The Downside of Being Up (4 page)

Talk about being left hanging. Everything was against me. Even the school lunch menu.

“Hey, dingle nuts,” Nathan said to me in the cafeteria line. “Today we're having hot dogs. Do you know the difference between a hot dog and a wiener?”

Fifty people stared at me waiting for the punch line to this obviously not-going-to-be-very-funny-tome joke. “No, Nathan. What?”

“Well, in your case, about four inches and a whole lot of firmness,” Nathan blurted out. Then he tried to shove a hot dog bun up my butt.

As Nathan did so, I looked to the school lunch lady for help. She wore a white uniform, white shoes and silly white hairnet thing.

Our lunch lady just giggled and watched Nathan torture me.

Wasn't she some kind of school employee who was supposed to intervene against bullying or something?

With flakes of hot dog bun hanging from my rear end, I crossed the gray-walled cafeteria and made my way past rows and rows of plastic yellow tables until I finally found a spot in the far corner of the lunchroom by a fire extinguisher that hung on the wall.

Lunch was usually smiles, food, chatter and people. Today, I was alone in the back corner of a windowless room, just me and my weenie.

“You know you're pathetic when even the lunch lady is laughing at you.
He-hurrggh, he-hurrggh
.”

“Shut up, Finkelstein.”

“Oh, come on, bro. Don't let it be like that, I'm just messin'.”

Clank!
He set down his tray of food.

“Wanna hear my English-class poem?”

“No.”

“Aren't you gonna ask what poem?” he asked.

“No,” I said again.

“While you were out yesterday, we were assigned a poem for English. Everyone has to write one or they won't pass for the quarter. I call this one ‘Zits.'”

“Don't read me your poem, Finkelstein.”

“Zits,” he began.

 

 

 

“Pretty good, huh?” Finkelstein took a bite of his hot dog.

“Finkelstein, if this school gives you credit for that poem, I am officially dropping out.”

“He-hurrggh, he-hurrggh
.
”

“And will you stop with that laugh?”

“Okay,” Alfred said. There was a pause.

I glared.

“Sorry, it's just how I laugh.” He took a second bite of his weenie, then jammed two Tater Tots into his face. “What you gonna do your poem on?”

“Morons,” I said.

“Niiice,” he replied, as if I was really onto something.

I watched Finkelstein take a third bite of his hot dog and chew. He must have gone to the orthodontist yesterday. This week's color: cat-whiz frog vomit.

I would have been more disgusted by Finkelstein's Frankenstein teeth except I knew that in a few minutes, the bell was going to ring. And that meant it would be time for me to go face the dragon. The monster. The worst of the worst of all of possible nightmares.

Math class. It was time for my return.

My stomach fluttered. My shoulders got tense. I looked at my food. There was no way I could eat.

“He-hurrggh, he-hurrggh
.
”

I looked up. Alfred was practically in hysterics.

“What're you laughing at, Finkelstein?”

“Morons,” he answered. “You said morons.”

“That was like ten minutes ago.”

“I know,” he replied. “But you were talking about me, right? That's funny. I'm glad we're best friends.”

“Shut up, Finkelstein.”

Bing-bong. Bing-bong.
The bell rang. It was time to meet my doom.

I threw away my uneaten food and then began the long, slow march down the crowded school hallway.

Thwap!
I got hit by another spitball. I pulled it off my neck and realized that this one seemed to have been dunked in chocolate milk. I didn't even turn around to see where it had come from.

Next stop . . . the executioner's chamber.

On my way to math class, three guys socked me, two tried to trip me and one tried to stick a Magic Marker so far into my ear that I thought they were going to color my brain. Maybe decontaminating Gramps's yellow belly-button ooze would've been a better way to go.

Also, I was concerned that I'd only had one boner all day, the one I woke up with. I swear those things were like roosters . . . up at dawn every morning, making it almost impossible to take a pee.

“Please,” I said to the Gods of Stiffness. “Please don't torture me next period.”

I didn't get a reply. Figures.

“Well, how am I supposed to manage these things, then?” I asked the Lords of Peckerdom.

Again, no response.
Urgh.
So frustrating.

In some ways, walking into math class felt like returning to the scene of a crime I never meant to commit. Of course, I sat down at my usual desk and tried to act as if everything was cool. As kids filed into the room, almost all of them had a comment, a look or a giggle for me. My life had turned into a source of nonstop chuckles for every student in the school. It was absolutely terrible.

And then it got worse.

While waiting for the teacher, I suddenly saw the girl who had said hi to me earlier in the day when Mom first dropped me off. Wow, she was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen.

I stared as she crossed the room, taking in every small detail about her. The way the red and white stripes of her socks perfectly matched the red and white stripes of her shirtsleeve. That she had six bracelets on her left wrist but only two on her right. That she wore a silver thumb ring.

We made eye contact. I smiled. She smiled back.

Now, I'm not one of those goofballs who believes in love at first sight—or in this case, love at second sight—or any nonsense like that, but when I saw this girl, something hit me.

Hit me hard.

And there was only one thing in the world I was hoping for just then.

That she'd been hit, too.

I stared at my mystery girl as she took a seat, one row up and one row over from me, the absolute perfect placement in class for me to gawk all day at this angel from heaven above.

I turned to Finkelstein “Who's that?”.

“Her name's Allison Summers, and she's hot like barbecue corn,” Finkelstein answered. “A new fishie in the pond, only her second day.”

“She's beautiful,” I said.

“Too bad for you she's also the new math teacher's daughter.”

Suddenly, a shadow rose from behind me, darkening my desk. It appeared like a storm cloud.

“So, you're the famous Bobby Connor?”

Gulp.
I slumped in my chair.

“My name is Mr. Summers, and I am the new mathematics instructor,” he began. Mrs. Mank, it turned out, broke her hip, ankle and fibula during the tumble she took two days ago. Word was she'd be out at least six months, maybe eight.

“Now, I do hope there will be no more ‘issues' for you in this classroom, Bobby,” Mr. Summers said in a stern, serious voice. He had brown eyes, a strong jaw and the most perfectly groomed mustache I'd ever seen on a man. Black and straight and totally even. It was as if he'd measured every whisker with a ruler.

“Um, no sir,” I answered. “No issues at all.”

Of course, we both knew I was lying. The truth is that the compass in my corduroys could point due north at any moment, and there wasn't a dang thing to be done about it.

“Good,” Mr. Summers said. From my upward-looking angle, I could see straight into his nostrils. They were like little pink caves with short, manicured hair.
Ew!
“Because I like order, Bobby,” he continued. “Order is the natural state of the universe. Math has order. Productive citizens have order. Good students have order. But chaos-causers . . .” He paused, letting the words dangle in the air. “They upset order. And thus, they upset me. Are we clear?”

Call it a hunch, but for some reason I didn't feel as if I was Mr. Summers's favorite student at his new school. I mean, we'd only known each other for like eight seconds, but still, something told me that he already didn't like me very much.

Perhaps my reputation as a kid with a winkie that sends teachers to the hospital had something to do with it?

“I said, are we clear, Bobby?” he repeated.

“Yes sir,” I said. “Very.”

“Good.” Mr. Summers turned and then called out to the rest of the class, “Students, take out a pencil.”

Kids slowly began reaching into their bags.

“Now!”
he barked.

The whole room jumped, then sprang into action.

“We're having a test on the materials I went over yesterday and you'd better do well. None of this ‘learn it yesterday, forget it today' stuff, understand? You will have twenty minutes to complete the following twenty problems. Make sure you copy the question on your own sheet of paper. Do not write on my test.” He began handing out tests to every student in the room. “And yes, you
must
show your work.”

“But the bell hasn't even rung yet,” Nathan said, finding it unfair to start class before class had even started.

Mr. Summers crossed his arms, squinted at Nathan and waited. His mustache waited, too.

Three, two, one . . .

“I'll be expecting excellence, Nathan,” Mr. Summers said. “Orderly excellence.”

Nathan, without a peep, looked down and began his test. Obviously, there was a new sheriff in town.

Sheriff Mustache.

“Um, Mr. Summers,” I said, meekly raising my hand.

“Yes, Bobby?” he answered impatiently.

“I wasn't here yesterday.” I handed him back the test he'd just given me.

Sheriff Mustache looked at the piece of paper I was holding, but didn't take it. I spent eleven seconds holding out the set of math problems like a complete idiot.

“So . . . ?” he finally said.

I put the paper back down on my desk, clearly getting the message: Sheriff Mustache didn't care whether I had been absent or not. I still had to take the test.

I looked at question number one.

“Be sure to show your work, Bobby,” Sheriff Mustache said before weaving his way up the aisle to look over people's shoulders whether they wanted him to or not. “No work, no credit.”

I already hated this man.

Just then the angel turned around from one row up and one row over to mouth something to me.

“Llrrffpth rrnnpf ffee,”
she said.

I shook my head, not understanding.

“Huh?” I mouthed back.

“Llrrffpth rrnnpf ffee,”
she repeated.

I shrugged. “Huh?”

She paused to make sure no one was watching her. “It's eee-zee,” she whispered.

“Allison!” snapped a voice from the front of the room.

The angel smiled at me with big red apple cheeks and then spun back around, not daring to turn around again.

Right then, I knew I was cooked.

Devastated.

Destroyed!

People called me Bobby Banana. People called me the Puny Pecker Pirate. People called me Mini-Man Connor Man, the Undersized Wiener Dog. All day long people called me the craziest names they could think of, and there was no telling when, or even if, it was ever going to stop.

But right at that moment, as I stared at a math question I had no idea how to solve, I suddenly realized I had a much bigger problem than spending the rest of my life as a sad, pathetic victim of stupid, immature erection jokes.

I was cuckoo in love with the new math teacher's daughter.

And she had a father named Sheriff Mustache who was ready to flunk me all the way back to second grade.

The room was dark and quiet. Clean. The air-conditioning was cold.

“Boys have a penis. Girls have a vagina.” That was the first thing my correctional erectional therapist said to me. No name. No introduction. No warm-up. Just headfirst into a conversation about human privates.

I replied with supreme intelligence.

“Um . . .”

She was a woman with the body of a pencil. Skinny arms, skinny fingers, skinny neck. She even wore skinny glasses.

“Girls also have breasts,” she continued. “Sometimes they cause arousal in men. Do you understand the word
arousal,
Bobby?”

“Um . . .”

“See, when your brain finds something to be arousing, it sends specific messages to your penis. Are you familiar with how the human penis accomplishes its biological functions, Bobby?”

“Um . . .”

“Think of your penis as something that has ears.”

“Ears?” I said. “My penis has ears?”

“Yes, your penis has ears,” she answered. “And when the ears of your penis hear sounds they find pleasant, the blood flow to your penis is temporarily increased and trapped in the penis so that your penis becomes elevated and enlarged. The scientific term for this process is called vasocongestion. Can you say vasocongestion?”