Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film about The Grapes of Wrath (6 page)

6:45 a.m
.

I spend the next twenty minutes making an impressive but tasteful label for the DVD and a matching insert for its cheap plastic case. I place it carefully in my backpack and go downstairs for some cereal. Our dog joins me for breakfast, staring at me as I search the kitchen. All we have left is an off-brand granola, but I'm not going to let that spoil my day. I'm feeling brave, nearly reckless. Rebel without an English paper. David, I decide while munching the stale granola, is being unreasonably sensible. But then again, he always is. Never mind, I'll go it alone. I'm ready to talk to Curtis. After all, what's the worst thing that can happen?

Curtis

English class. 8:17. Curtis, Mr. Curtis, Mr. Albert P. Curtis, M.A., sits on his stool at the front of the room regarding us with a suspicious glare.

Curtis is dressed in his geeky teacher uniform of khakis (slightly worn at the cuffs) and a button-down (with both old and current coffee stains). We slouch in our slug wear: jeans, T-shirts, sweats. Our faces are pierced, our hair is purposefully unruly, and all our clothes are too large—except Danielle's, which are a little too tight.

Curtis begins to lecture. Instantly he becomes background noise. He waves his arms about, gestures with sincerity. As we drift into our own little worlds, his voice becomes more and more strident. There is something he is trying to say.

“The subjective experience of the character is portrayed through the conscious manipulation of point of view.”

Danielle stares at her notebook. She doesn't doodle. She doesn't take notes. Her notebook is blank. She examines her nails. They are a subtle shade of green with an elegant white swirl across each nail. Glamour does not come cheap. She smooths her skirt, touches her hair, and, suddenly aware of her posture, sits up straighter. She sneaks a look at the cell phone placed strategically on top of her purse to see how many messages she has accumulated during class. She glances around to see if anyone is watching her. She returns to staring at her notebook.

“Characterization.” Curtis writes the word on the board. A few of us write it in our notebooks. “The delineation of the particular qualities, features, and traits of a fictional person, conveyed primarily, in decent novels, through the character's actions and dialogue …”

Louis is giving himself a nosebleed. It's a trick he doesn't overuse, so he must really want out of this class. The first time I remember him doing it was in fifth grade, as a way of postponing a geography test when we were supposed to have memorized all of the state capitals. He first tugs out some of the deeper nose hairs, then taps the side of his nose, up near the bridge. It takes about ten minutes, and then there's a gush of very red blood. I've never wanted a nosebleed badly enough to try it.

The gush comes. Louis catches it on his shirt. I hope he has to do his own laundry. He raises his hand.

“Excuse me, Mr. Curtis, sir?” Louis calls all the teachers sir or ma'am.

“Are you bleeding?” Curtis asks. He sounds a little shaken. He's not one to question the obvious.

“Yes sir, I'm sorry. I get nosebleeds. It's a puberty thing, sir. May I go to the bathroom?”

“Please,” says Curtis.

Still holding his shirt to his nose, Louis uses his free hand to grab his backpack, slings it over his shoulder, and leaves the room. He's not coming back. On the way out he pats Thad on the back, leaving a bloody handprint.

“ ‘Character' is a noun. ‘Characterize' is a verb. Both are derived from the Greek word …” And here Curtis stops to write something even more unintelligible than his usual handwriting. It looks as if it starts with an x. I assume he is now writing in Greek. “The word meant to mark, to distinguish …”

I drop my pencil. Well, “drop” would be an understatement. I don't just drop my pencil. I fling my pencil. I hurl it across the room. For several minutes I've been doing that nodding thing, where you start to fall asleep, then catch yourself just as your head moves forward and then you jerk back up suddenly. Fourth, maybe fifth nod, I jerk back up and my pencil flies across the room. It lands in front of Curtis, perfectly into the little space between him and the class, the demilitarized zone, the no-man's-land. Everyone looks up, then back.

If I had been quick, I could have looked around as if I also didn't know where the pencil came from. If I had been Louis, I would have tapped some schlep next to me (it probably would have been me), and said, “Good shot, dickhead.” If I had been cool, I could shrug it off. Big deal.

As I am me, my face immediately drains of all color. My eyes feel moist, my hands clammy. I sit on my hands. I stare straight ahead, into the oncoming headlights of Curtis's impending anger. I can't breathe. Everyone is watching me. I can feel myself expand, grow larger, fill up all of the empty spaces in the room.

Curtis picks up the pencil and walks the three rows back to my desk.

“This yours?” he asks.

I nod.

He places it on top of my open notebook, next to my doodle of a vaguely Curtis-like person impaled on a giant pencil.

“Try holding on tighter,” he suggests without any inflection, and then he launches into a soliloquy on stream of consciousness.

Beware anything that is too easy

David is sort of waiting for me at my locker. He always looks as if he just happens to be there when I get there, not like he's waiting for me.

“Myoclonic jerk,” he says cheerfully.

“What did I do to you?”

“No, dumbshit, in class, the pencil thing. It's called a myoclonic jerk. It's a medical term. Aren't you a doctor's son?”

“It doesn't mean I know anything.”

“We talked about it in biology last year.”

I sort of remember biology last year, but nothing this specific.

“It's the sudden convulsion people sometimes have right before they fall asleep.” David then does his imitation of a myoclonic jerk. I look around to see if anyone is watching.

“Don't do that again. You look like you're having a fit.”

David shrugs. “Three inches farther and you would have nailed him in the gonads.” He then smiles. “So, I thought you were going to ask him.”

“I didn't want to do it in front of everyone. I'll go back at break.”

At break, I find Curtis in his room, sitting at his desk reading a copy of
The New Yorker
. Doesn't he have papers to grade or something? Is it legal for him to read a magazine during school hours? He looks a little startled when I knock on the open door. Maybe he isn't used to talking to students outside of class. Maybe I'm nervous.

“Can I talk to you about the paper … the paper that was due today, the
Grapes of Wrath
paper?”

“I know which paper was due today. No, you can't have an extension. It has been on the syllabus since the
beginning of the semester.” He returns his attention to his magazine.

“I … um, don't need an extension.” At least not if you buy this idea. “I don't know if you know this about me”—you don't, almost no one does—“but I'm interested in Claymation and I have been making films. Claymation films.” Films, not cartoons. “I had this idea while reading
The Grapes of Wrath
”—or at least looking at the cover—“that I could, well … what I tried to do was capture something about the novel … I made a film and I have been working on it for a while and …”

I have his attention. He has now closed
The New Yorker
and would be looking me in the eyes, if I actually looked up. He seems oddly alert, like a small rodent that's heard a sudden noise. His nose might have twitched. He is really trying to figure out what it is I am trying to say. In class he rarely lets anyone finish a sentence. He gives the constant impression that he already knows whatever you were about to say and has already decided that it isn't worth listening to.

“I can tell you are trying to tell me something, or possibly ask me something.”

“Ask. I was asking.”

“And this film, about the book …”

“It's a sort of project.”

“Instead of a paper.”

“Yeah.”

“Sure.” He smiles. I stand there and stare at him. Seeing how I haven't responded, he continues, “I like initiative and creativity. I'd be happy to watch a … Claymation …?”

“Like Gumby. A cartoon, sort of.”

“Sounds great. Do you have it with you? Because, whatever it is, it is still due today.”

I pull it out of my bag. He looks at the cover and hands it back to me.

“I can shift things around a little, why don't we show it on Friday right after we wrap up the
Grapes
unit?”

I'm not quite prepared for this reaction. “Do you want to preview it first?”

“No, I trust you.”

“Okay, thanks,” I say, and walk slowly back to my locker, thinking, “No. Don't trust me.” I have made a seven-minute cartoon with naked clay figures being tortured in various ways and I am about to turn it in as an essay on Steinbeck. I don't feel particularly trustworthy. Maybe I could change schools. Maybe I could convince my parents to move. We could go to a new state. Oklahoma. We could move to Oklahoma.

“So what did he say?”

M.C. seems to be standing between me and my locker. I am used to seeing her Post-it notes above my lock, which are her way of letting me know she expects David to give her a ride home, but I'm not used to seeing her stand here in person. I have never asked why I get the notes and not
David, but I assume it has something to do with my being Carrie's brother.

“I'm thinking of moving to Oklahoma. Would you like to elope with me and live in Oklahoma?”

“Too flat. What did he say?” M.C. arches her eyebrow. A clear physical question mark. M.C. may be one of the more animated people I know.

“He said yes. He wants to show it on Friday.”

“I knew he would, he's so cool.”

Has someone changed the meaning of the word “cool”?

“It doesn't matter, I'm not going to do it. I'm moving to Oklahoma.”

“Not before Friday. It will be great.” M.C. does this little wiggle thing she always does when she's happy. It's like she's smiling with her whole body. I can't figure out why she's enjoying this so much.

“Gotta run,” she says, leaning into the words. “See ya.”

I watch her walk down the hall. I have known M.C. for at least nine years. I know her family, the name of her goldfish, her PSAT score, and the colors of most of her shoes. I still have no idea what is going on behind her freckled forehead.

Maybe I just don't have any idea about what's going on, period

Louis is sitting with David at lunch. He has already appropriated David's chips. David is defending his sandwich
and apple by holding one in each hand and never placing them on the table. Louis looks up as if he is surprised to see me here.

“Well, Mitch, Mitch Wells, join us. We were just discussing underwear.”

I'm guessing David didn't choose the topic. He waits for me to sit down and then tries to pretend Louis isn't there. It is a strategy that never works.

“I was thinking …,” David tells me.

“Me too,” Louis interrupts. “Hurts, doesn't it? I think there's surgery they can do now to prevent that.”

“I was thinking about talking to Wallman …,” David began again.

“Not me. I was thinking about Ms. Kalikowski. Better legs than Wallman. In fact, I was having happy thoughts all the way through history class. Whenever she wears her tennis dress to class it always gives me happy thoughts.” Ms. Kalikowski, in addition to being our history teacher, also coaches tennis. Often she changes into her whites halfway through the day. She is youngish for a teacher, cheerful, and maybe even cute, but I don't think she would be the object of so much discussion if she didn't wear a short tennis skirt to teach American history.

David shakes his head and waits for more, but Louis appears to have finished his thought. So he starts again. “I was thinking …”

“About kilts? Me too. I've been thinking a lot about
kilts.” Louis pauses for our reaction, which doesn't impress him. “You see, while I was having my happy thoughts about Ms. K bending over to pick up the chalk, it occurred to me that men should wear skirts. Women don't need them, there's nothing in their pants that needs extra room in the middle of class. But a man, now—for those twenty or thirty times a day a happy thought overcomes him, he needs some room to expand into. Some of us, of course, need more room than others. So, I decided, kilts.”

“You're going to start wearing kilts?” David asks, giving up.

“Which is why I wanted to talk undies. Boxers under kilts? Boxer briefs? Kangaroo pockets? Or nothing at all? Yeah, nothing, right? I thought so. But do you think kilts rub—would the wool be rough? I hate to leave you with that thought, but somewhere there is a class where I am notably absent. And I have sworn to figure out which one it is before the end of the year. Are you going to eat that?”

Louis points to the bag of cold leftover pasta that I have pulled out of my lunch bag.

“All yours.”

“Thanks.”

“I don't want to think about Louis chafing under a kilt,” I say, after Louis and my lunch leave.

“Not a pretty thought,” David agrees.

I wait for David to ask, but he doesn't, so I tell him anyway.

“Curtis said yes.”

“Okay.”

“That's it—okay?”

“What do you want me to say? Congratulations, you've scammed your English teacher.”

“I just thought you'd want to know.”

“So now I know, but I don't get it.”