Don't Care High (7 page)

The superintendent stared at him, his expression a combination of malice and pity. “Look, I've never seen a guy like that in my life, and if I did, I'd call the cops. Now, leave me alone.”

The boys left hurriedly, only to stand on the sidewalk staring back at the building.

“That's one-oh-six, all right,” Sheldon confirmed. “And this is Gordon Street. I don't understand it.”

“This is too weird,” said Paul in exasperation. “He drives a car that isn't anything, his phone number is phony, and he lives on the eleventh floor of a ten-storey building. And every day he drives home from school, goes into an underground parking lot and never comes out. It's as though the guy doesn't even exist!”

Sheldon shook his head again. “I just don't understand it. But as long as we're on our own for dinner, it occurs to me that we're not too far from Onmiburger, where they make the best burgers in town. And fries — oh, man! I'd sell my sister's cat to a tennis racket company just to inhale the aroma of those fries!”

“Sheldon —” began Paul warningly.

“We have to order the Megaburger. It's a whole pound of meat on an eight-inch bun. It comes with Ton-o'-Fries and Vat-o'-Coke. We can split it.”

“Sheldon, this isn't another one of your deadly poison places, is it? I mean, there's no patent on these burgers, I hope?”

“Heck, no, this is gourmet junk food at its finest. Come on. Let's go.”

* * *

Paul let himself into the empty apartment, clutching his midsection, where the Megaburger simmered, surrounded by his share of the Ton-o'-Fries. Passing the hall mirror, he looked at his green face. In the past two hours, he had taken in enough grease and oil to keep a fleet of taxis in perfect working order for six months. He switched on the radio in time to hear Flash Flood proclaim,

“Isn't it a beautiful evening in the greatest city in the world?”

“No!” Paul shouted. Mike Otis was on his mind, and fast becoming the only thing on his mind aside from his overtaxed digestive system. He sat down heavily at the kitchen table and noticed that Sheldon had left Mike's confidential file sitting there. Curiosity overcoming heartburn, he began to study it.

An odd feeling came over Paul, one that had nothing to do with the Ton-o'-Fries, and he all but ran to his room for the large family atlas.

“North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma… Finch… aha!” There
was
no Finch, Oklahoma. Paul was not surprised.

Replacing the atlas, he wandered to the window. Well, this certainly was a situation. Raincoat and safety pins notwithstanding, Mike Otis didn't seem to exist. Out of a school of twenty-six hundred students, Sheldon had picked at random the only one with no past and no present. As for the future, Paul could only shrug out the open window. It boggled the imagination.

* * *

A burst of flame caught his eye, and he squinted into a window of the building across the street. It was a fire-eater, getting in a little extra practice at homße. Paul found it pretty mundane, actually, when compared to Mike Otis's uncanny ability to disappear off the face of the earth.

It was as though the fire-eater had guessed Paul's thoughts and was insulted, because he stuck his head out the window and blew a fireball at Paul. Involuntarily, Paul jumped back.

Flash Flood's voice reached him from the living room. “It's seven forty-six in the greatest city in the world. The late traffic is a mess in the tunnels, and the weather is going to be lousy. Face it, the world's too complicated to try and figure out tonight, so stay home and stay tuned to the old Double 9.”

Paul smiled in spite of himself. Flash Flood was no dummy.

R
olling into the third week of school, a number of things changed. The weather went from insufferably hot to unseasonably cold, and naturally, the climate control system that governed the air inside Don Carey High School was taken completely by surprise. The school staff apparently gave up trying to meet with student body president Mike Otis, as he was no longer mentioned in morning announcements. And Paul Abrams became the first student ever to understand fully the system employed by the LaPaz triplets.

Lucy, Shirley and Rose LaPaz, identical in every way, were in Paul's math class, his second-to-last class of the day. Only one of the LaPazes was registered for the course, and therefore only one would attend any given math class. However, Paul had begun to notice he would be in class with a different LaPaz every day. They were quite open about their respective identities, and did not mind Paul's leading questions, but they would not reveal to anyone the secret and purpose of their system.

Through careful observation, though, Paul had worked it out. Each girl would receive her schedule of six courses, and would immediately request that she be changed out of any course she might share with a sister. Mr. Morrison, ecstatic over students showing an interest in the curriculum, would be only too happy to oblige. This left the sisters with a total of eighteen courses, through which they rotated in turn. Come exam time, there was a great pooling of information, and finals would be divided up, six apiece, each test to be written by the most capable in the subject.

“Wow!” exclaimed Sheldon when Paul let him in on his findings. “Ambition, you never cease to amaze me.”

When they confronted Rose LaPaz with the theory, she seemed pleasantly surprised. “That's quite a piece of detective work.”

“Oh, we never would have figured it out,” said Sheldon modestly. “But Mike Otis knew it for a long time.”

“Who?”

“Mike Otis, our student body president. He's unbeatable.”

Rose looked impressed and went off to tell her sisters.

That was the way it was becoming with Sheldon, Paul observed, not without some trepidation. Mike Otis was terrific. Mike Otis was wonderful. Everything good that happened was entirely the work of Mike Otis, regardless of reality.

The part that really worried Paul was that Sheldon didn't seem to be joking anymore. He had apparently convinced himself that Mike was some kind of superman. It was getting to the point where talking with Sheldon on the subject of the new student body president was downright impossible.

“You know, Shel,” Paul would say, “don't you think you're overdoing this whole Mike Otis thing a little? I mean, he's just a creepy little guy —”

“He's not creepy, he's just avant-garde, that's all. He's, let's say, the symbol for the nineties, so how can we, as eighties people, expect to judge him?”

“If weird is the way of the nineties, then I agree with you. I mean, I've got nothing against the guy, but he's strange. I've told you about how he doesn't exist.”

“Oh, that,” scoffed Sheldon. “A few mixed-up records. Mistakes like that happen every day. The guy is just too cool.”

Paul shivered. He knew, for this week anyway,
everyone
at Don't Care High was too cool. In response to last week's heat wave, the janitors had managed to get the fans circulating cool air, just in time for the cold spell. So all the students wore thick sweaters and coats to class. All except the student body president, who continued to move about the school shrouded in his voluminous raincoat.

Sheldon took this to be one of Mike's many endearing qualities. “Look at the guy!” he crowed gleefully. “Nothing can make him change his habits! Not even the elements!”

Paul nudged Sheldon. “That guy's crazy! You can never tell whether you should believe him or not!”

“He was meant for the stage, not the desk,” Sheldon whispered back.

Paul could tell from the wide smile of pleasure on Sheldon's face that his friend had big plans. He could see the wheels turning as Sheldon anticipated heaping credit on Mike Otis for each and every improvement made in the school during the weeks to come.

* * *

“I didn't know the student body president could do that kind of stuff,” said Phil Gonzalez after listening to Sheldon explain how Mike Otis had single-handedly arranged for the renovations to the school building.

“Of course he can,” Sheldon assured him, “if you're lucky enough to get a guy like Mike Otis in office.”

Wayne-o was impressed by Mike's reparations to the toilet facilities. “Good,” he commented. “You see, I spend a lot of time in the can — not using it, but, you know, killing time between classes.”

Rosalie Gladstone also took a particular interest in the washrooms. “Those new mirrors — you can see yourself in them!” She snapped her gum loudly. “I like to brush my hair a lot because I've got such great-looking hair when it's brushed right. The old mirrors are, like, foggy. I thought it was me.”

“Well, you thank Mike Otis the next time you see him,” Sheldon advised.

“Who?”

“The guy I just said got you the mirrors!”

“Oh, yeah. I guess so. I don't know.”

Feldstein was skeptical. “I don't know if I go for all this change. You know — clocks that give the right time, clean washrooms, new lighting. You can't tell where it's going to end. Before you know it, they'll bring in the P.T.A., and then the staff'll start taking over unused lockers and giving them away for not so much as a donut. I like the old ways.”

“Mike's working to make those great days even greater,” Sheldon assured him.

“When I think of Mike Otis, I see my 200C's,” said Feldstein sulkily. “But I've got to admit he's sharp. From the standpoint of someone who once tried to negotiate with Mike Otis, I have to say I feel sorry for the school board. Still, the guy is bad news. He ruined my retirement.”

When sandblasting of the school's stone front began, Sheldon had a large audience. “Mike Otis did this!” he shouted over the din of the machinery and the sounds of the usual morning traffic jam. “He saw what a dump the school was and went to work for us!”

“What are you talking about!” called someone. “Who's Mike Otis?”

“The student body president, you jerk!” exclaimed Wayne-o. “He's the guy who fixed up the can! Don't you know
anything
?”

Sheldon beamed. He was making progress.

* * *

By Friday, Mr. Willis's last period photography class had advanced to the enlarging stage. This was slightly behind schedule, as the teacher pointed out, for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it was not possible to use chemicals at room temperature when the darkroom was fifty-seven degrees. Then there was Wayne-o's annoying habit of arriving late and turning on the lights in the darkroom to see if anyone was there. And the class seemed to be having an inordinate amount of trouble just remembering to bring cameras to school. In many cases, there were no photographs to enlarge.

Looking at his contact sheet, Paul was impressed to see that most of his shots had come out. He was gratified to note that the pictures of Mike's car were sharp and comprehensive. He intended to mail those to the world's foremost car experts in the hope that one of them could identify the vehicle.

Mr. Willis came by and gazed critically at Paul's work. “Not bad. I suggest you blow up —”

“Blow up?” came a worried voice from across the room.

“
Enlarge!
” snapped Mr. Willis. He turned back to Paul. “Do the one of the front view of the car.”

Paul had not counted on this. “Uh… but what about this one of these buildings?” He did not much care for presenting his picture of Mike's car with Mike there. “I mean, the texture of the brick —”

“Boring,” said Mr. Willis. “Do the car. That bizarre grill, the hood ornament, the whole shape — which junkyard did you find it in?”

“The school parking lot,” Paul admitted in a low voice.

“Really?” remarked the teacher. “I wonder what it is.”

By the end of the class, only three of the students had produced finished prints. Many others had been ruined when the print drying apparatus decided to commit suicide, and incinerated a large part of the class work.

“No harm done,” Mr. Willis was saying as the janitor sprayed fire-extinguisher foam on the smoking machine. Paul noted that none of his classmates seemed perturbed in the least by the accident. Equipment failure was a common thing at Don't Care High.

“Just a minor incident,” the teacher assured his bored class. “No problem. It'll be good as new tomorrow.”

The janitor glanced into the smouldering machine and pronounced, “Yep, you can write this sucker off.”

“Well,” said Mr. Willis painfully, “we can still go back to the class and look at the prints we do have.”

The first picture was entitled “Wayne-o's Mother.” It portrayed a pleasant-looking woman holding a cake with oven mitts.

“That's my mother,” Wayne-o explained, “and she's just taken a cake out of the oven. Chocolate. You can't tell because it's black and white.”

The second picture was an extreme close-up shot of a crushed grapefruit.

“I call it ‘Perseverance of Citrus,'” said Trudy Helfield blandly.

Mr. Willis was round-eyed. “Why?”

“I was taking a picture of this pushcart downtown, and some Toyota rammed right into it. What a mess. Have you ever seen a banana make contact with a brick wall at thirty miles an hour? Anyhow, this grapefruit's rolling down the street, dodging all the cars like it's going out of style, and I'm thinking, What courage! Bus comes out of nowhere — wow! This is all that's left.” She pointed dramatically to the photograph. Mr. Willis swallowed hard. “So? The title?”