Rotters (5 page)

“What’s up, hon?” the woman asked. Cat’s-eye glasses were wedged onto a piggy face further undermined by excessive purple eye shadow.

“I’m new,” I said.

“Name?”

“Joey Crouch.”

She licked her thumb and fluttered through a few pages. “Okay, hon, I got you.” She glanced at me over her glasses. “You’re supposed to be with Pratt in English.”

“I don’t know where that is.”

“The room number is on your schedule, hon.”

“I don’t have a schedule.”

“You lose it? You got your log-in? Everything’s on the computer.”

“No, wait.” She was already glancing over my head at the person behind me. “I don’t have anything. I just got here yesterday. I don’t have a schedule. I don’t have a locker. I’m not even sure if I have books. My dad wasn’t able to tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

The woman paused and gave me her first real consideration. She pursed her painted lips and looked back down at her papers, her chin melting into the gelatin of her neck. “Joey Crouch?”

“Yes.”

“Parents are …” She looked. And blinked. Then, without looking up, she said, “Ken Harnett?”

There was the blast of an exhale from behind me, followed by a mutter of amazement: “No way.”

I had no recourse but the truth. I nodded. The woman
wormed her tongue inside her rouged cheek. Then she started clicking her mouse.

The other woman behind the counter, a younger redhead, called out, “Next,” and the boy behind me stepped up. He looked me up and down, a sly grin on his square and watchful face. He wore his blond hair in a military cut, and his tight shirt showed off his arms, thick with muscle and encircled with barbed-wire tattoos. His neck was irritated from a too-vigorous shaving routine.

“Woody!” the redhead exclaimed. “I swear you keep getting taller!”

“No, ma’am,” said the boy, dazzling her, and surprising me, with the size and ferocity of his grin. Over this blinding display of teeth, he favored me with another glance. “Bigger, maybe, on account of weights and stuff.”

“Well, I don’t doubt that. We were all talking this morning how we expect big things from Woodrow Trask this season.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And did you know I just saw Celeste not two minutes ago? Just the prettiest thing I ever saw.”

“You’re right about that, ma’am.”

I was dimly aware of the sound of a printer. With a smack, the bespectacled woman in front of me slammed a paper to the counter.

“That’s your schedule, Joey Crouch,” she said. She pointed a chubby finger at the first line. “That’s English with Pratt. Mr. Pratt. He’s in room two fourteen. That’s up the stairs and to the right. After that, you have calculus and biology and then lunch. That’s on this floor, but around back. You’ll figure it out as you go.” She pointed to where she had written in ink
a few numbers on the paper. “This is your locker number and your combination. You have four minutes between classes, so after Pratt, go make sure it works. Some of those things are a million years old, and goofy. Half of them open without a combination if you just pull hard enough, but you didn’t hear that from me. Now,” she said, looking at me again. “You said you didn’t have books?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “They could be at home. My dad didn’t tell me.”

At the mention of my father, her tongue again retreated to her cheek. She was clearly weighing her words. “Everything going okay out there?”

Without hesitation I lied. “Yeah. It’s just that we didn’t get to talk before he left for work. He must’ve forgotten to give me my books.”

She took off her glasses. They dangled around her neck on a pearled chain. “It does say here he picked them up on Friday.” She sighed again and rubbed her forehead. “Talk to him tonight, find those books. For the time being I’m going to give you a replacement folder. It’s got some information about the school, dress code, instructions about your computer access, all that stuff. There’s a salmon-colored packet in there about extracurricular activities, too. You like sports?”

I just stared at the folder she had in her hands.

“I like band,” I said.

She flapped a hand. “Well, hon, it’s all in your salmon packet. I’m going to give you this pen, too, because it looks like you need one.” She opened the folder, tucked the pen inside the pocket, and slid it across the counter. She gave me another lingering look, then briskly lodged her glasses on her
face. “You should be able to survive today. You have any problems, you come see me. My name’s Laverne, like the TV show.”

I picked up my class schedule. With my other hand I took the folder. It was red, white, and black, and had an icon of a plummeting bird with its claws splayed for attack.
BLOUGHTON SCREAMING EAGLES
was printed in a collegiate font.

“Thank you,” I said. I turned away from Laverne, my face buried in my schedule. Room 214. Up the stairs. English. Mr. Pratt. I stepped into the reverberating dimness of the hallway. My forehead struck something hard—someone’s chest.

“Sorry,” I said. Moving aside, I saw that it was Woody Trask. The sly smile had not left his face.

“The Garbageman is your dad?” he asked.

Sixteen years I had gone without knowing my father’s name, and here suddenly was a town where everyone seemed to have an opinion on him. I blinked a few times. I could not fathom why this person was speaking to me. He was big, blandly handsome, and obviously into sports—a profile that did not at all match my own. But I needed a friend, and badly.

I attempted an easygoing smile. “I’m Joey Crouch.” I held out my hand. It was a risk, but also a necessary reach from the precipice.

Woody Trask regarded my hand as if it were a fly pestering his vision. His lip curled. “Must be shitty having such a shithole for a dad,” he said, stepping away and heading for the stairs in giant animal lopes, two textbooks dangling from a single monster hand. Before disappearing, he cringed. “By the way, dude, you fucking stink.”

I
DIDN’T SEE HER
in English class; Mr. Pratt accepted my late entry wordlessly and gestured to a seat directly in front, so I never had a chance to look behind me, and her name on the roll call meant nothing. I didn’t see her in calculus because she wasn’t there. It was biology where I saw her for the first time, striding in with a pencil in her hair and the hard plane of her textbook slanting against the curvature of her chest. She was dark-lipped and black-haired with Egyptian eyes, and wore a loose yellow dress that softened the withering severity of her features. She sat down across the room from me and spoke secrets to the girls who fell in place around her. Somehow the geometric bracket of her chair made her all the more beautiful; I could see how her lower back arced away from the plastic and how the cruel flatness of the seat accented the teardrop of her rear, and as she switched her legs I could see the tender underskin of her knees unseal and reseal with sweat. I didn’t want to speak to her or meet her. I just wanted to watch her for the rest of my life.

Mr. Gottschalk took attendance. Justin Ambrose’s first name had been misprinted
Justine
on all the attendance sheets, and this was the third class in which I had to watch him shrug off the chuckles. The next name called was Celeste Carpenter, and she, the girl, raised her hand. A tiny woven bracelet fell from her wrist to the swell of her arm. Celeste—that name rang a bell, but how could I possibly know her? I leaned forward, trying to see around dozens of uglier bodies, but from where I sat, only the barest outline of her face was visible.

“There’s no Joey Crouch? Going once, going twice …”

How long had he been saying my name? Seeing Gottschalk go back to his list, I raised my hand and blurted, “Here!”

Nearly everyone in the room turned. I was met with the faces of my new life: inquisitive, territorial, bored, amused. I felt the red that colored my face, remembered my stupid duck-in-sunglasses T-shirt. I couldn’t help it: I looked at Celeste Carpenter. She had found me as well.

Gottschalk looked up. He was a short, thick man with a triangle of dark hair rising from the top of his head. There was something swollen about his face, as if the underlying structure had been made from tied balloons, then painted over with skin. “Mr. Crouch, splendid of you to join us!” He bent his balloon-animal face. “The name is unfamiliar. I take it you are new?”

I nodded but was so far away I couldn’t be sure that he saw it.

“Stand up,” he said.

I gripped my desk. It felt scummy, hard, and real—unlike this moment.

“Mr. Crouch,” he said. “Do as I say. Stand up.”

I slid sideways from the chair and stood. My vision rocked. Far below, students’ eyes twinkled up like street-lamps.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we call a teachable moment,” said Gottschalk. “Observe Mr. Crouch. This is his first day here. He is ill at ease. These feelings incite within him distress. But this is not psychology class—that’s upstairs with Mrs. Keaton. This is biology, and what we’re interested in here is how the exercises of the mental induce actualities of the physical. So take a look at Mr. Crouch. What do you see?”

My arms hung flat at my sides. I stared at the teacher, afraid to look anywhere else. There was giggling, but no one said anything.

“I only know two of your names thus far, so I’m forced to call on Mr. Ambrose, Mr. Justin Without-an-E Ambrose,” said Gottschalk. “Mr. Ambrose, meet Mr. Crouch. Tell me what you see.”

There was an edginess to Justin’s appearance that I had seen too many times before. It was the desperate look of the bullied finally given occasion to bully. I braced myself.

“I see sweat?” Justin ventured. The class roared as if prompted by a maestro. I reached one hand to steady myself against my chair but it was too many miles away. Justin was right, of course. The stains from my morning run still shadowed my pits. I felt a drop of perspiration clinging to an eyelash and I tried not to blink.
I see tears!
I could almost hear Justin Ambrose’s jubilation.

“Very good!” said Gottschalk over the merriment. “Sweat, aka transpiration: courtesy of the good old hypothalamus, the body generates water as a means of thermoregulation, a process that cools us as the sweat evaporates, keeping things cozy enough that we can continue to hunt the savage beast or, in the case of the female, suckle the brood.”

He looked down at his attendance sheet. “Miss Carpenter, I’m afraid it’s up to you. Look at Mr. Crouch and kindly supply us with a description.”

A low groan of pleasure gusted through the class. Dozens of smiling faces banked to Celeste, who blinked her night eyes at the teacher, then slowly turned her face to me. Distantly I heard the clock at the front of the room tick. The compulsion to specify tugged at my gut and I fought it.

“In case you need glasses, Miss Carpenter,” Gottschalk said, “Mr. Crouch is the sweaty one swooning at the back of the class. Take a look and tell us what you see.”

Perfect lips parted.

“I see a boy,” she said.

An uneasy, possibly disappointed noise nickered through the rows of students. “Diplomatic, Miss Carpenter,” said Gottschalk. “Diplomatic but also correct. He
is
—we can presume, anyhow—a boy, which enacts its own particular set of pheromonal influences when it comes to producing that sticky mix of water and solute that we can see glistening from all the way across the room. Other acceptable answers would’ve included the bags under his eyes or the blemishes on his skin; the origins of which, I promise you, we will get to in due time. We have, after all, all semester.” He turned back to the attendance list. “You can sit, Mr. Crouch. A-plus for the day.”

A
BOY
.
I
T HAD
sounded good coming from her, but standing in the hallway watching two hundred kids funnel into the lunch line and stream into the cafeteria coop, the two words rang in my ears as something more demeaning. Not a man, not even a young man, but a boy. I felt it, too: here was a simple human endeavor—lunch—and I was too scared to move.

After having bought snacks on the Amtrak, I had less than ten dollars left in my wallet, and much of that was in change. My mother’s meager fortune, as well the proceeds from the auction of her belongings, was inaccessible to me for two
more years. For now, this was it: eight dollars and thirty-three cents. I flipped through the bills as covertly as possible, but still people looked my way.

The line got shorter. I moved to the counter, accidentally ordered too much, and used almost every cent to pay for it. The woman at the register watched bemusedly while I counted out change.

Waiting until everyone else had gone first was a mistake, I saw that right away. Although this school was much smaller than my previous one, instead of splitting lunch into separate periods they tossed everyone together, grades nine through twelve. The tables seethed with feeding. There was nowhere safe to sit without impinging on claimed territory.

I wanted to flee, but my stocked tray had already been noted by too many people.
I’m too old for this
, I told myself as I began walking down the center of the room. I swept my eyes from side to side while trying to look as if I couldn’t care less. There was a seat—but I’d have to squeeze in between two girls. There was another one with better elbow room—but the bleary-eyed punks who had commandeered it looked less than inviting. I was nearing the end of the room. To double back would be disaster.

Impulsively I sat. The two boys nearest me were younger. “Hey,” I grunted, nodding curtly to indicate that conversation was not necessary. The kid at my elbow edged away like I had leprosy, but the boy across from me pushed a response past his pizza. I stared down at my food, recognizable shapes in autumn colors. None of it looked edible.

“Hey, Crouch!” It was a shout from the next table over: Woody Trask, smacking his lips. He swallowed and grinned, his perfect white smile marred with something green. There was snickering from the guys around him, while the girls
rolled their eyes and covered their faces. My heart sank to see Celeste Carpenter sitting to Woody’s right.