The SATs are less than a week away, and as the last precious minutes tick by, I am increasingly panicked and on edge. Despite my endless hours of mental toil, my practice Verbal’s going not up but down, and all this abstinence from everything worth living for has me busting at my fraying seams. I’m chugging Red Bull like water and taking long cold showers to stay alert. But I know it’s all going to come down to Farkus.
He’s expensive. Like really, really expensive. Farkus commands an hourly rate a Wall Street lawyer would envy. Try $325 an hour. I’ve budgeted myself five hundred, which gives me just over ninety minutes. Lily Gunkel says that’s more than plenty, and her scores shot up over two hundred. After just one session with Farkus, Phil Chen’s went up almost three. The man, I’m assured by one and all, is a giant of the craft, a genius, a game changer. And you can’t argue with results. Even so, I’m apprehensive because I can never quite get the specifics about what exactly makes Farkus so fantastic.
I pace back and forth. It’s three after the top of the hour, and when you’re being charged by the minute, every minute matters. I peer outside through the blinds and spy this spanking-new cherry-red Porsche Boxster GTS—list price at least seventy large without the extras—whip up along the curb to my dingy garden apartment complex. A telephone pole’s blocking my view so I can’t see who gets out, but I can hear slow, ominous steps making their way across the courtyard and up the three flights of stairs. They seem to take forever. The suspense is killing me. I am in my own horror movie.
Finally, there’s a knock on my portal. I spring to it, swing open, and stare out. I see nothing because Farkus is about two feet tall. Not two feet literally, but he’s short. Five feet, maybe an inch or smidgeon more. Maybe.
“I am Farkus,” he snarls in a sinister East European accent I can’t quite place. The dude’s in his early twenties, big clunky glasses, prematurely bald, and wearing major bling. Gold chains, pinky rings, multiple hoops in his lobes. And he’s got on this dippy one-piece velour sweat-suit ensemble.
“What a dump.” He swaggers past me inside, making a great display of disgust. A geek on a power trip. Only in the bizarro subterranean subculture of SAT preparation could a runt like him be a stud. In normal circumstances, I could wipe the floor with his smug ass. But these aren’t normal circumstances, and I’m his bitch. He dusts the seat of a chair before he sits down. “Thought I was in the wrong place,” he says patronizingly. “Farkus is used to a much more select clientele.”
“My money’s good as anybody’s,” I say a little hotly, sitting down.
“Then fork it over, chump,” he instructs, crooking a tiny finger.
“Show me yours first,” I say, bridling.
“Oh, you don’t trust Farkus? You want to check out the Farkus bona fides?” Sneering, he unsnaps a briefcase and takes out a small rectangle of paper encased in a transparent sleeve, which he tosses casually on the coffee table. “Sure, no problemo.”
I pick up the sheet. It’s the official ETS printout of Farkus’s very own, personal SAT scores. And I can’t believe what I’m seeing. For I’m clutching the Holy Grail in my pitiful, trembling hands. Triple Eights. As in three eight hundreds. The fabled trifecta of perfection. I’m holding what I was previously convinced was only legend. Twenty-four hundred. For real. Farkus, diminutive and obnoxious as he is, knows the Game inside and out. It goes without saying I am convinced. I pay my wages of sin readily, even eagerly. I’m so blown away I would have paid him six times over. Only after Farkus takes a full minute thumbing back and forth through my hard-earned boodle like a bookie does he deign—verb, to condescend—to acknowledge my presence again.
We get right to it. First, he insists on a review of the basics. Four number-two pencils honed to a dagger point, battery-powered sharpener, smelling salts. Smelling salts? That’s encouraging.
“Know your calculator,” he lectures me, holding one up. “He can be your best friend or your worst enemy.”
“Extra batteries,” he proclaims. “Alkaline.”
At $5.42 a minute, I’m more than a little underwhelmed by the level of the instruction, but for the time being keep it to myself. Next he moves on to coping with test anxiety. We murmur together:
“It’s only a test! It’s only a test! I can do it! I can do it!”
Then he demonstrates a series of relaxation exercises you can do while you’re sitting.
“Squeeze those buttocks!” he orders from the seat next to me, swigging from, like, a gallon jug of Gatorade, offering me none. “Make ’em burn!”
Finally, after another four minutes or so of this, we move on to maintaining a competitive edge. He takes out a whiteboard. He scrawls the word “SEX” on it with a marker, then emphatically crosses it out.
“None! For at least seventy-two hours!”
It’s been weeks since I’ve had any so I’m way ahead of Farkus, on this score anyway, but I raise my hand. Even though I’m in a classroom of one, he won’t recognize me otherwise.
“Does that include—” I ask, curious.
“Especially that!” he thunders. “Chew gum! Go on long runs!”
At least a hundred bucks has gone by, and Napoleon Bonaparte here hasn’t told me anything I don’t already know. I can take no more.
“Hey, when do we get to the good stuff?”
He glowers at me. I haven’t raised my hand. I raise it.
“Look, this is all great information, but could you speed it up a little?”
“Wise guy, huh?” he snaps back at me. “Thinks he knows everything?”
“Actually,” I say, “I’m acutely aware of my limitations, which is why I’d like to move on to something more critical like Critical Reading, which I really suck at.”
But Farkus won’t be swayed. Farkus has got his method, and Farkus is going to stick to it no matter what, damn him.
“We’ve reached the question-and-answer period,” Farkus says. “You’re full of questions. Go ahead, smartass. Ask me anything.”
I really think we should be doing Syllogisms but decide to humor him. I raise my hand again.
“What about the Christmas Tree Pattern?”
The Christmas Tree Pattern, for those of you not into shadowy conspiracy theories, is the ultimate high school urban myth. I know it’s ridiculous, but there are these rumors floating around that the Educational Testing Service is some sort of diabolical, top-secret society like Google or the Shriners. Some people are all paranoid that standardized tests are just a nefarious plot to control the planet. Some people—not me, mind you—are convinced that the answers are in some sort of clandestine ETS code. A repeating pattern of letters that spell out some sick inside ETS joke or form some sort of esoteric ETS symbol. Totally implausible, right?
Farkus gives me a pained look.
“Last year, I heard it was the words to ‘Thong Song’ by Sisqo,” I chuckle hollowly, a bit ashamed to have asked such an asinine question.
“Last year, it was the chord progression to ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ by Iron Butterfly, schmuck,” he tartly informs me. “You want to get down to business, let’s get down to business.”
The next seventy-three-and-a-half minutes are the longest in my life.
I will forever quake with fear and horror at the terrible memory of number twenty-two of Section Four. I am eyeball deep in Passage-Based Reading, my greatest adversary, confronted by eight questions based on five paragraphs taken from a book on sleep research. I know, I know. Sleep research? Who comes up with these topics? It’s like the ETS designs them to induce a vegetative state.
Here was my question: Which of the following, if true, would effectively undermine the “simple definition”?
Well, first off, I have no friggin’ clue what the question is asking. There is no “simple definition” or simple anything in the dense jungle of verbiage I’ve just endured, plus I don’t understand what they mean by “undermine.” My ass is grass.
For the record, here are my choices:
All people sleep.
Some people require long periods of sleep.
Some people don’t require long periods of sleep.
Some people sleep only when they are tired.
Some people sleep even when they are not tired.
I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried. I mean, this is a real-life question. I stare, I cogitate. My five alternatives blur together. I blink to stay awake. All these mentions of sleep have made me just want to roll over and take a superlong nap.
The seconds tick relentlessly on Farkus’s upraised stopwatch.
“Not so smart now, are we, buddy boy?” he taunts.
“E?” I venture, going with what I know.
Farkus smiles. He has been waiting for this moment, waiting to pounce. He unsnaps his briefcase and takes out a thick eighteen-inch ruler, which he hefts in one hand. I regard it and him warily. There’s a certain gleam in his eyes and practice to his grip that unsettles me.
“Think,” he hisses. “It’s an easy one.”
Maybe it is for Mr. Twenty-Four Hundred, but not for mere mortals like Mr. Nineteen Eighty-Five and only if you add my best scores. I rescrutinize the text. After a period of deliberation, I make my choice.
“C,” I announce with conviction.
Next thing I know, my ears are ringing and I’m seeing stars. Farkus has whacked me upside the head with the ruler.
“Hey, you hit me!” I squawk. “It really hurts!”
He whacks me again, careful to aim at a place that won’t leave scars. The pain’s sharp and excruciating. For a little guy, he sure packs a mean ruler. I leap to my feet and scramble to the other side of the table. He stalks me.
“These are the SATs, sonny. When those columns of fill-in bubbles are staring you in the face, Mommy and Daddy can’t buy you out of this one!”
I don’t know which is more traumatic—the fact that a deranged pipsqueak is pursuing me with an eighteen-inch ruler or the concept that I am paying for it.
“THINK!!” he screams, red-faced, veins bulging.
He slashes. Utilizing my fencing expertise, I duck. I am in fear for my life. I am beyond terrified. This, I abruptly realize, is the secret behind Farkus’s success, the reason he rakes in the big bucks. Farkus is a paid assassin, hired to do what helicopter parents cannot bring themselves to do to their hothouse flower children. Namely, to knock some fucking sense into them.
“B!” I squeal like a stuck pig. “Some people require long periods of sleep!”
In an instant, calm is restored. Farkus sheathes his sword and sits back down.
“Always go for the paradox,” he says.
A paradox. Of course. It’s so obvious. I willingly, if tremulously, edge back to my seat. For suddenly, I have discovered logic in all things and am experiencing supreme clarity through the throbbing pain and stinging sensations. My focus, for the first time ever, is absolute and total.
For the rest of our short time together, the eighteen-incher remains within Farkus’s easy reach. Under threat of bodily harm, I breeze through whatever he throws at me—Sentence Structure, Sentence Completions, Passage-Based Reading time trials—rattling off correct answers like a well-oiled machine.
“Sweep is to broom as cut is to scissors. An atlas has many maps. A book has many pages!” I bark like a trained seal. Farkus has harnessed me, ridden me, broken my soul, crushed my fragile ego, obliterated all trace of former personality. I’m in his box. And I love it. If he wanted me to, I would roll over, I would lick his hand.
“WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ON SATURDAY?” my lord and master demands.
“KILL!” I scream. I am his. We are one.
“I’M NOT FEELING IT!” Farkus snarls.
“KILL! KILL! KILLLLLLLL!!!”
---
Like two seconds after Farkus departs, I drop like a hanged man, mentally, physically, and spiritually depleted. I beach like a whale, breathing in and out, waiting for the adrenaline, testosterone, and welts to subside. My hand flops limply down to the floor and I feel the corner of something poking out from beneath the couch. A book—a large one—of some kind. Curious, I lift it up. It’s a photo album, one I know Charlie usually keeps in a moldering box under the bed in his slum of a room. Guess he must have been looking through it. Anyway, it’s been years since I’ve seen it.
I crack open the worn cover that is barely attached to a tattered spine. I examine the fading pictures carefully mounted inside. I see a super-skinny Charlie with a full head of hair and long, ridiculous sideburns and his whole life ahead of him. I see him camping at the beach, skiing down slopes, hiking trails. A self-starter, a doer, a go-getter. I see him grinning ear to ear with a bunch of equally skinny, hairy pals in their graduation gowns in Harvard Yard, overflowing with supreme confidence and mountainous expectations. Harvard! Do you realize how fucking hard it is to get into Harvard? Try impossible, even back then. Maybe even harder back then, because back then they used to take a ton more legacies and the rich and connected from fancy boarding schools. The right sort of people, don’t you know. To get into Harvard from public school from here in north central Jersey, you had to be flat-out brilliant, to be extraordinary, a certified superstar. And Charlie had done it, incredible as it is to believe. But there it is in living color before me. Proof.
Then another new, dazzling figure enters the pictures. My mother, dark hair and blue eyes, just like me, but petite and delicate. They’d met when he was a senior and she was a sophomore at Simmons College, a small, kind of arty women’s school right next door to Harvard in Cambridge. She was a dancer of some sort, though obviously not too successful because whenever I look her up on the Web, nothing’s ever there. When I was a kid and would ask where she went, all Charlie would say was that she went crazy or had problems, or he’d fall back on the regular standby that he didn’t want to talk about it. So long ago, I pretty much stopped asking.
But here they are, mister and missus, together, radiantly happy. Tanned and fit, him in Bermuda shorts, her in a bikini, arm in arm, at the helm of a sailboat in the sunny tropics. In seedy Atlantic City, cheerfully brandishing their winnings—one thin dime. Bundled together, welcoming the New Year in Times Square, crushed together, kissing.
I conjure up a parallel existence for myself. One in which everything isn’t so dire or, better yet, dire at all. Nothing too grand or elaborate. Two stable, well-adjusted parents with actual concern for my welfare. A somewhat spacious house in a well-tended ’burb, new cars to drive at my will, vacations overseas. As the Beach Boys once sang, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”
Then I hear the rattle of a key in the lock. Charlie, home from what he calls a job. Hurriedly I shut the photo album, shove it back under the couch, click on the TV, and pretend to be chilling. He shuffles in, hunched over, shaking off the rain that must have just started. He’s wearing his beat-up old parka patched with duct tape on both elbows. Why doesn’t he get a new one? Even he can afford a new one.
He sees me looking at him. “What?” he asks. He’s his usual unshaven, sloppy, disheveled self. Unkempt, but not in a making-a-statement, deliberately slovenly, slacker kind of way, but rather in a ratty, unsanitary way, almost like a street person.
How did it—he—come to this? He—they both—had so much going for them. Beauty, brains, talent, each other. It’s the great mystery of my being. The Great Unaskable, the Probably Unanswerable.
“Crystal Palace,” Charlie says, heavily depositing a bag of greasy takeout on the counter. “I got some of that Kung Pow Chicken you like so much.”
“Kung Pao,” I correct a bit too testily. “I said Kung Pow once when I like three and you’ll never let me forget it.”
“It was cute.” He attempts a smile.
“Maybe to you, but not to me,” I snap back, repudiating his familiarity. “And no thanks, I’m trying to stay off the MSG.”
He doesn’t ask why, because he doesn’t care or doesn’t want to know or both. He just commences eating while standing, chopsticking right from the carton. No plates, sitting down, or token pleasantries, thank-you-very-much-please.
I stand, disgusted, deflated, and still a little wobbly from my bout with Farkus.
“My SATs are on Saturday,” I huffily inform him, although I don’t know why I’m bothering.
He stops chewing for a second but doesn’t look up.
“Huh,” he grunts, then resumes feeding.
No good luck or attaboy, let alone what can I do to help? But what did I expect?
---
By Saturday morning, I’m pumped up again, in fighting trim. So pumped up, in fact, that I barely slept Friday night. So when my alarm finally sounds at 5:45, I’m already wide-awake and wired. I perform my calisthenics, shower, force down a healthy breakfast, lay out my instruments of battle, all the while softly chanting my mantra.
“KILL! KILL! KILL!!!”
I don’t limber up with flashcards and I dispense with the practice tapes. At this point, it’s too late. If I’m not ready now, I never will be. For better or worse, my die is cast. On the drive to school, as I vigorously chew my gum, I struggle to stay positive. Fourth time, baby, fourth time’s the charm. I can do it, I can do it. It’s only a test, it’s only a test . . .
Bullshit it is. More like Rattigan’s Last Stand.
When I arrive at Pritchard High, there’s already a long straggly line of kids, all vigorously chewing gum in the early morning pre-registration air. The repressed energy’s palpable. Over-caffeinated, sex- and sleep-deprived teenagers jostle into each other for no discernible reason.
“Stop shoving! Watch it! Quit breathing on me!”
We file, like the clones we are, past card tables manned by somber adults.
“License and registration! Let’s go! Keep it moving!” they shout.
The girl in front of me is having a meltdown.
“You don’t have a license?” a guy with a nametag that says “Menzer” asks her.
Rookie mistake, I think pityingly.
“No photo ID?” this Menzer dude asks, caring less.
“I have my dad’s gym membership card,” she brays, all weepy and shit. “That ought to count for something!”
“Next!” Menzer grunts.
She is firmly led away, first victim of the many pitfalls of inadequate test preparation. Quickly and efficiently, I display the proper documentation and am ushered into the inner sanctum. I try to ignore Tricia Prindle, who lingers nervously at the door, breathing in and out, being massaged and prepped like a heavyweight boxer by her overwrought parents.
“It’s only your entire Future . . . ,” Tricia’s mom soothes her.
“Whatever you do, don’t tense up!” her dad warns. “Because this is the last chance you’re ever going to get!”
For the first time ever, I am actually grateful that I am essentially an orphan.
---
The school cafeteria, scene of so many food fights and flirtations, is now a gladiatorial arena of cerebral combat. Across the grim, cavernous chamber, warriors prep for battle at their respective desks. I too set out my equipment at my appointed position. Calculator, spare alkaline batteries, stopwatch, four freshly sharpened number-two pencils, and lucky rabbit’s foot, which hasn’t done shit so far for me but I’m still too superstitious to get rid of. The guy next to me rubs a crystal. This one girl crosses herself. Another has her hands together, praying. Behind me, a smug-looking guy who I want to smack on sight sharpens his pencils like a pool shark chalking a cue stick. Then suddenly the guy with the crystal panics.
“Oh my God, I don’t have any pencils!” he cries, fumbling through his backpack and pockets. “I forgot my four number-two pencils!”
I, along with everyone else, ignore him. Then the poor bastard jumps to his feet, calling out plaintively, appealing to the entire room.
“Will no one lend me a number-two pencil?”
There are literally hundreds of us with four or more number-two pencils, and not a single one of us will part with a single one. Things are rough all over. Though I deeply sympathize with his plight, it’s a cruel world, buddy. Survival of the Fittest, man.
“My kingdom for a number-two pencil!” the guy moans, then starts sniveling like a baby, still refusing to go. It’s really starting to get on my nerves. I thrust a pencil at him.
“Here!” I growl.
“Bless you, kind sir!” He snatches the proffered implement. “I won’t forget this.”
“For the love of God, would you please just shut up,” I say. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot Smug Guy rotating his arms and legs, squeezing his butt cheeks, counting backwards. We haven’t even started and I’m already falling behind! My relaxation exercises! Hurry!
Me and every other sucker in the room are squeezing our butt cheeks ragged. As our official numerically assigned packets are handed out, Strack, looking even more unhinged than usual since it’s the height of application season and being a proctor is the last thing she needs, reads aloud from a prepared text.
“Welcome to the SAT,” she drones. “The SAT is a standardized test for most college admissions in the United States and the rest of the planet.”
Tell me something I don’t know. I am impatient, champing at the bit, itching to get to it, to just get it over with.
“The SAT does not measure intelligence,” Stack continues reciting. “It is not an IQ test.” She snorts skeptically. “Yeah, right.”
Somehow I don’t find Strack’s attitude encouraging.
“The SAT only measures how well you do on the SATs. It is not a predictor of future success.” She snorts again, mumbling, “Who do they think they’re kidding?”
Sighing, she raises her official stopwatch. Hundreds of young anxious eyes fixate on her finger, poised just above the trigger.
“Oh, the hell with it.”
She clicks the tab. The race is on. We’re on the clock.
“You have twenty-five minutes.”
Yellow number-two pencils explode into action on computerized answer sheets. I crack open the seal of my booklet and flip to the first page of the first section to my first question. It’s a math section, a relative strength. I quickly compute my first answer, but when I go to fill it in, nothing’s happening in my first bubble because my pencil has no point. Around me, my competition vaults through problems like champion hurdlers. I cast the defective instrument to the floor and scoop up another pencil. Now I am down to only two spares. I’m rattled.
“Kill! Kill! Kill!” I hyperventilate to myself, in and out. “I can do this, damn it!”
I hear the pitter-patter of hundreds of fingers tapping calculator keys. The soft creak of graphite rubbing against paper. The relentless ticking of a veritable sea of individual watches.
I sprint to play catch-up, am at a full gallop and on my last question when Strack’s voice cuts through the silence like an executioner’s ax. “Time’s up.”
I push it to the brink, filling in my final circle a millisecond after she clicks her stopwatch. I’ve made it just under the wire. But before I can absorb my achievement, the Scholastic Aptitude Test marches on.
“Please turn to Section Two,” Strack intones. She clicks. “You have twenty-five minutes.”
Section Two is Verbal, Passage-Based Reading, my greatest nemesis. Even worse, the passage is a poem. And it’s about fucking flowers. My heartbeat goes all loud and slow-motion. THUMP-THUMP-THUMP. The words are like hieroglyphics to me. On my stopwatch, the long hand sweeps around, the short one shifts an increment. A whole minute has passed, and I’m still on the first question. I sit paralyzed. It’s desperation time. I summon up Farkus and his words of hard-paid wisdom.
“The obvious answer is usually the right one on easy questions . . .”
I decisively fill in the letter B for the first question. Then I hear Farkus again.
“On hard questions, the obvious answer is a trap.”
I hurriedly erase B and fill in D, then erase that too and cast my fate with E.
The next three hours and twenty minutes pass in a blur. A blizzard of dense text, complex math diagrams, sentence completions, equations, word analogies, and graphs fly at me like attacking spaceships.
“There is no penalty for wrong answers on grid-ins,” Farkus advises, Yoda-like. “So when in doubt, guess, guess, guess!”
I draw mental straws. I fill in A.
“Wrong answers can kill your score on sentence completions,” I’m warned. “Whatever you do, don’t guess!”
I erase D, refill in C, my original second answer. Around me, I hear a chorus of flipping pages. The others are surging ahead. I gulp bottled water to steady myself.
“Never read directions. It’s a waste of time. Directions never change . . .”
I gladly skip ahead.
“Except in the experimental section.”
I stop in place.
“Nobody knows which section the experimental section is.”
I frantically backtrack. Panicked, I read the directions, I fill and re–fill in spaces. Faster and faster.
“Pencils down,” Strack intones. “Time’s up.”
She clicks her stopwatch with a conclusive, concussive snap. I look around. Crystal Guy springs to his feet and is first to hand in his answer sheet, then struts off with my fucking pencil. Smug Guy’s right behind, smiling. I could murder them both. Even the reliably gelatinous Tricia Prindle is looking spry and remarkably together. It’s over. And I am nowhere close to being done. I shakily close my booklet. A hollowed-out husk.
“Answer sheet, if you please.”
Strack pries my last hopes from my death grip.
---
As I stagger back outside into the glare of normality, a bunch of adult lowlifes are lounging by their cars, reading the sports page, rolling dice, smoking. Seeing me, they bolt into action, jockeying for position by the doors as other brain-weary seniors straggle into view behind me. We are swarmed with printed flyers.
“Post-SAT special at the Acme College Counseling Center!” one lowlife bellows. “Somewhere out there’s a school you’ve never heard of just for you!”
“Karen Richardson, licensed psychologist!” another booms. “You could have a learning disability and not even know it!”
“Blowout tonight at McClellan’s Bar and Grill!” yet another declares. “Kamikazes half-price!”
In a stupor, I wade through a virtual gauntlet of cottage industries that bottom-feed on the admissions process. There’s even a Hare Krishna dancing in circles, pounding on a tambourine, spouting gibberish. I actually contemplate joining.
---
Six hours, five Buds, and four bong rips later, I’m still PTSD, numb, staring into space. I can now defile the bodily temple. But, though I’m no longer denied the meager compensations of late-adolescent existence, though I have tossed abstinence to the winds, though I can even consider the remote possibility of sex again, I’m without solace.
“I feel very positive about it,” I inform The Murf for like the thousandth time since he got here. We’re wedged against the refrigerator, shouting into each other’s faces in the packed kitchen at some party of a girl neither of us knows, whose parents are away. The Murf, just off work, is still in full Gun regalia—fedora, striped vest, and shirt.
“I mean, I wish I had more time,” I admit. “But everybody feels that way.”
The Murf doesn’t say anything, merely replenishes the bowl.
“So there were a couple of sections I didn’t finish. Okay, more than a couple. But the answers I did answer, I definitely knew the answer. Except for the answers I guessed. Overall, I feel very positive.”
“Well, you’re bumming the shit out of me.” The Murf thrusts the pipe and the lighter at me. “I’m going to scope out Julie Hickey. She’s wearing a V-neck you wouldn’t believe.”
He abandons me to myself, leaving me alone in the happy crowd.
“Bomb. Verb,” I croak, belting down another brew. “To achieve complete and utter ruin.”
I could cancel my scores. I have before. Only this time I can’t. Because the best aggregate of my old scores is still seventy-five points short of the Promised Land. I have to stick with the new ones, come what may. It’s never easy for me. Never. Suddenly, I brandish a clenched fist at the ceiling.
“I did everything right! Everything!” I roar. “Ate my proper food groups! Slept with my calculator! Squeezed my buttocks ’til they were black and blue!”
I stop, realizing I am getting strange looks. Then, through the clamor, I feel the Ramones vibrating. My iPhone’s ringing. I dig it out from my pocket and click on.
“Suicide Hotline. Charles Manson speaking.”
“Brooks, Harvey Lieberman in Green Meadow again,” says a voice so meek I can barely hear it.
Lieberman. The name’s vaguely familiar. But there’s been so many on the ol’ voicemail lately. The voice mumbles something inaudible.
“Speak up, man!” I command, straining to hear.
I cover my ears to block out the noise. The voice on the other end barely increases in volume: “I hope I haven’t caught you at an inopportune time . . .”
I light up and suck on the pipe The Murf’s so considerately provided.
“What can I do you for, Mr. Lieberman?” I ask, like I don’t know.
“Actually, it’s Dr. Lieberman. And it’s not for me. For my daughter, Celia.”
“A wonderful girl,” I say in a monotone, exhaling a humungous cloud of smoke.
“Secretary-treasurer of Chess Club,” he recites by rote. “Captain of the Debate Team. National Merit Scholar . . .”
“But the Winter Formal’s coming up and she’s never been,” I cut in. It’s all so predictable.
Now that Homecoming season’s finally winding to a close, Winter Formal season’s just starting. I’m almost booked through November.
“Her mother believes—and I agree very strongly—that it’s important for Celia’s normal maturation process not to miss out.”
“When?” I’m all business, not in the slightest interested in any theories of child development, particularly inane ones.
“This Saturday?” he says meekly. I can feel him cringing. “I know it’s soon.”
Lucky for Lieberman, I’ve had a sudden cancellation. I sigh. After my latest debacle with the SATs, it seems so pointless to soldier on, but soldier on I must.
“Green Meadow?” I say. “That’s in New York.”
“I know it’s a little far . . .”
“Out of state will run you twenty-five extra.”