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Okay? She sounded relieved that she didn’t have to figure out a way to bring it up, as I’d known she would.

“Because it would be really bad if my boyfriend found out,” she said.

I took a stab. “Shinefield?”

“Him too.” She laughed, a little nervously maybe. I wasn’t sure who her actual real official boyfriend was, but it seemed safest just to adopt a blanket policy of nondisclosure that would cover him along with everyone else. Make things simpler. How had she explained the smudged breastographs, I wondered? Well, I was sure she had it all figured out. She had 300

that air. “And, um, you might not want to mention anything to Sam, either.”

Way ahead of you, babe. Not that I thought she was still messing around with Sam Hellerman, too. Did I? Was she?

She was a busy girl, but I sincerely hoped not.

“Or Yasmynne.”

Okay, this was getting weird. But I didn’t want to kill the

“Oh, thank God” vibe, so I let it slide. “Don’t worry, Fiona.

No one will find out.”

“Stop calling me Fiona,” she said.

“Okay, if you stop calling me Trombone.” Because she had started to call me Trombone somewhere during the conversation. But that was a deal she couldn’t or wouldn’t make, so I guess Fiona was back on the menu in at least a limited way. Plus, for obvious reasons the word “trombone” would now forever bring to mind her breasts, or one of them, anyway. So I suddenly found I kind of liked hearing the word

“trombone.”

With the nondisclosure agreement out of the way, the rest went pretty well.

“For the record,” she said, “I never thought you belonged on the dude chart.”

Dude chart? Now, that was hard to interpret. In a variety of ways, that statement went against everything I had understood about Dud Chart, the Sisterhood, and Celeste Fletcher’s role in the whole thing. Or at least, it seemed to give the game slightly different implications. Had Sam Hellerman gotten it a bit wrong, or contrived that I should get it a bit wrong? But wait: why didn’t I belong on it, if it was a “dude chart” rather than a “dud chart”? What was she trying to say? Who fucking knows? Nevertheless, even though I didn’t quite understand it, it was just about the nicest thing 301

anyone had ever said to me. I think. So I said thanks and left it at that. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

On the other hand, “dude chart” may just have been a playful mispronunciation. See, one thing I learned from the conversation really blew me away—and this is so typical of me it’s not even funny: Celeste Fletcher was actually in Mr.

Schtuppe’s English class, and was something of a champion mispronouncer in her own right. I had been too devil-head oblivious even to notice. So while I was obsessing over the mystery girl, the mystery girl had been right under my nose, and we had been reading about Jane Gallagher and mispronouncing the same words from Catcher in the Rye all along without my realizing it. Hell God damn. So that’s why, when it was finally time to wrap it up, I asked her how things were in Old Nocturnal Emission Hills.

“Libidinous,” she said, but she pronounced it so it rhymed with “shyness.” She was the real deal. A slan chick with a great rack, a devious nature, and a powerful vocabulary. Not bad at all. I think I’m in love, I thought, whatever I might have meant by that.

ALWAYS TH E QU I ET ON E S

In movies and books there’s this thing called a character arc, where the main guy is supposed to change and grow and become a better person and learn something about himself.

Essentially, there’s supposed to be this part right at the end where he says: “And as for me, well, I learned the most valuable lesson of all.” Now, if I were the main guy in a movie, I’d have the most retarded character arc anyone ever heard of. I didn’t learn anything. What’s the opposite of learning something? I mean, I knew stuff at the beginning that I don’t know 302

anymore. Bits of my life simply disappeared. I’m more confused than I ever was before, and that’s really saying something.

But if you’re expecting that touchy-feely “you have touched me, I have grown” character arc stuff, here it is.

Because, well, as for me, I have learned the most valuable lesson of all.

As I originally described the King Dork card game, a player automatically loses if he gets a king in his hand. Now I see that it’s a little more complicated. You can bluff and fake your way out of getting kicked out of the game. In other words, if you play in such a way that no one knows you have any kings, you stay in. I still need to work out the details, because somehow there also has to be a way that two or more players, like, say, Deanna Schumacher and Celeste Fletcher, can hold the same king card at the same time without realizing it. And maybe some way for the queens to masquerade as each other or something. Anyway, I don’t know how you win. Maybe no one ever wins, and you just keep accumulat-ing cards and bluffing about them till everyone dies and is forgotten.

I don’t know how it is if you’re a normal guy with one special girl who is your official girlfriend in the approving sight of God and country. Nice work if you can get it, but it’s just not available to everyone. So this only applies if you’re the schlumpy King Dork type whom girls don’t tend to want to associate with in public if they can help it. But here it is, the lesson:

If you’re in a band, even an extremely sucky band, girls, even semihot ones like Celeste Fletcher and Deanna Schumacher, will totally mess around with you and give you blow jobs and so forth, provided you can assure them that no one will ever find out about it. Start a band. Or go around 303

saying you’re in a band, which is, let’s face it, pretty much the same thing. The quality of your life can only improve.

I admit, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of an actual Sex Alliance Against Society. Maybe a Sex Alliance Against Society is in the end too much to hope for for some of us. But even though there is a small part of me that reacts with fury and indignation over that fact, another part of me would argue that considering where I was at the beginning of the school year and throughout my entire life previous to it, the current lack of a Sex Alliance Against Society is quite an improvement over the previous lack of a S. A. A. S. This second small part understands where the first small part is coming from, but still, all things considered, it can’t really see the flaw in it. Of course, the huge, hunkin’ part that’s left over has no idea what to think and is still totally confused and melan-choly and bitter. So it’s not like we’re looking at a tremendous change here. My poor, adorable, flimsy character arc: you blink, you miss it, bless its little cotton socks.

Still. I’ve got two slightly less-than-imaginary secret quasi girlfriends whom I can call on Mondays and Thursdays, and on Wednesdays, respectively, when their official boyfriends are temporarily out of the picture because they’re on the late shift at the convenience store.

What you got?

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epilogue

S H E R LO C K H E LLE R MAN

We were in my room at the beginning of Christmas vacation, listening to Ace of Spades. Sam Hellerman was seated on the floor, leaning against the dresser, with a glass of bourbon between his feet and a couple of my deluxe hospital-issued painkillers, one balanced on each knee. He had promised to delay actually taking them till he had finished explaining his Timothy J. Anderson theory—I didn’t want him to pass out in the middle of a sentence—but I could see it was going to be a struggle for him. Sam Hellerman had very little self-control when it came to tranquilizers.

“Once you realize that Timothy J. Anderson was a kid, or a teenager,” he said, tapping on the microfilm printout about the hanged student in the Most Precious Blood gym, “the whole thing starts to make a little more sense.”