I didn’t really have to go, but I figured a stall was the best place to be. I went in one—one with a good latch—and closed it and sat down. I was shaking. My heart was pounding. I was sweating all over.
I heard the lavatory door creak open. Steps. Shoes outside my stall. Adult’s. I gave some good grunts, but the shoes didn’t move. A knock on the stall door, inches from my nose.
“Somebody in here,” I said.
“Open, please,” the voice said.
I reached forward and slid the latch over. The door swung open. It was the vice-principal.
PUNISHMENT
MY MOTHER LOOKED UP FROM THE SUSPENSION NOTE. “JASON, what’s gotten into you?”
I shrugged. “Nothin’.” I tried to look nonchalant and normal, but I don’t think I made it. It’s hard to look normal when you’re sitting in your living room at eleven-thirty on a school-day morning, and you’re not sick.
“Nothing?” she goes. “You were suspended for nothing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what is it that you did? What could you have possibly done to get suspended?”
“I don’t know. Nothin’. Stuff.”
She squinted at me. “Stuff?” She looked at the ceiling. “Stuff?” She looked at me. “What stuff?”
I was not going to tell her. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was laughing. That’s all.”
I thought my mother would get mad and yell. But she didn’t. She only looked surprised. And confused. “I don’t understand it,” she kept saying. “This isn’t like you, Jason. Ham’s not going to believe it.”
But Ham did believe it. When he came home and my mother showed him the note, all he said was, “So?”
Now my mother was double confused. “He’s suspended,” she said.
Ham’s lower lip jutted out. He nodded. “So I see.” Then he started up the stairs.
“Wait,” my mother said. “Isn’t this serious?”
Ham laid a hand on the banister. “Well, yes and no. It’s serious as far as the school is concerned. And maybe as far as you’re concerned. But from a cosmic point of view, this is just another teenager going mad.” He pointed. “Look at Jason.” They both looked at me in the corner reclining chair. “He’s not bothered. He’s got the cosmic point of view.”
My mother came back with a good one. “Well, where’s your cosmic point of view,” she asked him, “when you’re getting an ulcer over him taking your food out of the refrigerator?”
Ham just smiled and wagged his hand. “So? The food directly affects me. This doesn’t. I reserve the right to get angry when my food disappears.”
“But you’re not bothered about this. This is not important enough for you to be bothered about.”
Ham leaned on the banister with both hands, looked at me, looked at my mother. “Honey, to tell you the truth, after I’ve been thinking about this for a while and we’ve been talking about it, yes, it probably will start to bother me. In fact, I can almost guarantee it. It’s just that right now, right this minute, I’ve just walked into the house after teaching all day, and I’m told Jason’s been suspended from school, and I’m trying not to treat it like it’s the end of the world. I’m trying to enjoy my indifference while it lasts.”
Just then Cootyhead comes into the house, and right away she sees I’m in trouble. So she plops down onto the sofa and pretends to be interested in some magazine.
“Get her outta here!” I holler. “Get her outta here!”
Ham tells her, “Out, Mary. Out or upstairs.”
Cootyhead says what’s the matter, she’s just looking at a magazine.
“Mary.”
“But I have to find pictures of water for school.”
“Mary.”
She goes upstairs, but no door shuts.
“Mary. Door.”
The door shuts.
Mom says, “It’s not like him, Ham.”
Ham held up a finger. “Not like he was. But that’s not to say it’s not like he is.” You have to be a genius to follow what he’s saying sometimes. “Remember what happened recently.”
“What’s that?”
“His birthday. Even you were kidding him about becoming a teenager.”
“Jason is still Jason.”
Ham shut his eyes and wagged his head. “No, no, dear. Jason is not Jason. Not completely. Not anymore. Never again. What we see sitting there in that chair is but a remnant of the Jason we once knew. In fact the pronoun he is hardly suitable anymore. It is just an abandoned skin we see there. The shell of the cicada. Perfect in every detail. Even the eye sockets. But go over there, turn him over, go ahead”—(she didn’t)—“turn him over and you’ll see the crack between the shoulder blades. There, where the worm is struggling to get out. The thirteen-year-old does not change from a worm to a butterfly, you know. It changes from a butterfly to a worm.”
He’s saying all this without cracking a smile, like he always does. Real dramatic too. Arms moving around. Eyes going wide open, then scrunching down. Like he was in that amateur theater. “Or if you want to put it more geologically,” he goes, “what we have sitting over there is a fossil.”
My mother said, “You’re a big help,” and headed for the kitchen.
Ham reached out. “No, wait, honey. I’m only half kidding. Really. Don’t worry. I’ll go over to the school with him. I’ll talk to the vice-principal. But I’m just saying, a lot of it has to do with his age. That’s all.”
My mother glanced at me before turning to Ham. Her eyes were shining. “That’s easy for you to say.”
Ham came down. “Jason, go upstairs now. Okay?”
He meant into my room, but I just went up and hung around the top of the steps. I stuck my ear through the banister posts. I could just about hear them in the kitchen.
“Honey, people have always told us, right? ‘Wait’ll you have your first teenager, wait’ll you have your first teenager.’”
“Yes, I know. But I can’t believe you’re going to be so blasé about it when it’s Timmy’s turn.”
By that my mom meant that Timmy is his kid. His real kid.
“Honey, I can’t deny certain things. Blood is blood. I can’t—”
“I understand that.”
“No, listen to what I’m saying—”
“I do. I understand.”
“You’re not listening. Now listen. So. Maybe there is something there with—uh”—I couldn’t make out the next word—“that can’t be duplicated. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care.”
“I know that.”
“No, you don’t. I mean more than just care. I mean, you live in the same house with a couple of kids for, what, four years now, and you wrestle with them in their pajamas” (I don’t do that anymore) “well, they come to mean more to you than just a couple kids down the block. You know?”
“I know. I know.”
“But?”
“You didn’t exactly seem devastated about Jason hurting his eye at that football game. You seemed more interested in whether the school would pay for it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Honey, what do you want?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I would like for someday you to say you love my kids.”
“Who says I don’t?”
“You don’t say you do.”
“Hey, are you complaining about how I treat you, or the kids?”
“See? Always joking.”
“Honey, don’t trust my reactions. Not the first, flip ones anyway. You know me. I’m not obvious. I’m an actor—remember? Believe me, it bothered me when Jason got kicked in the eye. I wasn’t happy. Honest.”
“So… the suspension?”
“Look, you’re right. If Timmy gets suspended from school in seventh grade, I’ll probably be upset. Maybe more than I am now. But I’ll tell you one thing. If it does happen, I’m going to try my damnedest to remember one thing.”
“What’s th
at?”
“That he’s not just a teenager. He’s a junior high school teenager. I would never teach in junior high school. I’ve seen them. That’s why I teach in college. I’m telling you, they’re different creatures.”
“Shall we have him as a pet instead of a son, then? Make up a box in the cellar for him to sleep in?”
“May be. May be. I’m telling you, the Jason we knew is being pushed out of his skin. It is the time of the new monster. Even he doesn’t know what’s going on.”
Then this banshee screeching behind me: “Mommeee! He’s listening! He’s listening!”
I was in my room before I was told. Ham was right. I couldn’t understand all those words, but it sounded like he was saying stuff that I was already thinking about myself. Like something weird going on inside of me. It seemed like all during that week there were two me’s. The one me kept laughing and messing around with Ralphie Smitht and getting into trouble. That me just seemed to go off on its own. I couldn’t even keep track of it. And then every day I would catch up with it in the vice-principal’s office.
But the other me, that’s the one I was really paying attention to. And that other me was only interested in one thing: Who was the other Luke Skywalker?
I had to be cool. I couldn’t let on to the guys what happened. But I asked around and dropped hints and talked about Halloween and talked about Star Wars. Zero. Zip. I still couldn’t find out who it was. I only knew what I saw myself: he looked pretty tall. All the time Debbie Breen was on the stage in her pink PJ’s I kept wondering: Is he somewhere in here watching her too?
Next morning Ham went with me to school. It was embarrassing. I tried to stay ahead of him, but he kept calling, “Hey, wait up there, old boy.”
The vice-principal didn’t look too mad. He had my records there, and he said what a good student I always was back to the first grade, and never any discipline problem. He said the teachers were all surprised at my behavior. But he was sure I was just getting something out of my system.
Then he got up and said, “Be right with you,” and walked out. I figured that was going to be it. But in a minute he comes walking back with—guess who—the girl with the trombone. Oh shit, I thought.
The two of them just sort of stood there in the middle of the room. The vice-principal was smiling. Ham stood up. I stood up.
“Jason,” the vice-principal said, still smiling, “this is Marceline McAllister.”
I nodded. I think I grunted. Up close, I recognized her from being in the other academic section. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t nod back. She didn’t smile.
“Jason, I guess you know Marceline, don’t you?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Well, you recognize her.” He chuckled a little and glanced at Ham. “You’ve seen her before someplace, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
She was glaring straight at me. Down actually, since she was taller. Like a boxer in the middle of the ring before a fight.
“Don’t you have something to say to Marceline, Jason?”
What would I possibly have to say to her? “I do?” I said.
I looked around. All three were staring at me. Eyes and silence. Then it hit me. Oh shit.
“Jason.”
“Uh”—I gulped—“I’m sorry.”
“Jason, she’s not lying on the rug.”
I looked up, up, into those stone eyes. “I’m sorry.”
The stone face cracked. It spoke. “I hope so.” She turned and went.
“She’s an excellent musician,” the vice-principal told Ham. “A member of the district band.”
As soon as it was okay I got out of there. The last thing I heard was Ham behind me, saying to the vice-principal, “He’s a good kid. He really is.”
Was he acting?
PIMPLES
I NOTICED IT FOR THE FIRST TIME YESTERDAY MORNING. IN THE bathroom. I was taking a pee at the time and just sort of leaning over into the mirror—and there it was. I was so shocked I lost my balance, and I had to clean up the floor a little.
It was on my chin. A little bit right of center. It’s funny how I knew it was a pimple the instant I saw it. I mean, why didn’t it occur to me it could be a measle? Or cancer? Anything else. But no, I just knew it. Without even thinking. Teenage instinct, I guess.
It was ugly and red and smooth and gleaming and swollen and about the size of a small mountain. I touched the end of it with my fingertips. I almost got the shakes. It was like touching a roach.
I felt around it. Pressed. It hurt a little. It was in there, all right. Rooted in my face.
I went down for breakfast. I took two bites of toast and came back up. It was still there. It was saying: “I am all yours, bay-beee.”
And it looked even bigger. It was growing!
No way I was going to school.
But I had to. Big test in math.
I snuck into my mother’s compact. I put some powder on it. Wouldn’t fool anybody. I put a Band-Aid on it, a little round one.
After each class I went to a boys’ room. It was getting worse. Redder. Harder. Bigger. Uglier. It was pushing out the Band-Aid. Pretty soon it would look like a zit wearing a sombrero.
For lunch I stayed away from everything that looked like it might have oil or sweet stuff in it. Which was just about everything. I had celery and water.
When I checked in the mirror before the last period of the day I almost screamed. It had a yellow head. It was hideous. It was out of control. I was doomed.
I squeezed it. It shot out like a yellow bullet. I could hear it splat. If a bug was walking in the line of fire right at that moment, it would have been killed.
I kept squeezing until all the yellow was gone. Then a kind of pale watery stuff. Then pink. I didn’t stop until there was nothing but good, solid, deep red blood coming out.
I couldn’t believe it—if anything, the pimple looked bigger!
I was starting to see why modern man, who flew to the moon, could not conquer the pimple.
The sticky was gone from the Band-Aid, so I threw it away. Somehow I got through the last class and out of school. I didn’t take the bus. I walked home. Alone. For once I wished I carried a handkerchief, so I could hold it in front of my chin.
The only thing good about the day, if you want to call it good, was that Debbie Breen didn’t see me. I went different routes so I wouldn’t pass her. The bad thing was, this was the day I was going to ask her about coming over to see my space station. She didn’t say anything about it since the hayride, but that was okay because I needed a little time to finish up a real neat part. Now, I keep having this picture in my mind of her seeing me. She takes one look at the zit and practically vomits. Girls like Debbie Breen don’t have to settle for zit-faces.
And speaking of faces—that’s the cruelest part of all: they’re on your face. I mean, do they have to be there? Why not on your feet? Your stomach? Your butt? I’d trade one on my face for a hundred on my butt.
After school I went to the drugstore. I took all my bagging money, and I bought things that say they will scrub it away (“with thousands of tiny scrubbers”—that sounded good), starve it, dry it up, kill it, zap it (Zap-A-Zit), and hide it.
I went home and tried them all. I even mixed them.
At dinner my mother noticed the Band-Aid. So did Ham. “Cut yourself shaving there, ol’ boy?” he says.
“Hah!” goes Cootyhead. “He has a pim-pul.” She spit out the p’s.
I tried to explain that I cut myself in woodshop.
We had chicken for dinner. I asked for hot tea too, which surprised my mother.
When we were about done, Ham says, “Anybody want more chicken?” He was looking at me under his eyebrows. Nobody said anything. “Okay,” he goes, and he dumps the chicken—it’s a breast—into a Baggie and puts it in the refrigerator. “That… will be my lunch tomorrow. My. Lunch.”
I asked if it was okay to take my tea upstairs. In the bathro
om I took the boiling hot teabag and put it on the pimple. Just made it redder.
Then I went to the library. I asked the librarian if they had any medical books. She gave me these big huge jobs. I was looking for “acne” and “pimple” and “zit,” but all I could find was “appendicitis” and “birth canal” and stuff like that.
So I looked around myself and I came up with this ratty old thing with a squashed bug inside it called Old World Folklore and Home Art Remedies. I looked in the boils and warts section and hit paydirt: a small paragraph on pimples. It said pimples were a sign of the Devil in adolescents, and the only way to get rid of them was to squeeze some pus onto—oh no!—the bone of a chicken. Then you wrap it in cloth worn by a virgin and bury it.
I hated to even think about it. But the more I looked at that sucker, and the more I thought of it being only the first of thousands more, and the more I thought of Debbie Breen, I knew what I had to do. I would never be able to live with myself if I ever found out later that the one thing I didn’t try, no matter how crazy it sounded, really would have worked.
For the virgin’s cloth I went up to the attic to the box where Cootyhead keeps her summer clothes. I got an old shirt of hers with birds on it.
As for the pus, I already squeezed it all out in school. I needed more. I ate some cake. A spoonful of jelly. A couple fingertips of raw sugar. I got down some cooking oil and dabbed the pimple with that. I smeared it with Crisco. I sat on my bed and worked up some dirty thoughts. I thought about every girl I knew, except Debbie. I thought about pubic hair and nipples and French kissing and The Lovers and fallopian tubes and ovaries and everything. I kept looking in the mirror. No yellow. Where was it when you needed it?
I thought about asking some ninth-grader for a donation. But I figured it had to be your own.
I went to bed but stayed awake. While I was lying there in the dark I made up a poem:
Nothing is simple
About a pimple