Q: What do boys want more — sex or love?
A: Most boys would probably answer “sex,” but that is only because they never get any. For the real answer, go google the word sex. You will get a couple billion hits. Now google the word love. You will get four times as many.
— from What Boys Want
Principal Graves made me sit in front of his desk while he worked on a Rubik’s Cube. The Terminator stood silently behind me with her arms crossed over her formidable bosom. In case I made a break for it, I guess.
I spent the next minute or so watching Graves fumble with the cube while I pondered the difference between “bosom” and “boobs.” Maybe they were “boobs” when you could tell there were two of them, and a “bosom” when the two boobs grew together to form a single shelflike protuberance.
Graves had the cube almost solved, but he was missing a key move. I could hear faint grunts and exhalations coming from his tightly closed mouth. Finally, he tossed the cube on his desk.
“Confiscated from one of our sophomores,” he said. “It relaxes me.”
He did not look relaxed.
“Do you want me to show you?” I said, indicating the cube. I could have solved it in five or six twists.
“No, I do not,” he said.
Bob Glaus had once compared Principal Graves with Rick Moranis — the guy who shrunk his kids in that old movie — because they both wore the same kind of glasses. I thought he looked more like a younger, beardless Santa Claus: heavy, balding, and jolly on the surface. But there was no jolliness that day.
He leaned forward as far as he could, desktop digging into his belly, and stabbed a pudgy finger at me.
“Let’s cut to the chase, Merchant. And if the words freedom of speech emerge from your mouth even one time, I will have you permanently and irrevocably expelled from Wellstone High. Do you understand me?”
He had made the first move, and what a move it was! My entire defense, undermined with one sentence. They must teach that in principal school.
“This,” he said, holding a crumpled orange flyer in his fist, “is unacceptable. This school is not your little marketing laboratory. And this book you are attempting to promote is decidedly not a part of our curriculum.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but Graves held up a hand. “I do not know how or when you stuffed this junk mail into the school lockers. Frankly, I do not want to know. What I do want from you is your promise to cease and desist from selling your book on campus or during school-related events. You will not speak of the book, you will not bring a copy onto school property, and you will not distribute any more flyers or other promotional materials.”
He stopped for breath.
I tried to speak again, but he cut me off.
“I am disappointed in you, Adam.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, because when speaking to angry adults, that’s the best way to start out. “Maybe selling the book in school wasn’t such a good idea” — actually, I still thought it was a great idea — “but I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Really.” Graves was giving me a cocked eyebrow, this-is-gonna-be-good look. “And why did you think that?”
“Because the book is partly for my creative writing class. Ms. Ling is giving me extra credit. Also, I was just following your example.”
He sat back and raised both eyebrows, a very comical look on Graves — there was about three inches of brow between his eyebrows and the tops of his glasses.
“Remember that note you left in everybody’s locker the first day of school?” I said. “I just thought that was a really good idea.”
I noticed that Graves was getting a little red in the neck. That should have clued me to shut up, but for some reason I kept talking.
“I mean, it’s very efficient if you think about it, and cheaper than TV advertising. And since I got the idea from you, I thought —”
“Merchant! Shut up!”
I shut up. Graves’s face had turned a scary shade of pink, and suddenly I remembered what Blair had said.
Graves is gonna pop a vessel.
I lined up Dennis and Emily for a Wednesday night tutoring session, and I managed to avoid running into Mrs. Crowe. I should have left school at the end of the day feeling pretty good, but instead I felt extremely schlumpish. Lita Wold, teenage schlump.
What is a schlump, anyway? When I got home I typed it into my dictionary program and came up with “slow, slovenly, or inept person.” That didn’t quite fit. “Deprived” would be more accurate. Deprived of what? Well, all my friends had something exciting going on. Emily and Dennis were in love (with different people, but still …), Adam was doing his book thing, my dad was still in LA, my mother was sunk so deep into her novel she probably thought I was a wraith, and I was … what? All I had was my stupid blog and my utter mortification over the incident with Mr. Crowe.
Time for another Anger Walk. Or Deprivation Walk, which was pretty much the same thing. I put on my hoodie and took off, but as soon as I hit the sidewalk I realized I had a problem. I really did not want to deal with the dropout car jockey again, and it pissed me off that because of him I had to turn left, not right. I stood on the sidewalk fuming. I hate having my options limited. I pushed out my jaw (what my mother calls my stubborn two-year-old look) and decided I’d walk wherever I wanted to walk.
I turned right. But when I got to Holden Avenue there were no legs blocking the sidewalk. Instead of a gray car, the short driveway was filled with the cab end of a semi.
I slowed down as I walked past the house. Had Brett traded in his “classic” car for a truck? I walked around the truck and looked into the open garage. It was typical guy space, orderly and filthy all at the same time. A radio propped on a workbench was playing country-western music. I noticed several books piled on one end of the bench. Books draw me like a magnet. I had to see what they were. I stepped into the garage, close enough to read some of the titles: The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Huckleberry Finn — all older classics, and not what I expected to find on a workbench.
“Something I can do for you, son?”
I whirled around. An older man, probably in his forties, stood in front of the truck’s huge grille, wiping his oily hands with a blue cloth. He had long, thinning, reddish hair gathered into a pathetic ponytail.
“Oh, hey, you’re a girl. One of Brett’s little sweeties, eh?”
Brett’s little sweeties?
“Not hardly,” I said. I started to move out of the garage, keeping as much space as possible between us, which wasn’t much. He kept watching me with this moronic grin. He didn’t strike me as particularly dangerous, but I didn’t like being in that garage with him standing in the doorway. I hoped he wasn’t Brett’s dad.
He said, “If you aren’t a friend of Brett’s, then what are you doing in here?”
“I know Brett,” I said. “That doesn’t make me his sweetie.”
The man threw back his head and roared. When he had finished laughing he said, “Tough little cookie, aren’t you?” He ducked his head and peered beneath my hood. “Cute, too. What’s your name, honey?”
“Elizabeth Bennet,” I said, moving to get past him and out of the garage.
He made a quick move to his right, not enough to block me, but almost. I think he did it just to scare me. It did.
“Excuse me,” I said.
He swept his arm out and performed a mocking bow. I walked quickly past him staying as far from that arm as possible.
“Don’t be a stranger,” he called after me.
In a good news-bad news situation, I always like to start off with the good, because you never know when you’re going to get struck by a stray meteorite, so you should always enjoy the good things while you can. Also, if you put off the bad things long enough you might never have to deal with them.
That’s my theory, anyway.
The good news was that Graves’s head had not exploded — at least not physically — and I’d sold lots of copies of my book. Plus, I had a whole week ahead of me with nothing to do but finish writing it.
The bad news? Five-day suspension. My parents would not be happy. Mostly my folks were cool, but me getting kicked out of school would definitely heat them up. So I came up with a plan: I would spend the rest of the week with my laptop at the public library. They would never know I wasn’t at school, at least until Graves notified them. He had already called once and left a voice-mail message — fortunately, both my parents had been at work. I deleted it as soon as I got home. He would probably follow it up with an official letter, something like Your evil son has been banished. Sign here.
I could intercept the mail, but if he called them at work or on their cells, I’d be dead.
I called Lita to tell her what had happened.
Instead of “hello,” she answered by saying, “I hear you got kicked out for littering.”
“That’s what I called to tell you.”
“Three typos.”
“What?”
“You had three typos in your flyer.”
“Gimme a break. I’m dyslexic.”
“No, you’re not. You’re just lazy.”
This was not going well. I’d called looking for some sympathy.
“I thought you were done being mad at me.”
“I’m not mad.”
Which meant, of course, that she was. This called for a change of subject.
“How’s the Emily and Dennis project going?” I asked.
“Very well, no thanks to you.”
“Me? What did I do?”
“Nothing. Beep-beep!”
“That’s the sound of my battery running low.”
“Oh. It sounded like you saying ‘Beep-beep.’ I —”
She was gone. Had she hung up on me? I thought maybe she had. Oh well, I could call her tomorrow and apologize for whatever it was I’d done.
In the meantime, I had a book to write. I woke up my computer, opened Google, typed in the word boner, and got forty million hits.