He sits there hanging on to the front end of his desk with both hands like the floor’s gonna tip.
“Why get a hundred years of detention for this kid?” I tell him on the phone that night. “Why not just save him for our thing?”
“Save him for what?” he finally goes.
“Our thing,” I go.
There’s a little buzzing on the line. Nothing works right in either of our houses.
“He could be first,” I go. “We could start with him.”
“Yeah,” Flake admits. I can tell he thinks it’s a good point.
The next day before homeroom someone trips a seventh-grader when he’s coming down the stairs with his art project. His art project is the Seattle Space Needle made out of elbow macaroni. Flake and I are at the bottom when he lands. Macaroni ricochets off lockers.
He sits there wailing and scooping up the pieces that are still glued together. He doesn’t care who sees him. Kids with lockers nearby look sympathetic. Some kick macaroni back toward him.
“Somebody should help BG out, there,” somebody from our grade goes. He got called Baby Gherkin after some kids saw him in the shower in gym.
A girl carries a bigger piece over and sets it down next to him. “Thank you,” he goes.
People step around him going up and down the stairs, and he tries to fit a couple of the pieces back together.
When I see Flake before third period his middle finger is wrapped in this fat bandage. It looks like a Q-Tip. He’s happy about it. He says they were doing dissection in science and he put the little plastic scalpel with the razor blade in his pocket. He only remembered when he put his hand in his pocket later. “Look what I did to my finger!” he says to the vice principal when he goes by while I’m standing there. Kids laugh. “Ouch,” the vice principal goes. It looks like he’s already heard about it. He doesn’t seem to get that he’s just been given the finger.
After lunch Flake spots me at the other end of the room and waves both hands. Both middle fingers are bandaged. When I ask him, it turns out that after he cut the first finger he stuck the scalpel in his other pocket.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I tell him.
“No,” he goes, like he lucked out twice. “Hey, Mrs. Pruitt!” he calls. He sticks up both middle fingers.
After school we decide to walk home when Flake’s detention is over. I sit on the steps and wait, watching the other kids with their friends. When he finally gets out we hang around the end of the playground for a minute before heading home. A ninth-grader comes up and asks if we want to buy any shit.
“What do you got in mind?” Flake goes.
The kid has a white kitchen garbage bag in his knapsack. He shows us the inside of it without taking it out. I can’t tell if Flake knows what he’s looking at.
“White crosses,” the kid goes.
We look at them. You can tell Flake’s thinking the kid might be fucking with us.
“What happened to your fingers?” the kid asks.
“What fingers?” Flake goes.
“Those,” the kid says, pointing at the bandages.
“Boating accident,” Flake goes.
The kid takes some time to work that out. “So you interested?” he finally says.
“How much?” Flake goes.
The kid tells him.
“I don’t think so,” Flake goes, like that’s too much. The kid shrugs and twist-ties his bag and zips up his knapsack. He walks back over to his friends.
“You know what white crosses are?” I ask.
“You?” Flake goes.
“Yeah,” I go.
On the way home Hermie comes running over from a side street. He must’ve seen us going by. “What happened to your fingers?” he asks Flake.
“Boating accident,” Flake goes.
“Yeah, right,” Hermie says. “That kid try and sell you something?”
“How do you know?” Flake goes.
“He’s always ripping people off,” Hermie goes.
“How’d you know he was trying to sell us something?” I go.
“I saw you,” he goes.
A black Camaro goes by and does a U-turn and slows down when it reaches us. A girl hangs out the window and a much older guy is driving. “Eat shit, Herman,” the girl goes.
“Fuck you,” Hermie calls.
The guy guns the car and they peel out.
“My sister,” Hermie goes.
“You got a sister?” Flake goes.
“I guess I must, if that’s her,” Hermie goes. I laugh.
“Shut up,” Flake goes.
“Duh,” Hermie says. Flake lets it go.
“So what happened to you?” I finally ask Hermie. He’s got like a huge scuff mark on the side of his head. It’s a black-and-red scab.
“Budzinski,” Hermie moans. He touches the scab with his fingers like it’s come off before.
“I’m gonna have to see this Budzinski,” Flake says, like he’s impressed.
We walk along for a while. Nobody says anything or asks where Hermie thinks he’s going. You can see how happy he is about it.
“My dad’s got a gun, you know,” he goes.
“Everybody’s dad’s got a gun,” Flake goes.
“I know where he keeps it,” Hermie goes.
“I guess we’re all in trouble now,” Flake tells him.
I start to say something, but I don’t even know what I was going to say. I’m such a loser and a half. I’m the kid you think about when you want to make yourself feel better. If I were me I’d talk about myself behind my back.
It rains for three straight days. One morning it’s so dark that I think it’s still nighttime until my mom comes upstairs and strips the covers off the bed with me still lying there. Flake’s detention lasts until the end of the week, so when school’s finally over I just go home and do homework.
The girl sitting next to me in homeroom cries all three days. The teacher asked about it on the first day and they talked at the front of the room, but he hasn’t brought it up since.
“Here he is, Mr. Greenpants,” my math teacher says to everybody when I show up a minute late.
I spend the rest of the class not believing he did that to me.
Every Monday morning we have to hear on the PA system, along with the rest of the horseshit about blood drives and smoking on the playground, how JV football did. Half the kids cheer when it turns out we won. The principal always goes, “And in JV footbaaaaall . . .” and then waits, like it’s a cliffhanger. It drives me nuts. It feels like it’s six in the morning and these idiots are getting excited about a game they saw last Friday. Weeks when it turns out we lost, a few of us around the room cheer. “That’s very nice,” the homeroom teacher goes.
Our nickname is the Hilltoppers. The student newspaper has headlines like LADY TOPPERS O’ERTOP LADY PANTHERS. During Student Fair the first week of school when I found myself over by their table the editor asked if I’d be interested in working on the paper. He had no idea who I was. I told him I would if I got to do a Dirp column.
“Sure,” he said. “What’s a Dirp?”
“Dicks in Responsible Positions,” I told him.
“Hey,” he said to a kid standing right behind me. “You interested in working on the school paper?”
My dad had the same idea that week. He sat me down and gave me the college-and-extracurriculars talk.
“College?” I went. We were all in the kitchen and I was helping my mother break the ends off of green beans. “I’m still deciding if I’m going to high school.”
“Very funny,” he said.
When he sees me in the living room looking like death warmed over and staring out the window because school sucks and it’s been raining for four years and Flake’s been in detention all week, he goes, “Now, what do you want?” and makes a face at me. “You going to turn into an aggrieved minority group?”