King Dork (19 page)

probably be something on the note that would indicate how

the substitution worked, and the date seemed likely. Of course, even if the back rub passage
had
been a decoding key, it wouldn’t necessarily have been the one that had been used for this particular message. That was a long shot. Nevertheless, with the Star-Spangled Banner Substitution Cipher in mind, I got out the
Catcher
and started counting words, just to see. I tried a few possibilities, using 5 or 6 and 31, but they yielded only more gibberish.

Then I noticed something: counting letters instead of

words, the fifth letter of the passage was “T” and so was the thirty-first. That wouldn’t have been any use for a substitution cipher, since the in and out letters would all have been the same. What if Tit had written “5/31” and then changed

the five to a six when he realized the 5/31 combination

wouldn’t work as a key? Sixth letter from the beginning was

“H,” and the thirty-first was “T. . . .”

Damn. It still didn’t work, not in any of the configurations I tried. Yet it seemed too much of a coincidence that Tit

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would have happened to cross out a date that would not have worked as a key and replace it with one that would, if he

hadn’t been working from that particular passage. And it explained why there was only one underlined passage, and perhaps also why there were all sorts of other mysterious pairs of numbers scribbled all over the
Catcher.
It was the perfect theory in all but one respect: it didn’t work. What was I missing?

TH E G I FTE D AN D TH E TALE NTE D

Meanwhile, though it seemed a bit much with everything

else that was going on, I continued to attend my inane, pointless classes.

In Humanities we were still doing The Turbulent Sixties,

working on the Peace Collage. There was this big pasteboard

“wall” on which you were supposed to glue things cut out

from magazines that had to do with the sixties, or peace, or civil rights, or the women’s movement, or, well, just about anything at all, really. There was a lot of potential mischief afoot with all that glue, but I managed to avoid getting glued to anything for once.

In part, I believe, this had to do with the Paul Krebs

Brighton Rock
incident. I had been worried about the consequences of the episode, but only a little. Technically, I suppose I had beaten him up, though that had been entirely due to luck and randomness. I still thought of it like he had attacked and persecuted me as usual, even though I “won.”

One of the reasons it had been possible to knock him

down, and probably the main reason he had given up so eas-

ily and resigned himself to whimpering in his own blood, was that he had not expected me to fight back. I never did. I never had. He wasn’t on his guard because he had assumed there

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was no reason to be. He had been shocked out of his normal aggressive mode, and his mind had stalled trying to process the unfamiliar information and finally locked. Plus, I had smashed his head into the gravel very hard and it had to hurt.

I guess it was the combination of shock and gravel. And loss of blood.

I had been as surprised by my reaction as he had, but I’m

not going to say I don’t know what came over me. What had

come over me was that in six solid years of being harassed, abused, beaten, ridiculed, humiliated, dehumanized, and tortured by Paul Krebs and his fun-loving buddies, they hadn’t ever attacked something I really cared about till they poured Coke on my dad’s
Brighton Rock.
There was no way Paul Krebs could have known, but he had picked the wrong fucking

book to pour Coke on. I flipped out. I went berserk. I wasn’t in control of myself, and he wasn’t ready for an attack by a flipped-out, berserk King Dork inflamed by the rage that only grief and (devil-head) filial piety can summon.

If the walkway had been concrete, or even asphalt, the

blow to the head would have injured him seriously, maybe

even killed him. Then I would have been in trouble. But I

doubted it was that serious. The gravel would have absorbed and distributed the impact evenly. As I knew quite well from years of experience, head and scalp injuries bleed a lot and hurt like hell, but they always look worse than they are. The worst you usually have is a concussion, some messy clothes, and a lot of explaining to do. They are easily attributed to accidents. In fact, I have a solid, largely inaccurate, reputation as an absentminded, accident-prone klutz at the Henderson-Tucci HQ , owing to all the times I’ve said I’ve fallen off ledges or walked into walls or run into poles.

And I was pretty sure that that was what Paul Krebs

would do, as well. I will always think of him as the guy I ac-142

cidentally beat up, but he would be rather eager to prevent the world at large from knowing him that way. It would

hardly have been the first time he had come home from

school all bloody, though the fact that this time it was his own blood would have been something of a novelty. But he

would keep that part to himself. And he would hate me more than he ever had before, even if neither he nor I had believed such a thing to be possible. I knew I had to brace myself for some kind of retaliation from him and potentially from the other Matt Lynch minions as well, but I was sure it wouldn’t become a legal matter. That’s what I’m saying.

Anyway, despite that, word did get out around school a

bit, somehow. No one said anything to me, but people were

looking at me from a distance with a kind of awe. I mean, I was in shock about it myself. These things don’t happen, not usually. I imagine most people discounted it as a grossly implausible rumor. Sam Hellerman didn’t doubt me, but he said, and I knew he was right, that I would have to watch my back from now on. I was totally used to watching that, though.

It was a measure of just how sick Hillmont High School

society is that smashing someone’s head to pulp in the gravel by the baseball diamond was such an unequivocal reputation enhancer. But so it was. It had worked for years for Matt

Lynch and Paul Krebs and the other normals in their demi-

human goon squad. Now, weirdly and in a way that wasn’t

entirely welcome, it was temporarily working for me. (I had no illusions: the vital element of surprise was only destined to work the one time. But it had worked.)

So maybe that’s why no one tried to glue me to anything

in Humanities while we were working on the Peace Collage.

Someone did, however, glue some stuff from a gay porn mag-

azine on Bobby Duboyce’s helmet while he slept peacefully

in his seat. Peace indeed.

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As for Paul Krebs, I figured he still had a few concussions coming to him. I have heard, though, that if you fall asleep with a concussion you can die, so I was relieved when I

learned that he was back in school a couple of days later. And not to be all Bad Seed and everything, but just to be on the safe side I got some new Converse All Stars from the Shoe

Mart and threw the old, blood-spattered ones in the shop in-cinerator on my way back to school. Because you never

know.

The day after I attended the lunchtime gathering around

the Hillmont Knight, I noticed for the first time that

Yasmynne Schmick was in my Advanced French class. She

smiled and nodded a greeting as I walked in, which was definitely a new experience for me. I guess my failure to say “guitar” properly had formed a kind of loose bond between us.

Which was alarming, in a way. I mean, I wasn’t sure I wanted another friend: Sam Hellerman was about all I could handle.

She was wearing a tight-fitting purple velvety bodysuit and a lot of silver jewelry. She looked like an enormous Christmas ornament. She was actually pretty nice, though, for a drama goth pod-hippie; maybe the drama hippies weren’t all bad after all.

Now, I had started taking French in seventh grade, so this was my fourth year, and even I found it shocking to think

how little French I actually knew after three-plus years. True, I knew quite a lot about Jean and Claude and how they go to the movies and eat beefsteak and fruit, and I could tell you all about their other fabulous adventures, though only in the

present tense. I was a master of the present tense in French. I guess that is pretty advanced, when you think about it.

I felt a little sorry for the French teacher, Madame

Jimenez-Macanally, not only because students would often

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mispronounce her name so it sounded kind of nasty, but also because it must have been hard knowing deep down that

whatever activities may have been going on in that class, the teaching and learning of the French language was not among them. Someone had hit on the idea of asking her to explain the complicated twenty-four-hour French system of telling

time at the beginning of each class, just to see how long she would go along with it before cracking. She was determined not to crack, though: she explained the twenty-four-hour system every single day. Whether that was giving in or fighting back is hard to say: you could look at it either way.

The last fifteen minutes of Advanced French is called

Advanced Conversation, where the students pair up for ad-

vanced, stimulating dialogue. Yasmynne Schmick approached

me and said, as near as I could make out:
“Le nez est bête.”
The nose is a beast? A little puzzling. Then she switched to English:

“Renée is stupid,” she said. “You’re actually a pretty nice guy.”

Pause. “Really?” I had to assume she was talking about

Née-Née Tagliafero. What the hell had they been saying

about me?

Madame J.-M. frowned at us. We weren’t supposed to

speak English in Advanced Conversation. So we continued in French:

“What time is it?” I asked.

“It is 11:05,” she replied.

“Thank you very much,” I said. “What a shame. If it

pleases you, what do you call yourself?”

“I am sorry,” said Yasmynne Schmick. “I am hungry. The

young girls wear a very pretty dress. They eat and play soccer with the mother and the fathers. My name is Yasmynne.

I am four years old.”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “The young people love to buy discs of

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pop music for dancing and for holiday making.” I chose my

words carefully. “They . . . they . . . my God: they eat bever-ages. It is true. My two friends Jean and Claude go to the cin-ema yesterday to view films. What a surprise. They eat. They are flowers.”

Yasmynne Schmick nodded. “Thank you very much. I am

sorry.” Her face clouded over. “There is a match between two opposing teams at the stadium. It is true, is that not correct?

Therefore, my little friend,” she said quietly and with a sad smile, “all the world very much loves the automobile who

calls himself a cat.”

“You are correct,” I said hopelessly. “I am enchanted. Our little green hat is orange on the head of this very interesting horse.”

“Would you like to sleep with me this evening?”

“Thank you, Mr. Roboto.”

It was kind of fun. That Yasmynne Schmick was all right.

Later that day, I was on my way to Band, running a little

late, when something grabbed the back of my army coat,

stopped me short, and almost pulled me to the ground. It

turned out to be one of Mr. Teone’s large, rubbery hands. He was scratching his butt with the other one. Ugh.

“Henderson,” he said. “Henderson.”

There was something about the way he said my name

that made it sound like a particularly nasty swear word. Wait a minute, I thought: you can’t call me that. It’s rude.

He told me that he was writing a book on gifted and tal-

ented young men and women, and that he’d like to give me

an IQ test and interview me with a group of other kids after school on Friday. At his fucking house. I don’t think so.

“I can give you a ride in my ’93 Geo Prizm if you like,” he 146

said. He was always going on about his ’93 Geo Prizm, like it was some kind of cool car or something. What a moron. He

reached into his sports-jacket pocket with the butt hand and pulled out this crumpled, grubby, curling fistful of papers.

Presumably, this was the IQ test. He poked me with it. And I recoiled in horror.

It was hilarious, though. I had serious doubts that Mr.

Teone could write his own name, much less compose a

whole book. He had supposedly started out at Hillmont way

back as a shop teacher, which I could well believe: he had that air. Then he got some kind of administrative credential and became a principal. So the man had some education. But from what I could tell, he was still more or less functionally illiterate. He looked down at the papers in his butt hand and started to laugh like a maniac.

“No pain, no gain!” he said. “No gain, no pain!” Way to

sell your dopey afterschool program to a skeptical student body. Whatever, freak.

Mr. Teone’s afterschool Gifted and Talented program

might have been of some use as an anecdote factory, but that was about it, and I felt I really didn’t need the anecdotes at that price. Not that I ever would seriously have considered participating in something like that, even if it hadn’t involved Hillmont High School’s most bizarre and unhygienic administrator. I didn’t need any more self-congratulatory self-

esteem baths and collage-making bees in my life at the

present moment. Sam Hellerman had attended one of Mr.

Teone’s ill-conceived afterschool activities last year, a sort of science fiction club. He never went back. He wouldn’t say

much about it, except: “he’s a deeply weird man.” It hardly needed stating.

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TH E LOR D RO C KS I N MYSTE R IOU S WAYS

Meanwhile, despite the multifaceted depravity of Hillmont

High School, and personal mysteries various and extremely