King Dork Approximately (7 page)

I had no idea if my dad had ever read
Dune
. It didn’t have his initials written in it like the others, but it was from a box in the same general area of the basement, and he could well have read it. I decided to pretend he
had
read it and see if that helped. For now, though, I put that book down too, opened the desk drawer, and took out the little square of graph paper containing the Catcher Code, the one piece of physical evidence I had that linked my dad with Mr. Teone. I had made a little case for it by cutting up and taping together a clear plastic seven-inch sleeve. I turned it over in my hand, thinking. At this point, it was little more than a talisman, a souvenir that had already taught me all it had to teach. But maybe if they ever did catch Mr. Teone, they’d want it as evidence. Or if there was ever a lawsuit …

As a last-ditch effort at doing something I could actually accomplish, I put on NAR-012 as loud as possible, hoping to provoke someone to get mad and tell me to turn it down, but
even that was met with what seemed like utter apathy from the world outside my room.

My mom was in the living room, slouched on the sofa smoking one of her long cigarettes and drinking what I took to be a martini in a regular glass, based on the olives that were in it. I guess she had managed to get that jar open after all, rendering my band obsolete in the process. Ah, well, we’d had a good run. It was a slightly unusual home cocktail for her, and in my current mood, that and the coincidence of the presence of the olives from her most hated jar seemed vaguely ominous.

Now, I think I’ve mentioned that my mom has an eccentric way of dressing, especially for a mom. She can look like a little girl playing dress-up one day, and then like a crazy lady living on the street the next, and then, on the third day, like an old-fashioned airline stewardess who has fallen out of her plane, landed on a Toys “R” Us, and emerged covered with brightly colored toys. They even called the cops on her a couple times way back when I was a kid when she was picking me up from school: her outlandish dress sense was enough to set in motion an elementary school lockdown and they had to call my dad to come get both of us just to be on the safe side.

It’s mostly a matter of strange hats and vibrant, clashing colors. Her outfits have triggered epileptic seizures in the elderly and in cats. This is well known. But even so, I was surprised to find her wearing a kind of Christmas uniform: red-and-white striped socks, green sort of short overalls, glittery boots that Ace Frehley would have been proud to wear, earrings that were little dangling Christmas trees, and a funny green hat like a baseball cap but really puffy on top. As I explained, my dad
had been a pretty Christmassy guy. My mom was not, as a rule, anywhere near this Christmassy.

“Work party,” she said in response to my questioning look. “So …” She was distant as usual, distracted by something only she could see, remaining aloof from the entire living room, maybe the entire world. Was it likely that there would be a dress-up work party at the dentist’s office on Christmas Eve? It didn’t seem too likely to me, but what do I know about Christmas, or dentists?

“Hand,” she said.

My look begged her pardon.

“It says ‘hand’ on your shoe.”

Oh, right. By way of explanation, I held up my right palm, the one that had SHOE sloppily written on it, maintaining a deadpan expression. Now, I thought that was funny. My mom didn’t see the humor, however, and nodded sadly, as though the spectacle of a son who needed labels to distinguish his foot from his hand, and who moreover got the labels wrong, was somehow a confirmation of some dark, long-held suspicion.

“Mom,” I said, finally resorting to words. “Did Sam Hellerman send me a letter recently?”

Her look seemed to say “I don’t know, did he?” managing to combine maternal sarcasm, juvenile smart-assery, and her usual mournfulness in the same weird package. But in words she said, “Not that I know of, baby.”

She crinkled her brow and sighed out a perplexed jet of smoke.

“Love you, sweetie,” she finally said quietly, with just the hint of a shake of her head. That was one of her two ways of signaling that she had no more to say and the conversation was over, the other, less affirmative one being just getting up and leaving the room.

Nice talking to you, Mom, I said silently, by means of placing a gentle hand on her shoulder as I walked past. She patted my hand with the bottom of her glass, and half of her mouth seemed to smile, almost. Looking back at her from the hallway, I thought her eyes might possibly be a little misty. She looked beautiful and shiny in the dim light, a long scroll of smoke spiraling from the tip of her cigarette like an Elizabethan signature.

SHOE, HAND, LETTER. If nothing else, the awkward conversation with my mom was a reminder to remember to look at my reminders to remember Sam Hellerman’s accursed letter. This better be good, Hellerman, I thought. I don’t know why I had begun obsessing about the stupid letter. Maybe because I just wanted to cross something, anything, off my list, and nothing else seemed remotely cross-offable at the moment.

Knowing Sam Hellerman, it could be anything: a puzzle, a code, a sly insult, a puzzle that when solved revealed a coded sly insult, an informative newspaper clipping, an uninformative newspaper clipping, a picture of a sexy girl with the caption PHOTON TORPEDOES: TARGET ACQUIRED … My best guess was that it was something of the photon torpedo type, possibly to do with Jeans Skirt Girl. Or it could in fact be nothing at all, no letter, no nothing, just something Sam Hellerman said for no reason whatsoever. That was my second-best guess.

At any rate, once I jump on the obsession train, there’s just no derailing it. I know it’s stupid, but the more I try to ignore
something, the more it swirls in my mind, till I’m gibbering and laughing hysterically, brushing invisible insects from my arms, covering the walls with crookedly placed newspaper clippings containing the word “letter,” and sitting bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night screaming
“What letter, Hellerman? For the love of all that is holy, just tell me, WHAT GODDAMN LETTER?”
In that quiet way I have, of course.

Well, I vowed not to let that happen if I could help it; plus, I was going crazy with boredom as it was and I had to do something, so instead of passively waiting till the next time I saw Sam Hellerman and hoping I’d still have HAND on my foot at that point, I decided to take action. A brief tug-of-war with Amanda later, the phone-baby was in my possession, and I was locked in the bathroom tapping in the number of Hellerman Manor.

After many rings, Sam Hellerman’s father answered and said, in his scary German-accented voice: “It is the dinner hour, young man, and it is Christmas Eve.” He then asked if I was insane. Well, I’m sure I sounded plenty insane, especially when I begged him to put Sam Hellerman on the phone and avowed that it was a matter of life and death. That was taking things too far, I know, but if I’ve learned anything in my brief time among the inhabitants of this planet, it is that your chances of getting your way can only be improved if the other party believes you’re crazy enough to be dangerous. Sam Hellerman soon came on the line.

“I can’t talk, Henderson,” he said in an exasperated whisper, and I didn’t blame him. It had sounded like Herr Hellerman was planning to give someone a nice Christmas beating, and Sam Hellerman was certainly the most likely candidate to receive it.

“Just tell me about your letter, Hellerman,” I said quickly, in a tone of voice that added “that’s all I ask.”

“My letter,” he repeated, in the way that someone who was unaware of any letter might say the word “letter” when asked about a letter.

I was pretty sure I had my answer right there, but just to confirm I added:

“So you didn’t send a letter.”

“No, why would I do that?” he said. “Do you know how crazy you sound right now?”

I was just about to hang up when I heard him suddenly say:

“Oh, wait.
That
letter!”

I could almost hear him wince over the phone when I said “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“You mean the one from the school district,” he said. “It wasn’t from me. Did you get—”

But I had already hung up.

There was no mail from Sam Hellerman in the huge pile of barely opened mail on the mail pileup area of the kitchen counter by the phone, but there was lots and lots of mail. Junk mail, bills, bank statements, threats from collection agencies—my family is not very ept at opening and answering mail. The phone and gas get cut off regularly just because no one bothers to open the delinquent bills and pay them, and Little Big Tom sometimes has to drive down to the gas company’s headquarters to pay in cash at the last minute when it gets critical.

I wasn’t expecting this letter to be anything interesting. And on the outside chance that it turned out to be something interesting, I wasn’t expecting it to be anything good. But as I’ve
explained, at this point I just wanted to cross it off my list, and going straight to the source seemed a better approach than trying to tease whatever it was out of a terrified, whispering Sam Hellerman over the phone.

It took some time to find it, but in the end there it was, from the Santa Carla Unified School District, dated a few weeks back. It was a long letter. My eyes scanned it.

“… tragic events … liability … district policy … safety and well-being … students, staff, and administrators … appropriate measures … pending litigation … law enforcement … federal investigation … media scrutiny … counseling available … effective immediately … upon commencement … close its doors … offices to remain … administrative functions … smooth transition … academic excellence …”

Then I read it again, more carefully.

My God, I said, almost out loud. They’re closing Hillmont High School.

Well, what do you know? I thought. There was a lot of babble about the welfare of the students and “academic excellence” and so forth, but the bottom line seemed to be that fears of legal trouble and bad publicity and uncertainty as to what else the various investigations might turn up had led the school district’s administrators to decide that inviting students back into the Hillmont High School buildings after what had happened would only make them look even worse than they already did and would possibly open them up to further liability. Their solution was to close the school down, effective almost immediately.

I had to hand it to Mr. Teone. He and his hidden cameras had finally managed to achieve what forty years of sucking worse than any high school in the history of high school could not. And it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving
school, despite being a decade or three late. I doubted anyone would mourn the demise of Hillmont High School.

The Hillmont students were to be filtered into other schools beginning in the spring semester. The end of the letter informed me that following winter break, after doing “Finals” at the Hillmont “campus” (ha, I inserted mentally), I was expected to show up for registration at Clearview High, with classes to begin officially the following week. That was really soon.

It was difficult to believe. I just stood there turning it over in my mind, getting more and more annoyed. I certainly wasn’t upset that Hillmont High was closing. I had no delusions that Clearview would be much better, but it could hardly be worse, and I hated Hillmont more than life itself. What was bugging me was my stupid, incompetent family, who couldn’t even manage to open the mail every now and then, who showed no interest in participating on my behalf in what appeared to be a considerable orgy of forthcoming litigation against the school, who basically refused to bother to do or know anything about anything. Plus, there was the fact that I was only finding out about it now, when Sam Hellerman and everyone else had already learned of it ages ago.

I was still standing there, letter in hand, when Little Big Tom came up behind me and started giving me one of his trademark unsolicited back rubs, the sort that are supposed to be comforting but actually make your skin crawl.

“Listen, chief,” he said in his soothing therapy voice, the one like thick, gentle, alarming syrup. “I know you have deep, deep concerns and anxieties about Y2K. But the first thing to remember is, this is a safe place.…”

I started to see bubbly colors like I had seen before I accidentally beat up Paul Krebs.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to punch a baby in the face.
Most of all I wanted to get out from under Little Big Tom’s oppressive therapy grip. But what I did was, I tipped up the kitchen table and knocked it all the way over, scattering the mail, dirty dishes, and everything else that was on it in a big clattering crash that made Little Big Tom jump five feet in the air and brought my mom and Amanda rushing into the kitchen at light speed.

“What on earth happened here?” said a Christmas tree who happened also to be my mother.

“The time bomb finally exploded,” said Amanda, even as she was tapping in a number on her phone-baby to report the latest to her bureau chiefs at headquarters. Her shoulders raised slightly as though to say “It was only a matter of time.”

“Never seen someone so darn upset about Y2K,” said a visibly mystified Little Big Tom, dabbing his shirt where a flying open bottle of wine and a tub of butter had landed with satisfying accuracy.

“They’re closing Hillmont High School,” I said when the colors had receded, rattling the letter.

“Oh, yeah,” said my mom. “I heard about that.”

I stared at her. My eyes said: “You heard about it and didn’t bother to mention it? And that’s because why?” And I’m not at all sure that one of my eyebrows didn’t add the word “bitch” somewhere in there.

It was the easiest game of Try to Guess What I’m Mad About in the history of the world, but, well, my family really, really sucks at Try to Guess What I’m Mad About.

“Chief,” said Little Big Tom, still in the therapy voice, taking my hands in his. “Going to a new high school is a challenging time for any teen.…”

I twisted away and left the room, winning.