“We could sponsor a child,” one girl goes.
“For a year?” somebody says.
“Well, what would you do?” the first girl goes. “Sponsor one for a week?”
They talk about a car wash. After a while they quiet down and I realize they’re looking at me.
“You know who Kel Mitchell is?” the beautiful girl asks me.
“What?” I go. I switch my milk and Rice Krispies Treat on the tray. I never know what to do with my hands.
“You heard of Kel Mitchell?” she says.
When I keep looking at her, she says about me to her friends, “He’s not a random guy.”
“He’s a random guy,” one of them says. “He counts.”
It’s some kind of bet. “Yeah, I know who he is,” I go. “He’s the guy on that thing.”
They’re looking at me like they found a little lizard asleep on the table. “What thing?” one of them says.
“That thing,” I go. My Krispies Treat’s all sticky. I can’t think of anything, but I’m not giving them the satisfaction. “You know, that thing on cable.”
Their faces look like I may have hit it. The beautiful girl goes, “You are so bluffing.”
“Mr. Hanratty,” my fifth period social studies teacher says in front of the whole class. I haven’t even sat down yet. “You going to be favoring us with more of your particular brand of sullenness this year?”
I write my name on the inside of the 20th Century Civilizations cover: E. Hanratty.
“What are you shaking your head about?” he wants to know.
I’m not shaking my head about anything, I tell him.
He asks if I’m calling him a liar.
“I’m not calling you a liar,” I tell him.
He says he’d like me to apologize to my classmates for wasting everybody’s time at the beginning of the semester.
I apologize to them. Kids snicker. “Don’t let it happen again,” a kid behind me murmurs.
“We’re going to be concentrating this year on Innovators,” the teacher says. “Men and women of the twentieth century who found new ways of addressing society’s problems.” A kid in the last row makes a farting noise. The kids around him make snorty and strangled little sounds.
“Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King,” the teacher goes. “Mr. Hanratty? Any names to add to our list?”
“Richard Speck,” I go.
So on day one I get detention. The secretary outside the vice principal’s office congratulates me on being the first kid called in this year.
I don’t see Flake for three straight periods.
“What’s the matter with you?” a girl asks me on the stairs.
I have to call home when detention’s over, since the buses all left an hour ago. My mother comes to get me and drives a mile and a half after I get in before she says anything. I measure it on the odometer.
“Your friend called four times,” she says. “He didn’t seem to know about your detention.”
“You mad?” I ask.
“No, I’m proud,” she says.
“Sorry,” I tell her.
“So what’d you do?” she says. “Talk back?”
“Talk back,” I tell her.
At dinner my dad tells me I’m grounded.
“No more malt shop for me,” I go.
He tells me I’m grounded an extra week.
Flake can’t believe it when I get him on the phone. “That’s fucked up,” he says. I can hear him sucking down a Go-Gurt. He goes through the things like he’s five years old. “How could you get into trouble so fast with everybody?”
He likes what I told the teacher. He thinks my parents should’ve cut me some slack. “FS,” he goes.
“FH,” I tell him.
All the lights and the TV finally go off around midnight. My dad peeks in to make sure I’m not on the computer or sharpening a spoon to cut out his heart. “You asleep?” he says.
“Completely,” I tell him. I have the covers over my face and a hand off each side of the bed.
“Try and avoid any felonies on day two,” he says. “Though I know you already set a standard for yourself.”
“I think Mom’s waiting for you,” I go.
“You got some mouth on you,” he says.
“Good night,” I tell him.
And I can’t sleep. The digital clock on the nightstand makes loose little flipping noises when the minutes change. I put my underwear over it and then can’t take it anymore and have to see how much time has passed. 1:14. 1:51. 1:54. 1:55. I lie there swearing like I’m calling Jesus Fucking Christ on my pillow radio. The flipping noises keep going, each one getting me closer to school.
I get up and go to the bathroom mirror. My nose is eight feet long and I’ve never had a haircut I liked. My glasses are crooked from always being broken. My lips are too big. If I get any skinnier I’ll be able to pull a sock up to my neck.
“Somebody help me,” I go. I squat on the floor with my hands behind my head and rock in place.
“You look worn out,” my mom tells me at breakfast.
“Can I just have orange juice?” I go.
“I’m worried about your weight,” she goes while she watches me drink it. My dad isn’t even up yet. He’s an econ professor at the college and his first class on Tuesdays isn’t until two-something.
“Your pants are ready,” she tells me, to cheer me up. “If you want to wear those green pants you were looking for.”
At the bus stop I squat again. I pull my knapsack by the straps up to the top of my head. The two ninth-graders waiting with me look weirded out.
“That girl who’s on everybody’s shirts is like Satan,” Flake goes at lunch. “She’s like Evil Incarnate.”
“You ever notice how many people around here wear green?” I ask him. “Everybody wears green.”
“Yo,” a seventh-grader says as he passes our table. Flake gives him a miniwave.
“What’s he want?” I go.
Flake’s looking at the dessert line. “I want like a million billion dollars just for travel,” he says.
“Yo, faggot,” a ninth-grader calls from a table across from us. When we look over he lobs something he’s got wadded up. It’s off by like six feet. Me and Flake make like we’re looking for it way off in the distance. The kid wads up something else, but someone else whacks the back of his head with something and then they get into it.
Two girls from sixth-period art, Michelle and Tawanda, ask if they can sit with us.
“Free country,” Flake goes.
They give him a look and turn to me. “So listen,” Michelle says. When her jeans ride down, you can see the “Victoria’s Secret” on the elastic band of her underwear. “We have to do this World of Color thing with three people.”
“And?” Flake goes.
They look at him again. “Tawanda says you’re really good,” Michelle says to me. She’s got ponytails that start way up on both sides of her head. “She says you’re a really good artist.”
“You’re really good,” Tawanda says.
She was in my art class in seventh grade. She did a self-portrait of a round face with big tears dripping out of the eyes called Coffee Skin! that the teacher went apeshit over. I did a drawing called War the Scourge of Life that had War swinging his mace through a whole city, with tiny bloody victims hanging off the spikes, and it got hung next to hers. After everybody’s stuff was up she told me in the hall that my thing was amazing.
Flake starts doing his constipated-monkey thing. It’s so impossible to describe: he grits his teeth with this sleepy expression and jiggles around in his seat and goes Inka inka inka inka. It kills us both. He’s got thick brown hair and his ears stick out, so he makes a good monkey.