I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class (15 page)

 

There’s a conversation killer if ever I’ve heard one.

 

“Oh,” I say. “Good luck with that.”

 

“Thanks,” he says. Then he gets up without saying goodbye and walks out to the school yard.

 

I watch him go, with a curious emotion in my chest. Is it possible for me to feel guilt?

 

No.

 

Thank God!

Moorhead’s latest cigarette reads
CARRY A COPY OF
GRAVITY’S RAINBOW
. He stares at it with alarm.

 

I don’t really blame him. Lest you forget, receiving mysterious messages on cigarettes is a pretty alarming proposition, any way you look at it.

 

Plus, this message tells him to carry a copy of
Gravity’s Rainbow
, Thomas Pynchon’s legendarily unreadable novel. Eight hundred pages long. Dense, wordy, kooky. Exactly the sort of thing to impress a smarty-pants like Lucy Sokolov, but a daunting prospect for a tiny brain like Moorhead.
⁸²

 

But I guess the most alarming thing about this particular cigarette is
where
he found it: inside an orange he just peeled. That was childish of me.

 

There he stands, in the middle of the hallway, slack-jawed. Ripped-open orange in one hand, pulp-covered cigarette in the other, getting jostled by the class-bound hordes. He turns warily in a circle, scanning the vicinity for someone—a magician, perhaps? A playful god?—who could have done this. But there’s only me. And I’m scratching my butt with my pencil case.

 

Vice Principal Hruska storms past, mentally calculating the number of seconds until he can retire. He plucks the cigarette from Moorhead’s fingers. “Not on school property, Neil.”

 

Moorhead points urgently as Hruska walks away, “Wait! Read it. . . .”

 

But Hruska has already crushed the cigarette in his hand and dropped the soggy shreds in a garbage can. “Read what?”

 

Moorhead stares at the old man, then at the garbage, then back at the old man.

 

“Read what, Neil?”

 

Moorhead turns and walks silently back to his classroom, letting the orange slip from his limp fingers. It’s like he’s forgotten he was holding it.

 

See, not everyone likes surprises. Some people love ’em; some people have heart attacks. It’s a matter of taste.

 

Does Randy Sparks, the Most Pathetic Boy in School, like surprises? Let’s find out.
⁸³

 

He’s put up with some pretty surprising stuff lately. Like his father getting a girlfriend. And it’s all happened so fast! Wasn’t it just a few days ago that she returned Randy’s bike? After single-handedly taking it away from the motorcycle gang that stole it?

 

Kind of hard to believe when you think about it, but when Verna starts talking, it all makes sense. She can be very convincing—about almost anything, if the price is right. Not that Randy knows that.

 

The thing he mostly hears her be convincing about is the beauty of the democratic process (she used to run campaigns for
national elections
). As it turns out (and, I’ll grant you, this is improbable), the elections she’s really interested in now are middle-school ones. They are, apparently, incredibly important in shaping the character of “our next generation of leaders.”

 

Naturally, Verna was horrified when Randy told her that a boy was running unopposed for the eighth-grade class presidency. Boy, was she ever horrified. She tried to convince Randy to be horrified, too, but even the Most Pathetic Boy in School isn’t going to fall for that one.

 

So she focused her powers of convinction on Scott Sparks, the Luckiest Man in Omaha, and he was instantly, thoroughly, completely convinced. He told his son he should run for class president. And I mean he
really
told him. Scott Sparks practically begged Randy to run for class president.

 

Randy didn’t want to screw things up for his dad, so he promised he’d try. And, being the sort of person who keeps promises, he went to Mr. Pinckney, who said, “No, no. Absolutely not,” just like Randy knew he would. And that was that. And Randy was relieved. He’d done his best.

 

What Randy didn’t know was that one minute after he left Mr. Pinckney’s office, The Motivator went into it. That was yesterday.

 

Today is today, and Randy and I are sitting three desks away from each other in Earth sciences. Miss Broadway teaches it. She’s technically a math teacher, but because she’s new, she gets stuck with a lot of the classes no one else wants. “Dirt for Dummies” is one of those classes. Right now she’s talking about the big news in the science world—the burglary last night at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

 

“Thank goodness they didn’t take more,
⁸⁴
but
still
. I mean,
really
. This is the home of some of our most valued national treasures. People shouldn’t be able to just stroll in and take whatever they
want
.”

 

Broadway seems less concerned with what was stolen than she is with the whole decline-in-law-and-order aspect of the story. Most of her conversations turn in this direction. In geometry, she once made a compelling speech linking the sides of a scalene triangle to a recent outburst of gang violence.

 

I can assure her (but I won’t) that the burglars didn’t “just stroll” into the museum. This was a precision military operation, conducted by top-flight Armenian mercenaries. They were in and out in under five minutes, and they didn’t leave a trace.
⁸⁵

 

I glance at the wall clock, then over at Randy, who is picking wax out of his ear. If my instructions are being followed, just about now The Motivator is walking into Principal Pinckney’s office with a little brown box.

 

Which means that just about
now
, Pinckney, who heard about the museum robbery with a combination of excitement and dread, is opening that little box with trembling fingers.

 

And just about
now
, The Motivator is reminding the Principal of his side of the bargain.

 

And just about
now
. . .

 

“Your attention, please.” Pinckney’s voice crackles over the loudspeaker. “Attention. This is your principal. Pardon the interruption. This is . . . is highly unusual. . . .”

 

He pauses, apparently unsure how to continue. Every eye in the room is on the little speaker mounted above the blackboard, except for mine. I’m looking at somebody sitting three desks away.

 

“Um. Well . . .”

 

Buried in the static hissing out of the loudspeaker, you can barely hear someone whisper, “Just say it.”

 

“Um . . . Randy Sparks is now a candidate for the eighth-grade class presidency.”

 

Then a horrible
clank
as the microphone is abruptly shut off.

 

Surprise!

 

Turns out Randy Sparks is the have-a-heart-attack type. Only he’s too young to have a heart attack, so he just turns purple and starts coughing. When he recovers, Broadway is standing over him, seemingly determined to draw the truth out of him with her immense gravity.

 

“What are you up to, Andy?”

 

“Randy.”

 

Broadway rolls her eyes. She doesn’t like students who mouth off.

 

Randy starts sputtering, trying to make sense of it for himself. “I don’t know! I asked him yesterday; he said I couldn’t . . . I didn’t think he’d—”

 

“You just
asked
Mr. Pinckney to make you a candidate?” Broadway booms, horrified. “Don’t you know that there’s a
procedure
you have to follow?”

 

“But my dad, he . . . My dad has a
girlfriend
!”

 

That’s enough to start the orangutans on a laughing jag and Randy on another coughing fit. Broadway storms around the room, muttering, looking personally insulted. When the animals finally quiet down, she addresses us in fune real tones.

 

“This is just what I was talking about before. Just
exactly
. There are rules we are supposed to follow. As a society. As a nation. As a school. When those rules aren’t followed—especially
here
, where you’re supposed to be learning to respect them—the wheels come off the cart. They just do!” She points a sizeable index finger at Randy. “
You
were supposed to be nominated by someone.” Her voice rises in pitch, speed, and passion. “
That
nomination was supposed to be seconded. Your homeroom teacher was supposed to witness it all! Where was he or she in this process?
Who is your homeroom teacher
?”

 

Randy shrinks down in his seat. “You are.”

 

The animals are laughing too loud to hear the bell ending class.

 

My sympathies are with Randy on this one. No one should be so anonymous that his homeroom teacher doesn’t know he exists.

 

“Spray Broadway with solution X-9,” I whisper. Tomorrow, she is going to come down with a very, very bad cold.

 

“And solution X-5.”

 

And a rash.

 

“And let the air out of her tires.”

 

Now I’m just being nasty.

Daddy stands at his closet, combing through his collection of bow ties. I have nothing against bow ties personally, except when Daddy wears them. He likes to wear
fun
items of clothing when he gets dressed up, as if to say,
I don’t take things like this too seriously
.

 

“What do you think?” he says, holding up two ties. “The one with dancing babies on it, or the one with roller-skating Frankensteins?” I take a special joy in giving him the stupidest ties I can find every Christmas and Father’s Day. I would enjoy it even more if he didn’t like them so much.

 

“They’re both nice,” says Mom, who sits on the bed. He nods, gives each tie another serious look, then puts them aside for further consideration. He’s picking out what he’ll wear on his station’s upcoming pledge drive, a monthlong extravaganza of whining for dollars.

 

Daddy drops his favorite corduroy jacket on the pile, then puts a hand to his noble brow. “God, I hate this.” He looks even more world-weary than usual. “Wasting my time going on air. So many important things I could be doing in my office . . .”

 

“Then don’t do it,” I say, sitting on the floor, playing tug-of-war with Lollipop.
⁸⁶

 

Daddy looks a little too pained to respond. Mom fills the vacuum. “He has to do it, Sugarplum. He’s scheduled to be on TV three nights a week. For a month!”

 

“Yeah,” I say, drawing it out, as if the idea is just dawning on me. “But he’s the boss of the whole station.”

 

“That’s right.”

 

“So isn’t he the one who makes the schedule? He could make it so other people have to go on TV, and then he can do all the
important
work in his office—”

 

“Someday you’ll understand what it means to have responsibilities,” snaps Daddy. He turns back to his closet with a passion and starts pawing through his wardrobe with real energy.

 

“Maybe when I beat Randy and become president,” I say.

 

“Yeah, maybe then,” says Daddy, distracted. Pledge-drive season takes up an insane amount of my parents’ mental energy. He starts pawing through his sock drawer.

 

I thought he’d be a little more interested when he heard I had an opponent. “It’s going to be a tough election,” I venture. “I’m scared Randy will get all the kids who have glasses to vote for him. Because he has glasses.”

 

My parents haven’t heard a word of it. Daddy’s examining a pair of bright-orange socks. “I can’t wear these on TV—they’re stained.”

 

“You should get a haircut,” says Mom.

 

He looks in the mirror. “No,” he says, stroking the curls around his pointed ears. “Then it would look like I cared.”

 

I shouldn’t be surprised by their lack of enthusiasm. As it turns out, Randy Sparks’s late entry in the race wasn’t even the biggest news at school today. After lunch, word leaked out that Tatiana had been suspended for two weeks. Someone’s been spray-painting graffiti in the parking lot since January. Typical juvenile stuff (
see plate 15
). This morning, Ms. Sokolov remembered that she’d seen paint on Tatiana’s fingers the other day. And that was that.

 

Here’s the funny thing: The vandal uses blue paint.