Space Station Seventh Grade

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  Then she snored.

  Richie looked at me and I looked at Richie, and it was like our eyes said to each other: We ain’t getting paid.

  Richie said, “Wanna steal the diamond?” He was all excited. Then he remembered. “Oh yeah, it’s just a fake.”

  So we just sort of left in a daze. When we passed the stupid wide-eyed animal on the coatrack, I gave it a smack in the face. We were a couple blocks away before I could finally admit it to Richie. “You were right,” I told him, “it’s a fox.”

  Next day me and Cootyhead went to my father’s for our monthly weekend. One thing for sure: when we go there I don’t have to worry about stepfathers or deaf old ladies trying to starve me. My father loves to eat, and he lets us make pigs of ourselves.

  It starts right at the train station, where he meets us. We spot him right away by his white shoes; he started wearing them when he moved away. We go over. Cootyhead runs. I walk. (Timmy’s not there. He’s Ham’s.) Then all this hugging with Mary and handshaking—well, now it’s hand-slapping—with me. Then he puts Cootyhead down and spreads out his arms and says so loud you get embarrassed: “It’s all yours, kids! What’ll it be?”

  He means we can have anything we want to eat in the whole station. And we aren’t limited to one thing either. We go a little crazy. We head off in different directions to the places we want to start at. Like me to the pizza and Cootyhead to the water ice. We get there and start yelling across the station for my father to come pay for what we got.

  I walk out of there feeling like there’s a hump in my stomach. Ice cream, hot dogs, candy, sodas, soft pretzels—anything I want. And every time—it never fails—by the time we get to my father’s place one of us has to vomit.

  My sister was the vomiter this time. After an hour or so I was ready for food again. In my father’s refrigerator there’s always a couple good things and a couple weird things. I love looking into it. It’s not like at home. (“What are you looking for? You just looked in there two minutes ago. Did you think something appeared in there in the last two minutes? Shut the door.”)

  “What’s that?” I asked. I always ask now. One time I chomped into something I thought was a cherry turnover and it turned out to be full of mashed chicken livers.

  My father took it out and held it in front of me. He pulled it away when I went to touch it. “Ten dollars and ninety-five cents a pound,” he goes. My father does that a lot, tells you the price of a thing instead of the thing. He was looking at it like grandparents look at babies.

  I didn’t even know if it was meat or fruit or what. It was sort of shiny and wet and in thin slices and orange-pink. Somewhere in color between a basketball and Cootyhead’s face when she gets mad.

  I said, “What is it?”

  “Lox,” he said.

  “What’s that?” I said. Crazy name.

  “Fish.”

  “Fish? I never heard of it.”

  “It’s smoked.”

  That sounded strange. “Smoked? What do you mean?”

  “They build a fire under it and let the smoke flavor it.”

  “Who would want to do that?” I asked him.

  This thin little grin came over his face. His eyelids lowered. He put his hand over the fish like he was healing it. “Jews,” he said.

  Ah, well, that explained it. Sort of, anyway. See, my father, since he moved out, wants to become a Jew. “Bet he has a Jewish girlfriend,” was the first thing my sister said. I don’t think so. I think it started with the delicatessens. Delicatessens are sort of Jewish grocery store-restaurants. They’re famous for sandwiches. Well, when my father went to live in the city, he found it was crawling with delicatessens. And there’s one way my father is just like a kid: he can eat all day. “Found a new deli,” he’s always saying happily.

  So I guess my father figured if the Jews could come up with delicatessens, they must have a lot of other good stuff going for them too. So he decided he wants to be one.

  But I guess it’s not so easy. As far as the Jews are concerned, my father says, everybody who’s not a Jew is a Gentile. Everybody. Whether you want to be or not. Me and an African pygmy and an Eskimo—we’re all the same to a Jew: we’re Gentiles. If there are any Martians out there, they might not know it, but as far as the Jews are concerned, they’re Gentiles too.

  So you see, it’s almost impossible to become a Jew. If you weren’t born one, you can practically forget it. You can’t sneak in either, because the Jews can spot a Gentile a mile off. Funny thing, though, if you’re a Gentile and a Jew happens to be standing right next to you, you probably wouldn’t even know it. To look at them, they seem just like us. But I don’t know… when you hear about some of the weird stuff they do.… Like, they eat fishballs. In a soup! And they wear these little beanies in church—which they go to on Saturday. I also heard they’re scared to death of pigs; they think pig meat’s poison to them. (Well, personally, I don’t know about that. Maybe it’s true about the adults, but there’s a Jewish kid in my math class, Marty Renberg, and he eats in the dining hall with the rest of us, and once I saw him eating a BLT and he didn’t keel over.)

  Anyway, the main thing about Jews is “life,” according to my father. He says they used to throw fire and apples into the air. And they dance in a circle and smash glasses with their feet when they get married. There’s something he says almost every time he’s sitting in front of a mile-high corn beef sandwich with Russian dressing. He says it real slow and serious: “The—Jew—knows—how—to—live.” And then he sinks his teeth into the sandwich, and the Russian dressing oozes out and runs a little down his chin.

  When I think about what would happen if my father ever manages to become a Jew, I wonder mainly about two things:

  1. Would that make me Jewish too?

  2. What about Christmas?

  At first I used to think the Jews had it really bad because they don’t have Christmas. But then I heard they came up with their own holiday about the same time. It’s called Hanukkah. There’s no tree or trains, but they do get the best part: presents. One present a day for eight days. Now, that may not sound so hot, but I talked to Marty Renberg and he says maybe you only get eight, and maybe they come at you slow, but every one of them is a winner.

  Later that night we all walked to a deli. My father had to get a bagel to make a sandwich with his lox. Mary asked him if he was a Jew yet.

  “ ’Fraid not, Peanut,” he said. “They won’t let me in.” He was sad.

  We went into the delicatessen and got the bagel, but as usual my father wanted to hang around the meat and salad counter awhile. He was pointing out the different stuff to us, pronouncing their names in Jewish. You could tell that made him feel a little better. I started thinking about my father’s teeth chomping into those corn beef sandwiches, and how bad he wanted to dance and smash glasses. Then I remembered that the Jews go to church on Saturday, and this was a Saturday, and we were in a delicatessen, and my father was almost even kneeling down in front of the counter like it was an altar, and he was saying Jewish words and I thought to myself all happy: Hey, Dad—you made it! You are one! You’re in!

  THE END

  I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. SUMMER’S ALMOST OVER.

  Summer has a funnel shape. It seems real wide at first, and deep. Slow. Like it will last forever. You just float on top of it.

  But all the time it’s getting smaller and smaller. And before you know it the summer days are getting sucked down faster and faster. You’re helpless. You can’t stop it. You’re like a bug in a toilet that was just flushed.

  One sure sign that summer is coming to an end is that I start liking the kids on the corner again. There’s these little kids that always play on the corner in the warm weather, and I’m sort of their hero. Like, they always stop me when I’m going by on my bike and give me paper and ask me to make them paper airplanes, which I’m an expert at. I also have to settle their little arguments and all.
br />   Early in the summer I don’t mind it much. Then it gets to be a drag. But then, I kind of start liking them all over again. I guess because I know that as long as they’re out there playing on the corner, summer isn’t over yet.

  Baseball: you can feel it dying. Every morning we meet at the field in the park: me, Richie, Calvin Lemaine, Peter Kim, and Dugan. All day we play. We can feel September closing in. We hit a little harder, run a little faster, stay a little longer. We try to squeeze out of the summer every base hit left in it. So far I have two hundred and forty-seven homeruns this year. (I keep track.) I’m shooting for last year’s record of two hundred and ninety-five.

  I get home and I kind of don’t want to wash. Because I know the day is coming when I’ll have to wait nine months to get this dirty again. When I oil my glove and put it away in the shoe box—that’s when baseball will be officially over.

  I ride my bike more now, when I’m not playing. I go farther and farther from home.

  I guess my biggest regret is that another summer is gone and I still didn’t learn to spit between my teeth like Dugan.

  SCHOOL

  THE FIRST WEEK OF SCHOOL IS OVER. I HATED IT. I’M NOT GOING back.

  I wish I was back in the sixth grade. I was important there. I’m nothing here. I’m a turd.

  They had us fooled for a little while, the teachers. “Welcome to all our new seventh-graders,” the principal said over the intercom.

  The woodshop teacher, Mister Slatter, gave us a little speech. He told us to relax and sit on the edge of the bench if we wanted. He smelled like sawdust. His eyebrows were golden from it. “You are not boys anymore,” he told us. “From now on you are on the road to adulthood. You left your childhood back in grade school. You can kiss it goodbye.” He saluted out the window. “You are in junior high school now. You are… young men.”

  Hah! I was a young man for about half an hour in woodshop on Wednesday. Then I had to go to the bathroom. The door didn’t say Young Men. It said Boys. As soon as I opened it a ninth-grader took a cigarette out of his mouth and said, “Watta you lookin’ at, faggot-face?” I walked out. For the rest of woodshop I was sawing wood and having to pee. The more I had to pee the faster I sawed. Young man, monkey dung.

  The teachers don’t run this place, neither does the principal. It’s the ninth-graders. You can tell a ninth-grader a lot of ways, like size and deep voice and all, but the main way you can tell them is their eyes. They don’t see you. It’s like they’re blind to the sight of seventh-graders. They’re always talking loud and laughing to each other and shoving each other, and their eyes are always off in the distance; always down the hallway somewhere like they’re looking for more ninth-graders, or girls or something. If you’re a seventh-grader, even standing right in front of them, you’re invisible. I saw a seventh-grader, a puny little kid even for seventh-grade, and he was standing in the hallway when a mob of ninth-graders came running up. They just went right over him. Never turned back. Like he was grass.

  I didn’t get run over yet. Mostly it’s just eyes, zooming up and down the hallways over your head, like you’re in a shooting gallery of eyes. Pray one of those eyes don’t hit you. It happened to Richie. He was going along being invisible with the rest of us when all of a sudden he got hit by a ninth-grader’s eye. We were in the bathroom. I was in one of the stalls, sitting down, but I could see out because there was a little round hole where the latch used to be.

  I could see Richie right across the way. He was standing at a urinal. He just got started when some ninth-graders came in. Well, right away they start saying stuff, like, “Hey, look, we got a dingle-dick in here!” And “Leteem alone. He’s tryin’ to find it!”

  I froze. I was thinking, Richie, you’re dead. All I could see was the back of him, all hunched over and looking down and not moving a muscle. I made a vow to use a stall even when I had to go standing up.

  Then some of the ninth-graders stepped up to the urinals. That made a problem, because now all the urinals were used up but there was still one ninth-grader that had to go. I stopped breathing.

  This one ninth-grader—the backs of his sneakers were slit down to the soles—went up to Richie and put his face about one millimeter from Richie’s ear. Richie didn’t even look up. Just hunched over. I think he was in a coma.

  The ninth-grader took his face away and just sort of stood there, next to Richie. Actually he even backed off a couple steps. Good, I thought. Then I saw it: this sparkling yellow stream going from the ninth-grader’s pants down to Richie’s right sneaker.

  It’s funny how you act sometimes. Like when me and Richie met outside the bathroom, nobody said a thing about what just happened. We just talked about geography class. We said everything we knew about the continents, plus Australia. But you still couldn’t help hearing the sneaker squooshing away every step down the hall.

  In grade school, if you had asked me what a classroom was like, I would have said “boring” or “hot” or maybe even “interesting.” Now, with all these ninth-graders in the hallways and bathrooms, I have a new word for a classroom: safe.

  HAIR

  I DON’T KNOW WHY, BUT I’M THINKING ABOUT HAIR ALL THE time these days. All I have to do is hear somebody say the word and I start laughing. The same thing is happening to Richie and a lot of other guys.

  At first I thought it was just me. It started the first time we had to get a shower after gym class. I guess I knew the time would happen sooner or later, but I still didn’t like the idea. I had a secret plan to just get dressed and put some water on my hair, but the gym teacher kept hanging around.

  It was like I didn’t have any control. My eyes kept looking at the teacher and my hands kept taking one thing after another off my body. I was getting nakeder and nakeder and nothing I could do about it.

  When the last thing came off I quick put the towel around me. I sort of hung around my locker, finding stuff to straighten out and all.

  Then the teacher hollered: “Six minutes!”

  I went over to the shower room. (Why can’t they have bathtubs?) Onto the tile. I took the towel off but I still had it in front of me. I folded it, with it still in front of me I looked around for a place to put it. There were no towel racks. I’m always getting yelled at for throwing towels on the bathroom floor at home. Now when I wanted a rack…

  “Five minutes!” the teacher called.

  I put the towel down. The whole universe was eyes. It’s like a million people are waiting hours just for me, and I finally come out onto a balcony and everybody is staring up because I don’t have any clothes on. My butt felt like the Hindenburg and there was this elephant trunk hanging down in front of me. I was afraid to look down at it. One of the frosted windows was open and I could see this shiny silver airplane against the clear blue sky. I wondered if they could see me.

  “Four minutes!”

  Into the shower. Steam. Splash. Tile. Skin.

  I took a peek down. I was surprised at how small it was. While I was looking down I bumped into somebody. Felt like a warm fish. Ugh.

  I went to one of the showers and stood under it. That’s all I did. I figured I’d get into soap some other time. The main thing was, I didn’t turn around. As long as my front was facing the wall I felt a little safer.

  I got out almost as soon as I went in. As I was leaving I noticed a funny thing: everybody else was facing the wall too—all backs and butts. I dried off in about one micro-second. I didn’t have to touch my back.

  Then something funnier started happening during the next couple weeks. Kids started turning around. Two or three new ones each shower. I sure didn’t want to be the first, but I didn’t want to be the last either, so one day I turned around too.

  Hair. That was the first thing I noticed. Joe Sorbito had pubic hair. Lots of it. All black like his head. He looked like my father. (I never saw my stepfather yet.)

  What’s funny is, Joe Sorbito is little. He’s one of the littlest guys in seventh grade. And he’s
not older than everybody else either. He just has hair. It’s a weird feeling being in the same shower with him, especially if it happens to be just the two of you. It’s like I thought he was like me but I found out he’s not. It makes you feel like a little kid again.

  I watched him drying off. It’s under his arms too. I wonder what it’s like. What does he know that I don’t know? Since last Wednesday I see Joe Sorbito in class and in the hallways; he still wears the same clothes, but he’s not the same Joe Sorbito I used to know.

  Richie shocked me one day. Out of the blue he goes: “McGinnis has hair.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “He got hair. Pubic hair.”

  Richie’s in a different gym class. We never talked about this before. “Down there?” I said.

  “No, on his feet, turdbrain.”

  “Arms too? Pits?”

  “Yep.” He looked proud.

  “Sorbito too,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I ain’t surprised,” Richie says.

  “You ain’t? Why not? He’s just a little dude.”

  “He’s Italian.”

  “So what?”

  “They get theirs faster. Them and black guys.”

  I was surprised he knew all this. I’m usually the one that knows things. I said, “Where’d you find out all this?”

  “My mother.”

  That was weird. I’m going to have to take a closer look at Richie’s mom.

  “So McGinnis is Italian, huh?” I said.

  “He ain’t black,” Richie said.

  “So I guess Calvin has it then, huh?” I said. Our friend Calvin Lemaine is black.

  “Guess so.”

  Then I brought up Peter Kim, who’s Korean.

  “Ever see a Korean with a beard?” Richie said. I couldn’t think of any. “They don’t get hair,” he said.

  “No?”

  “Nope. Nowhere. Just on the head.”

  I said, “Dugan?”