I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class (5 page)

The man and woman ask you to please, please call the number on your screen and make a donation, so they can continue to bring you fine programs featuring fat sweaty opera singers.

 

Daddy’s job is to arrange these fund-raising extravaganzas. Sometimes he even appears onscreen as the smiling man with glasses. Have you seen him? He’s got a bony triangle for a face, a feathery “smart guy” mini-mullet tickling the back of his neck, and narrow, narrow shoulders that somehow bear the sins of this world.

 

So, though I mock him, I have to admit my father can do
one
thing I can’t: beg.

 

I roll my mouth around a brussels sprout and swallow loudly. I give him my gravest little-boy-seeking-wisdom look: “But wouldn’t you be able to buy Mom presents if you made more money?”

 

Daddy responds with his gentlest
haven’t I taught you anything?
voice: “Some things are more important than money, Ollie.”

 

“And I don’t need any silly presents,” says Mom. She grabs our hands. “I’ve got everything I want right here!”

 

“Exactly,” says Daddy, as he slips his hand out of hers. “Your mother has everything she could possibly desire.”

 

This is not strictly true. I know for a fact she wants a new dishwasher and a rather lavish new Easter bonnet. She’s also fond of expensive chocolates and porcelain statues of baby animals. In fact, it’s precisely so Daddy could buy her these things that I had one of my minions offer him a job today.
²⁹

 

But that was a miscalculation. Because one of the great perks of Daddy’s job is that it allows him to turn down other,
better
jobs. Then he gets to feel completely righteous and upright, and brag about it at the dinner table—with the end result being that Mom congratulates him for keeping her deprived. My life is a torture chamber of ironies.

 

Someone has started a motorboat engine under the table. Daddy looks annoyed: “For God’s sake, Ollie, do something about that dog.”

 

I look down. The rumbling is coming from Lollipop. She glares with cold hatred at Daddy. Her tongue hangs out of her mouth like an animal she’s just caught and killed. Maybe she didn’t like the way he stopped holding hands with Mom. Or maybe she sensed that I didn’t like it.

 

“
Galtzazpiko
,” I whisper. Instantly, Lolli stops growling and shambles out of the room. My father smiles like he’s won a great victory. He won’t be smiling so much when he finds the present I just told Lolli to leave him in his underwear drawer.

 

“Who wants banana pudding?” asks Mom.

 

My father pats his belly and gets up. “No thank you, dear. I think we’re all pretty full.” He gives me a meaningful look. “
Right
, Oliver? We’ve all had
plenty
to eat.”

 

I am too dumb to understand meaningful looks. “I’m still hungry,” I tell him, even though I’m not. Daddy scowls and exits into the living room.

 

I eat three bowls of pudding without tasting them.

“What’s the matter, dork? Don’t you have any ambition?”

 

The speaker is Tatiana Lopez, Meanest Girl in School. The dork she’s talking to is me. It’s lunchtime, and I’m sitting in my traditional seat at my traditional table, chewing on my traditional fluffernutter sandwich. Tatiana stands across the table, leaning over me, pointing her spiteful little pink fingernails in my face. She’s good at this. Her spine curves and her shoulders hunch forward, so that she seems to lean over everyone she talks to, even when her victim is standing, even though she’s short. It’s magical.

 

“Mudlark,” I mutter. It’s the codeword I use to tell Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym not to interfere. Tatiana doesn’t scare me. Much.

 

“What was that, Butterball?”

 

“Leave him alone, Tati.”

 

Speaker Number Two is Randy Sparks, the Most Pathetic Boy in School. More pathetic than I am, even—and he’s not doing it on purpose. Randy is one of those unfortunate types who are geeky without being smart. He’s painfully scrawny, wears thick glasses, has greasy skin—but is a low-C-average student at best. Too nerdy to associate with the normals, too stupid to associate with the nerds, Randy is a nation unto himself. I mean, even Pammy Quattlebaum has friends, and she’s a melon-headed suck-up who’s only been at this school a year. They make her do their homework, but still, they’re
friends
.

 

Here’s how pathetic Randy Sparks is: He chooses to sit at the same table as me. There are plenty of empty tables around the room, but he chooses to sit with me. I discourage him,
³⁰
over and over again, but he keeps hanging around like a wad of toilet paper stuck to my shoe. Revolting. I predict a great future for him in the field of getting-a-dead-end-job-and-dying-alone-and-unmourned.

 

Tatiana ignores him and keeps her poisonous brown eyes pointed straight at me. “Know what your problem is, Jumbo? No ambition. Here I give you the perfect opportunity to be
president
of the whole stupid class, and you’re too scared to even try. You make me sick,” she says venomously.

 

“Uh-huh,” I say retardedly.

 

“You got plenty of guts,” she adds. “It’s just they’re only the kind that jiggle around your middle.” She snatches the sandwich from my hands, takes a long, savage bite, then tosses the twisted crust into my lap. It oozes peanut butter and marshmallow fluff, like a crushed bug.

 

Tatiana smirks and preens with feline satisfaction. She plucks up the collar of the pink cashmere sweater she won in a contest and saunters away. I watch her go through half-closed eyes. Ah, Tatiana. You vile, deceitful, mean-spirited little goddess. You will get what you deserve. Someday.
³¹

 

“Don’t let her get to you.” Randy Sparks has walked over and has the presumption to give me a comforting pat on the back. I squeal with feigned pain, “Stop hitting me, Randy! It hurts!”

 

Randy looks at his hand, amazed by his own strength. “But I was just—”

 

“Child abuse! Child abuse!” I grab my lunch bag and sprint from the room. The laughter of the chimpanzees follows me out the door.

 

It’s been an eventful day. The reason Tati’s so mad at me is because of what happened in homeroom this morning. My homeroom teacher, Lucy Sokolov, was leading us through the process of nominating candidates for student council. Ms. Sokolov is an intelligent but scary woman. She looks like someone stretched a thin layer of Silly Putty over a skeleton and slapped a red wig on top. My Research Department tells me she wants to be a novelist, but the publishing houses always reject her masterpieces. Which makes her mean. She takes out her thwarted ambitions on her students.

 

After my more spineless classmates finished nominating each other for the more meaningless offices (secretary, treasurer), we got to the meat of the issue: nominations for class president. Naturally, five people nearly got into a fistfight in their eagerness to nominate Jack Chapman. Sokolov sorted that out, and the nomination was swiftly seconded. Then she asked Jack if he would accept the nomination.

 

Every neck in the room twisted toward Jack, the best student in school, the wide-shouldered (but gentle) king of recess. Ah, Jack! That high Shakespearean brow. That broad masculine nose. He stared thoughtfully at his hands. Then he stood, paused, and nodded.

 

I cannot describe this nod adequately. It was slow, impressive. It was the kind of nod Abraham Lincoln would give. It was the humble nod of a man who has not sought out a position of leadership but who will take on that dreaded responsibility if his community needs him. And it was suddenly understood by all that we
did
need him. Everyone in the room—Sokolov included—seemed to melt an inch in the presence of such magnificence.

 

Everyone, that is, but me and Tatiana. Obviously, I’m too stupid to recognize greatness. Tatiana’s so mean she hates greatness when she sees it. Her hungry little arm snaked into the air, demanding Sokolov’s attention.
³²
Sokolov frowned, confused. “What do you want, Miss Lopez?”

 

Tati stood. Tight curls. Tiny teeth. Snub nose. Cinnamon skin. She opened her mouth and let out the words that would forever sully Jack Chapman’s moment of glory: “I nominate Oliver Watson for president.”

 

The class, to its credit, was for once too disgusted to laugh. Sokolov looked like she’d been slapped with a fish. Tati threw me a mean wink and flounced down into her seat.

 

Logan Michaels, a desperate and fat girl who occasionally functions as Tatiana’s slave, dutifully seconded my nomination.
La Sokolova
turned to me. “Oliver,” she said, with an expression on her face like she’d just bitten into a chocolate bar and found a toenail, “do you accept the nomination?”

 

I made her explain the question to me three times before I declined.

 

Later, Tati taunted me in the cafeteria and violated the sanctity of my fluffernutter. But you saw all that.

 

I have P.E. after lunch. More accurately, my
classmates
have P.E. after lunch—I have a note from a doctor that says I will suffer explosive diarrhea if I ever have to take part in P.E. Coach Anicito doesn’t like it when people drip
sweat
on the gym floor; he doesn’t make me participate.

 

He does, however, make me suit up in shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers, like everyone else. Plus, like all the other boys, I have to wear a legally mandated (but in my case, wholly unnecessary) jockstrap.
³³

 

Today, like always, I stand by the water fountain, watching my classmates exert themselves. The boys play kickball on one side of the gym; the girls play kickball on the other. Liz Twombley, the Most Popular Girl in School, kicks a dribbler off the inside of her foot. Her curly blonde hair (and everything else) bounces as she tries to beat the throw to first. Both games come to a halt as everyone watches her with a mixture of longing and awe. Liz, bless her great big stupid heart, doesn’t notice.

 

I’m catching up on some business. I have a bud—a listening device—in my ear so I can talk to Sheldrake. “I really think we should consider buying more Kreelco stock,” he natters. “The company is solid and the price is at an all time low.”

 

“Sell all our shares,” I command.

 

A moment of silence. Then: “Oliver, normally I wouldn’t argue, but—”

 

“I said, sell it.”

 

“But I thought—”

 

“Don’t
think
, Lionel,” I say. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

 

I pause to take a sip of cold chocolate milk from the water fountain. I get that by pressing on an old mildew stain on the wall. If I press the spot right below the stain, the fountain spits out root beer. Sometimes I switch back and forth between the two while I’m drinking. It’s like making a root beer float in my mouth.

 

I burp. “Trust me. We’ll buy it all back next week at half the price.”

 

I do most of my business through Sheldrake. For security reasons, only fifty-two of my most-trusted minions even know of my existence. The next tier down is a group of five hundred agents who think Sheldrake is the head of the vast criminal empire they work for. Then there are roughly a thousand agents, scattered around the world, who don’t even know who they work for. That way, my enemies can’t get any information from them if they’re captured.

 

And that’s just the
secret
side of my Empire. There are also several hundred thousand people whom Sheldrake Industries employs openly (and who think Lionel Sheldrake is their boss).

 

“Next on the agenda,” I say. “Redecorating. Put in a call to Paris—”

 

I shut up as Josh Marcil trots off the court and pushes me aside so he can get to the water fountain. He doesn’t know about any of my secret buttons, so he makes a face as he slurps up the warm dishwater that comes out. “Tastes funny,” he says.

 

I smile and say, “I like it.”

 

He flares his stubby little nose at me and says, “You would.” Then he quite unnecessarily pushes me again as he runs back to the game. My head bumps the wall. That hurts a little. Josh is a loud boy, chubby, freckled, and sweaty. I watch him go back to his position in the “outfield.”

 

“You were talking about Paris—” says Lionel.

 

“Just a second.” I click my jaw, taking me off the private channel I use for talking to Sheldrake, and onto the channel I use for Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym.

 

“Josh Marcil,” I say. “Stomach.” Then I click back over to Sheldrake and turn my back to the game. “Now, I was saying—”

 

From behind me I hear the loud hollow
Spong
! of a red rubber ball hitting the belly of a middle-school boy—hard. Then the sound of a middle-school boy falling to the ground and moaning.
³⁴
Coach Anicito is yelling at someone: “No! We do
not
throw the ball at people on our team. Unacceptable!”

 

“As for Paris, Lionel,” I say, through a cute little smile, “I think it’s time we stopped playing games.”

Your earliest memory is probably of a walk in the park when you were four. Or getting a teddy bear for Christmas when you were three.