King Dork (17 page)

uation. Maybe there’s some kind of drug they can give you

for it.

Anyhow, the Celeste Fletcher trio was closely associated

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with the Syndie Duffy trio, which was closer to the center of the drama establishment. Syndie Duffy was quite mean, for a drama hippie. They also had a much looser association,

through Née-Née Tagliafero, I imagine, with the Lorra Jaffe group, who were thoroughly normal and thus quite psychotic. It was the #2 of the Lorra Jaffe group who had tried to pull a Make-out/Fake-out on me recently in PE, if I’m not mistaken.

At the lunchtime be-in, Sam Hellerman had been sitting

in the shadow of the Knight, roughly in between the Celeste Fletcher and Syndie Duffy trios, and had appeared to be talking to both. I would have given quite a bit to know what the hell they had been discussing. But Sam Hellerman wasn’t

talking.

Sam Hellerman
had
said I was welcome to “hang” on the lawn during lunch period with him on the drama people’s

turf if I wanted. I’m sure he said it with solid confidence that I wouldn’t take him up on it. Yet I did in fact give it a shot on the following day, more in the spirit of field research than from a sincere desire to be one with the earth.

It was a weird scene, man. Celeste Fletcher was lying on

her stomach on the grass facing away from us, raising her

head every now and again to tell Yasmynne Schmick to fetch this or that, or to draw subtle attention to Yasmynne

Schmick’s weight, height, or skin condition with less-thanconvincing compassion. Syndie Duffy was lying nearby, with her head in her scruff-grunge knit-cap boyfriend’s lap. The boyfriend was half asleep, leaning back between the Hillmont Knight’s legs, and Syndie Duffy was sucking idly on his fingers. You could tell her group’s #3 was on the way out be-

cause whenever the #3 would try to say something, Syndie

Duffy would roll her eyes or, with a great show of aggrava-125

tion, remove the boyfriend’s fingers from her mouth and tell her not to be stupid before putting them back in. That’s normal 1-on-3 behavior, perhaps, but there was something about the way she was saying it that made it clear it was pretty much all over.

There were some dudes a bit farther down, engaged in a

philosophical debate about how high they were now as op-

posed to how high they were going to get at some future

point in time. Everyone over by me was idly watching Née-

Née Tagliafero and Pierre Butterfly Cameroon make their

rounds, and talking amongst themselves about male and fe-

male actors, getting high,
The Music Man,
how LPs sound better than CDs (which I actually agree with), and (did I

mention?) getting high. And about Bobby Duboyce, the hel-

met guy, who, it was claimed, had been seen making out with some unspecified, and grossly implausible, girl in the football-field bleachers. (I was skeptical. Is it even physically possible to do that with a helmet head? But of course I mental-noted the grim fact that, for the sake of argument, even narcoleptic helmet boy was more of a hit with the ladies than I was and filed it away for use in some future flight of self-pity.) I sat next to Sam Hellerman, cross-legged in my army

coat, in silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say. The only time anyone acknowledged my presence was when

Yasmynne Schmick, for some reason, asked me what I played

in the band. “Guitar,” I said. Except that I said a few ums and uhs beforehand, stammered a bit during, and had a little

coughing fit afterward. I was jumpy. I was doing the ear thing.

For some reason, I felt kind of warmly towards Yasmynne

Schmick, maybe because of sympathy for her role in life,

which really wasn’t her fault. But I couldn’t talk to these people. My one line in the whole scene, and I had flubbed it.

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As for Sam Hellerman, he said not one word the entire

time, and no one said anything to him. He just sat there staring at Celeste Fletcher with a faintly stupid expression. He did manage to leave the impression, though, that he was

drooling on the inside.

So it was obvious. I guess. Sam Hellerman had the hots

for Celeste Fletcher, and for some reason she had decided to tolerate his presence and to allow him to subject her ass to the Hellerman eye-ray treatment for thirty minutes each day.

I couldn’t blame him for that: it’s a nice ass, and I have to admit I was giving it the relatively less dramatic Chi-Mo treatment myself. What she got out of the deal was harder to

fathom. It was clear, though, that his deep and tender feelings for her ass were not reciprocated. As to why she decided to tolerate his (devil-head) parasitic presence, who knows?

Maybe she was just one of those people who likes having a

large (devil-head) entourage and she felt she needed another extra to make the crowd scene look more believable. Maybe

her ass needed the positive reinforcement.

All I knew was, Sam Hellerman was no more a genuine

participant in the lunch period Grooviness on the Green than I was. Celeste Fletcher hadn’t even looked back at him the entire time. It made zero sense.

WE CO OL?

I was a little surprised that so much time went by without Little Big Tom acknowledging my peace and love note. It

wasn’t like him. I’d sent him notes like that before when there had been equally explosive substitute-father/son trouble in the past, and he always responded in some way. Like putting 127

a little Post-it on my door that said “We’re cool.” Plus, Little Big Tom was almost immediately back to his old self once the conflict had wound down.

I had pretty much decided to pick up the pieces and

move on with my life in that particular area when there was a knock on my door that turned out to have come from Little Big Tom’s Celtic knot ’n’ serpent wedding ring. That was unusual. I mean, that’s how he always knocked on things, but when he had something to say to me he would usually just

stick his head in and out without warning.

He walked in carrying the weapons-and-tactics maga-

zines in a stack on one upturned palm, like a waiter with a platter of hors d’oeuvres.

He set them down on my dresser and said:

“We cool?” One eyebrow was raised, and his head was

tilted and his neck was trained in such a way that he almost looked like he had turned into a question mark for a moment.

“Well,” I said, drawing out the word in an exaggerated

fashion and making a little motion with my hands as though I were physically weighing whether we were cool or not—

mime isn’t my strong suit, but, see, I was trying to communicate with Little Big Tom in his own language. Finally, I made a “well, what do you know?” face and said, “We are cool.”

He said he had overreacted and was sorry, especially for

reading my notebook, but he used way more words than

necessary to get that across, and before he was finished he was starting to get a little flustered. I was trying to look at him neutrally while he talked, but the more neutral I tried to look, the less comfortable he seemed to get. Finally, after two half-finished word clumps that were more like automobile accidents than sentences, he gave up trying to get in touch with his feelings and said, in a more familiar tone:

“Some of the things you said the other day have been rat-

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tling around in the old brain box. Young men always think

they know everything and that old men know nothing, and

old men always think the same thing. But maybe the answer

could be somewhere in between.”

Mmm, deep.

That’s what I thought, but what I said was “We’re cool,

Big Tom.” Then I added, uncharacteristically, but because I knew he’d like it: “You’re not even that old.” I’m shameless.

He looked at me, still expecting something.

I held up two fingers at about shoulder level in a peace

sign with what I hoped was the right attitude, slightly sardonic but good-natured.

His mouth crinkled just a bit at the left corner, and he did this little sniffy laugh while shaking his head. Then he rumpled my hair, which was the real sign that he was more or

less satisfied with how things had concluded.

“Rock and roll,” he said as he went out, sighing just a bit, I think.

LADI E S’ WE E K?

I was starting to lose track of all of the mysteries. There was Tit’s code and the cryptic notes and documents associated

with my dad’s teen library. There was my adult dad’s death.

There was Sam Hellerman’s unusual behavior. And above all, there was Fiona. I still had the sense that somehow all the puzzles were related and could solve each other if only one were to come undone. I also had the sense that that was

crazy. At any rate, I thought about Fiona practically con-

stantly, both as a context within which to experience my

horniness and as a puzzle piece. I decided to write down

everything I knew about her, imagining that it might be

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useful one day if I ever gathered my possessions in a satchel, kissed my mom good-bye, and set off on a perilous journey

to track her down and discover her secret. Like a hard-boiled detective. Or a hobbit.

I hardly knew anything about Fiona. I sure wished I had

paid more attention to what she had been saying while I was ogling her like a sex maniac.

To summarize what I came up with:

Fiona was most likely a junior. She was in drama, acted

in plays, made costumes and her own clothes, and was kind

of hung up on vocabulary-level feminism but not in any way that mattered practically. She was interested in the occult and the paranormal, though in fact she had no psychokinetic or supernatural powers. She was nearsighted. She liked the

Who. She had a boyfriend who was not at the party but who

had friends who were. She wouldn’t go past second base with anonymous strangers in dark basements; or, the party had

coincided with her period (ladies’ week, as my mom calls it).

She liked to smoke pot.

If she went to CHS, she was known by a name other than

Fiona, and dressed and behaved so differently from how she had been at the party that no one who would have seen her

at school recognized the description. But most likely she

didn’t go to CHS. I had assumed she did because she had

been at a party with lots of CHS kids, and having the Who

shirt and being in drama had made it seem like she had to be one of the CHS drama mods. But that wasn’t necessarily the case. She could go to another high school but know some of the CHS drama mods well enough that she would be invited

to their parties.

In fact, the Who shirt was the only definite mod-related

thing about her, so maybe she wasn’t even a real fake mod at all. Maybe the drama people at her high school were all on 130

some other trip (though I don’t know what—crochet-core?)

and the Who shirt was just random, or worn because she

knew she’d be hanging out with CHS drama mods on that

particular evening.

There was another reason I had assumed she went to

CHS, though. Something in the back of my mind that had

been bugging me, though I didn’t consciously realize what it was at first: somehow she had known I was from Hellmont.

I had instinctively assumed that she had reached that

conclusion because she didn’t recognize me from school at

CHS, which would have made it obvious. Most kids from

Hillmont went to Hillmont High, though a small chunk, from the hills, mostly, went to CHS. No Clearview or Clearview

Heights kids ever went to Hillmont, that I knew of—CHS was a much bigger school, and had kids from several towns. What I’m getting at is: if Fiona didn’t go to CHS herself, it wouldn’t have been at all obvious that I was from Hillmont. I mean, even if she knew a lot of CHS kids, she couldn’t have been positive that she could identify every one, especially a random dweeby one, if she didn’t go there. She would have

assumed I went to CHS, like almost all of the kids at the

party, right? She would have said “How’s tricks in Queer-

view?” And I would have said “Homoerotic.” And the pop-up

devil-he—oh wait, that was before the devil-head started popping up. Those were simpler times.

Now, maybe she had just guessed right, or had men-

tioned Hillmont randomly. Maybe not, though. But I couldn’t figure out how or why she would have known anything

about me. Man, maybe she was psychic after all.

So where did you go if you lived in Salthaven but you

didn’t go to CHS? OMH (Old Mission Hills) possibly. I didn’t know a whole lot about the school system out there. I was

going to have to do some research. Or maybe she wasn’t

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even from Salthaven or Salthaven Vista. Sooner or later,

thinking about all this, everything started to go in circles and I had to take a break.

In my fantasy, Fiona is still a mod, a real one, and she and I are living in a grimy, sweaty gray underground flat in

Carnaby Street, London, listening to “Substitute” on a little gramophone. I’m standing in the doorway in a parka and

she’s on a couch in a houndstooth miniskirt and go-go boots.

We’re both crying, but I can tell by how she’s looking at me through the tears that she wants it. The time, I mean . . .

I woke up the next morning feeling pretty stupid about all that “Fiona must have known who I was all along” crap. Who was I, Miss Marple? Sam Hellerman, please assemble all the guests in the drawing room, and you might want to take the precaution of bringing along your revolver. I rather suspect there may be trouble. Does that mean you have cracked the

case, Aunt Jane? Oh my, yes. I have known for some time.

People can be very, very cruel. . . .

There was really only one blindingly obvious conclusion