Wise Young Fool Read online

HORROR.

  It’s not even second period and Lacy Duplais is already pretending to fix her heel by my locker. She’s wearing mascara, a pearl necklace, and a cabled sweater that has gift from Grandma written all over it.

  “Hi, Ritchie!”

  “Lacy doo-play,” I say.

  “Wow, you got big over the summer.”

  “Big as in tall? Or you mean big as in huge ’cause the ’roids have finally kicked in?”

  “Huge,” she says, deadpan.

  I bust out the trembling Hulk Hogan flex. Then I wonder what the hell I’m doing a stand-up routine for.

  “Maybe we’ll have a class together,” she says, playing with her necklace. “You can make me laugh when it gets too boring.”

  “You got seven periods of remedial?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’re not gonna have any classes together.”

  She giggles uncertainly. Actually, we’re both in Dice’s History of the Americas, but I don’t tell her that, mostly so I don’t have to say his name out loud.

  “Catch you later.”

  “Bye, Ritchie!”

  El Hella is at my side as we weave through tiny sophomore dudes in polo shirts. He’s wearing leather wristbands and ten square kilometers of scalp, clearing a wide swath on attitude alone.

  “That Lacy’s cute.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “What’s to guess?”

  I shrug. “She’s a little… old-fashioned.”

  “So?”

  “So for that apparently shallow and unacceptable reason, I am not all that into her.”

  “Into her is the whole point, chief.”

  “Don’t freaking ‘chief’ me.”

  “Sorry, chief, but you’ve got a major malfunction. She’s a keeper. And she’s been making eyes at you since eighth grade.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m not really sure why the Lacy pheromones don’t get the Ritchie bonermones revved more, but they just don’t.”

  He shakes his head. “You are one dumb fucker, you know that, chief?”

  “I told you to ix-nay that ief-chay shit. Have some respect for indigenous peoples.”

  “As Sackville’s only voluntarily bald man, I’m exercising my right to make fun of my fellow minorities.”

  “Voluntarily bald men and strident sociopolitical views are a bad mix.”

  “Good point. As my group’s official spokesperson, I officially apologize. Also, from now on, I will be referring to you as ‘champ.’ Unless, of course, it offends the boxing community.”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  “You do that, champ.”

  Elliot peels off into Applied Mathematical Concepts. I take a left toward Sociology: New Perspectives on Our World.

  In front of the classroom, there’s a gaggle of kids. Off to one side is Ravenna Woods. She waves.

  “Hey, Ritchie!”

  I practically sprint over.

  “Hey, Ravenna.”

  She’s about to say something when the sun is blotted out. It’s Spence Proffer, looming behind us.

  “ ’Sup, Sudden,” he says, rocking a new perm, elaborate braces, and nostrils that flare like twin manhole covers. He looks like Babe the Blue High School Ox, a bizarre combination of hard fat and harder muscle. If he dragged a plow from class to class, no one would even blink.

  “Hey, Spence,” I say.

  “Hey, Spence,” he mimics.

  Ravenna giggles.

  I want to reach over and snap off his gold necklace, melt it down with an acetylene torch, form it into a much daintier necklace with I HEART TWINKS spelled out in cursive, and gently return it.

  Instead, I do nothing.

  “I got a message for your buddy,” he says.

  “I have no friends.”

  “Tell Hella he needs to step the fuck back.”

  “I have zero clue what you’re talking about.”

  Spence grins, then gives me a tittie twister.

  Few people understand the agony of a tittie twister pulled off correctly.

  I tell myself not to rub it, not to rub it, not to rub it, then stand there in the middle of the hallway, rubbing it.

  Counterclockwise.

  Ravenna laughs as Spence lumbers off.

  I should be mad. I should turn and walk away, leave her hanging like a counterfeit twenty.

  But I can’t.

  Because she’s playing me and every other lame at school like the deuce of hearts. Even Mercedes and muscle dudes are practically running naked into traffic and throwing themselves off clock towers to get her attention.

  And the thing is, she’s not really beautiful beautiful at all.

  She’s actually a little weird-looking. Asymmetrical. With a funny half smile that makes one side of her mouth turn up like the Joker’s. Her eyes are too dark, just this side of cruel. More knowing than gorgeous. More weary than drop-dead. Superior. Not the princess but the princess’s raven-haired stepsister. The one with the vials of poison lined up on her dresser. The one who seduces the regent while dating the dragon.

  Or dating no one at all.

  So why does she make every guy in school apoplectic?

  Why does she walk around lobbing a toaster in the collective male bathtub?

  Hey, let’s not pretend.

  It’s her body.

  There is simply no ignoring its heft and criminal perk. Its taut Austrian hydraulics. If she were flat or fat she’d still be pretty, but no linebackers would be cutting practice trying to get to know her better. Without the badonkadonk and sheik-money strut, guys would hardly be killing themselves to score her fake digits anymore.

  You’ve got to figure that level of constant objectification and wheedling hypocrisy would make a girl bitter.

  And you’d be right.

  Ravenna’s caught two hundred meters below the reef, unwanted sexual pressure crushing her lungs, sharks below and the bends above, nowhere to go but further inside herself.

  A place where I’m already shacked up and paying my own rent.

  So I don’t have to walk a mile in her nine-inch pumps to totally and completely get it.

  Which is why I always act like I totally and completely don’t give a shit.

  Ravenna’s into guys who aren’t into her.

  A list that is exactly zero guys long.

  “Um, what were we talking about again?”

  She leans against me. “I was wondering if you were ever coming back to Sack.”

  I yawn. “Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”

  “ ’Cause the last day of junior year you said, ‘I’m never effing coming back to this brain-dead wax museum.’ ”

  “Did I? That doesn’t sound like me.”

  “Yes, it does, Ritchie Sudden. It sounds exactly like you.”

  “Well, as tempting as it was, I couldn’t leave town. What with the new band I’m in and all.”

  “Band?”

  “Sin Sistermouth.”

  “You did what?”

  “That’s our name. Sin Sistermouth.”

  “Interesting,” she says in a way that makes it clear she does not find it the least bit interesting. “Who’s in it?”

  “Hmm. Lessee. It’s a duo. Which, you know, means two people. So, there’s me. And then there’s—”

  She makes a face. “Elliot Hella?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Figures.”

  The bell rings. She closes her locker with a low-rise hip, stepping away like a runway cliché.

  “Welcome to senior year, Ritchie.”

  “You figure it’s gonna be a good one?” I ask.

  She winks. “Depends on your definition of good.”

  The curves are a smokescreen, I tell myself. Inside, she’s a bag of hard edges.

  And I, Ritchie Sudden, am prepared to eat sheet metal.

  “Take the o out of good and you’ve got God. He’s pretty much all I need.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes ma’am, it is.”
<
br />   “You’d be more convincing if you didn’t have a burning pentagram on your chest.”

  I look down. She’s right. I forgot I changed into an Iron Maiden hoodie at the last second.

  “Well, I guess the devil’s in the details.”

  Her eyes sparkle. “I guess he is.”

  Dick Isley struts down the hall toward us. He’s every inch the Dick he was last year, except now he’s got a turquoise ring on his thumb. “Get to class, people.”

  “Hi, Dice,” Ravenna says.

  “Ravenna!” he answers, drawing pretend six-shooters. “Pow! Pow! Pow!”

  She turns on us both and clichés away.

  Dice and I just stand there watching.

  For that, at least, I can’t blame him.

  The fourth coil of Hades: Ravenna Woods in skinny jeans.

  There’re only five minutes left in lunch period. There’re always only five minutes left. Lunch could be three hours long and the second you sat down, the bell would still be just about to ring.

  It’s an immutable law of nature.

  Kyle Litotes clatters a tray next to me, five warmer-lamp cheeseburgers wrapped in foil. At Sackville High, you got two lunch choices, each a vegetarian’s dream: a heaping ladle of that day’s meat slop with tomato sauce, or wheezy little burgers with a slice of government cheddar for a buck a pop.

  “Dude, you must be hungry.”

  He doesn’t even look up. “Eff you, Sudden.”

  It’s classic Litotes. Or, as some people call him, Clitotes. He’s got a baby face, almost pudgy, prep wear and a scholarship to Amherst already locked down. Everyone knows it. Mostly because he told them. Loudly. For years Kyle made a big deal out of being one of the abstinence kids, head of Students Against Drinking and Say No Way to Drugs and Saving It for Marriage and the Anti-Masturbator’s League, handing out pamphlets and padding transcript with all the many ways he was pure.

  And then, at some party junior year, he had a beer.

  Just one.

  Bam.

  Two weeks later he was pounding more tall boys than Perez Hilton, doing beer bongs and swilling gin and groping girls, filling that abstinence hole one fresh guzzle at a time. Now he walks around with a fifth in his backpack and a sixer in his duffel, saying things like, “If the party’s in your mouth, I’m coming!” and doing lame hallway pranks like snapping girls’ bra straps and hiding their gym shoes.

  I turn and finish my conversation with Lacy Duplais and Meb Cavil, who came and sat all giggly two seconds after I parked my tray. Meb’s this cute little chick seemingly unbothered by the fact that she sports a mustache every cowboy in cinema history would be jealous of. “Meb” is either short for Mary Beth or My Estrogen Brush. I’m always tempted to ask why she doesn’t spare herself the stares and just spring for a can of shave cream, but my admiration for the big middle finger she’s giving the world by so completely not giving a shit stops me cold.

  Meanwhile, Lacy Duplais is explaining how she’s halfway through some book called A Clockwork Orange.

  “It’s written in this entirely nonsense language.”

  “French?”

  “Ha. No, like the author made it all up.”

  “Sounds… tedious.”

  Lacy smiles, reveling in the chance to explain something to someone who’s actually listening. “Yeah, but it’s not. It’s fascinating, ’cause once you unclench your brain, you can totally understand what’s going on.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Like, okay, they say ‘viddy’ instead of ‘see,’ and you subconsciously understand what it means because of ‘video’ or whatever, even though it’s not really a word.”

  “Huh. So—”

  There’s a tap on my shoulder.

  I brush it away.

  It taps again, harder.

  I turn and almost bang foreheads with Kyle Litotes.

  “What’s up, dude?”

  What’s up is he’s totally freak-eyed, in a panic. I figure it’s one of his usual stunts until I notice all five of his burger wrappers are flat. There’s no way he porked them down that fast.

  “Man, are you okay?”

  He grabs my shoulder, digging fingernails in. Sweat dangles from his nose. I can sort of make out a half orb of beef in the back of his throat, especially since he keeps pointing to it. People are watching, craning their necks. My need to act is way overridden by my need not to be suckered into a prank. But he keeps making with the fish lips, no words coming out, just a deep, airless wheeze.

  “Call the nurse,” Lacy says.

  “Yeah,” Meb says.

  “Right,” I say, but for some reason don’t move. I don’t take charge. I don’t leap into action. I don’t leap at all.

  I just sit.

  Scared.

  Until Young Joe Yung lumbers over in tie-dyed overalls. Young Joe has long dreads and a chin like a cruiserweight. He’s big and incredibly thick in the way some Chinese are but almost all the rest aren’t. He grabs Litotes from behind, just below the ribs. They do this funky little dance, finding just the right balance and leverage, and then Joe Yung’s massive forearms constrict. There’s a sound I’ve never heard before and don’t ever want to hear again.

  It’s intestinal, slithering.

  Kyle’s mouth distends into a gaping oval. His body recoils, and then a perfectly formed cylinder emerges from between his lips. It hangs there for a second, and then plops to the floor with a wet smack. It’s like he just gave birth to a can of Pringles. A quivering yellow foot of chewed and compacted burger.

  “Oh hell no,” someone says quietly.

  Litotes gulps air, already in tears, turning and giving Young Joe the thank you oh thank you oh thank you routine. The burger tube, meanwhile, has a rapt audience. A hundred people stare at it with a mixture of fascination and disgust.

  No one dares to move.

  No one dares to breathe.

  Then the thing sort of shivers.

  Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, a flicker of the fluorescents, but for a second it seems like it might rear up and attack.

  Some girl lets loose a curdler of a scream.

  And then it’s madness, people streaming toward the exits, trampling freshmen underfoot. The bell rings. Lacy wipes away a few tears, looking over Meb’s shoulder, wondering why I’m not the one rubbing her back instead.

  Joe Yung and I walk to our next class.

  “Nice work, dude.”

  He swings dreads out of his face and smiles. “Just taking it as it comes.”

  Even though it was only two years ago, I still sometimes forget that Joe used to be a Sackville legend, a sports god, on every team, good at everything. And then suddenly hung up his cleats to became a man of peace. A grinning mountain. The rare hippie half the football team wants to fight for being a traitor, while the other half still looks at in awe.

  “No, for serious, man. That was first-responder shit. I am majorly impressed.”

  He considers for a second, then holds up one finger. “Well, my mom always said chew before you swallow.”

  “I thought she said spit don’t swallow.”

  Young Joe busts out laughing, holding his big overalled stomach as Ravenna Woods comes out of the girls’ room and walks toward us.

  “Way to go, Joe Hung,” she says in a voice so suggestive it stings.

  Young Joe stops laughing. His jaw drops, an elevator with the cable snapped, penthouse to basement in a second flat. He looks like he’s going to melt, right there, into a huge puddle of earnestness in the middle of the floor.

  Ravenna turns to me. “Way to get involved, Sudden.”

  “Um.”

  “Remind me not to call you if I ever have a problem.”

  “Um.”

  “Unless, you know, it’s one of those special emergencies that requires someone to just sit on his ass and watch.”

  “Um.”

  Ravenna makes a face, spins on one very high heel, and then metronomes back on dow
n the hall.

  Tick, tock, tick.

  The ninth coil of Hades: Ravenna Woods in a skintight turtleneck.

  It takes us a few long minutes to get back even a semblance of cool, and by the time we make it to class we’re way late. Miss Menepausse, in her ironic fifties skirt and vintage pink sweater, signs a pair of detention slips without even looking up.

  “That’s not fair,” I say.

  One of her two dozen unnecessary barrettes comes unsprung. “Oh, really? Why in the world not?”

  “Well, for one thing, we’re only late ’cause Young Joe Yung just Heimliched the fuck out of Clitotes.”

  “Language, Sudden! Besides, Kyle Litotes? Wouldn’t we all be better off if you’d simply let him cross to the other side?”

  My face goes blank.

  Miss Menepausse looks up and gasps, realizing she’s just made a death joke to The Tragic Kid.

  We eyeball each other.

  Her pores are enormous behind tortoiseshell glasses.

  Her lipstick is rude, red, messy.

  She wants to apologize, but that would mean bringing up Beth.

  I don’t want her to apologize, because that would mean someone I care so little about bringing up Beth.

  Besides, in that long second I have an epiphany: Maybe she’s not the bitter post-hipster stuck in a dead-end job I always assumed, but is actually a melancholy cat-loving midnight-merlot-guzzler who would otherwise be cool if she could only come to terms with the fact that she will never make a living off the prize money from Tuesday night swing-dance competitions at Jack Rabbit Slim’s.

  “No, seriously,” I say, letting her off the hook. “Joe just saved the kid’s life.”

  Miss Menepausse sighs, trying to decide if she’s being taken for a ride, concludes that you cannot bullshit a classically trained bullshitress, and tears the detention slips in half.

  “Please be seated, gentlemen.”

  Gentlemen?

  Young Joe Yung, maybe.

  But I’m just another worthless tool, sliding into an empty desk, all the way in the back row.

  There’re five minutes left in lunch period. I’m in the chow hall, which is actually a rectangular room with a raised walkway for counselors to stare down from. Not really a cafeteria at all. More like a Vegas club designed to look like a movie set designed to look like a cattle pen. B’los is at the far end, sitting with other Hispanic dudes. Conner and Peanut, everyone’s favorite interracial couple, have their own table. Tough white dudes sit together on the near side. Pussy white dudes sit in the middle, the worst spot. A mix of kids everyone calls United Nations take up the only round table—a couple Asians, an Indian, a black kid with glasses, a dude who claims to be from Madagascar (which immediately cemented his new name: WhereverTheFuckThatIs), some white kids who have somehow avoided picking sides, an Arab who prays on a towel five times a day, and a kid who gets special meals (peanut butter and jelly for breakfast, lunch, and dinner) because his father’s lawyer convinced an appellate court that chronic gag reflex was a federally protected disability.