over.
He took two more steps.
"You can show me from here", he advised her. He was still, oh maybe six feet away. I was behind him, just getting up, and wondering if I should beat it already. Dana would probably have given me a look to just that effect if she wasn't so totally smitten. She had completely forgotten I ever existed.
"Uh-uh", she told him and there was that smile coming out of her face for maybe the first time in years.
"Oh all right", he muttered, and walked up beside her. As soon as he did, she grabbed both his hands with her own and she kissed him, full on the lips with her eyes shut tight and gripping his fingers so tightly he had no chance to escape.
That's when I ran. I was just following orders and I didn't look back. I didn't even want to know, not then, not later, not ever, and as it turned out, I never did. The trick worked. She was right. She got him and kissed him and that was all that it took. I was free.
After that there was only Nazi boy, Cootie girl and me left unpaired. Turned out Cootie girl liked me, but I couldn't do it, so I just let Nazi boy win. I didn't care. None of those people would ever be my friends, never again. They say that when one door is closed, another door opens. I don't know what they are talking about. All those doors closed, and when that last one slammed shut I was glad.
Awards
By the time I was fourteen I was pretty good at being alone. God knows I'd had a lot of practice, but I was still somehow a magnet for all things undesirable. I had accumulated a whole host which clung to me like various rusty odds and ends. I had nicknames which I won't repeat here. I had legends spread about me, ranging from the time my own cat bit my ear half off, to the rumor of what I'd done with cootie girl and where. Everybody knew these stories and whispered them in the hallways as I passed, or so I imagined. I was also well on my way to being pretty much insane. What else can you call it when you wander around in a fog of mostly imaginary miseries?
Unfortunately, enough of those were not so intangible. I had continued my pattern of attracting exactly one and only one friend, each of whom belonged to families which strangely moved out of the state within a year of their child befriending me.
There had been Hakim Marsala, a miniature virtuoso celloist I met in the seventh grade. I got to know him in music class and I think we were friends because we were the only boys smaller than the smallest girl, and because we were always the last to pack up our instruments and get them out of the room. Hakim's cello was approximately twice his height and weight and it was I have to admit pretty funny to watch him struggle with the thing. His father had come up with a system to hook the case up with wheels but the straps on which the wheels were attached were elastic, like suspenders, and it was impossible to get their configuration right, so he ended up dragging it along on one wheel at a time while the other wheels occasionally whacked the floor or squealed like broken shopping carts. One day the whole apparatus collapsed on top of him while he was trying to maneuver it down the stairs and he and the cello fell in a clump right on top of Mrs. Angeline. They ended up mouth to mouth on the landing, with his bow poking out of her skirt. Most unseemly.
Hakim was also a chatterbox in private and it was my great privilege to get to listen to the history of his illustrious family while riding the bus every day. Most of his ancestors had done something or other and he was under a great deal or pressure to "amount", as he put it. Each generation of Marsalas had outdone the previous one, and seeing as his father had been his country's Ambassador to Somewhere it was hard to see how he was going to do it. The poor guy worried an awful lot.
After Hakim relocated, I met up with Danny Wheat, another small fry. By this point I had managed to reach nearly eighty pounds and had also become a bookworm. This was a fantastic combination guaranteed to make you really popular in a school of mostly big fat idiots. Danny was a smart kid, and a funny one too. Where I tried to hide and be quiet, he was always drawing attention to himself, and by extension, to me. Danny was the first to pipe up about the quality of the lunch in the cafeteria. He was the loudest to snort in class whenever a teacher said something ridiculous. He just couldn't help himself and was at his worst in those classes where he knew more than the teacher did. He would raise his hand and wave it wildly until he was finally called on and he'd say,
"Actually, that isn't quite right",
and then proceed to revise the lecture accordingly until the teacher made him shut up. He knew more about history, politics, other cultures, religions, science and literature than anybody else, it seemed. The one thing he didn't know much about was sports, and Mr. Stones, the gym teacher, never let him forget it.
"I've heard about you", he informed Danny menacingly in front of everybody. "You're the kid who always knows better. Am I right? Am I right? Am I right?"
He'd get in front of Danny's face and splutter and spit like a sergeant in the army. Stones was a flat-topped, boulder-shaped lump of a man with bad breath and a worse mentality. He had a system of counting where everything was measured in laps around the gym in winter, or around the track the rest of the year. If you forgot your special socks, two laps. If you forgot your special shorts, four laps. If you spoke when you were not being spoken to, ten laps. He had most of the kids running around in circles most of the time, but especially Danny and me. He called us "The Wheat Twins", and thought it was very funny. It was a joke on the crackers called Wheat Thins, because we were both skinny, and then there were two of us, so the Thins became Twins. I gave him points for trying to be witty, but I hated that man. He singled us out for extra punishment, I'm sure of it. Neither of us was able to perform to his standards. We couldn't climb the rope to the ceiling. We couldn't vault over the horse. We couldn't hit any target with any ball.
"Wheat Twins!” he'd yell and we'd have to come running "on the double" or else he'd "let us have it". Naturally, everybody else in the school picked up on the title pretty soon, and it was "wheat twins" wherever I went. One particular protégé of Mr. Stones was a very mean and very large boy named Rick Fripperone. I used to call him Rick "Frickin" Fripperone because every other word out of his mouth was the F word. In my mind I still see him as a sort of half-grown clone of Mr. Stones, with that same rock filled brain and that same wicked sneer. Fripperone would follow me around issuing taunts and challenges he knew I had no hope of matching.
"Hey, Frickin Kruze Control", he'd catch up to me, "Bet you can't frickin climb that frickin tree", and he'd point to the giant maple beside the gymnasium. Of course I couldn't climb the darn tree. There were no branches until at least eight feet off the ground. I'd say,
"Of course I can't climb that tree. There's no branches until at least eight feet off the ground."
"I can frickin climb it", he'd say, "What? You don't believe me? You calling me a liar?"
I could only sigh. This became a daily ritual for me. Fripperone would corner me somewhere and work the conversation into a situation where I was obviously calling him a liar and questioning his integrity, which required him to do some physical damage to either me or something in my possession. He especially enjoyed destroying my homework and school projects, kicking me, pushing me to the ground, or even pressing my hand so hard against a wall he broke two of my fingers. There seemed to be no escape from this reign of terror, and it felt like everywhere I turned, there he was. The bastard must have gone to bully school and aced his studies there because I swear, he was a classic.
Naturally, Fripperone was rarely ever by himself. As a textbook bully, he had to have his little gang of toadies, which included four fat boneheads even duller and pettier than he was. The
y even had their appropriate ranks and stationed themselves around him accordingly. It was a cast right out of your favorite television show. He even had tryouts, walk-ons who didn't meet expectations and were quickly cut out of the group.
The right-hand man was taller and darker, of course. This was an Irish boy known only as Jockstrap. The name actually referred to his odor and not his parts. Jockstrap's favorite maneuver was the fake push followed by the real push, whereby he'd pretend to knock you over, like a quarterback's pump fake, draw back slightly, and then actually push you down. If you winced, you lost. If you didn't, down you went in any case.
Number two was the roundest boy, a yellow-haired tubby named King who had a vicious black dog of the same name. King was famous for his laugh, which was loud and wet and hard to stop. Any little comment set him off as long as it was made by his boss. Fripperone was guaranteed a positive reception which only encouraged him to repeat the most ignorant things, like "your momma's got chicken wings", a phrase which nearly caused King to choke on his own spit every time.
Three and four were brothers, Curly and Rags. Seriously. They had the same dad, a Filipino mechanic named Manny, and different moms. Curly was dark brown skinned and nearly bald (you get the joke) and Rags wore heavy flannel shirts unbuttoned all year round, with a torn up t-shirt underneath the flashy fake gold chain around his neck. Both of them were strong