“Earl, if you change your mind, you can tell Thuyen to put it on Mr. McCarthy’s tab. All right?”
“Awright.”
“His pho is much better than mine anyway.”
“Awright.”
“Gentlemen.”
“Mr. McCarthy.”
As soon as Mr. McCarthy left, of course, we got some paper cups and macked on that soup. It tasted OK: like chicken soup, but with strange overtones that we couldn’t identify. Sort of garlicky and licoricey at the same time. Anyway, it wasn’t mind-blowing. At least, not at first.
I first started to feel funny when the bell rang at the end of the day. I stood up and all the blood rushed to my head and I got that brown fuzzy wall in front of my eyes that you sometimes get when the blood rushes to your head, and I had to stand there until it went away. Meanwhile, my eyes were still open, and apparently they were staring at Liv Ryan, the first girl at our school to get a nose job. Specifically, my eyes were staring at her boobs.
From behind the brown fuzzy wall, Liv said some words. I could definitely hear the words, but for some reason I wasn’t able to put them together.
I had no idea what the fuck was going on.
“Greg, what’s your problem,” said Liv again, and this time I was able to determine what she was saying, and also her boobs slowly materialized.
“Blood,” I said. “My, uh, head.”
“What,” she said.
“Couldn’t see,” I said. It was hard to talk. Also, I had become aware that I looked and sounded like a moron. My voice sounded ridiculously nasal, like my face was about 80 percent nose.
“Blood rushed to my head and I couldn’t see,” I explained, although I may not have said all of those words correctly, or in that order.
“Greg, you don’t look so good,” someone else said.
“Can you just not look at me, please,” said Liv, and her words filled my heart with terror.
“I have to go,” I blurted. I realized that I needed to get my bag, and moved my feet for some reason.
That is when I fell down.
I probably don’t need to tell you that nothing is funnier at Benson, or any other high school, than when a human being falls down. I don’t mean witty, or legitimately funny; I’m just saying, people in high school think falling down is the funniest thing that a person can possibly do. I’m not sure why this is true, but it is. People completely lose control when they see this happen. Sometimes they themselves fall down, and then the entire world collapses on itself.
So I fell down. Normally, I would have been able to deal with it by getting up and bowing, or doing an ironic celebration or something. However, I wasn’t feeling normal. I couldn’t think straight. “Everyone is laughing at you,” my brain was telling me, instead of providing me with valuable information, or coming up with a plan. “It’s because you fell down like an idiot!” My brain was malfunctioning. I panicked. I grabbed my bag and actually lunged for the door, and in the process, fell down a second time.
People were close to throwing up from laughing so hard. It was truly a gift from the Comedy Gods: a chubby guy falling down, freaking out, lurching in the direction of the door, and falling down again.
Meanwhile, I scrambled out the door and into the hall, and somehow the hall was about three times longer than normal and just totally packed with people. I was swimming in a sea of human flesh, and trying not to completely freak out. Faces floated past and they all seemed to be staring at me. I was trying to be invisible, but I have never felt so conspicuous in my entire life. I was the Human Nose, as well as Fall-Down Boy.
It was probably five minutes, but it seemed like it took an hour to get outside, and it was an hour of hell. Then, as soon as I was through the school doors and onto the front steps, I got a text.
that soup had drugs .meet me in parking lot
It was Earl.
“McCarthy puts weed in that soup,” he hissed. This took a while to register with me.
“Man, he musta put a damn ton of weed in there,” continued Earl. “Cuz I didn’t even have that much. You had seconds, though. You must be done, son.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You look high as hell.”
“I fell down.”
“Damn,” said Earl. “Wish I’d seen that.”
So this was what it was like to get high. I had tried smoking marijuana once before at a party thrown by Dave Smeggers, but nothing happened. Maybe I hadn’t been smoking it right.
“Let’s go to your house and mack on some grub,” suggested Earl.
“OK,” I said, and we started walking. But actually, the more I thought about it, that sounded like a terrible idea. I looked high as hell! According to Earl! So when we got home: Mom and Dad would immediately know that I was on drugs! Fuck! Then we would have to talk about it! I wasn’t capable of talking about anything! I wasn’t really even capable of thinking with words! I had this badger image in my head for some reason! That badger was awesome!
Also, I would have to make something up because I didn’t want to get Mr. McCarthy in trouble. What was I going to say? That some random stoner kids forced us to get high? That was ridiculous, right? Where the hell was I supposed to tell them we had gotten high from? And maybe more importantly: How was I going to make it all the way to the bus without falling down again?
“Do McCarthy act stoned in class,” asked Earl. “Cuz this is lights out. I can’t wait to get my grub on. Damn.”
Earl was in an awesome mood. I was not. In addition to worrying about Mom and Dad, I felt that everyone on the street was staring at us with disapproval. We were two kids on drugs, just walking around! We were incredibly high! And my nose was like a blimp attached to my face! A blimp filled with mucus! How could we not be the center of attention? (Only in retrospect did I realize that, on the Can’t Stop Watching Scale of Interestingness, me and Earl walking down the street does not get a very high rating. [Ha ha! “High” rating! Get it? That’s truly hilarious. Just kidding, of course; that joke sucked. In fact, that type of joke is the reason most people hate stoners.])
“Do McCarthy act all stoned,” repeated Earl. “While he teaching.”
“He—not really,” I said. “Well, maybe. Sort of. I guess. You could, uh . . . Not exactly, uh. You know.”
I couldn’t even put a goddamned sentence together.
Earl was temporarily silenced by this display.
“Damn, son,” he said eventually. “Damn.”
While we were on the bus to my house, I got another text.
going in for chemo tomw. do u want 2 say goodbye 2 my hair? :)
I’m embarrassed to say that it took us the entire bus ride to decipher this message. First of all, we did not understand that “chemo tomw” were abbreviations. Instead, we thought they were nonsense words. We said them to each other.
“Tcheh-moe tom-wah.”
“Khee-moo tuh-moe.”
“Emu tomb.”
“Ha . . . ha . . . ha.”
“Heh heh.”
“No seriously, what, uh.”
“Heh.”
“Harf.”
Finally, as we were leaving the bus, Earl figured it out. “Chemotherapy,” he said.
“Ohhhh.”
“Your girl gonna lose all her hair.”
“What?”
“Chemotherapy. You get injected with a shitload of chemicals and all your hair fall out.”
This struck me as ridiculous, even though I sort of knew it was true. “Ohhhhh.”
“You basically get sick as hell.”
Well, I thought to myself, this is a pretty pickle. Then I started thinking about the phrase “pretty pickle.” Pretty soon I was envisioning a cucumber with Madison Hartner’s face and boobs. Somehow this was hilarious.