I began to call myself insulting loser names shortly after I was sent to Sunrise Junior High. It was known as a tough school, full of kids with low potential and no plans for the future. Gary Pagoda had gone there until he failed three years in a row and dropped out. He had already been a veteran juvenile delinquent by seventh grade, and even he swore it was dangerous. He called it a school for the “criminally insane.” So I had figured it was like a prison filled with hardened convicts with swastikas tattooed onto their foreheads and homemade knives strapped inside their motorcycle boots. That was only a guess.
What really shocked me was when I found out how true my guess had been. After I had been at Sunrise for a few weeks I’d heard all about the school’s peculiar history. Before it was a school, Sunrise Junior High had been Sunrise State Detention Center. When Florida still had chain gangs working to pick up trash and cut weeds on the side of highways, the criminals had been housed in the same rooms where I now studied English, math, science, and wood shop.
This made a lot of sense when I looked at the school’s architecture. The double rows of twenty-foot-high chain-link fences were topped with rusty barbed wire that over the years had snagged a lot of plastic grocery bags. When the wind picked up, the bags snapped back and forth and sounded just like the tough girls smacking their gum as they lined up outside the phone booth. There were steel gates that led into the school, two in the front and two in the back. The stone towers sticking up at every corner had been guard shacks where trained snipers could pick off any escapees. Now one tower was used as a science and weather station, another as a “Time Out” zone for hyperactive bullies, one as the DARE office, and the other as headquarters for the Latin Club. I guessed they were the only club that got a tower because the few token smart kids needed to barricade themselves in from the illiterate Huns all day.
The more I poked around the school, the more evidence I found of the old prison. About every fifty feet down each corridor, there were swinging metal doors with bullet-proof glass panels. Broken security cameras mounted on steel poles were everywhere, inside and outside. There were thick bars over all the classroom windows. But the strangest thing about Sunrise was the wood and sheet-metal machine shop where prisoners had made institutional furniture, license plates, military dog tags, and other stuff no one else would make unless they were in prison. It was the size of a football stadium. This was why Sunrise was a magnet school for vocational training in shop. Kids—mostly guys—from all over Fort Lauderdale were bused to our school just to make benches, picture frames, jewelry boxes, letter openers, salad sets, bedside tables, baseball bats, and other stuff they sold in a little gift store next to the Department of Social Services office, which was next to the principal’s office.
There was only one way to escape from Sunrise aside from tunneling under the fences. You had to test your way out of the school. You had to prove you were smart enough to be sent to a magnet school for the arts or sciences, or a school with a college-preparatory curriculum. And so I had signed up for the tests, figuring I’d be transferred out of there in no time.
Mr. Ploof was the Guidance Counselor. One Monday, as arranged, I went into his small office, which had probably been a padded isolation cell. He had prepared a battery of tests for me.
“Are you ready to exercise your mental muscle?” he asked, and pointed to his own hydrocéphalie cranium, which was as hairless and white as the belly on a watermelon.
“I can’t wait,” I replied. “I’ve been thinking about this all night long.”
“Should have just got some sleep,” he remarked. “‘Cause you’re in for a long day.”
He started out by timing how fast I could stack a hundred small washers onto a thin metal rod. I didn’t even turn my brain on for that one. Instead, I daydreamed about my future. I figured in about a week I’d be in a school where the teachers actually helped students to write books. All day we’d read stacks of great novels and discuss them inside and out until we knew everything about how they were written. Then we’d write and rewrite our own books until we sent them off to be published.
Afterward Mr. Ploof gave me a tray of fifty assorted nuts and bolts and I had to fit the proper nuts to the proper bolts as quickly as possible. It was a breeze.
“Pretty good manual dexterity,” Mr. Ploof remarked, nodding as he jotted down some figures on a pad.
“I write a lot,” I said, stretching the truth. “Keeps the fingers limber. Besides, our dog can do this stuff.”
“Don’t go getting a swelled noggin,” he warned, as his monstrous head wobbled dangerously on his skinny neck. “The tests get harder.”
“Just bring it on,” I said, feeling supremely confident that I was soon going to have my ticket out of this loser school.
I did a test where I read a page of mixed-up information, then summarized it in the most logical order. That took only an ounce of common sense. Then I had a long list of sentences where I filled in the blanks about my feelings. That took me extra time to sort through because I always felt two or three ways about any one thing that happened to me.
After that test I was a bit run down and asked if I could take a break, stretch my legs, and eat a snack. I had a family-size Zero bar stashed in my locker.
“No,” he replied. I had begun to figure out that he was one of those people who stressed every word with a gesture. He said no while at the same time slowly rotating his head back and forth. A double no. Even if you didn’t understand English, you would get the universal sign language for no.
“You have to do this all in a row,” he explained. “Plus, you can’t be left alone. How can I tell you won’t cheat?” To illustrate that he had asked a question his hands darted out from his sides like a puzzled Egyptian hieroglyphic.
“How can I cheat?” I asked. “The questions are a secret. Besides, you can come with me.”
“Pull yourself together,” he said, and narrowed his eyes. “Part of this test is endurance.” He jutted out his chin, but his head began to tilt forward so he pulled it back. Then he removed the standard IQ test from its sealed envelope and placed it face-down in front of me. “Now I want you to concentrate,” he instructed, and tapped a finger against his temple. “Of everything you’ve done today, this is the most important. The IQ results will go on your permanent record and will be with you for the rest of your life.”
It was as if he was reading me my Miranda rights—you have the right to remain silent, the right to call an attorney, the right to …
He removed a stopwatch from his pocket. “On your mark. Get set.” He pressed the top button. “Go!” he shouted, and pointed toward an imaginary finish line.
I was so revved up I put too much pressure on my pencil and as I wrote down the first answer my point snapped. I desperately looked up at Mr. Ploof. “Can I start over?” I asked.
He frowned down at me. “No talking. Keep going!” he instructed.
I didn’t have a pencil sharpener so I began to gnaw at the wood around the lead, spitting out the pulp, until I exposed the blunt end. I felt even more like a white laboratory rat, but I pulled myself together and raced through the test. For something so important it didn’t seem too difficult or take very long even though I got off to a rough start. I found it more challenging when Mom asked me to sort the laundry into lights and darks and I had to decide where to put clothes that were mauve or salmon or chartreuse. But I never thought that sorting the laundry was an indication of my future potential.
When I lowered my pencil Mr. Ploof pressed another button on the stopwatch and wrote the time down on his pad.
“You can go now, but return next week for the results,” he said.
“Thanks,” I replied, picking at a few splinters in my lips. I dashed out the door and down the hall. I was starving, so I got my Zero bar from my locker and went into the boys’ toilet. There were a couple of scrawny guys in there smoking cigarettes and taking turns punching each other so hard in the chest that twin plumes of dragon smoke rolled out their noses. I swallowed my Zero bar too quickly and it got stuck in my throat.
A week later I was back in Mr. Ploof’s office.
“Sit down,” he said, and pointed to a ruggedly carved chair that was probably made by a former ax murderer. Then he patted the seat of his own matching chair so I wouldn’t misunderstand him. “Take a load off.”
“I’d rather stand,” I said. I was pretty nervous so I jumped to the point. “What about the test results? Can I go to another school?”
He sat down and sighed. “Sorry, kid,” he said, trying to sound cheerful as he opened my file. “You’re just normal. Average.”
“That can’t be,” I protested. “Just earlier this year I was better than average. In fact, I was superior.”
He rolled his eyes. “You may have peaked early,” he suggested. “It happens.” He spun my file around so I could read it for myself. “You didn’t show us any reason to send you up to the next level.”
I sat down. Typed out on a sheet of paper were my test results.
PHYSICAL DEXTERITY—AVERAGE
LOGIC SKILLS—AVERAGE
EMOTIONAL MATURITY—AVERAGE
IQ—LOW TO AVERAGE—85
“I don’t have a low IQ,” I said with my voice rising. “No way I’m this—”
He cut me off. “Be grateful it’s still in the average zone,” he stressed. “Believe me, I’ve seen a lot worse. If anything, this score means you should make something really spectacular in wood shop. Just so you know, before you pitch a fit and insult me, my IQ is also eighty-five.” He gave himself a little congratulatory pat on the back.
I was horrified. He was the pinnacle of what I might become. This couldn’t be true. It was a nightmare. I stood up and shuffled toward the door. I felt as though I had just received the worst possible sentence: Simpleton for Life Without Parole.
“Don’t take it so hard,” he advised, and waved at the air in front of his face. “It’s not like we’re going to send you to Siberia. Just join the crowd. Average guys like you and me are the majority. We’re the men that make the world go around. We work in the trenches, digging ditches, unclogging toilets, mowing lawns—you know, the jobs that nobody wants to do but that have to be done. Who do rich people call when they need help? Guys like you and me, that’s who.”
“But I want to be a writer,” I said quietly.
“Hey, a low IQ doesn’t stop you from writing. You can do phone messages. Grocery lists. Sweetheart tattoos. Graffiti. Heck, you can pass notes back and forth in class, can’t you?”
“But I want to write books,” I explained.
He scratched his hairless head. “That,” he replied, “could prove to be frustrating. Why defeat yourself by trying to become something you can’t?”
“But I can try,” I said. “Whatever happened to the idea that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again?”
“I guess nobody told you,” he said matter-of-factly. “That little ditty is for losers, for old dreamers like me,” and he pointed to his huge cranium, “who beat their head against the wall one too many times. Look, do yourself a favor. Pick something you can handle.”
“Like a broom?”
“Now you’re thinking,” he said with fresh enthusiasm. “Now you’re putting those brain cells to work.”
“Thanks,” I said in a whisper, and backed out of his office. I stumbled down to the boys’ toilet and splashed water on my face. I wished those guys were in there punching each other. I would have asked them to put me out of my misery like a horse with a broken leg.