We were in the cafeteria. I was staring at Sam Hellerman with the question on my face, and he knew what the question was without my having to say it out loud. His earlier evasiveness had evaporated, and he actually seemed in a pretty good mood, though I didn’t know why yet.
“There’s some stuff I haven’t told you,” he said, as though that were something I didn’t already know.
Then Sam Hellerman began to tell the following story: It seems that the Celeste Fletcher trio, along with the Syndie Duffy group and a few others as well, had this kind of club that they called the Sisterhood. (I know—I’m eye-rolling and gagging, too.) They had a lot of complicated activities and rules and procedures, but the one that concerned Sam Hellerman was this game called Dud Chart. Or, I guess it was more like a contest. The name comes from this board game for girls called Mystery Date, where you would open a door in the middle of the board and the guy behind it would either be a dream, meaning a Greg Brady–looking guy with big fluffy sideburns in a purple velvet tuxedo, or a dud, meaning a guy who pretty much looked like Sam Hellerman and me.
It was pretty kitschy retro popular. I think Mystery Date was even the theme of one of the proms last year.
In Dud Chart, they had this chart of all the dorky, nerdy guys in school, and the object was for each girl to score points on the chart by flirting with them or making out with them in various ways. Like you’d get a certain number of points for flirting, for kissing, for getting to different bases, or for walking around like Née-Née Tagliafero did with Pierre Butterfly Cameroon, which had had one of the highest point values because it was so public. But it all had to be in public 187
to some degree so it could be observed and documented.
Different guys had different point values: the less desirable the guy, the higher the score. It was originally supposed to be just flirting and making out, but like a lot of dare-type situations, the stakes escalated as the game went on.
“So basically,” I said, “you’re talking about an institution-alized Make-out/Fake-out.”
“Pretty much,” he said, a little curtly, and continued to explain the system.
I supposedly had a pretty high point value, mostly because of the now-famous PE Rape-Prevention balls incident, which had made a big splash. Bobby Duboyce was near the top, too, because of his helmet. But here’s where Sam Hellerman came in. Celeste Fletcher, hoping to gain unfair advantage over the other girls, had hired Sam Hellerman as a kind of consultant. He pretty much knew everyone on the chart, and had all sorts of information about them that might be useful, and might even, she thought, be able to help set some of them up. Sam Hellerman’s stipulation was that she use her influence to keep both him and me off the chart and out of the game, which she had somehow been able to do. I said a silent prayer of thanks: my life definitely didn’t need another formal humiliation ritual.
They had planned to do some kind of splashy announcement of the results at one of the pep rallies. I don’t know, maybe passing out a zine with all the scores, or posting the chart? That’s just a guess. It didn’t actually happen because before they could complete the game Syndie Duffy had had a big falling-out with Lorra Jaffe. I don’t know the details, but the whole Sisterhood had basically collapsed in a shambles of infighting and scheming against one another, and Dud Chart had been forgotten in the excitement. Lorra Jaffe had focused her energy on trying to destroy Syndie Duffy instead of win-188
ning the relatively inconsequential make-out-with-dorks contest, and everyone else had followed suit.
It’s pretty hard to keep these elaborate schemes going for too long, though they can sometimes coast along on their own for a while. Meanspiritedness is powerful. I have no doubt that Née-Née Tagliafero’s team would have won, though. The Pierre Butterfly Cameroon gambit had been so spectacular that it was still being talked about several towns down the strip months later.
In the end, the Dud Chart fiasco was an object lesson in how getting involved with normal people, if you’re not normal yourself, or even if you’re subnormal/drama, is always trouble.
You start by allowing your own world to be corrupted by their warped values, and then you gradually start using their sadistic methods and eventually end up adopting bits of their sick ideology. And even then, when you have become just like them, they will eventually turn on you anyway. Normal people are savage beasts. Even Sam Hellerman hadn’t been immune: he sold out his people, though the corruption thankfully hadn’t been deep enough to induce him to betray the sacred bonds of alphabetical order. It’s sad. I imagine some of those girls at least had been decent, nice people before they were infected with normalcy by exposure to Lorra Jaffe. Maybe not, though.
I was impressed by the deal Sam Hellerman had managed to get for his services as Celeste Fletcher’s Dork Consultant. Two full bottles of Percodan (from her dad’s pharmacy), a half-bottle of Valium (from her mom’s night table), twenty dollars, and a blow job. No way did I believe the blow job part at first, but he looked so serious and, um, pleased with himself while he was saying it that I even almost started to believe it. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that there were circumstances where it was conceivable that a 189
Sam Hellerman could get a blow job, even an insincere one, from a Celeste Fletcher. And if you are under the impression that I was not burning with envy over said insincere blow job, I can assure you that you are quite mistaken.
According to Sam Hellerman, anyway, Celeste Fletcher had been a Sister of her word despite the cancelled contest.
But she had held out till the end of the term of the deal before delivering the i. b. j. as a kind of final payment, which partly explained his searching looks in her direction out there on the lawn (he had been keeping an eye on his business interests, among other things) and his seeming indifference now that the transaction had been completed. On learning this, it occurred to me that oral sex would probably have been worth a lot of points in their game and that maybe Sam Hellerman had been in the running for the Make-out/Fake-out after all without his knowledge. Or maybe he had known, but they hadn’t known he’d known. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s faking out whom in the battle of the sexes. It hardly matters, though. A blow job is a blow job. Or so I am given to understand.
The Hellerman/Fletcher eye-ray/ass phenomenon had been pretty spectacular, though, and I still wasn’t sure, so I asked one last question: was it all just business, or did he really have the hots for Celeste Fletcher?
“Henderson,” he said, as he does when he wants me to know he’s being serious, “I have the hots for everyone.”
I could see his point.
COI NC I DE NC E S WI LL D O THAT TO YOU
Meanwhile, it was time to reassess the Catcher code. There wasn’t any direct evidence that the note had in fact been ad-190
dressed to my dad, but it was a fair assumption. So my dad had had a friend, a Sam Hellerman–ish figure, named Tit, and they used to give each other coded notes. Probably there had been many, many other such notes, because such elaborate methods only develop over time, and not if you’re just dab-bling. Each of the scribbled dates in the Catcher had potentially been keys to notes that were now lost. The note preserved in A Separate Peace was, I was guessing, a tiny rem-nant of a vast body of other coded notes, like a dinosaur’s fos-silized rib. The more bones you find, the easier it is to imagine what the dinosaur might have looked like when it lived. If you only have the one rib, it’s harder, and the results will be sketchier. More notes would have made it easier to see the total picture of my dad and Tit and their world, but I only had the one note to go on. It was clear, though, that it was a pretty weird world.