King Dork Approximately Read online

  ALSO BY FRANK PORTMAN

  King Dork

  Andromeda Klein

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2014 by Frank Portman

  Jacket art copyright © 2014 by gray318

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouseteens.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Portman, Frank.

  King Dork Approximately / Frank Portman. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Sequel to: King Dork.

  Summary: With stitches in his head and aftereffects from surgery, Tom Henderson finds some of his most deeply-held beliefs shattering but, somehow, “makes out” with at least two girls by the end of tenth grade.

  ISBN 978-0-385-73618-3 (hc) — ISBN 978-0-385-90591-6 (glb) —

  ISBN 978-0-375-98567-6 (el)

  [1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. High schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.P8373Kk 2014

  [Fic]—dc23

  2013042885

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introductory Remarks

  Part One: Christmas Vacation

  Live Wire

  For It Was He

  The Iron Fist of the Santa Carla County School District

  It’s Not Easy Being a Twelve-Year-Old Girl

  It Never All Falls Away Completely

  A General Theory of the Universe

  Remaining Aloof

  Sam Hellerman’s Assets

  Fieldwork

  All Aboard the Obsession Train

  APLPA-016

  Part Two: Y2K

  The Brutal Conditions of the North American Kibble Mines

  You Might Want to Skip This Part

  Never Mind

  The Curse of the Easygoing Guy

  Book Roulette

  Doing It for Humanity

  The Thing

  Of Pizza and Metal

  A Manacled Place

  What’s It All About, Hellerman?

  The Secrets of Women Revealed

  “Finals”

  No Ass-Grabbio

  The Sweet Fruit of True Rock and Roll

  And They Shall Know Us by Our Monikers

  Hellerman and Hellerman, Attorneys at Law

  Part Three: Queerview

  Saint Ass

  One-Third of a Lifetime Supply

  Sam Hellerman’s Camelot

  Doin’ the Hillmont Rag

  Pat O’Brien and His Honolulu Lou

  Going Steady for Good

  Tom, Get Your Horn Up

  My Chariot

  Godzilla vs. Deodorant

  Book Reader

  Science Be Damned

  Down With the Universe

  Space: The Final Frontier

  Part Four: Naomi

  Questions

  A Pretty Good Bone

  Happy Birthday to Me, Happy Birthday to Me

  Hot Underwear

  Naomi

  Lulguayvian Events at the Aladdin Arcade

  The Hots

  Meanwhile, I was Still Thinking.…

  Hey, I’ll Take it

  Part Five: Prom

  Fonzie

  Ramoning Makes the World Go Round

  Shirley Temple, the Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time

  New Band Name

  Women!

  The Reptilians

  On Being a Boyfriend

  A Well-Rounded Nut

  Carrie

  Part Six: Halls of Innocence

  Zero Tolerance

  Stupid Eyeball

  King Dork Strikes Again

  Elmyr de Hellerman

  They Call It That Old Mountain Dew

  Carnage

  Aftermath

  King Dork Approximately

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Discography: (December–June)

  About the Author

  Excerpt from King Dork

  THANKS TO:

  Krista Marino, Beverly Horowitz, Barbara Marcus, Angela Carlino, Steven Malk, Tanya Turek, Lindsey Haggar, Paige O’Donoghue, G. K. Chesterton, Mavie Portman (hi, Mom), Bobby Jordan, Ted Angel, Jim Pittman, Chris Appelgren, Ben Perlstein, Matt Riggle, Kepi, Franz Barcella, Diego Clemente, Stefan Tijs, Ian Brennan, Marilena Delli, Lavinia Rosato, Alexa Alejandria, Marisa Graham

  for dinataruni

  O’Brien is tryin’ to learn to talk Hawaiian

  to his Honolulu Lou

  and he’s sighin’ and cryin’ and all the while he’s tryin’

  just to say “I love you true”

  with his “arra yaaka hula,” “begorrah hickey dula,”

  and his Irish “Ji-ji-boo,”

  O’Brien is tryin’ to learn to talk Hawaiian

  to his Honolulu Lou.

  —Rennie Cormack, Al Dubin,

  “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian,” 1916

  INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

  So I’m just going to pick up where I left off, if that’s all right with you.

  Tenth Grade, act one, was pretty awful. I wouldn’t recommend tenth grade to anyone. Yet I survived. And while there was no particular reason to believe that the looming second act would be much better, the most pressing challenge, as I saw it, would merely be figuring out a new hair strategy for the upcoming semester. My previous method of preemptive self-ostracism, where I would sit with my back against the wall hiding my face behind my glasses and my glasses behind my hair and my hair behind a book, would be severely hampered because I had quite a bit less hair to work with. They had had to shave some of it off to do my surgery, and then my mom had cut the rest of it pretty short with my dad’s old electric clippers once I got home from the hospital.

  “You’re a nice-looking boy without all that hair,” she had said, causing my sister, Amanda, to collapse in melodramatic amusement.

  Well, yes. I was a “nice-looking boy,” and it was going to be a great year. Maybe I could get a hat or something, was my main thought.

  Of course, I was as wrong as wrong could be. The horrors of Tenth Grade, act 2, would not, and could not, be solved by a mere hat.

  That said, do you want to hear something weird? If yes, just read this sentence out loud:

  I’ve done it. With a girl.

  It is basically true, as in, it’s pretty much the case. Except “I” is me, not you, and I guess that’s more like one and a half sentences. So yeah, I screwed that up, but never mind.

  Now, perhaps it didn’t sound all that weird when you said it aloud—I don’t know you. (And if you’re a girl and it didn’t sound weird, all I can say is, congratulations: you’re hot.) But when I say it, trust me, it sounds weird. And maybe you’re thinking I’m just being cagey, and it will turn out that the “it” that was done, with the girl, by me
, was something like baking cookies, or playing Monopoly, or fetching a pail of water from the old well up the hill. But I assure you, it means what people usually mean by “it.” I’m talking full-on, approximately literal ramoning. (If you’ve somehow been fortunate enough to avoid my previous explanations, I’ll make it clear: ramoning is sex.)

  I know you probably don’t believe me about this alleged ramoning. I wouldn’t believe me either. And it’s true that I’ve been caught in an exaggeration or three when it comes to women. For instance, being strictly honest, I had, at the beginning of the stuff I’m going to tell you about, made out with three girls in my short career as a womanizer. Well, okay, technically two, but the third one kind of counts, as she was an alternate identity of one of the first two. And what if something extra special happened during one of these “sessions,” something that went above and beyond the call of ordinary making out? Shouldn’t that really count as a bit more than one? I think so. And then if I include girls who have, say, pretended to be interested in me as a Make-out/Fake-out stunt, and girls I’ve accidentally brushed up against, and girls where it seemed like they might have been looking at me and maybe would have possibly been potentially willing to make out with me? Well, then sometimes I can get the total up to as high as twelve or thirteen. Once I even made it to nineteen, but since two were comic book characters and one of those was a space robot, even I can’t accept that statistic as official.

  But trying to be as honest and accurate as I can, we’re talking making out with anywhere from three to nineteen girls, but mostly just two, and doing it with at least one. Salvador Dalí couldn’t have done much better at fifteen, I’m pretty sure of that. I’ll tell you what, though: math of any kind makes me dizzy these days.

  So who’s the lucky lady, and who’s this Salvador Dalí character, you’re asking? Well, Salvador Dalí—and I’m surprised at you for not knowing this—was this Spanish artist who painted things like melting clocks and ships with butterfly sails. He was a notorious lover of women, particularly of naked women, who all went wild for his crazy eyes and his big twisty mustache. There’s a photo of him using a sexy lady as a desk, doing office work on her belly. Even I can imagine being interested in homework under such circumstances. One day I may attempt to pattern myself after him, if I’m not doing it already. So that’s our Salvador. As for the “lucky lady,” that’s the thing I’m telling you about here, so don’t rush me. (But the Salvador Dollies would be a great band name, and if I ever meet three willing girls I will totally Kim Fowley them and turn them into rock and roll history. Who’s this Kim Fowley? Look him up, I’m tired of explaining.)

  Anyway, you’ll have to bear with me because even though I was promised a full recovery, my brains are still scrambled on account of this head injury, which, if you remember from my previous explanations, I received when the normal people of the world tried to kill rock and roll by hitting me in the face with a brass instrument. Words come out a little funny sometimes, when I talk at all, and I find I lose track of things more easily than I believe I used to. Thanks, tuba.

  Nevertheless, I’ve given the matter some thought, slightly, and here’s how I’m going to start the story part of this.

  So travel back through the mists of time, long, long months ago, in the twilight of a Christmas vacation much like any other, to a town called Hillmont, in a bathroom called “the bathroom.” Free your mind of all preconceptions, put your trust in my gentle care, and then, with any luck, I think you will find, dear reader, in the end, that it will, well, you know, sort of just pretty much be okay.

  LIVE WIRE

  I was doing the thing where you look in the mirror and try to decide if you recognize the face staring back at you. And I did recognize it. The bruises were coming along nicely, little rings of black, purple, and yellow, as if some evil hippie scientist had figured out a way to tie-dye random areas of my entire body with dark, foreboding colors, as a grim warning, perhaps, to any who dared question the sacred doctrines of recycling, organic dishwashing liquid, and the Doors. A centipede snaked across my forehead just under the hairline, the transparent legs of which, doctors had told me, would soon dissolve, leaving a legless centipede of scar tissue that would itself eventually fade to almost face color. At the moment, though, it was like a third, off-center eyebrow of fishing line. My hair, as I’ve already explained, was too short to cover the centipede in front, which was unfortunate, but looking on the bright side, I supposed it would allow me to test the conventional wisdom that chicks dig scars. I couldn’t resist stroking it. “We shall see, my little centipede,” I whispered. “We shall see.”

  If I held my head at just the right angle and blurred my eyes up a bit, it didn’t look all that bad. Bruised as it was, I could work with it.

  So I started to do the thing where you think of all the women you’ve had and pretend you are the Lord and Master of the Universe, making grandeur-deluded Mussolini eyes with an Angus Young lip curl and a slight head-bang, left hand idly positioned with the fingers draped over an invisible, floating guitar neck while the right index finger makes a series of rhythmic stabs, in time to which you growl tunelessly, under your breath, something like “I’m a live wire, live wire, I’m a live wire.…”

  Don’t try to tell me you’ve never done this. Be honest, you were probably doing it just now. Also, don’t try to tell me that when you were doing it you didn’t at some point become conscious of a threatening presence behind you and slightly to your right. Everyone gets caught practicing eventually, is what I mean, especially when you live in a house full of annoying family members, like you probably do. In my case, the figure standing in the bathroom door that I should have remembered to close and lock happened to be my reliably inconvenient younger sister, Amanda.

  Her thoughts were clearly visible on her face, as though written there in Magic Marker. “Ah,” they ran. “And another piece of the puzzle falls into place.”

  But what she said, with her voice, in a withering, partially italicized tone, was:

  “Hey, Live Wire. It’s your other half on the phone.”

  She was holding the telephone like a TV remote control, pointing it at me as though deciding whether to switch the channel.

  “How much did you see?” I asked.

  “All of it, Live Wire,” she said. Then, after a pause, she repeated “All of it” and walked away shaking her head in an exaggerated manner, as she did in response to pretty much everything. Fortunately, she’s family, so what she thinks doesn’t matter.

  Now, “other half” is a euphemism for “mate” or “spouse” or any other person with whom you have what they used to call “sexual relations” on a regular basis. It’s meant as sweet-natured ridicule, implying that once two people have begun, you know, ramoning, they no longer have individual identities. It’s kind of sad and beautiful when you pause to think about it—one of the English language’s more lyrical insults, if “lyrical” means what I think it does. And an optimist might have assumed, knowing this history, that the voice on the other end of the telephone would be a female one.

  But if nearly fifteen years of walking around on this godforsaken hellhole of a planet in the midst of its godforsaken hellhole of a society has taught me anything, it’s that this kind of optimism is rarely warranted. My godforsaken hellhole of a sister’s mocking, italicized tone said it all, transforming a gentle romantic put-down into nothing more than yet another tedious gay joke, the kind of thing that the normal people of the world, even up to and including your own sister, never ever ever ever seem to tire of. In other words, I was not at all surprised that the voice coming out of the telephone was not that of a female but rather that of a dude. Well, technically, anyway.

  “Satan?” it said.

  FOR IT WAS HE

  “Mussolini, actually,” I replied, marveling at the voice’s keen powers of observation and deduction. All it had needed to hear was Amanda’s mocking “Live Wire” to know what she had discovered me doing in the mirror.
>
  “Better stick to Satan,” said the voice.

  “But I thought you were Satan,” I said.

  “We can all be Satan,” it said, and I could see its point, which was actually pretty beautiful. The rock and roll Satan face was just the rock and roll Mussolini face with the addition of a flicking tongue. I could do that.

  “Did you get the letter?” said the voice.

  Letter? What letter? And who, or what, was this mysterious voice?

  Okay, you know what? I’m already tired of this “for it was he” gimmick, “the voice” and everything. You and I both know it was Sam Hellerman on the phone. Who else would have been calling me to talk about Satan and Mussolini and whether I’d received some letter? He was pretty much the only person I knew.

  “What are you talking about, Hellerman?” I said. For it was he. “What letter?”

  It was hard to interpret the silence that followed.

  “Meet me in front of Linda’s in forty-five minutes to an hour,” he finally said.

  “Will you be the one wearing a yellow carnation?” I said, because the conversation sounded a bit like we were being spies, and that’s a joke I sometimes make when proceedings have taken a spylike turn. It’s from a movie, probably, though I couldn’t tell you which one. One of those old black-and-white ones where the guys’ pants come up to their chests and Humphrey Bogart has to stand on a box just out of frame to kiss the tall ladies.

  “And bring the stuff,” said Sam Hellerman, ignoring my brilliant carnation gag. Okay, Agent X-T9. I decided to give the carnation joke one more try sometime soon and then, if it didn’t get a laugh, retire it for good. Why no one thinks it’s funny is beyond me. I had planned to say something along the lines of “Just tell me what fucking letter.…” But he had hung up.

  “Christ, what an idiot,” I said under my breath. I was referring to myself. Sam Hellerman, as I’ve often remarked, is, despite considerable flaws, a genius. I’m just the one who always falls for it, whatever scheme he’s working on, in which I am occasionally the target but more often a mere pawn in some grand plan beyond my understanding. He’s that kind of guy.