Mr. Smartass
By Ryan Daly
Copyright 2012 Ryan Daly
Smashwords Edition
Cover Design by Susanna V. Walden
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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To Angela,
always my favorite teacher.
Epigraph
Arm me, audacity, from head to foot!
- Cymbeline I.vi.19
Chapter 1: Hit-and-Run Teacher
Chapter 8: The Cave, the Beast and the Lady
Chapter 9: Mrs. Udderson’s Legacy
Chapter 13: Alarums and Excursions
Chapter 14: Lonely Night at the Memory Hotel
Chapter 18: Matter Changing States
Chapter 19: Independent Variables
Chapter 21: Post-Op Complications
Chapter 23: Physical Educationally Challenged
Chapter 24: Vicodin, Whiskey Chaser
Chapter 25: Till I’m Buried in My Grave
Chapter 26: Bring a Knife to a Food Fight
Chapter 27: The Law of Unintended Consequences
Chapter 28: For the Love of God, Montresor!
Chapter 29: Drinks and Denouement
Hit-and-Run Teacher
Alan Raff prowled the parking lot for the space that would afford the quickest getaway when the bell rang at 2:30. He didn’t know why the police had come to Harrington Middle School, or why they had to hog the best parking spot. What he did know was an opportunity when he saw one, and the shattered glass window and police car at the school’s front door screamed opportunity.
Before a single bus had come to a complete stop, the sixth, seventh and eighth graders aboard lurched from their seats in egregious defiance of safety regulations to get a better look at the police car. They poured from the buses, flinging questions at each other. The sight of a uniformed officer taking pictures of the smashed-in window sent rumors into the air like drunken carrier pigeons.
Someone had broken into Harrington before, back in the first week of school, long before Alan started substitute teaching. Whoever did it stole some DVD players, ransacked the office, plundered the nurse’s medicine cabinet, and fouled the lobby for days with the stink of urine. The criminal mastermind wrote “FUCK SKOOL” on the wall in permanent marker, a double-blow to Harrington’s staff for the spelling as much as the sentiment.
This frigid February morning’s investigation would yield nothing so eloquent. Nothing was taken. No dissenting opinions were written on the walls in giant letters, and, aside from the broken window, there were no signs of vandalism or graffiti. The snowplows, which cleared four inches from the parking lot before dawn, had destroyed any tracks that might have led to or from the scene. A plain-clothes detective named Lankershim interviewed the administrators and the head custodian who discovered the break-in. Lankershim and the uniformed cop responding to the break-in call would hang around for an hour to flex their presence in front of the impressionable kids, then leave to pursue the zero leads they’d dug up.
By month’s end, the police would be regulars at Harrington.
Alan circled the parking lot, keeping one eye on the broken window. The kids who cut through the lot instead of walking around like they were supposed to darted out of his way when they realized he wasn’t going to stop for them. Alan didn’t slow down in school zones, he didn’t look both ways, and he didn’t yield to pedestrians; he braked for larger vehicles and women, not much else.
At twenty-two, he was young enough to remember that adolescence, to an adolescent, equaled invincibility. He felt compelled to disabuse them of that belief. Teenagers could be inarguably stupid until they started drinking and having sex with some regularity, but if they couldn’t recognize the superior size, strength and gas mileage of a Honda Civic and keep a safe distance, they deserved to be culled from the herd.
Fantasy hijacked Alan’s attention. Scenarios involving wild animals loose in the building, or an escaped convict, or, better still, something to do with terrorists blinded him to the man coming out from behind a jeep until force and momentum planted the guy on Alan’s hood.
Alan hit the brakes.
The man rolled, yelped, and disappeared under the bumper.
Time spent reflecting on the collision might have flooded Alan’s mind—a virtual, instantaneous brain-dump—with frenetic, panicky thoughts like: Jesus, I killed him! And: Where did he come from? And: What do I do? And: It’s not my fault! And: Huh, not very icy; plows must have salted. And: This can’t be good for my insurance… Unless… Nah, what are the chances this guy’s a war criminal?
He didn’t have time for such thoughts, though, only time to crack the window an inch and hear someone shout, “Asshole!”
The man sprang up. Alan recognized him—Mr. Bachman, eighth grade math teacher. Fear knotted in Alan’s chest, and was tempered almost immediately by the fierce impulse to laugh. Bachman, with his mouth full of saliva and teeth that expatriated from dental hygiene years ago, looked too much like the shark from Jaws popping out of the water to sink the heroes’ boat.
Bachman didn’t give Alan time to open the door and apologize before he was on his feet. He slurred and gave the Civic an open-fisted punch.
Alan knew the math teacher’s reputation for aggravating students and staff alike. And if Alan, who had only been substitute teaching since January, knew the consensus, it might as well have been published in the school newsletter. Bachman’s name never came up in conversation without the words “crazy”, “creepy” or “batshit insane” tacked on. His head was a bushy mess of hair, black on top, silver at the chin. He always wore paint-spattered pants and mud-crusted hiking boots. At the moment, those boots were made for walking back to his jeep.
Leaving before school started? Maybe he was fetching a gun. If any Harrington teacher had a gun stashed in his glove box, it was Bachman. Maybe he was going straight to the hospital. Alan would have to drive in the other direction and just keep driving, change his name, live a life of quiet desperation, fall for the wrong woman, probably murder her rich husband and fall again for her inevitable double-cross. Or he could deny the collision and test his credibility against a teacher reputed to throw pencils like darts at students who asked to use the bathroom.
The jeep shuddered to life, rumbled and tore out of the lot down Friend Street and away from the school. Alan forced a deep breath and turned on the defroster. The spot where Bachman slapped his hood didn’t look dented. He breathed in relief, because he couldn’t picture any tactful, self-effacing way to bill the math teacher for scuffing his paint.
Alan parked in the newly vacated space and walked to the door. The forecast called for flurries in the late afternoon and temperatures in the mid thirties all day. Not the kind of weather that students liked to stand outside in, but stand outside they did. The nearly six-hundred students of HMS packed into tight clusters, some around trees, some in the yard beneath basketball hoops, most in front of the main doors, not for the crime scene spectacle, but for warmth.
Alan muscled his way through the crowd. A few enterprising eighth graders followed his lead and tried to rush the door. Mr. Pike, the assistant principal, kept them at bay as he always did until the first bell rang.
“Morning, Sergeant,” Alan said, stopping by the broken window.
Mr. Pike scowled. “You demoted me.”
A retired Army lieutenant, Don Pike guarded the door like a star federal witness was on the other side. Behind lacquered shades, his eyes scanned the crowd of students for signs of trouble. Behind Mr. Pike was the police officer, looking apprehensive about his proximity to so many squirrelly children.
Alan pointed to the window. “The school this desperate for air conditioning?”
“Looks like we had a break-in,” Pike said, looking down at the glass like he could divine the intruder’s identity by the arrangement of glass fragments.
“Not surprised,” Alan said. “I used to confuse this place with the methadone clinic all the time.”
The officer stopped what he was doing and glared. Alan disarmed him with his trademark just-messing-with-you smirk: a smirk cultivated over ten years, a smirk beta-tested on his mother and perfected on girlfriends, bouncers, professors, store clerks, and one traffic cop.
He smirked a lot at Harrington.
Someone, a girl in the crowd, shouted to Alan, “Hey, Mister Guy.”
Alan didn’t take offense to students not knowing his name since the anonymity of subbing prevented kids from slandering him in the bathroom stalls.
The speaker was a shivering sixth grader whose idea of winter weather gear included a loose flannel shirt over a tank top and a denim mini-skirt. She might have been the only white girl in a cluster of older and taller Latinas, but Alan had no trouble identifying her as the Alpha of the group. Good genetics gave her a face that could someday land a magazine cover, unchecked steroids in the nation’s food gave her an almost fully developed body at age twelve, and drunk, divorced parents gave her a pair of eyes with disquieting maturity.
“Shouldn’t they close school?” she asked.
“We’re secure,” Pike said, puffing his chest a little. “Trust me.”
The girl and her troupe weren’t shy about rolling their eyes. The girl asked, “What if the, you know, whoever broke into my locker and, like, took my stuff?”
“Like, you know, the library can replace your books,” Alan said.
Some of the girls giggled. The alpha said, “I don’t got no library books. I got a bottle of perfume in my locker cost forty dollars.”
Alan checked the reflexive urge to ask if she was high. He thought he was young enough to still get this generation, but none of the girls he had known in middle school kept anything more aromatic than Bubblicious in their lockers. “Don’t worry about your obscenely overpriced perfume,” Alan said. “Chances are nothing was stolen.”
He shrugged. “More likely, someone planted a bomb.”
Pike groaned and shook his head, muttering something inaudible beneath the fresh excitement sweeping over the kids. He opened the door and ushered Alan inside.
Alan smirked at the cop and crushed glass beneath his shoes.
* * *
The office buzzed with activity. Teachers flitted in front of their mailboxes, picking up new staff memos. More teachers hovered over the backed-up photocopier. At one desk Mrs. Hudson conversed with a boy and his parents, the boy acting as translator for his Spanish-speaking mother and father, while across the room, Mrs. Shanley listened to a pair of brothers who forgot their lunches at home. Over all the talk, a symphony of telephones played on the secretaries’ desks and in every adjoining office.
Common knowledge, even among substitute teachers, was that Liz Shanley found the bellicosity of Harrington’s office an energizing tune. Being head secretary required a flexible mind; building order out of bedlam was in the job description. For Liz, who had been running the office more years than any of the teachers had worked there, more years than many of them had even been out of school, it was little more than an organizational chore. Listening to the brothers’ lament, she scribbled a reminder to shuffle the principal’s faculty evaluation schedule and read an email from yet another teacher who couldn’t work that day. She had already called in three subs when Alan Raff entered. Liz pulled the boys’ dad’s work number from the computer and said she’d call him during first period. When they left, she smiled at Alan and said, “Good morning, sir.”
Fairly well known about Liz Shanley was that she graduated from Harrington forty-three years earlier, back when it was a high school serving Lowden and its two surrounding towns. For thirty-six years, from her same corner of the office, Liz had watched the building upgrade facilities and downgrade from high school to junior high to middle school. She watched three sons and two daughters pass through the same halls. She watched staff come and go, and endured the regime changes of ten different principals. She watched, and she managed the chaos. The secret fear shared by HMS and the Board of Education was that when Liz retired the school would simply collapse. Forget bricks and mortar; she was the nerve center. Without her, the ceiling would cave in and the walls would crumble.
And still she called a twenty-two year old substitute “sir.” That kind of class, an old-school modesty, Alan’s mother taught him to appreciate.
“Who am I today, Mrs. Shanley?” he asked.
“Whoever you want to be,” she answered.
The first time Alan subbed at Harrington, Liz told him, “Today, you’re Mister Kapelski.” Wet behind the ears, a little playful and a little hung over, Alan had asked, “Why can’t I be myself?” This wannabe-existential exchange became ritual in the weeks since. For Alan, the appeal of subbing was self-reinvention, of taking on a different person’s job with none of their baggage or responsibility.
Liz rummaged through a filing drawer under her desk full of sub-folders and came out with an attendance sheet paper-clipped to a red folder. “Mister Saddler, seventh grade Science, upstairs, room two-oh-two.”
The Saddler schedule was inches from Alan’s hand when Mrs. Hudson called from across the office, “Liz, Ken Bachman just went home. Need another.”
Liz held the Saddler folder just out of reach. “Would you rather teach math?”
Taking the job of a man he had run over in the parking lot—Mother Raff would not have found that classy, no sir, but there was such a bent irony to it that Alan wavered, considered. This time, class won. “Math was never my strong subject,” he admitted. “That’s why I only know how to add debt and subtract funds from my bank account.”
“Maybe the class can help you balance your check book,” Liz said.
Alan smiled. “All my favorite superheroes were scientists.”
The first bell rang. Liz surrendered the Saddler folder and scooped up the phone to call another sub.
At the sound of the bell, hundreds of cold, agitated tweens invaded the lobby. Alan waded up the stairs in a current of crankiness, weariness, flightiness, meanness and pretentious angst. Half the kids he could see were fumbling with MP3 players or texting their friends down the hall. Some boys tossed a football with no intention of catching it, but rather seeing how many of their peers’ heads the pigskin could bounce off of before hitting the floor. The girl walking in front of Alan wore camouflage pants and a belt made of what had to be a thousand safety pins. The girl behind him wore a shirt that she had outgrown around the time she learned to walk. The tallest eighth graders matched him for height, but his caramel-colored leather jacket and general sense of balance set him apart from the students. He possessed the air of superiority exuded by adults in the presence of youth, a smugness derived from being legally obliged to do all the things kids wished they could do.
He picked up scattered parts of conversation. Talk of birthdays, talk of tests, talk of siblings, talk of underwear, and lots of talk about the break-in. Everyone wanted to know what everyone else knew. Theories were proposed; suspects were named. “Hey, Katie, you hear the police found a bomb?”
Mr. Saddler’s room was good and warm. Whitey, Harrington’s head custodian, had cranked up the heat after the broken window turned the school into a walk-in freezer. Alan sat at Mr. Saddler’s desk and went to work absorbing every part of the sub-folder he needed.
The first ten minutes of the day could be terrifying for substitute teachers. You had to figure out everything you needed to do for the rest of the day. You had to know what the day’s expectations were, where the materials were, which students you could trust and how to manage those you couldn’t. You had to know where the call/emergency button was in each room, just in case somebody fainted or somebody brought a knife. While you were figuring all this out, students were pouring into the room demanding to know who you were and why they should care. If you screwed up anything, they let you know, and their criticism was hardly constructive. All of this anticipation generated a rush that a good sub could ride for the entire day.
This day, all Mr. Saddler required of Alan was the ability to push PLAY on a remote control. When the bell rang to start class, he stood at the front of the room next to the television. He counted twenty-five bodies spread around nine tables. Two kids were absent, and of those present only a handful were facing him, and nobody was quiet.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he addressed the class. “Your teacher, Mister Saddler, isn’t here today because he’s dead.”
A collective gasp whipped through the class. Heads spun around. Eyes bugged and jaws dropped.
“Dead,” a student in the front row asked, “really dead?”
“That’s right,” Alan said, then shrugged for affectation, “or just sick, maybe, I don’t know. Important thing is he’s not here today. I’m Mister Raff.”
Twenty-five boys and girls exhaled as one. Some laughed. Some shook their heads. Before anyone could speak, Alan began pacing the front row, pulling twenty-five sets of eyes where he walked. “You’re, what, thirteen years-old, most of you? You’ve all had subs before so you know the drill. You’re expected to show me the same respect you would pretend to show your regular teacher. But you’re not expected to learn from me, which is why we’re just going to watch a movie all hour.”
He stopped in front of the TV, picked up the DVD case and held it up for the class. “Today’s fine educational presentation is Jurassic Park. Have you been studying cloning or dinosaurs or biology?”
A few kids shrugged. A few said, “Kind of.”
“Kind of,” Alan repeated. “Good enough for me.”
Two Households
Whitey followed the snowplows’ path to work. His drive took short of an hour. The sun hadn’t come up yet. Emmylou Harris’ honey lemon drawl filled the cramped cab of his pickup.
He got home late Monday night after a double-shift. He fell asleep beside the Wife at eleven, and woke five hours later to shovel the driveway before heading out. Living so far from Harrington had been a necessary evil seventeen years ago when he started as a part-timer. When he had a two year-old daughter, another on the way, and plans to marry their mother. Now, the Wife encouraged moving to a house in Lowden. Even with the oldest’s college tuition, she said they could manage it. The whole family worked or went to school there anyway, so why not?
Whitey’s reason why not, which he could never articulate to the girls, was that he loved the time alone in his truck, when he was answerable to no one. His music made the drive more than tolerable, but enjoyable. What other people got from meditation, therapy or church, Whitey got from music.
The girls got him an iPod for Christmas. They spent Winter Break first convincing Whitey that computers weren’t tools of the Devil, and then how to download songs and upload his old CD collection. By February, Whitey was enamored of the little “gadget” and told his daughters he’d gladly sell one of them before his iPod.
At quarter past six, he pulled up in front of HMS, where his headlights lit up the doors, the windows and all the little bits of broken glass on the ground.
He grabbed his iPod and earbuds and his toolbox from the passenger seat. He locked the truck and opened the school. Snow had been blowing in for hours. The lobby looked like some iceberg archipelago: all scattered mounds of snow that hadn’t melted yet floating in a great puddle of what had. He sloshed down the dark, Antarctic halls decorated with student art, Black History Month posters, sports trophies and ads for the upcoming Valentine’s card sale.
He went downstairs to his office by the boiler room. He flipped on the light and tossed his keys on the desk. In his statement to Detective Lankershim later that day, Whitey would omit the following: he didn’t pick up the phone and call the police right away like he was obligated to. He fed his fish first. Whitey kept several dwarf pufferfish in a thirty-gallon tank that he adopted from a retired science teacher. He checked the filter, the PH level, and then sprinkled bloodworms into the tank. The puffers were quick to breakfast.
Whitey draped his jacket over the back of his chair. He had Sara Woodson’s home number in his cell phone. He flipped through his contact list when memory brought his finger to a halt: Sara was downstate at a principal’s conference for three days.
He snapped the phone shut. “Now what?” he asked the fish.
Calling the police was his responsibility, but calling the principal instead had been his preference since becoming head custodian. He didn’t like cops, he didn’t like talking to cops, and he didn’t like inviting them into his building. Sara Woodson was assertive enough—and believed Whitey dumb enough—that she always made the call, after chastising him for not taking initiative.
Don Pike was the only other staff member with the executive authority to notify the police, that is, if executive authority was required, and if such a thing as executive authority even existed at the middle school level in northern Illinois. Whitey knew Pike would jump at the chance to play official around real men in uniform. He picked up the desk phone, which had the assistant principal’s number in its speed-dial. He had erased the same number from his cell, in accordance with his New Year’s resolution to never start a conversation with Pike. Oh well. His last three resolutions had involved eating healthier, finding a better job and taking the Wife to Hawaii. He was still pushing two hundred fifty pounds, still at HMS, and their last vacation was to exotic Omaha.
Thirty-eight days was a good run, he told himself, dialing.
After the second ring, a sleepy woman’s voice said, “Hello.”
“Yeah, Don Pike there?” Whitey asked, then added as a courtesy, “It’s school-related.”
He listened to the woman call out “Donald” to her husband in another room. Whitey shook his head. Donald…
“Yello.” Pike’s tone sounded militarily crisp.
“Whitey,” he identified himself. “Got a broken window on the main door here. Could be somebody broke in last night.” He could picture Pike’s shoulders slump and his lip curl, a bad Elvis imitation that only a pufferfish could find endearing. Pike was only halfway through his first year as assistant principal, and Whitey didn’t think he’d ever dealt with anything like this yet.
“Okay, hmm,” Pike said. “I guess the police should be called, yeah?”
“Sara likes to call them herself.” He paused a second for Pike to absorb that. “I guess I could do it, but since you’re in charge today, I thought maybe—”
“I’ll do it.”
Sucker.
“I’ll send them right out and be there ASAP.” Pike pronounced it as one word rather than four letters. “Over and out.”
Now it was Whitey’s turn to slump. “Yeah, over and out, Donald.”
* * *
The sucker, as Whitey called him, went to Mr. Saddler’s room during sixth period. He carried a coffee mug with the Department of the Army seal in one hand, his radio in the other. Don Pike had been out of the Army for twenty years but still walked with parade-ground stiffness at work. His hair was brown, not quite shaved, but close. He’d filled out a decent paunch in civilian life.
He stopped in the doorway. The students sat up, looked at the TV, appearing dutiful and inconspicuous while keeping a peripheral view of Mr. Pike. He soaked up the attention, knowing that in the mind of the class, his mere presence meant somebody was in trouble. He might as well have come dressed in fatigues, brandishing an assault rifle.
Then a Tyrannosaurus roared, and Lieutenant Pike flinched. Coffee splashed his shirt. The class erupted. A boy in the back row said, “Smooth.” Someone else said, “It’s just a movie, it can’t hurt you,” which brought another torrent of laughter from the kids.
Without his shades nothing could shield the menace in his eyes. He pointed the radio antenna like a weapon. It didn’t take him long to recover. He puffed himself up to fill the doorframe and glared.
“Glad you found that funny,” he said to no one in particular. “You can tell everyone in detention how funny it was.”
The threat silenced the laughter but couldn’t undo the damage. None of the students could look at each other for fear of cracking up. They covered their mouths to hide their still-beaming grins. They shrank away as he walked around. Alan got up from Saddler’s desk and met him at the back of the room.
“What are you doing tonight around five?” Pike whispered.
“Why do you ask?”
Pike set his coffee mug down on the back counter and checked the stains on his sleeve in the window light. “We got a three-on-three basketball game every week. After work, before dinner, just guys from the building.”
This surprised Alan. His contact with Harrington staff had been limited so far, but the impression he’d formed was that they mostly felt the same animosity toward each other that Whitey felt toward Pike. A weekly basketball game rang contrary to his image of an antisocial faculty.
“Bill Saddler usually plays with us but he’s sick. There aren’t many guys in the building to begin with. And some of them irritate the hell out of me. So if you want we’ll let you in tonight.”
“Wow. You really know how to flatter a guy, Colonel.”
“You’ll do it?”
“Five o’clock?”
“Affirmative.”
Pike glared at the class one final time from the doorway and then disappeared down the hall. Alan snatched the remote and pressed PAUSE just as a T-Rex was pounding the shit out of an Explorer filled with whiny kids.
“You all get extra credit,” Alan announced, “if you tell your friends about Mister Pike getting scared by the movie.”
* * *
The three-on-three faculty game was a Harrington tradition going back five whole years. Don Pike inherited the game from the assistant principal before him, who inherited it from the assistant principal before him, who played one game before a botched back surgery forced him off the court and into early retirement. As with school security, family vacations, and church attendance, Pike treated the basketball game with a seriousness bordering on zeal. He scheduled which night of the week the guys played, what kind of attire players were supposed to wear, and how long they could be in the gym before the night custodian needed to sweep. He had been coordinating with the high school to arrange a real game sometime that spring.
Filling the other five slots with men forced Pike to scrape the pool of all but two teachers: Tom Guffey, the boys P.E. teacher, currently remanded to a wheelchair; and Ken Bachman, who was never invited to any school functions ever. Those who made the cut were Martin Lorenzo, the special ed. teacher and co-captain; John Qin, one of the guidance counselors; Scott Kapelski, the computer teacher; Bill Saddler, and Whitey.
When Alan showed up dressed in sweats, Lorenzo clapped his hands once and said, “All right, we got six. Let’s get started.”
Pike put his hand on the shoulder of a kid who was taller than half the guys, older than any middle school student, but a still a kid. “This is my son, Jason,” Pike said. “He’s subbing for Whitey. Misha called in sick again, so Whitey’s pulling another double-shift.”
Alan shook hands with everybody. Pike and Lorenzo flipped a coin for teams. Lorenzo won and picked Jason. Pike grimaced and picked Kapelski. Lorenzo picked Qin. Alan defaulted to Pike’s team.
He lined up opposite John Qin, who asked if he played ball much. “Not since I was eighteen,” Alan admitted.
“What was that, two weeks ago?” Qin asked, laughing a bit heartier than perhaps the joke warranted.
Alan got a basketball hoop for his eleventh birthday. It went above the garage door. He spent hours shooting hoops with his mom after dinner. Kelly Raff played HORSE while she grilled her son about all he’d learned in school.
“What’d you do in Science?” she would ask.
“Anatomy of plant cells,” Alan would answer.
“Plant cells, huh?” She eyed the hoop. Her eyebrows tended to arch above the bridge of her nose, making her look apprehensive all the time. “What’s the difference between mitochondria and chloroplasts?”
Alan would scratch his chin, even though it would take three more years before he could grow hair on that spot. “They’re spelled differently,” he said. That caused Kelly to laugh and invariably miss her hook shot. “You have H-O,” Alan said, snickering.
“Boy, I’ll make you my ho,” Kelly threatened with a smile, “if you don’t tell me what mitochondria does.”
Alan explained what every part of the plant cell did. Then how animal cells were different. Then, as he got older, he would tell her about the Bay of Pigs, and how to plot parabolas on a coordinate grid. Later on he’d quote Macbeth and Streetcar, all on the driveway in front of their house. His jump shot improved with his knowledge of classical literature and pop-culture. Long after Alan had better things to do with his nights, he maintained a regular HORSE/study session with Mom. They retired when he left for college.
The three-on-three games were played to fifty points. Alan’s team won 50 to 29. Pike, who scored only eight points, would brag all week about how his team absolutely crushed Lorenzo’s.
The Harrington Globetrotters filed out quickly by six thirty, going home to dinner with their families. The only staff that typically worked after dark was the principal, who wasn’t around, and the night custodians.
Alan stopped at the boys’ bathroom before heading out. Even knowing how thoroughly Whitey and his crew worked, there was a certain smell to school bathrooms that never went away. Girls’ bathrooms smelled worse, Alan decided when he was fourteen. He and Tracy Beck had snuck into a girl’s stall to make out. The smell of used sanitary pads wafting up from the receptacles was too distracting.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I like you a lot, but right now I’d rather flunk a math quiz than stay in here.” Tracy Beck didn’t speak to him after that. On the other hand, he got a B on the quiz.
Above the urinal, one of Harrington’s prestigious alums had scrawled something in marker. It had been scrubbed over many times, but the letters were still dark enough to read:
KIMBALL HAS BIG TITS
Sloppy penmanship aside, Alan applauded the graffiti’s content. It reassured him that even while literacy levels plummeted in public schools, the kids at Harrington could still recognize quality bosom in the fairer sex.
Coming out of the bathroom, he spied Whitey walking through the main office, carrying a closed, unmarked cardboard box under his arm. Alan heard a thump from inside the box, but the custodian wore his iPod earbuds and didn’t seem to notice the noise or Alan coming up behind him. Whitey slipped into Pike’s office and shut the door. Alan heard what sounded like Whitey shaking something in the box. He heard Whitey say, “Smelly bastard,” and then Whitey came out with the box, now open and empty. Breathing heavily, he pulled the earbuds out and asked, “What the hell are you still doing here?”
“Basketball,” Alan said.
Whitey stood straight and fingered the brim of a black ball cap with a red Chinese character. He had stolen it from John Qin’s office after the counselor asked him not to refer to students in the hot lunch line as tubbies. Whitey tried to translate the character into English. Depending on which website he trusted, it meant “indomitable spirit” or “itchy nipple”.
Alan was less interested in the hat than the box. “What’s going on?”
Whitey said, “Nothing. What did you hear?”
“Nothing.”
After two interminable seconds of scrutiny, Whitey said, “Anyways,” and locked the office. He carried the box into the hall, broke it down, flattened it, folded it and stuffed it in a big, rolling garbage can. “So he roped you into taking my place, huh?”
“His son actually took your spot.” They wheeled the garbage can down the hall, and Alan found himself sliding into Whitey’s routine. They each grabbed a trash basket from a classroom and dumped it into the big can.
“That boy’s been calling my youngest,” Whitey said. “They both hang out in the same circle of friends, and I guess they’re already talking about prom coming up and… shit.” He stopped pushing the can, tipped his hat back and wiped sweat off his forehead. “Fathers of daughters shouldn’t be allowed to own firearms. The temptation to use ‘em can be too strong some days.”
Working together they sped through the typical night custodian rounds. Whitey brought Alan down to his office. “Should I take my shoes off before I enter?” Alan asked from the threshold of Whitey’s sanctum. Whitey smiled and waved him in while verifying that nothing had been stolen from his personal toolbox. Alan fed the pufferfish and Whitey gave him a breakdown of his morning up to the point where Pike asked him to sweep up the broken glass and Whitey responded by telling Pike where he kept the broom and where he could stick it when he was done.
“You and Pike don’t ever spend the weekend fishing together, do you?” Alan asked.
Whitey snorted in response. “Probably drown him.”
“Why the bad blood?”
“Some guys, you know, they just rub you the wrong way,” Whitey said, pulling his jacket on and grabbing his toolbox.
They headed up the stairs. Whitey flipped light switches. Alan asked, “Do you know what begot the feud between the Montagues and Capulets?”
“No,” Whitey said, blinking.
“Yeah, neither did they.”
Whitey reached his arm out and said, “Listen,” like he was taking Alan into strict confidence, even though they were alone in the dark hallway. “I’ve worked with five ass princes, and they’re all the same.”
“Ass princes?”
“Assistant principals.”
“That’s clever.”
“Thanks. I also call them asshats and fucksticks.”
“Less clever,” Alan said. “Yet you play ball with him every week.”
“And every week I try to throw an elbow in his guts.”
They walked out to the cold night air. The maintenance guys had shaped a piece of plywood over the broken window. It looked ridiculous, but it functioned. A few steps out the door, Whitey stopped and said, “Ah, damnit!”
“What’s wrong?” Alan asked, but Whitey didn’t answer. He dropped the box and patted his jacket pockets. Perspiration froze on Alan’s skin as the seconds ticked by. At last Whitey grunted, as if from the weight of a great decision, and walked back toward the school, still carrying his toolbox.
“What’s up?” Alan asked.
“Forgot something,” he said.
“What?”
“My keys. Forgot my keys downstairs.”
Whitey stopped in front of the door and set his toolbox down on the pavement. He opened it and withdrew a heavy-looking claw hammer from its recesses. Without looking back at Alan, he said, “You know those maintenance guys? Bunch of fucking assholes, anyway.”
The first strike that fractured the plywood sounded like bursting bubble wrap. The second punched a hole clean through and ripped it off the door.
Even at a distance, Alan lurched back, as though the splinters of wood shooting into the lobby might blow back like artillery onto the parking lot. Whitey reached through the gaping hole and opened the door.
He smiled. “Damn teenagers, right?”
The smile didn’t say just-messing-with-you; it said we’re-all-mad-in-here.
Chloe Rounds, a junior at Lowden High School and Harrington survivor, stood at the cash register, nodding along to a trip-hop tune playing in her head. She started working at the supermarket after school, learning the cash register, picking up store lingo, employee gossip, and dodging the manager who scowled at her nose ring and short, spiky hair. After two weeks, Chloe knew the routine well enough to get stoned before work.
On the way home, Alan stopped for a gallon of milk, a box of thank you cards, and a ten-pack of Trojan condoms. Chloe blushed when she ran the condoms over the price scanner. In spite of her encyclopedic knowledge of cannabis and its properties, she had only seen one real live penis, that belonging to her younger cousin and viewed quite by accident when she was eleven. She still catalogued male genitalia under the mental heading: Thingies. Just touching the box for a second—the crisp, colorful box with its bold lettering and suggestive imagery, the scandalous cache of prophylactic weapons, the fabled Ark of Thingy Covers—her capillaries compressed, turning her face as bright red as the apron her dickhead manager made everyone wear.
“Is that the only box you sell?”
“Excuse me?” Chloe asked her feet.
“The cards.” Alan pointed to the package of thank you cards. “There’s twenty in the pack. I wondered if you sold any with less.”
“Oh,” Chloe exclaimed, chancing eye contract. “Um, I don’t know. Probably whatever you see back there is what we sell.”
Alan scratched the back of his head. “I hoped you sold ten-packs. See, I really only need one thank you per condom.”
Chloe reached for a coherent phrase, lost it, ended up giggling and looking away.
“Forget it.” Alan ended the matter by pulling some bills out of his wallet. “I’m sure some will need more thanks than others, anyway.”
He jumped in the Civic and tilted the rearview to watch Chloe through the supermarket window. She called another cashier to her counter. She pointed to Alan’s car. She recapped what he’d told her.
Whitey could have his music; for Alan, inner peace came from awkward encounters with store clerks. Nothing thrilled him more than a cashier’s uncomfortable reaction to a box of little rubber raincoats. Not sex, not even sex with a new partner when the first couple times felt like an engrossing mystery that he had to see again to spot the clues along the way. Not even a bowl of Thai stir-fry from the noodle place downtown. Alan’s true passion was for muddying the sexually repressed waters. Many times he’d gone out of his way to induce anxiety in hapless clerks.
But the best response, the most fruitful and lasting that surpassed any other response to his misadventures in consumerism, hadn’t involved the purchase of condoms. It was eleven months earlier, March during his penultimate semester at Corey University in Lowden. He went to a florist at the campus mall, the only floral shop he had ever been inside, a place called Good Scents.
He regretted not wearing sunglasses. There were more kaleidoscopic bursts of color in the shop’s foyer than a discotheque. It smelled how he imagined the rainforest smelled, that conspicuously all-natural smell of a hundred different flowers in various states of bloom. Here was a corner of potted greens, big and small. Here was a pyramidal arrangement of tropical fauna and a recording of ambient waterfall sounds. Here was a wall lined with refrigerator units and prefab bouquets. Towards the back was a counter with glass cases of orchids running half the length of the store. Behind the counter were tables covered with coal black dirt and empty pots and vases and flowers whose stems had been clipped short, and on one of the tables was a stereo playing the UB40 & Chrissie Hynde cover of “I Got You Babe.”
Here was Amber Owens working at the table, potting pink tulips, singing, swaying to the music. Loose strands of hair slipped out of her tail. She brushed them from her eyes and kept moving to the reggae beat. She set the potted flowers down and reached for the pruning scissors. That’s when she noticed him. He’d been standing at the counter watching her for a full minute.
“Oh, hi,” she said. “Be with you in a sec.” She pulled off a pair of dirty gloves, tucked her hair back and walked over to the counter. If she was embarrassed at being watched, it didn’t show. Performance was in her nature; she encouraged voyeurs, or she ignored them, never shunned them. “What can I help you with?”
Alan leaned on the counter. It was impossible to smell what fragrance she might have been wearing with all the competing aromas, but he tried. “Flowers, only I have no idea what kind to buy.”
Amber expected this. Three semesters working at Good Scents, combined with so many high school dances and bad dates reassured her that no man in the world knew how to shop for flowers. Red roses were the uncreative cupid’s security blanket, like a Hallmark card.
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” she said, putting on the courteous helper charm. “As long as you can tell me what the occasion is, I can find the flower.”
“Excellent,” Alan said. “Well. They’re for a girl. I need something that says romantic, a little daring, but also apologetic.”
“That’s a pretty specific order.”
“Now add all that,” he continued, “the romance, the daring, the apology, add that to an air of…playfulness.” He let those elements resonate a second, and asked, “What can you recommend for that?”
Amber smiled conspiratorially. “Depends what you’re sorry for.”
“I didn’t cheat or anything. I was misleading.”
“Hmm, well, let’s take a walk,” she said, coming around the counter. They toured the shop. She showed him just about everything they had except for the houseplants. Some Alan dismissed instantly and others he lingered on, asking her irrelevant questions. He said he liked the Stargazer lilies and some of the lilacs. Amber said they lacked the playfulness and daring that was crucial for his intended presentation. She began to worry that such an intriguing mission might be sabotaged by Alan’s indecisiveness. So, when her patience began to wane, she gave him an out: “There’s always a dozen tender roses.”
“That’s a little obvious, isn’t it?”
“Red roses, sure.” She gave him a bonus point for scoffing at the obvious. “You can be subtle and different with another color. Like orange, that’s my personal favorite. In Victorian symbolism red roses are for love, but orange is for passion.”
“Can’t argue with the Victorians,” Alan said, earning another point. He paid for the flowers, thanked her for all the help and left. He walked to the end of the block and turned around.
Alan knew who she was before he went to Good Scents. She was a dance major in her third year at Corey. He knew because he read it on a playbill the night before. He was taking Basic Acting that semester, an unchallenging time-filler for one as bereft of shame as Alan. The instructor required him to see the department’s stage performance of Agamemnon, a show Alan would have seen anyway because he supported regicide and the Arts, and because this production featured scantily clad dancers as the chorus. Amber played the chorus leader. Her wardrobe consisted of a scarlet bikini and frayed strips of leather tied around her arms, legs, and forehead. Her hair, done up so big it put Bon Jovi groupies to shame. After the show, Alan devoted an hour to stalking. She never came out to the plaza, so he questioned everyone in the cast until “Cassandra” told him Amber worked part time at the Ped Mall flower shop.
He reentered Good Scents, bouquet in hand.
“Forget something?” she asked.
He stepped up to the counter and presented her with a dozen orange roses.
“I’m Alan. I’d like to buy you dinner.”
Like Chloe Rounds at the sight of a box of Trojans, Amber’s eyes went wide. Her Black Irish cheeks lit up as bright as anything Good Scents had in stock. “Wow,” was all she said for a few seconds. She accepted the flowers, even gave them a whiff as if she didn’t remember exactly how they smelled.
She cleared her throat and asked, “So, Alan: is Romantic your last name?”
“Legally no, but I put Mister Romantic on my business cards.”
“Nice,” she laughed. She turned the flowers over in her hands, staring at the counter. Then she aimed a skeptical look at Alan. “You know, this type of bouquet says romantic and daring, but also apologetic. What are you sorry for?”
“For making you think there was anybody else.”
* * *
Home for Alan was a first-floor apartment in a redbrick sandwiched between two churches, one Catholic, one Methodist. Across the street was the university’s Biology building. His street was the border of college campus and residential Lowden, his block the fault line of science and religion, his building the demarcation of good works and faith alone. He called it Temple for a while, then Mecca. Amber disapproved. Alan started calling it the Rift.
It was home in as much as he slept and ate there. Alan liked to think of it as a halfway house—halfway between his last place and the next one. Never mind his name on the lease; as soon as Amber moved in last August, it was hers. The self-deception let Alan fancy himself a transient, having no claims on his time or person, capable of up-and-leaving at whim, like the young, rebel hero of a Springsteen song.
A car on the street belonged to Amber’s best friend. He entered the apartment expecting company; the milk he carried, the condoms and cards he stuffed in his sweatshirt. Amber shouted, “Where have you been?” from the kitchenette. She tapped a box of spaghetti against her thigh, waiting for an answer.
Tapping the refrigerator just as impatiently was Emily Scott. She was, indeed, Amber’s nearest, dearest friend. They were often mistaken for sisters despite sharing no common DNA. Emily, only because she was taller, was rightly guessed the older. Her husband Ramses watched ESPN from the couch. Ramses didn’t mute the TV or turn around when Alan came in, just waved and said, “What’s good?”
The women eyed Alan from the kitchen, still waiting for an explanation.
“Where were you?” Amber repeated. She took the milk out of his hand, and passed it to Emily like a relay baton. “We’ve been waiting for you and we’re starving.”
“I left a note,” Alan said.
“What—this?” Amber picked up the post-it note he had left when he came home to change for the basketball game. “This says ‘went out.’ What does that mean? I didn’t know where you were or when you’d be home.”
“I didn’t either,” Alan admitted.
“Where were you? You’re all sweaty. Were you working out?”
“Basketball.”
“This is why you need a cell phone,” Emily chimed in from the kitchenette, and Amber punctuated her friend’s idea with, “Exactly.”
Alan, who had still been in the doorway, took the moment to fully enter the apartment and close the door behind him. “I don’t call people that often.”
“Other people can call you is the point,” Amber said. She returned to the kitchen with Emily. To end a conversation, she didn’t bother with anything Socratic; she just left the room, a debate strategy she picked up from her parents.
Alan set keys on the end table by the couch. “What’s up, Ramses?”
“S’up.”
Ramses Scott was Emily’s husband of two years. His parents emigrated from Sudan when his mother got pregnant. Ramses spent his first twelve years on the streets of Baltimore and the next twelve in rural Iowa. The result was a beautiful farm boy with Midwestern work ethic and gangsta vocabulary.
Still watching the TV, Ramses asked, “Who’d you ball with?”
“Some guys at the school.”
Alan viewed his social peers with the same clinical detachment he felt for his apartment: fleeting. He maintained few friendships. When he had a girlfriend, her friends became his friends. When the girlfriend went away, so went the friends. For now, for as long as Amber was around, Ramses was his best friend.
In the bedroom, Alan stripped off his sweaty clothes for a quick shower. Pencil shavings from the trashcans clung to the sweat on his arms and legs. He dropped the thank you cards on the nightstand. He took the condoms to his dresser and opened the bottom drawer. Looking back were hundreds—literally hundreds—of condoms, unused, in wrappers and packages of all different styles. Three years earlier, for no more particular reason than his amusement at freaking out virgin cashiers, Alan made the conscious decision to buy protection whenever he went to the store.
The first time Amber got a look at his stockpile she tried to escape through the window. After convincing her not to call 911, Alan explained that he wasn’t a sexual compulsive or even a pervert as far as he knew. He told her about the cashiers, about the priceless blend of stupefaction and dread on their faces whenever he walked up to the counter with chocolate syrup and a box of condoms. Or peanut butter, bananas and condoms. The cashiers’ faces were worth the cost of a drawer full of condoms that might never be used.
“I guess you could call me a collector,” he said.
Amber wouldn’t sleep with him for a month.
There were a lot of great things about the Rift, but water pressure wasn’t one of them. After ten minutes in the shower, he had accomplished as much standing beneath Andre the Giant and asking the big guy to drool on his head. The shower was actually an old, claw-footed bathtub with a showerhead and curtains mounted on wooden two-by-fours. Before Amber moved in, before they got lazy, they used to make love in the tub. By then she’d gotten over the shock of his prophylactic surplus.
“It’s still insane,” she told him, “really insane, like demented.”
“It’s harmless,” he tried to explain. “Some people buy a pack of cigarettes every time they shop; that actually kills people. So I buy condoms. At least they’re helpful.”
“Insane,” she said, but she never asked him to get rid of them.
By the time Alan dried off he could smell oregano and marinara sauce. Amber and Emily were laughing at something Ramses said when Alan joined them. They pulled couches around the dinner/coffee table. The ladies drank Bordeaux, the guys Heineken.
Amber introduced him to the Scotts on their third date. She monopolized the conversation and didn’t do a great job of including her new boyfriend. She told stories out of context, with no roadmap for Alan. Three times she referenced sans context a mysterious Tommy that made Emily snicker for reasons unknown. Alan had been on dates like this before, always last dates. In the past, he once pretended to fall asleep until his date noticed. Another time he pretended to cough something repulsive into his napkin, asked the girl to hold it for him, and then left the restaurant. He could have said or done so many things to forcibly immerse himself in the conversation with Emily and Ramses, but at that point in the relationship, he hadn’t seen Amber naked yet, and that was important to him. So he waited and half an hour into dinner Amber had gotten to talking about letters in their names and said, “Amber, Alan and Emily—Ramses, you’re the only one of us whose name doesn’t begin with a vowel.”
Unlikely to get a better opening, Alan said, “He’s also the only one of us who’s black.”
Amber dropped her fork, voicing her shock with a metallic clang. Emily’s eyes bounced from Alan to her husband and back. Ramses leaned back and questioned Alan without words. Whatever Alan did—his non-threatening posture, his bored expression with the faintest trace of a just-messing-with-you smirk—was enough for Ramses. Across the table they reached an unspoken understanding that the joke was on Amber.
“Why would you say that?” she asked.
“No, it’s true,” Ramses admitted humbly.
“Your hair is curlier too,” Alan added.
“Natural,” Ramses said.
Emily started laughing. Amber was less amused and asked them to shut up.
“This is fun,” Alan said, ignoring Amber’s request. “Let’s come up with some more ways you’re different from us.”
“Let’s not,” Amber said.
“I bet you can run really fast from the cops, can’t you?” Alan said. Ramses had to cover his face.
“Stop it,” Amber said.
“You started it.”
Amber looked around the restaurant. Between dropping her fork and yelling at her date, she’d made something of a spectacle. She picked up her fork and set it back on the table. Alan smirked. Amber blinked. Then she started laughing.
That date had picked up for everybody, unlike tonight’s dinner. Despite the informal setting of a spaghetti dinner on a futon and loveseat, Alan felt more like a host for foreign ambassadors. Amber recapped everything they had said and done for two weeks, putting a glossy coat on mundane events and spinning their fights into whimsical banter. Alan said “Yeah” and “That’s right” a lot, while Amber tried to sell their friends on the myth that she was happier than ever. Ramses looked unconvinced. Emily smiled like a dutiful friend, laughing when she was supposed to. But her eyes rarely showed any affection for Alan. Amber wasn’t dumb enough to think the Scotts were buying into her charade, but she’d committed herself to a role for the night and wouldn’t break character. As graduate students in the Theater department, Ramses and Emily would respect her dedication.
After dinner and the dishes, Alan cinched up the garbage bag. Emily asked Ramses to get her cigarettes from the car. The dumpster was in the alley beside the Methodist parking lot. Alan heaved the trash bag while Ramses retrieved the pack of cigarettes. They lit up and started pacing the alley to stay warm. Alan never smoked except when someone gave him a cigarette. Bad influences, he told himself, another reason to keep friendships temporary.
“What’s up?” Ramses asked.
“Your wife doesn’t like me anymore.”
“You know her dad died, like, couple years ago.”
“She blames me for that?”
“No,” Ramses said. “When he died, it crushed her, man. The girl didn’t talk for days. She stopped eating. You know, I checked her into the hospital for dehydration that’s how much she was crying.”
“I never knew that,” Alan said.
“Truth.” He puffed. “Your mom died a couple months ago.”
“That I knew.”
“We ain’t seen you crying. You act like you don’t fucking care.”
“This is why she’s pissed at me? I can give her better reasons, valid reasons to dislike me. She’s mad because my grief isn’t as melodramatic as hers?”
“I ain’t seen you grieve at all.”
“How many times have you seen me, what, four times since she died? I didn’t realize I was supposed to bawl my eyes out. I thought it might have spoiled the party.”
Ramses stopped. They had walked down the alley and back to the dumpster.
“Don’t you think Amber tells us shit? She didn’t even know your mom was sick. You never told your girl your mom had cancer ‘til you had to go to the funeral. That’s cruel. Yeah, that’s why Emily’s pissed. Amber too. ‘Cause you been together for nearly a year and she don’t know about your life. You treat her like a roommate you get to fuck whenever you want. And hey, I understand how good that sounds, believe me, but you can’t deny it’s cruel.”
Alan took a long drag off the cigarette and held it for a while before he exhaled. He started walking again. Ramses fell into step with him.
“You know why she’s really mad?” Alan asked. “Because she never got to know me until something forced her to. Mom dies, then suddenly Amber takes interest in my personal life, and guess what? She doesn’t like it much.” He took a last puff and flicked the cigarette butt twenty feet through the air into a snow bank. “I’m a bad investment. That’s why she’s mad.”
They had circled back to the apartment. Ramses stopped in the doorway just as it was beginning to snow. “You gonna leave it like this?” he asked.
“Until she leaves.”
“Why don’t you tell her you want out?”
“And break my streak?”
“What streak?”
“I’ve never broken up with a girl before.”
“What?”
“I always let the girl dump me when the time comes,” Alan said.
“What if she don’t say goodbye to this, whatever, charade, will you do it?”
Alan shrugged. “We’ll see how things go. But she wasted a year. She really should be the one to throw me out. I think it would be cathartic for her.”
Alan made harsh, guttural noises picking up the phone. No linguist worth his salt would describe the sound coming through the receiver as actual words. Surely, the caller must have thought she misdialed a psychiatric hospital, where a lobotomized, Tourette’s afflicted patient answered the phone pretending to be a Sloppy Joe given sentience and the vocal chords needed to wax on about its own doomed existence. The most learned experts in phonetics and phonology, the kind who earn their living translating garbled recordings for the NSA, might have hazarded a guess that Alan’s noise was some loose approximation of “Hello.”