After the fifth or sixth boom, she revolved her head, annoyed, and I saw her face. I didn’t think she saw me. I would not have let her see me right then — a sufferer, a sinner, unable to warm her — and I thought the combination of doorway-shadow and jamb blotted me out of her line of sight, but a couple booms later, she revolved a second time and was smiling. I didn’t smile back. I couldn’t. I was trying to suffer and she was such a good smiler and it stunned me.
Then she was raising her hand. Miss Gleem walked over.
June said to her, quietly, “I need to get out of here for a minute.”
Miss Gleem said, “What do you mean, Juney?”
June said, “It’s important.”
Miss Gleem whispered a question to her.
June made a single laughing noise: Tss. She said, “It’s not that.”
“Well…” Miss Gleem said. You could tell she wanted to let June leave.
June said, “It’s fine, Miss Gleem, I promise — and did I tell you about the idea I had for the sculpture competition?”
Miss Gleem lit up. “I thought you wouldn’t enter.”
June said, “I wasn’t going to, but then yesterday, I found this website with paintings by Jean Dubuffet, and also some Alberto Giacometti sculptures, and I had this idea about shadows and a flattened animal made of clay, glazed ultra-brightly — not like a cartoon roadkill or anything, but a very shiny and complicated mammal that won’t look right in two dimensions. Like say it’s a rhinocerous, but smashed down flat like a stingray, so how could she walk? is what you’ll ask yourself. How can the many chambers of her stomach perform the exertions required to digest exotic grasses? is the feeling I hope to evoke. And then an outline. A thick black one bordering the entire rhinoceros on both sides. Do you see what I mean about the outline? Because an outline is what you do before you learn shadows, right? And I’ll set the sculpture on its side, thin-way-down, on a set of casters, the super-cheap kind that won’t go in carpet, and then, attached to the back part of the back caster wheel will be a rigid length of wire that’ll be bent so that I can hang a sun-colored styrofoam lightbulb from the end of it, like the midmorning sun, and bracketed to the front part of the front caster wheel will be a large pane of smoked plexiglass that’ll lay flat, in what do you call it? perpendicular respect to the rhinoncerous plane — I have to learn to cut and stain plexiglass, first — but this plexiglass will be cut into the shape of what the shadow of the three-dimensional version of the rhino would be at midmorning, which will basically be the same shape as the 2-D rhino, but foreshortened to account for the rhino’s position relative to the lightbulb, which, like I said, will be at the angle of the midmorning sun, in summer I’m thinking, on the summer solstice, in Illinois. Don’t you think that would be a funny sculpture, though? A 2-D rhino with a fixed shadow in a 3-D world? Or is it pretentious? I think it’s funny, but my mom said it was pretentious, but I think that maybe when I told her about it, I did a bad job explaining.”
June looked at me when she said “Jean Dubuffet” and again when she said “rhinocerous” and “midmorning-height,” but didn’t make a face or anything. It was stealth.
“It does sound funny,” Miss Gleem said, “and also completely wonderful!” She said, “I take it you liked the Dubuffets?”
“I loved them,” June said.
Miss Gleem said, “There was an exhibit in Amsterdam a few summers back — I went right when I finished grad school, and they were so amazing.” She fiddled with her combs, remembering. “Did you have any favorites?”
June said, “Of course, and I’d tell you, but I don’t like titles, so I never checked them.”
Miss Gleem said, “That’s because you think visually, June, and you should be proud of it. Can you describe the paintings you liked? How about the cow ones?”
While June described cows by Jean Dubuffet, the Janitor farted twice with his armpit. I couldn’t see, but I knew it was him.
Miss Gleem turned from June and said, “Mikey Bregman! We know it’s you.”
“Sorry, Miss Gleem,” said the Janitor.
“Sorry, Miss Gleem,” said Vincie Portite, in a sissy voice. I couldn’t see him either, the liar — Vincie was the one who told me no one read the detention assignments.
Miss Gleem said, “Vincie.”
Vincie said, “Miss Gleem.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay then,” said Vincie.
Miss Gleem clicked her tongue and turned back to June.
June said, “I’ve really gotta get out of here for a minute, Miss Gleem.”
Miss Gleem said, “Only a minute.”
“Maybe five or six,” June said.
“Five or six.”
June came toward me, not looking at me.
I heard Ronrico say, “Oh but I’ve got feminine problems, too, Miss Gleem!”
June laughed.
Miss Gleem said, “Just stop, Ronrico.”
Ronrico said, “Sorry, Miss Gleem,” and June flicked her eyes at me = “Get out of the doorway”/“Come into the hall,” and then turned into the doorway and continued past me.
As soon as I started getting up, I remembered how I was supposed to be suffering and, instead of standing, I crouch-walked along the doorway’s sidewall, and when I made the turn into Main Hall I pressed my spine on the corner as hard as I could.
We sat next to each other, leaning back against the lockers with our knees up.
“What happened?” June said.
I said, I’m sorry. I said, I got stuck in the Office and—
June said, “That’s fine. What happened to you is what I mean? You look like something happened to you. Or at least you did a minute ago — now you look happy.”
I told her, I said a terrible thing to Brodsky. I said, I hurt him in his own office.
“Why?” she said.
I was trying to speed things up, I said, so I could sit by you in detention.
“It worked out, then.”
How’s that? I said.
She said, “You hurt someone to get something you wanted, and then you didn’t get what you wanted and that hurt you. It’s fair.”
I said, But you’re here, now. I said, I’m not really hurting anymore.
“Probably Brodsky isn’t either,” she said.
I’d wanted her to look in my eyes and see me suffering, then tell me everything was fine. And, in a way, she did tell me that, but we were next to each other and she was facing forward, and I wasn’t suffering anymore. Still, I wished she would hug me, so I tried to think of something that might evince her sympathies which might become a hug. It was hard to think of anything like that, though. What did I have to complain about, really? If I had failed at something that might undermine my self-image or whatever, that might work, but — boom.
I said, And plus, the thing is, I couldn’t do this action.
June said, “What action?”
I said, Nakamook discovered this action that everyone at lunch could do except for me. I said, Your whole body shakes and your face gets red and tears fill up your eyes. It looks like a seizure.
June was already doing it. She I’m Tickinged for about half a minute. Her face became darker than her freckles and her irises shook inside the whites. I didn’t like to see it, but it was good to see it, because while she was doing it, I thought: If June had a disorder that made her I’m Ticking for minutes at a time out of every hour of every day, would you, Gurion, still want to sleep beside her on the beach of the Dead Sea, even though she would shake you awake every night and probably drool on you while she did it? and I thought: Yes, it would be hard to do, and sometimes very gross, but I believe I would still want to sleep next to her.