During most classes I split my brain in two: half of me tracked the material being covered while the other half revised and expanded my girl database. The exception was Combined Math, a two-semester dash through geometry, trig, and algebra designed for math-adept freshmen. Only two of the girls in the class were listed in my notebook, and the content consumed all of my attention. The teacher, Mr. Gestetner, was a rumpled man with a genius for exposition: you left his class palpably smarter than you were before. Kids like teachers who are good at teaching, but teaching is difficult, so a lot of teachers settle for being friendly.
Gestetner assigned quizzes every few weeks, with extra homework for anyone who performed unsatisfactorily. We were leaving the classroom after one such quiz when I heard Graham Neale’s voice behind me. Graham was the boy from my homeroom with the split-level haircut. In math he sat in the back and didn’t volunteer, although when Gestetner called on him he always produced the correct answer with no evident struggle.
“That was brutal,” he said over my shoulder.
“Yeah,” I said, slowing to fall in with him. In fact I had enjoyed it.
“The number of quizzes in this class is a fucking joke,” Graham said, coming down on the penultimate word with savage relish.
“I know,” I said. “It sucks.” I was trying to use words like sucks more. And then I heard a croaking voice calling my name, and Bill Fleig was hurrying out of the classroom after us. From a distance of more than ten years, I can see how he recognized me as a kindred spirit: my dull wardrobe; my habitual look of beatific concentration; my unfortunate haircut, which swooped out from my ears in smooth shallow curves describable by quadratic equations. But at the time it felt like he had arbitrarily chosen to mark me by association.
“Do you know Pascal?” he asked. He had a way of jumping straight to the substance of conversations, treating greetings and pleasantries as noise.
“Nuh-uh,” I said as Graham looked on.
“I was talking to Mr. Gestetner,” Bill said. “He says he’ll teach Pascal classes after school if I can find one other person who wants to do it.”
This proposal was not without its appeal. I was frustrated with the limitations of BASIC and eager to become a more sophisticated programmer. But allying myself with Bill, or publicly expressing an interest in computers, would be a catastrophic error.
“Pascal is retarded,” I said, proud to be disowning my nerd impulses. And then Graham gave me a quizzical look and I realized my mistake: I should have said, What the fuck is Pascal? Instead I had outed myself as someone who had opinions about programming languages.
“So does that mean you won’t do it?” Bill asked. “Because if I can’t find someone else, Gestetner won’t teach the class.” Graham was heading off toward his locker.
“Well, boo hoo,” I said, and turned my back on Bill Fleig. Feeling defeated, I grabbed my coat and books and made my way out of the building to the school’s front steps where my mom would pick me up. Plastic bags and sheets of loose-leaf paper soared and sank in the wind. I waited on the bottom step, at the far left, where my mom always looked for me, and watching the cars I realized: they were all driven by other students. That’s when my mom’s pale blue Nissan pulled up, and she leaned over the passenger side and waved, and there I was, the only kid at my high school getting picked up by his mom. As I got in, it was as if some adult version of me, someone capable and self-reliant, was watching and protesting: That’s just a kid! That little kid is going around pretending to be me!
When I started at MLK Mom had, temporarily and with great bureaucratic effort, adjusted her schedule at the doctor’s office where she worked reception. We’d anticipated that I would meet other kids who lived in Sheridan and my mom would arrange a car pool with their parents. But I had not yet met any such kids, and if I had I don’t think I could have said, Hey — you live in Sheridan? We should carpool! Most of the older kids drove or got rides with friends; the younger ones took the municipal bus. But then, most of the kids at MLK didn’t live in Sheridan, off the city bus routes.
It was warm in the car. “Hey, sugar,” Mom said. She pulled away from the curb, humming with the radio. We stopped at the end of the street as a gaggle of kids crossed in front of us.
“So how was school?” Mom asked me.
“It was fine,” I said, slouching in my seat, hoping I wouldn’t be seen.
“I was thinking of doing tuna casserole tonight,” she said. “And L.A. Law.” My mother and I enjoyed this show, but I wasn’t in the mood. For the first time, the fundamental syllogism of adolescence occurred to me: Your mom loves you. Your mom is biologically obliged to love you, even if you’re a total loser. Therefore her love means nothing, and you probably are a total loser.
“That’s great, Mom,” I said. “That sounds great. Um, I need to talk to you about something.”
She shifted instantly into concerned mode, which comes more naturally to my mom than any other mode. “What is it, sweetie?” she said.
“I don’t want to ride home with you anymore,” I said. I wasn’t even looking at her, but everything suddenly felt different, and I knew I’d hurt her badly.
“I just… no one else rides home with their mom, you know?” I said. A long pause.
Finally she said, in a voice almost entirely devoid of inflection, “So how does everyone else get to school?”
“They get rides with other kids,” I said. “Or they take the bus.”
“I’ve always said you can get a ride with someone else’s mom,” she said. “That was the whole point. And if there was a bus for you to take, believe me, I’d be more than happy for you to take it.” I didn’t say anything. “Do you think I like spending an extra forty-five minutes every morning and forty-five minutes every evening in the car?”
I remained silent, partly because I had believed that she did enjoy it. She always seemed happy to see me, and happy to be driving along listening to the radio, just the two of us. I wasn’t sure if she’d never liked it at all, or if she was pretending because I’d hurt her feelings. We drove the rest of the way in silence, except for the radio: “More Than Words,” “Justify My Love,” commercials for local mattress stores. Of course there was no way for me to get to school without her.
My mother parked on the street and I shadowed her into the house. She put her handbag heavily down on the kitchen counter and, still in her coat, began grabbing cans of food out of the cabinets. I skulked past her and into my room, where I took off my shoes and sat on my bed with my knees tucked under my chin. For a long time I played out the conversation we’d just had in different ways: sometimes I said, Thanks for driving me to school, Mom, I really appreciate it; other times she said, Well, we’ll just have to move somewhere closer to a bus line. After running both versions half a dozen times without much satisfaction I gave up and reached for my backpack. I had a few new pieces of information to add to the notebook: Danielle Orr had said hi to me in the hallway, and Rebecca Castillo seemed to have dumped Steve Papp for Dave Breuer, a definite trade-up. I unzipped the bag and flipped through the items inside: my ring binder, my chemistry textbook, my paperback copy of Stranger in a Strange Land. I couldn’t see the notebook at first, but this was not unusual because it was smaller and thinner than most of the books I carried to and from school. I went through the bag’s contents again, more systematically, and felt an abyss of panic open beneath me. I pulled the books and folders out of the backpack one by one. I held each upside down by its spine to allow anything hidden between the pages to drop onto the bed. I reached my arms into the empty backpack and ran my fingers over the interior’s nylon surface, peering inside and taking in the rubbery scent. I unzipped the small pocket on the front of the backpack, although the notebook wouldn’t have fit inside, and removed my wallet, my calculator, the house keys I carried in case of an emergency, two black pens, a green marker, two Jolly Ranchers, a Jolly Rancher wrapper, and a dime. I stopped and looked at the pile of objects on the bed. None of them was the notebook. It’s probably in my locker at school, I thought. Or if it’s not I can always kill myself.