King Dork Read online

  Not only that, but Scott Erdman said that Molli Miklazewski specifically made a point of saying that it’s not seeing just anyone’s balls per se that grossed them all out. The girls in her circle, she wanted to emphasize, quite enjoy seeing someone’s balls in many situations. Sometimes they see a person’s balls and throw a big party in the spirit of reverent and enthusiastic ball admiration. Whether it’s gross and makes them want to throw up or not is all dependent on whose balls they are. Now, maybe she was saying this in part just to make sure Scott Erdman knew that she felt okay about his balls, but the message was clear. The entire second-period sophomore girls’ PE class thought my balls were uniquely and supremely beneath contempt. Great.

  Never mind about the date-rape prevention from this end, Ms. Rimbaud. I got you covered. There will be no dating, school district approved or not, going on in the general vicinity of my balls for a long, long time.

  But the Lord never closes a door without opening a window, and on the bright side, it could have been much, much worse, as this would have been the perfect opportunity for someone to propose a groundbreakingly embarrassing new nickname. But fortunately, just at the point when the discussion in the band room would have reached the all-important nickname development stage, in walked Pierre Butterfly Cameroon.

  Needless to say, Pierre Butterfly Cameroon is cursed with one of the worst names ever misguidedly foisted upon a poor, defenseless kid by adoring, clueless, hippie parents. He’s also the shortest kid in school (another wonderful gift from the Whole Earth Mom and Dad: stunted growth owing to a protein-free vegan diet in his formative years). Plus, he had been insane enough back in elementary school to have chosen to play the flute rather than some more gender-appropriate instrument, so when he walked in someone lifted him by the legs of his jeans and shook him upside down till he fell out of his pants and hit his head on a saxophone case and lay there crying in his underwear and everyone started chanting, “Get a belt! Get a belt!” So my balls were forgotten in the excitement. Like I said, doors and windows.

  So I guess I ended up having a slight change of attitude about that CHS party. I mean, I was kind of looking forward to it, suddenly. It had disaster written all over it, but really, how much worse could anything get?

  TITS, BACK RUBS, AND DRY CLEANING

  I had, of course, brought all the CEH books up to my room right after I found them at the beginning of that week. I had cased out the Catcher pretty thoroughly, but it wasn’t till the Thursday just before the party that I got around to examining the rest of them closely as a set. Sam Hellerman had had to skip band practice to do something with his parents (an obligation I wouldn’t wish on a dog—his parents are no picnic). I was on my own. So I put on Rocket to Russia and began to go through them.

  A couple of the books were familiar from school as Catcher in the Rye alternates or runners-up. That is, if Catcher is for any reason unable to perform its official duties, they make you read one of the other ones instead. There was A Separate Peace, which is about this irritating guy who keeps trying to make this other irritating guy fall and break his leg until he finally does and ends up dying. And there was Lord of the Flies, which is kind of like Hillmont High School meets Gilligan’s Island, except that the goons in charge are prissy English schoolboys instead of normal red-blooded American alpha psychopaths.

  There was one pretty cool one, though: Brighton Rock. Reading books can be a lot of fun when they’re not the same ones that they make you read over and over and over till you want to shoot yourself. Brighton Rock seemed pretty interesting. I opened it and read the first couple of pages. But knowing it was my dad’s book gave me a weird feeling that kept distracting me from the story, so I didn’t get too far.

  Really, though, I was less interested in reading the books than I was in examining them for physical evidence. The Catcher in the Rye, CEH 1960, was the most beat up and had had the most things written and spilled in it. The others were in better shape, though some had stuff written in them as well, mostly little check marks and lines drawn next to paragraphs at the margin, with an occasional note. Someone had written “Beatles” and the word “wow,” as well as the word “HELP,” and had drawn what looked like a mushroom cloud on the inside back cover of The Crying of Lot 49, CEH 1967. Hilarious. The Seven Storey Mountain, CEH 1963, had a business card from a dry cleaner stuck between the pages, and also another little card, which appeared to be from the funeral service of someone named Timothy J. Anderson. What that told me was that my dad used to bring his books with him in inappropriate situations, like the funeral of a family member or friend, just like my mom gets mad at me for doing. And that he may have been into the midperiod Beatles and had a fine sense of irony, as well as things that occasionally needed to be dry-cleaned. Hey, I’m a regular Encyclopedia Brown.

  I still couldn’t make out a lot of what was scribbled in the Catcher. In addition to underlining the Jane Gallagher back rub passage, my dad seemed to have used it as a sort of all-purpose notebook and scribble pad, jotting down this and that inside the covers and on random pages. Which makes sense if it’s something you’re always carrying around, I guess. I use the white rubber parts of my shoes for the same purpose. A lot of the scribbles looked like they might be dates, and maybe some of them were phone numbers, though I don’t know—they didn’t look like phone numbers to me. There was never much more than the numbers, either. I could understand if they were phone numbers, which you sometimes just write down when someone tells them to you for temporary purposes. I’ve got some phone numbers on my shoes that I have no idea what they are. But why would you write down dates with no identifying information, like an appointment or something? A date alone is meaningless.

  Some of the pages were missing, but I doubted there was any significance to that. The book was in such bad shape I’m sure pieces of it were scattered to the far reaches of the universe by now. The scribbles that looked like words were mostly illegible and incomprehensible, but, absurdly, of the ones I could kind of make out, the word “tit” seemed to crop up a lot. What the…? All in all, there were four of them, including the “tit lib friday” on the inside front cover. One of the other books, Slan, CEH 1965, had some string in it that appeared to have been used as a bookmark and had a scrawled note that said (I think) something “4 tit” something something. Four-Tit Something Something. Great band name. Not much use in any other way.

  In the end, the results of this phase of the investigation were pretty negligible. But I did know one thing: whatever my dad had been up to between the ages of twelve and eighteen, it had somehow involved tits, back rubs, and dry cleaning.

  THE TEEN WITHOUT A FACE

  For some reason, I didn’t want Little Big Tom and Carol to know I was going to a party, though it would probably have thrilled them to imagine that this could be the start of my finally trying to socialize with other kids. They’re worried about me in that respect. While being thrilled, though, they still would have teased me about it. I think the same thing that makes them worry about my lack of socialization would also make them uncomfortable about any attempts at remedial socialization that I might try. My mom would have looked at me dubiously and asked if I was planning to dance with anybody. Little Big Tom would have said something like “the girls better watch out!” or “looking good!” I just couldn’t face it.

  So I said I was going over to Sam Hellerman’s house to play D and D. There hadn’t been a late-night D and D session in my world for some time, but they had no way of knowing that. Carol and LBT were watching a pledge drive on PBS anyway and had no idea something out of the ordinary was going on. Amanda knew, but she wouldn’t tell because there were things she didn’t want me to tell about that she was intending to do. She had teased me almost as relentlessly as I had feared my mom would, but in the end we had worked it all out.

  “Call if you need a ride home,” said Little Big Tom. “I’ve got a set of wheels!”

  It only took around thirty-five minutes to walk to the par
ty, but once you get to Clearview Heights it feels like a different world. It looks pretty much the same as Hillmont, but somehow you get the feeling that there’s an invisible wall between the two towns and that you’re on the good side of it all of a sudden. There was a good chance that no one would have any idea who I was over there. I was the teen without a face. There are worse feelings.

  We got to the door of the party house and just walked straight in. No one tried to kick us out. Outstanding.

  There were a lot of normal people there. But quite a few of the ones other than them seemed to be CHS drama people, which was good.

  Normal people freak me out, but I’m not scared of drama people. There are some at Hillmont, of course. They’re all right, but they tend to be a bit faux hippie and into “jam bands” and the Grateful Dead and Neil Young, so they remind me of my folks a little too much, and they always seem to be trying too hard to be wacky. The real reason I don’t like them, though, is that I know they will never let me into their club. I wouldn’t particularly like to be a fourteen-year-old hippie revivalist with embroidered jeans listening to the Dead and playing Man in Auditorium in Our Town by Thornton Wilder. But the fact that they wouldn’t accept me even if I did want to be a f.-y.-o. h. r. with e. j. listening to the D. and playing M. i. A. in O. T. by T. W. rubs me the wrong way.

  There is, however, one thing I can guarantee: no drama person has ever beaten anyone up.

  The CHS drama people seemed similar to their Hillmont counterparts, but they were faux mod rather than faux hippie, and that’s a vast, vast improvement. It seems to me if you are going to express your individuality by adopting the costumes and accessories of a long-vanished youth subculture, you’re better off with mod. At least you get some cool-looking boots and short skirts out of the deal, and the music is a whole lot better.

  Sam Hellerman stood in line for the keg, then came back and handed me this big red plastic cup of beer.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “Put cup to mouth at slight angle. Swallow contents. Repeat,” he said, demonstrating. But he knew what I meant. He recommended trying to “act normal” (yeah right) and mentioned that there was a TV room downstairs if all else failed.

  Then he went off to talk to some of those old friends who, for whatever reason, still felt they could afford to be seen talking to him.

  Clearview really was Freedom.

  The music on the stereo was all Small Faces and the Who and the Kinks and the Jam. Not too shabby. The mod thing was a bit much, though. There was a guy running around wearing a British flag as a cape, and several people were speaking in unconvincing English accents. They, and their hilarious asymmetrical haircuts, were trying too hard. But that’s the thing: trying at all is trying too hard. I granted them an indulgence on account of the fine, fine music and gave them absolution for their lapses in taste. I was in a generous mood.

  I slouched around quietly, checking everything out, trying to stay away from situations that might erupt into a sudden ridicule/torture session and blow my cover.

  Despite the civilizing influence of the unusually numerous drama people, there were a lot of these situations brewing. I mean: clumps of normal guys horsing around and asking each other “Who you lookin’ at, homo?” And gaggles of normal girls, any one of whom might suddenly decide it would be fun to put her arm around you and pretend to be hitting on you to see what you would do, with everyone laughing at you the whole time.

  That is one of life’s most trying and irritating situations. Sam Hellerman and I have given it a catchy name: the Make-out/Fake-out. I don’t know if it has a real name. The object of the game isn’t actually to make you think they’re sincere and go for it, which no one would be stupid enough to think, but just to watch you squirm and see how you’ll try to get out of it. You can’t win. You might as well just bite down and break open the cyanide capsule concealed in your false front tooth. If you’ve got one of those. It was fresh in my mind because there had just recently been a Make-out/Fake-out attempt on my dignity during PE class, and I could still feel the pain of having no cyanide capsule to make it all go away.

  The danger zones were easy to avoid, though. Steer clear of the schools of sharks and flesh-eating piranhas. Avoid the sirens. Drift toward the playful mod dolphins, who are so busy being entranced with their own wonderfulness that they don’t even notice your ungainly boat paddling in their midst. “It’s quite a lagoon you’ve got here,” I said, to no one in particular.

  Eventually, I drifted into a little basement room down some stairs at the end of the hall. This was presumably the TV room Sam Hellerman had mentioned. It was quite dark, and almost totally empty. There was a turned-off TV and a sofa, and on the sofa was this girl. She was staring intently at a candle that was burning on top of the TV and holding the smoking stub of a joint in a mall head-shop roach clip. You know, with feathers dangling from it, and I think maybe a pentagram or an ankh.

  She didn’t have a full-on mod costume, but I could tell she was one of the funky CHS drama people because she had a Maximum R & B T-shirt underneath a crazy-looking denim and—what? Yarn?—yeah, it was a yarn ’n’ denim jacket that looked homemade. She had on this black soft cap that looked kind of military. And these little black glasses. I was pretty sure she was older than me, a junior maybe. The Who shirt was tiny and didn’t go down all the way and her belly looked really good, what I could see of it. I mean really good.

  She waved me over and said, “I’m trying to make the candle go out with the power of my mind.”

  I walked over, unsure of what to do. She said I should sit down and help her. Concentrate, she said. I sat down next to her and stared at the candle. It didn’t go out.

  “You call yourself a hypnotizer?” she said after a while.

  No. I’m quite certain I had never said I was a hypnotizer. I hadn’t said anything. Part of me was off in the corner thinking, Maybe these are my people? Eccentric and funny and weird with good taste in music and off-the-wall hobbies, I mean. Another part of me realized that I was so self-conscious that I wasn’t exactly radiating Good Eccentric around here. But the biggest part of me was just staring at her bare stomach, which was, like, the nicest thing I’d ever seen in person, though I was trying to do it kind of sideways, hoping she wouldn’t notice. She didn’t seem like she was in much of a noticing mood, to be honest.

  She asked me if I wanted the roach. Now, the thing I said sounds really stupid and goofy, but I know from having watched people smoke pot all my life that it’s the thing you say. I still felt like a big ass saying it, though.

  “I’m cool.”

  Never in the history of the world had there been a less accurate statement.

  She shrugged and popped the roach in her mouth—reminding me, weirdly, of my mom—and grabbed my half-filled cup and drank it all in one long swallow.

  “Fiona,” she said after a lengthy grimace. “I’m in drama. I’m an actor and I also do costume. What’s your story?”

  Wow, a female actor. Just like Mrs. Teneb. I guess she could tell my jumpy brain was mulling over the concept of the female actor, because she quickly added, in a slightly lecturing tone: “We don’t say actress. Everyone is an actor. It’s unisex.” Then she said, carefully, “Actress is diminutive.”

  Well, okay. Not that I didn’t love how she said “diminutive”: with great care and delicacy and solemnity and attention to detail, the way you lean two cards together on a new level of a card house.

  But I still had to tell her my “story.” What was my story, exactly?

  “I’m in a band,” I said.

  “Yeah? What are you called and where are your gigs?”

  “The Stoned Marmadukes,” I said, making a mental note to make sure to tell Sam Hellerman the new band name so our stories would be straight. Me on guitar, him on bass and paleontology, first album Right Lane Must Exit. Then, out loud and rather lamely, I said, “We’re working on some, um, on some…” Gigs. As if.

  But Fio
na had already lost interest in that topic. She was scanning the room to see if there might be anyone else around to liven up the conversation. There was no one, so she started talking, in a distant way, about something or other. But I was getting the feeling that she had started to realize what she was dealing with here and had reached the conclusion that my fitness as a participant in any future spooky telekinesis experiments was in serious question.

  I sat there while she spoke, trying not to make it too obvious how intently I was examining her, which I totally just couldn’t help doing. She had some really tight jeans on, and black boots. Shiny boots of leather. She mentioned how she was making all the costumes for some play she was in. She always ended up doing the costumes, she said, because she was such a good seamstress.

  “You mean seamster,” I said.

  She paused, and said, as though talking to herself, “Mmm, that’s interesting.” Then she stared at me. The candlelight made her glasses glisten when she moved her head. At times they looked almost like they were made of liquid. I suddenly noticed that she looked a little sad, or so it seemed to me, but maybe she was just stoned and sleepy. Maybe I was just imagining the sadness for my own purposes—I always think girls are prettier when they’re crying.

  Now, Hillmont is known as Hellmont, or less commonly as Swillmont. And most of the people at the party went to CHS, so I’d have guessed they probably lived either in Clearview or Clearview Heights. Queerview. So that’s why Fiona said, “How are things in Hellmont?” And that’s why I said, in response, “Diabolical.”