Playing With Matches

  “Leon…”

  “Well, enough work. It’s almost time for lunch. And it’s taco day!”

  “Leon, c’mon.”

  Mr. Hamburg was not what you’d call an easy grader, so I figured I should stop trying to be silly. “Okay, how do you want to do this?”

  “Maybe we could meet at the public library sometime and do our research there.”

  I thought back to all the times I had told my mother I was studying at the library when in reality I’d been studying at the library. I shook my head.

  “Well, how about here, after school?” Melody’s voice took on a self-pitying tinge, as if it wasn’t the work I was trying to avoid.

  “Okay. Tomorrow, though. I have detention today.”

  Melody’s hairless eyebrows rose. “Detention?” She spoke the word like most people would say “fifty-year prison sentence.” “What did you do?”

  “I led a walkout as a protest against human rights violations in the Congo.”

  Her eyes got so wide I had the irrational fear that her skin would tear. “Really?”

  “No.”

  The lunch bell rang.

  “And it’s chow time!” I jumped up. “Do you eat lunch this hour?”

  “Yes.”

  I hopped from foot to foot. “Well, move it, then! It’s Mexican day!”

  “Okay!” I should have realized that the excitement in her voice wasn’t due to the school’s greasy tacos. She followed me to the door.

  “So this snake walks into a bar…,” I began.

  “Walks?”

  “Slithers into a bar. And tells the bartender he wants a beer. And the bartender says, ‘No way.’ And the snake asks why not. And the bartender says…”

  We passed through the security device and into the hall. Two guys bolted past us toward the lunchroom. One of them looked right at Melody. I couldn’t hear what he said to his friend, but they both laughed.

  Melody’s face wasn’t very expressive; when you don’t really have cheeks or eyebrows, it’s not easy to express anything. But the hurt in her eyes was unmistakable.

  “I eat in the library, Leon.” The library door didn’t have time to swing shut before she was back through it.

  I stood alone in the hall.

  “And the bartender says, ‘Because you can’t hold your liquor!’”

  Timing is everything in comedy.

  In the book 1984, room 101 was the government torture room. At Zummer High, it was the detention room. I was probably the only one who’d ever made that connection.

  Detention began at three-forty-five sharp. I could have pleaded conflict and rescheduled, but it was best to get it over with. I waited until three-forty in case Amy wanted to thank me for my parking lot heroics, then slouched my way to my one-hour prison sentence.

  Room 101 was the size of a standard classroom, though utterly void of decoration. Only one poster graced the walls. It had no images, simply the words I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR MY ACTIONS. Where the hell did the school find stupid crap like that?

  There were a dozen or so students serving time that day. Kids who’d smarted off to teachers, were tardy one too many times, or rubbed Dr. Bailey the wrong way. Mr. Knight, the shop teacher, had guard duty. It was hard to ignore the fact that he was online, intently looking at some sort of sports-fandom Web site.

  I found a seat and fished a book from my backpack, preparing to wait out the next thirty-six hundred seconds.

  “Leon!” whispered the guy next to me. “Hey, Leon!”

  I turned toward him, then jumped away. I had approached Dan Dzyan without a crucifix or holy water.

  Dan was short and chunky, with longish greasy hair and acne. In the normal scope of things, he’d have been a bigger nerd than me. However, Dan did not fit into the normal scope of anything. He was insane.

  He worshipped the devil. Some members of the lunatic fringe claimed to be Satanists, for shock value, but I think Dan actually sacrificed poultry. He’d steal frog guts from the biology lab. Mr. Hamburg refused to discuss war atrocities when Dan was in class; the constant giggling was distracting. An attempt to allow prayer in Zummer High was scrapped when it was learned what Dan intended to pray to.

  “Leon, check this out.” Dan pulled something from his folder and looked behind him, as if fearing he would be seen. I snuck a peek at whatever dirty picture he wanted to show me, and nearly puked for the second time that day.

  “Christ, Dan,” I whispered, turning away. “Where the hell did you get that?”

  “Internet. See, this guy had a brain tumor, but he never got it checked out, so his skull rotted away. Then these maggots—”

  “Hey!” barked Mr. Knight. “Shut up!”

  I propped my head on my fist, too irritated even to read. Amy was the one who should be here. Hell, she should have gotten a week of in-school suspension, but I had taken the fall for her. And was she grateful? Did she say “Thanks, Leon”? Did she say “I appreciate it, Leon”? Did she say “Would you mind helping me out of this restrictive bra, Leon?”

  “Hey, Leon!” whispered Dan loudly. “Leon, look at this!”

  Apparently, detention wasn’t punishment enough.

  “Very nice, Dan,” I whispered. “I’ve never seen a more hilarious decapitation.”

  “He was running from the cops and tried to clear that fence with the spikes on it.”

  I rubbed my forehead. Here I sat, listening to this junior Hannibal Lecter, while Amy was off with her cool friends somewhere. It probably never occurred to her that I liked her, that it would mean a lot to me if she’d just say hi once in a while.

  I bet Dan never had these problems. He didn’t understand human emotions. He just sat there happily smiling, looking at a picture of some guy with a drill bit through his face.

  In a way I envied Dan. I feared him even more, of course, but at least he was never lonely.

  7

  THE ELECTRONIC BABYSITTER

  Melody and I met at our lockers after school the next day. She was less shy than usual and didn’t give me a chance to pretend I’d forgotten about our study plans.

  She carried several books. “I went to the library yesterday, Leon. Since you wouldn’t pick a topic, I thought maybe we could do television and politics.”

  “I call television.”

  “Leon, could you be serious for just one minute?”

  “Possibly not.”

  Melody frowned. I might not have realized that earlier in the week, but I was beginning to clue in to the subtleties of what remained of her features.

  “I want to go to the Missouri Scholars Academy this summer.” That was a summer school for the upward bound.

  “I’m sorry, Melody,” I said in a sarcastic, pitying tone. “I didn’t know.” I touched her arm. Her shirt didn’t have sleeves and the feel of her bare skin startled me. It was so smooth compared with the roughness of the burned flesh on her face.

  “I have to keep my grades up. If we’re going to do this together, I need you to help.”

  Did girls take secret classes on the art of the guilt trip?

  “Fine. But not now; I’m fried. Hey, you got a car?”

  She thought for a moment. “I can borrow one. Should we meet at the library?”

  “We should, but we won’t. Wanna come to my house around five? We can get started on this thing, and that’ll still give me time to catch the five-thirty movie.”

  I scouted around my bed for dirty underwear. Thanks to the recent purge, my room was pretty clean, but I had to check for stray pubes and porno. I doubted that Melody would even see my room, at any rate.

  Why had I invited Melody over? Well, she was right: we did need to get to work. This way I’d be close to my TV and junk food.

  I didn’t want to admit that there might have been another reason. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be seen with her in public. She was certainly nice, but when a guy and a girl were hanging out together, even if they were just studying, people tended to assume they were bo
yfriend and girlfriend. And I had a hard enough time getting dates without people thinking I had to stoop to asking out someone like Melody. She was sweet, but I couldn’t risk inspiring any rumors about us.

  Mom and Dad didn’t usually get home from their jobs in St. Louis until around six-thirty. Hopefully Melody would be gone by then.

  At exactly 5:00 an enormous thirty-year-old pickup with a cracked windshield parked in front of my house. So much for Evil Dead II, which came on at 5:30.

  I cleared some junk off the kitchen table. When the doorbell rang, I shouted, “Come in!” but nobody did. After a few seconds the bell rang again.

  Annoyed, I answered it. Melody was standing on the porch, her skinny arms full of books, papers, and binders. She was trying to ring the bell again with one finger free. I grabbed some of the stack from her.

  “Did you find the place okay?”

  “Yeah.” As she was stacking some of the books on the table, she dropped one. When she bent to pick it up, I could no longer see her head. A strange transformation took place.

  Once Melody’s face was not visible, I noticed her body for the first time. More specifically, her butt. Nice, round little cheeks, not the flabby ass of the overweight, nor the bony rear of a skinny girl. Melody, shockingly, had a perfect butt. As her shirt rode up her back, I stretched in an attempt to get a better view.

  Melody stood up and suddenly I was ashamed of the way I’d been checking her out. That withered prune of a face, that mutilated nose, those tiny holes where her ears had been…What was I doing admiring her rear?

  We sat at the table. “Looks like you’ve already been working,” I said, glancing over her notes.

  “A little. I’ve outlined the way we could go about this, if it’s okay with you.”

  Feeling guilty about not doing my share, I read through Melody’s outline. We were supposed to research how television had influenced politics from the 1950s until the present day. In two weeks we were to present our findings to the class.

  We got down to business, reading through books, making notes, and being disgusted by some of the political tactics. One congressional hopeful had run ads accusing his opponent of being a notorious Homo sapiens who was married to a practicing thespian. He won by a landslide.

  After about an hour of this, I noticed that Melody was talking a lot more than I’d ever heard her at school. Once we’d gotten to work, she constantly cracked corny jokes.

  “Knock knock.”

  “Who’s there?” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a knock-knock joke.

  “Interrupting cow.”

  “Interrupting cow wh—”

  “Moo!” Melody cracked up at her own joke. I smiled, enjoying her tinkling laughter.

  My turn. “What has two legs and bleeds profusely?”

  Melody frowned. “What?”

  “Half a cat.”

  Whenever I got on a joke-telling kick, Jimmy or Johnny or especially Samantha would tell me to shut up. Melody might have just been being polite, but she always laughed.

  We’d been working for about an hour and a half, and that was enough for me. “Study break, Melody. See what’s on the tube.” I got up to look for some snacks. Melody continued to take notes for a few minutes, then turned on the TV.

  “Hey, Leon, are these your Monty Python DVDs?”

  Yikes. Nothing branded a guy a geek more than being a fan of that British sketch-comedy show. Every engineer, scientist, and computer programmer in the world could recite entire Python episodes from memory. There’s a reason junk e-mail is called spam.

  “Uh, I haven’t watched them for a while.”

  Melody was rooting through the video collection under the TV. Her butt was sticking up and I caught myself looking again. It was like looking at those swimsuit catalogs I’d steal from the mail before my mom saw them: not very dignified, but no one had to know.

  “And you have Blackadder!” continued Melody. “And Red Dwarf! Where did you find that?”

  I was surprised she recognized the last obscure show. “On eBay.”

  “I tried that once, but it wouldn’t play on an American machine. Ooh! Kids in the Hall! Can we watch this?”

  Though our couch was big enough for both of us, Melody sat in my dad’s easy chair. I was relieved; things would have been a little close otherwise. Grabbing a couple of sodas and some not-too-stale chips, I joined her in the living room. She pressed Play and we began watching the Canadian answer to Saturday Night Live.

  “I used to watch this all the time with my brother,” said Melody. She took a bite of a chip, coughed, and politely laid the other half on a napkin.

  “Lucky. I have to watch these alone. My friend Johnny says I have bad taste.”

  “Isn’t he the one who mooned the Charleston basketball team last year? And he says you have bad taste?”

  She smiled. Now, when a guy says a girl has a nice smile, he usually means You have amazing breasts. Melody, despite her disfigured lips, really did have a nice smile. Then again, maybe I was just getting used to her. I’d stopped thinking of her as Melody the freak. Now she was just Melody.

  We began talking about movies and other things we liked. We had a lot of obscure favorites in common. Normally I never talked about my favorite films, not even around my friends. None of them shared my enthusiasm for science fiction movies. Melody, however, was really into the genre. For the first time, I could talk to someone about Stargate and The X-Files without getting that pitying look.

  “I watch a lot of TV,” Melody admitted. Her casual tone began to fade. “Not like I have much else to do.”

  I chose to ignore the deeper meaning of that statement. I really did not feel like talking about how she didn’t have any friends or whatever she was going to say. That wasn’t part of the assignment. I always felt uncomfortable when people unloaded on me; their problems were always bigger than mine and I never knew how to respond.

  “I hear you. St. Christopher is kind of one huge wasteland in that department. No clubs, no museums, no beaches, no parks. Just a lot of car dealerships,” I said, trying to change the subject.

  “Well, it’s not just—”

  Mercifully the phone rang before she could start a deep discussion. I took it in another room.

  “Hi, Leon.” It was my mom.

  “Hey.”

  “Listen, your dad has to work late again. I’ll be home soon. Would you like me to grab a pizza?”

  “Sure. Maybe two; I have a friend over.”

  I could hear Mom gritting her teeth over the phone. “It’s not Johnny, is it?”

  “This again? I told you, there was no toilet paper and he didn’t know what else to do. But no, her name’s Melody.”

  There was a pause. “You’re there with a girl?”

  Instantly, I realized my tactical blunder. Mom was torn between her joy that I had a girl over and her fear of my having a girl over.

  “She’s just a friend, Mom.”

  “I’ll be home soon. Very soon.”

  I returned to find Melody cleaning up the crumbs I’d left on the coffee table.

  “You in the mood for pizza?”

  She smiled again, and for a moment she was almost as normal as Samantha or Johnny. Well, as normal as Samantha.

  “Sure. Domino’s is having their two-for-one special tonight.”

  “Nah, my mom’s bringing some home.”

  Melody shot to her feet with such violence that the scarf on her head slipped a bit. She seemed to be completely bald.

  “I have to go, Leon.” She hurriedly began gathering her books and notes.

  “Already? Look!” I pointed to the TV. “Here’s the sketch where the guys have the beer-gut contest.”

  Melody was heading for the door, trailing papers and books.

  “Slow down, Melody! Here, I’ll give you a hand.” Jesus, I know no one likes hanging out with someone’s mom, but damn! What happened to “We have to get to work, Leon”?

  Melody calmed
down a bit and let me help her with her things.

  “I don’t mean to rush off like this.”

  “Well, we’ve still got plenty of time to finish the report. We’ll rent a movie next time.”

  Melody smiled, but this time her grin upset me. She hadn’t misinterpreted my friendly invitation, had she? Asking a girl over to see a movie…Maybe she thought I was trying to get her here alone again. I was sure no one had ever asked her out before, and it was possible she thought I wanted a date.

  “And we’ll invite my buddy Rob,” I quickly added.

  Melody’s smile didn’t waver as she climbed into her truck. “I’d like that, Leon.”

  I watched as she drove off. I hoped she really would join us on movie night sometime. With her vote, we might get to watch something besides the T and A flicks the twins always wanted.

  Mom arrived fifteen minutes later with two large pepperoni pizzas. She made a lot of obvious noise, dropping her keys, fake coughing when she opened the door, just in case I needed time to get my hand off something delicate. She was annoyed when I said Melody had left, and I didn’t think it had anything to do with leftover pizza.

  8

  SIMON SAYS “STAND UP”

  The next day was Friday. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Melody. Well, I didn’t try to talk to her. I did, unexpectedly, talk to Amy.

  I noticed her as I was leaving school for that afternoon. Rob had track practice, so I was alone when I saw her walking alone down the fine arts hall. It always amazed me that even here at Zummer High, she wasn’t followed by flocks of photographers and autograph-seeking fans. I wasn’t exaggerating either. They always say celebrities aren’t nearly as attractive in real life. To me, Amy was as pretty as anyone on TV, even without professional makeup and lighting.

  I hitched up my backpack and prepared to walk right on by. Play it cool. So what if she never thanked you for saving her in the parking lot? Just keep moving.

  I suavely ignored Amy by looking directly at her and grinning like a monkey in agony. To my surprise she walked over to me.

  “I never thanked you the other day,” she said with a smile. And it wasn’t a fast food–employee type of smile either; it was real! Her eyes and nose crinkled in an adorable way, and for the first time since elementary school, she looked like she wasn’t anxious for me to leave.