converse All Stars from the Shoe Mart and threw the old, blood-spattered ones in the shop in-cinerator on my way back to school. Because you never know.
The day after I attended the lunchtime gathering around the Hillmont Knight, I noticed for the first time that Yasmynne Schmick was in my Advanced French class. She smiled and nodded a greeting as I walked in, which was definitely a new experience for me. I guess my failure to say “guitar” properly had formed a kind of loose bond between us.
Which was alarming, in a way. I mean, I wasn’t sure I wanted another friend: Sam Hellerman was about all I could handle.
She was wearing a tight-fitting purple velvety bodysuit and a lot of silver jewelry. She looked like an enormous Christmas ornament. She was actually pretty nice, though, for a drama goth pod-hippie; maybe the drama hippies weren’t all bad after all.
Now, I had started taking French in seventh grade, so this was my fourth year, and even I found it shocking to think how little French I actually knew after three-plus years. True, I knew quite a lot about Jean and Claude and how they go to the movies and eat beefsteak and fruit, and I could tell you all about their other fabulous adventures, though only in the present tense. I was a master of the present tense in French. I guess that is pretty advanced, when you think about it.
I felt a little sorry for the French teacher, Madame Jimenez-Macanally, not only because students would often 144
mispronounce her name so it sounded kind of nasty, but also because it must have been hard knowing deep down that whatever activities may have been going on in that class, the teaching and learning of the French language was not among them. Someone had hit on the idea of asking her to explain the complicated twenty-four-hour French system of telling time at the beginning of each class, just to see how long she would go along with it before cracking. She was determined not to crack, though: she explained the twenty-four-hour system every single day. Whether that was giving in or fighting back is hard to say: you could look at it either way.
The last fifteen minutes of Advanced French is called Advanced Conversation, where the students pair up for advanced, stimulating dialogue. Yasmynne Schmick approached me and said, as near as I could make out: “Le nez est bête.” The nose is a beast? A little puzzling. Then she switched to English:
“Renée is stupid,” she said. “You’re actually a pretty nice guy.”
Pause. “Really?” I had to assume she was talking about Née-Née Tagliafero. What the hell had they been saying about me?
Madame J.-M. frowned at us. We weren’t supposed to speak English in Advanced Conversation. So we continued in French:
“What time is it?” I asked.
“It is 11:05,” she replied.
“Thank you very much,” I said. “What a shame. If it pleases you, what do you call yourself?”
“I am sorry,” said Yasmynne Schmick. “I am hungry. The young girls wear a very pretty dress. They eat and play soc-cer with the mother and the fathers. My name is Yasmynne.
I am four years old.”
“Ah, yes,” I said. “The young people love to buy discs of 145
pop music for dancing and for holiday making.” I chose my words carefully. “They . . . they . . . my God: they eat bever-ages. It is true. My two friends Jean and Claude go to the cin-ema yesterday to view films. What a surprise. They eat. They are flowers.”
Yasmynne Schmick nodded. “Thank you very much. I am sorry.” Her face clouded over. “There is a match between two opposing teams at the stadium. It is true, is that not correct?
Therefore, my little friend,” she said quietly and with a sad smile, “all the world very much loves the automobile who calls himself a cat.”
“You are correct,” I said hopelessly. “I am enchanted. Our little green hat is orange on the head of this very interesting horse.”
“Would you like to sleep with me this evening?”
“Thank you, Mr. Roboto.”
It was kind of fun. That Yasmynne Schmick was all right.
Later that day, I was on my way to Band, running a little late, when something grabbed the back of my army coat, stopped me short, and almost pulled me to the ground. It turned out to be one of Mr. Teone’s large, rubbery hands. He was scratching his butt with the other one. Ugh.
“Henderson,” he said. “Henderson.”
There was something about the way he said my name that made it sound like a particularly nasty swear word. Wait a minute, I thought: you can’t call me that. It’s rude.
He told me that he was writing a book on gifted and talented young men and women, and that he’d like to give me an IQ test and interview me with a group of other kids after school on Friday. At his fucking house. I don’t think so.
“I can give you a ride in my ’93 Geo Prizm if you like,” he 146
said. He was always going on about his ’93 Geo Prizm, like it was some kind of cool car or something. What a moron. He reached into his sports-jacket pocket with the butt hand and pulled out this crumpled, grubby, curling fistful of papers.
Presumably, this was the IQ test. He poked me with it. And I recoiled in horror.
It was hilarious, though. I had serious doubts that Mr.
Teone could write his own name, much less compose a whole book. He had supposedly started out at Hillmont way back as a shop teacher, which I could well believe: he had that air. Then he got some kind of administrative credential and became a principal. So the man had some education. But from what I could tell, he was still more or less functionally illiterate. He looked down at the papers in his butt hand and started to laugh like a maniac.
“No pain, no gain!” he said. “No gain, no pain!” Way to sell your dopey afterschool program to a skeptical student body. Whatever, freak.
Mr. Teone’s afterschool Gifted and Talented program might have been of some use as an anecdote factory, but that was about it, and I felt I really didn’t need the anecdotes at that price. Not that I ever would seriously have considered participating in something like that, even if it hadn’t involved Hillmont High School’s most bizarre and unhygienic administrator. I didn’t need any more self-congratulatory self-esteem baths and collage-making bees in my life at the present moment. Sam Hellerman had attended one of Mr.
Teone’s ill-conceived afterschool activities last year, a sort of science fiction club. He never went back. He wouldn’t say much about it, except: “he’s a deeply weird man.” It hardly needed stating.
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TH E LOR D RO C KS I N MYSTE R IOU S WAYS
Meanwhile, despite the multifaceted depravity of Hillmont High School, and personal mysteries various and extremely sundry, the band was trying to soldier on. It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t worried that I’d get in trouble for blowing up the Magnavox Astro-Sonic hi-fi console. It hadn’t been used for years and years. Lifting the lid had let loose an enormous cloud of dust. It was just a large piece of furniture from long ago that was used as a thing to put other things on, its original function forgotten. We hadn’t even been sure it would turn on.
However, that still left us with two-thirds of a band and nothing to plug in to. (Some Delicious Sky, aka SDS, Squealie on treble and vocals, Sambidextrous on thick bottom and industrial arts, band name squirted on a tanorexic female midriff in white toothpaste, first album Taste My Juice. ) Because I’m so brilliant, I had blown up the left channel on the stereo in my room, too. I was philosophical about it: after all, a lot of the records I like are in mono. But we were running out of consumer electronics products to abuse in the name of Rock and Art.