Elliot Allagash (2 page)

Jessica scooped a handful of pencils off my desk and hurried across the room.

“Hey, Lance,” she whispered. “Need a pencil?”

She fanned them out in front of his face so he could see them all at once. He stared at them for a while, smirking.

“Can I take two?”

Jessica nodded rapidly and Lance plucked out his two favorites.

“Thanks, Jess,” he said.

She averted her eyes, embarrassed.

“Of course!” she said. “Anytime!”

She plopped the remaining pencils onto my desk, returned to her seat, and watched in rapt silence as Lance finish doodling his lightning bolt.

Some of my pencils rolled onto the floor, and when I stooped to pick them up, I noticed that Elliot was watching me. He kept staring at me for the rest of detention, even as he unscrewed his pen and flipped to a new page of his notebook.

• • •

My parents rarely asked me how school was going. It’s not that they weren’t interested; the stakes were just too high. Glendale wasn’t particularly glitzy by Manhattan standards. It cost significantly less than those top-tier prep schools that lined Central Park and dotted the hills of Riverdale. But it was still an expensive school—the most expensive one my parents could afford. They never mentioned money around me, but our apartment wasn’t very large and if I stayed up late, I could hear them talking about their financial struggles through our shared bedroom wall, in the hushed, low tone they reserved for that subject alone. They were paying an incredible percentage of their income to send me to Glendale and I think they were both secretly terrified that their investment was coming to naught.

If my parents had told me my tuition cost a hundred dollars or a million dollars, I probably would have believed them either way.
Money was meaningless to me until it was converted into rock candy. My father had recently begun to give me five bucks a week to teach me the value of a dollar, but the five-dollar bill he handed me each week might as well have been a voucher with the words
GOOD FOR ONE MEDIUM BAG OF ROCK CANDY
printed on it, because that’s the only thing I ever considered buying with it. When I tried to visualize the amount of money I was wasting by going to Glendale, I pictured myself wading through an entire
roomful
of rock candy, like Scrooge McDuck, scooping up the pieces and tossing them over my head. It felt that obscene.

On the rare instances in which my parents asked me about school, I felt tempted to confess everything: How I was the only student in third-year French whom the teacher had to address in English. How someone had sarcastically nominated me for class president at an all-school assembly, and it had prompted laughter so prolonged and intense that the principal actually had to bang some kind of gavel, which I had never seen before, to make it stop. How I had faked my last four fevers just to have an excuse to stay home and take a break from it all. But I didn’t want them to think I was ungrateful. And besides, I had a feeling they already knew about all my problems, even though I never talked about them. They never asked me follow-up questions about school. If I told them the swim test had been “normal” with “no weird things,” they took me at my word and allowed me to change the subject. And when I said I had a fever, they never consulted a thermometer. They just squeezed my shoulder, carried the television into my room, and told me to feel better.

Their standards for me were almost unbelievably low. They
congratulated me on Cs and hung Bs on the refrigerator. If I managed to get an A on something, they immediately called my grandmother, even if it was late and she was ill.

“No!” she would exclaim. “I can’t believe it! I
don’t
believe it!”

“It’s true!” my mother would say. “Seymour, tell her!”

“It’s true,” I’d mutter.

And then she would start screaming,
really
screaming, like the time she won the Mediterranean cruise at our annual synagogue raffle. I appreciated the support, but sometimes I wished that the bar was just a little bit higher.

• • •

One week had passed since Elliot pushed me down the stairs and he still hadn’t said a single word to me. He continued to sit beside me at lunch, though, scribbling in his notebook and staring creepily at me from time to time.

I was trying my hardest to ignore him. We had a French vocabulary quiz after lunch and I was determined to do well for a change. I was memorizing the French words for animals when I felt a firm tap on my left shoulder. When I looked over, Elliot was facing me. It was the first time we had ever made eye contact and I was struck by how tired he looked. His face was smooth and unblemished, but the bags under his eyes were dark and craterous. He somehow looked both young and old for his age.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

It didn’t occur to me until he started speaking that I had never actually heard his voice before. It was high-pitched and lilting, but
also weirdly phlegmatic. He sounded like an elderly British woman with a lifelong smoking habit.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The bell is about to ring,” he said. “And yet you’ve only consumed two chocolate milks. At this rate, you’ll never finish the five cartons you find it necessary to go through during each and every lunch period.”

I forced a laugh.

“I don’t always drink that many.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, flipping idly through the pages of his notebook. “In fact, you often drink as many as six.”

His eyes widened suddenly.

“On one occasion…you drank
seven
.”

I looked down at my lap.

“I didn’t think anybody saw that.”

“So?” he said. “What’s the problem? Are you ill?”

“No—just nervous, I guess. You know, because of that French quiz.”

He grabbed the textbook from my hands.

“Why are you looking at the animals page? The quiz is on job names.”

“When did he say that?”

“He didn’t,” he said. “But it’s obvious.”

“What do you mean?”

He curled his fingers and leisurely examined his cuticles.

“Mr. Hendricks never writes his own quizzes. He’s too naïve. He always just photocopies them straight out of the book.”

“So?”

“So, there are only nine vocabulary quizzes in this chapter. And we’ve done the other eight in class. There’s only one left.”

He flipped my book open to the “Occupations” page and handed it back to me. I couldn’t believe it. There were five minutes left in lunch and I had neglected the only page that mattered.

“How did you figure all that out?” I asked.

“Basic reasoning.”

I started to study the page, but at this point, I was more interested in Elliot’s strange book.

“What are you working on?” I asked.

“It’s none of your business,” he said.

“Oh. Sorry.”

I quickly returned to my book.
The farmer, the businessman, the cook—

“It’s research,” Elliot said. “I’m doing research.”

“Oh, really? On what?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”

He stared at me in silence for a while, until it was clear that I wasn’t going to press him for additional information. Then he started talking again.

“My father donated a sizable amount of money to this horrible place and it seems that I’ll be forced to stay here for a longish period of time. I’m studying the school to make my time here as painless as possible.”

He flipped through his notebook and showed me some of the diagrams he had made. One charted the frequency and duration of fire drills. Another ranked the teachers by seniority. There were
detailed maps of the school, including the boiler room and maintenance tunnels, and a few random codes which looked like locker combinations.

“What’s this one?” I asked, pointing to a list of students’ names.

“It’s a status index,” he said. “I’ve been trying to chart everyone’s position. See? That’s you, at the bottom.”

“That’s
way
off,” I said.

“You think you should be higher?”

“No…that part’s right. But the rest of it needs some work. Like, Lance should be much higher. You didn’t even put him in the top five.”

Elliot nodded slowly.

“What else?” he asked.

I scanned through Elliot’s list. I noticed that he hadn’t put himself anywhere on it.

“Well, you should probably put Jessica higher,” I said. “And the bottom’s wrong too. Some of these people have lots of friends.”

He handed me his fountain pen.

“Fix it,” he demanded.

I awkwardly took the pen.

“Okay…but, Elliot? Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Why did you push me down the stairs?”

Elliot shrugged.

“Amusement,” he said. “And research purposes. I wanted to test the extent to which they’d discipline me.”

“But why’d you decide to push
me?”

“In order to standardize the experiment, I needed to commit a
generic crime. Abusing you seems to be a pretty common offense around here.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“Let me ask
you
a question,” Elliot said. “Why are you so unpopular at this school?”

I could tell by his tone that he didn’t mean any malice by the comment. He was just genuinely curious.

“You have about as much money as the other children. You’re overweight, but not drastically. I mean, some of your classmates are actually obese.”

He pointed them out.

“So,” he said. “What is it?”

I thought about my unpopularity more or less constantly, but I had never actually had a conversation with anybody about it.

“A lot of reasons,” I said.

“For instance.”

“Well, for instance…I’m not so great at sports. Especially basketball.”

Elliot’s eyes widened.

“Status is determined by
athleticism
here?”

I nodded.

“That’s a big part of it.”

“So that black child who’s always jumping up and down to touch the tops of things—”

“Chris.”

“Whatever. That boy is considered powerful? Even though he’s obviously on scholarship?”

“People don’t really care about stuff like money at Glendale,” I
explained. “It’s more about how cool you are and how good you are at sports and whether or not people think you’re stuck-up. Stuff like that.”

“Is that what you really think?”

Elliot closed his eyes and massaged his temples, like talking to me had exhausted him. His limp blond hair, so fair it was nearly white, fell over his hands. He smoothed it back, opened his eyes and pointed at me.

“Has anybody ever told you that money trumps everything? That nothing else in this world matters?”

I shook my head stupidly.

“I could buy you all the popularity in this school,” he said. “With a little research and some well-placed investments, I could make you a
king
. Admired by girls, respected by boys, feared by all.”

I laughed nervously.

“What would I have to do?”

Elliot grinned.

“Everything I say.”

• • •

When I tell people stories about Elliot, they always ask me the same question: Why did he devote so much time and effort to improving your life if he barely knew you and the two of you had just met? It’s a good question. And the only way I can even begin to answer it is by talking about video games.

Before I met Elliot, I played
a lot
of video games every day after school. And even though I wasn’t crazy about playing basketball
in real life, I was thrilled when my parents gave me NBA Slam ’97. The game was unique at the time because it allowed you to become the “coach” of a team. You could make trades, sub in players, and play an entire season against the other teams, all of which were controlled by the computer. I set the game to “easy” because it was my first time playing. And I chose the Sacramento Kings, because I liked their uniforms—purple and black with a slash of silver.

The computer suggested a starting lineup based on who the five best players were in real life. But I decided to use my coach status to mix things up. Mitch Richmond, a six-time all-star, was slated to start at guard. But that was what everyone was expecting! I decided to take him out of the lineup and replace him with Derrick Phelps, a random benchwarmer who had only played in three official games during his entire professional career. As soon as I entered the change, a line of red text appeared on the screen:

Are you sure you want to substitute DERRICK PHELPS for MITCH RICHMOND?

I hesitated for a moment, aware that I had made an unorthodox coaching decision. But then I got angry. Who was the computer to tell me who I could and couldn’t put into my starting lineup? I was coach of the Sacramento Kings! I spitefully hit the start button, and within seconds, Derrick Phelps was making his way onto the court. I won the tip-off, passed him the ball, and immediately made him fire up a three. It was a horrible shot, barely grazing the rim, and the other team easily got the rebound. Had I
made a mistake? I decided to call a time-out and take a closer look at Derrick’s stats from the previous season:

They weren’t very encouraging, especially when compared to Mitch Richmond’s numbers for the same year:

I switched Mitch Richmond back in for a couple of plays. He immediately got a steal and threw a no-look alley-oop pass to my center. The crowd went wild, but their cheers left me cold. It was too easy to dominate the game as Mitch Richmond. Sure, I could play by the book and let him carry my team to a championship. Or I could turn the basketball world upside down and create a new legend from scratch. A legend named Derrick Phelps. I called another time-out and put him back in the game.

By the end of the third quarter, Phelps had taken nearly seventy three-pointers. He was programmed to miss the majority of his shots. But he had still managed to rack up sixty-six points, and with the game on “easy” mode, it was all we needed for a victory.