My Awesome/Awful Popularity Plan (2 page)

Hmm … I decided to remember back to that afternoon in the park to see if there were any nuggets of wisdom I’d let slide by me.

I had spent all of freshman year in denial of the growing feelings I was having toward boys. I absolutely didn’t want to grow up to be gay. I had been called a fag ever since fifth grade, and it had always made me feel awful about myself before I even knew what it meant. Realizing that I probably was what the name meant was too much for me. By the spring, I had successfully suppressed thinking about it.

Until that afternoon in late June.

Right after our algebra final exam, I was walking home with Spencer. We were both in a good mood because we only had one more final and it was in health, which would cover such difficult topics as “Can you get pregnant from a toilet seat?” and “Is showering good?”

We were laughing as we made up new topics—“Should you set your hair on fire?” or “How many venereal diseases equal a bushel?”—when we passed by Doug Gool and his friends in front of the Ben & Jerry’s. Even though the other boys in his gang tower over him, Doug is clearly the leader. He’s my height (short) and weight (heavy) but it’s all muscle. He’s always sported his white-blond hair in a scary crew cut, and
two years ago he broke his nose in a big fight with a wrestler from Woodmere Academy. His beady eyes, army haircut, offcenter nose, and bulging muscles equal terrifying-looking.

“Hey, Fag Goldblatt!” Doug said as we walked by. “Laughing about faggy things?”

I sped up and Spencer followed. It was one thing to be called a fag when I was by myself, but to have a friend witness it was awful.

When we got a block away, I started talking about health class again, hoping Spencer would pretend that nothing had happened. Instead he said, “Doug Gool is a douche bag.”

I tried to laugh but couldn’t; I still felt so embarrassed. I wanted to say, “I hate being called a fag,” but I said, “I hate being a fag.”

Suddenly, complete silence. We were in front of the park, and the only noise was from the toddlers on the swing sets.

Spencer looked at me seriously. “Justin, you’re not a fag.” He said it firmly. He obviously wanted me to believe it. But at that point, I was sick of denying it to myself.

“Spencer, I
am
a fag.”

I expected him to be disgusted. But he wasn’t. He gave me the same look he had just given me. “Justin, you may be gay, but you’re not a fag.
Fag
is a mean word that douche bags use to make gay people feel bad about themselves.”

“What?” He was confusing me with his not caring about my announcement. I decided to reiterate it. “Spencer, listen to
what I’m telling you—I like boys. I am what they say I am. I’m a fag.”

“And, Justin, I’m asking you this—you’re Jewish, right?” I nodded. “Does that mean you’re a kike?”

Hmm …

I began to see what he meant. It was the first time I separated being gay from being called a fag.

He continued. “Just because we’re not what the majority is doesn’t mean we have to take on the a-hole-like words they attach to us.”

Good point
, I thought. Then,
Wait a minute!
He had said,
Just because we’re not what the majority is …
Spencer wasn’t Jewish.

I managed a weak “We?”

He stood up taller. “Yes, Justin. I like boys, too. And I’m not a fag.”

OH MY GOD! My best friend was gay! Now I could discuss all the guys I’d been harboring crushes on! I began to calculate in my head … We needed at least two to three hours for grades six through eight and then four more hours just for ninth grade!

Suddenly a thought hit me: Spencer seemed so sure of himself. Did that mean …

“Spencer, you say you’re gay like you’ve … you know … proved it.”

“Proved it?” he asked. “Do you mean have I quote-unquote
been with anybody?” He laughed. “Hardly. The only boys I’ve been with remain in my Abercrombie and Fitch catalogs.”

I knew what he was driving at and didn’t want the details. Health class at least taught me it didn’t cause hairy palms.

Then I got annoyed. “If we’re both gay, why am
I
always the one being called a fag?”

He thought for a minute. “I don’t know … I’m quieter than you. People don’t seem to notice me. You’re certainly more ‘out there.’ ”

“Meaning what?” I asked indignantly.

“Well, you were pretty public about wanting to make the day of the Tony Award nominations a school holiday.”

I was incensed. “They announce them at eight-thirty a.m. sharp! It’s unfair that I have to wait until first period ends to check my phone and find out what’s up for Best Musical!”

Spencer smiled and held up his hand to stop me. “You don’t have to convince me, but most teenage boys don’t care about Broadway. Or if they do, they don’t admit it.”

He had a point. Most boys in our school were obsessed with sports and not the latest Sondheim revival.

He continued. “Broadway is thought of as a girl thing, and if a boy likes it, the narrow minds in school will label him a fag.”

He was on to something. “So,” I reasoned, “if I start pretending I like different things, the other kids’ll stop making fun of me?”

Spencer looked annoyed. “I guess … but why do you want to be who you’re not?”

We started walking into the park. It was a gorgeous day and we loved sitting by Goose Pond and watching the rowboats.

“I don’t want to be who I’m not.… I just want people to like me.”

Spencer stopped walking. “People
do
like you.”

Was he crazy? I was one of the most unpopular kids in school. The only ones less popular were the hippie guidance counselor’s daughter and that ten-year-old who started high school when he was nine.

“People like me?” I asked. He nodded emphatically. I couldn’t believe he was trying to make me believe a lie. “People like me?” I was getting angry. “
No one
likes me!” I yelled.

“Oh, really?” Spencer yelled back. I knew I’d pissed him off. Spencer hardly ever yells. Except at Young Republicans. “I guess I’m no one—even though I’ve been your friend since Mrs. Gibson’s class!”

He was right. We met in fifth grade and first bonded over
The Simpsons
. We were the only boys in our class who were more obsessed with Comic Book Guy than with Bart. Yes, “Eat my shorts” is funny the first few times you hear it, but “Worst (fill-in-the-blank) ever” is always hilarious.

“Spencer,” I said, calming down. “I know you’re my friend and I appreciate it, but you just don’t know what it’s like to have everybody—
mostly
everybody—dislike you.”

We had walked all the way to the pond. It was one of those global-warming super-sunny days, so we sat on a bench with a huge tree shading it.

“Maybe I don’t have people actively dislike me like they dislike you, but you never even try to make friends.”

That was a lie! “Yes, I do! I’d love to hang out with the Michelle Edelton group or Ty and his eleventh-grade friends.”

“Exactly!” Spencer said, pointing at me. “You only want to be friends with the super-popular kids, whether or not they’re dicks. You’re never friendly to any of my friends.”

Ouch. He was right. But Spencer was friends with kids who were one echelon—or
maybe
one and a half—above me. And once he even ate lunch with that ten-year-old. “I talk to your friends at lunch,” I offered, trying to appear nice.

He let out a laugh. “You only talk to them because you have no choice—they’re sitting right next to you.”

I tried not to look like he was totally right.

“Justin, I can tell you’d cut the conversation off in a minute if a popular kid started talking to you.”

“What’s wrong with wanting to be popular?” I asked.

“That’s not why you make friends.” Spencer was talking to me like he was my dad. It was annoying. “The kids you’re chasing after don’t share any of your interests. Do you really want to sit around discussing whether Michelle Edelton should or shouldn’t get a nose job for her Sweet Sixteen?”

Not really. Especially since there was nothing to debate. She
should
get a nose job … preferably by her Sweet Fifteen.

“By the way,” he said quietly, “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything when Gool called you a fag.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “No one wants to get beat up by him for talking back.”

He seemed surprised. “Oh, I’m not scared of getting beat up. I’m just trying to practice a Zen thing of not responding to negative energy.”

Oy! Lately he was doing nonstop name-dropping of various Dr. Phil/​psychobabble/​Eastern religion theories. Unfortunately, I asked him to clarify.

“Well,” he explained, “I’m basing it on the theory that if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, it hasn’t fallen. In other words, if I don’t respond to negative energy, it doesn’t exist.”

I was still trying to understand the tree-falling-silently theory when my cell phone rang.

It was my mom reminding me I had a violin lesson in an hour.

I hung up and turned back to Spencer. “Look, I have to go home, but I appreciate everything you’ve said today.” Even though I didn’t understand half of it and disagreed with more than 30 percent.

“Justin,” he said as he left, “you don’t have to be somebody you’re not.”

Hmph.
That’s easy for him to say
, I thought as I walked home. Everybody likes him. Or at least ignores him.

I snapped out of my remembrance as my
Tale of Two Cities
slipped to the floor. I picked it up. I knew I should finish the chapter since we were going to be tested on it, but I suddenly didn’t care if I got an A or an F on the exam. People would still ignore me in the hallways. Besides, there was only around ten minutes left until the bell rang. That’s right—it took me almost an entire period to think through what happened that afternoon, and it had been a big waste of my time. Spencer hadn’t said anything helpful to get me out of the loser bin. His main advice was “be yourself.” But I don’t
want
to be myself if the rest of my high school years are going to be like this morning. I want more. Why should I settle for being so near the lowest rung of the school’s popularity ladder? And even though there’s not much further to go, every day I keep getting lower and lower. It’s only three weeks into sophomore year and I’ve already dropped two rungs.

I recently did an informal calculation and figured out that 94 percent of freshmen are more popular than me! I thought that everybody hated freshmen. That’s supposed to be the fun of being an upperclassman. Somehow I’ve become the exception to the age-old rule. My loserishness has trumped the inherent loserishness of almost the entire freshman class—even that kid who carries around his tuba!

I sat in the library and finally gave thought to something that’s secretly dwelled in the back of my mind for years.

I’ll always be a loser
.

Then I said it out loud. “I’ll always be a loser.”

It made me feel terrible.

But … there was something familiar about that sentence. Who did it sound like?

My mom!

“I’ll always be a college dropout.” My mom has said that my whole life whenever people would ask her what she did for a living. Well, she wouldn’t say that right away. First, she would look at me as if she were thinking,
Should I say this in front of him
? and then she’d plunge right in with the backstory. “Well, I had
planned
on having a career, but suddenly there I was … twenty and pregnant.…” She’d shake her head and trail off. My mom and dad met in college and, according to them, fell in love and got married their junior year. I say “according to them” because my grandmother let slip one Seder after too much Passover wine that the main reason they got married was so they could live in off-campus housing. Regardless, after a few months, my mom got pregnant with me and quit school to have me. By the time she felt I was old enough for her to go back to school, it was too late. She couldn’t bear to be the one older person sitting in the classroom with twenty-year-olds. “I remember taking sociology with a sixty-year-old woman who’d suddenly decided to go back to school,” she’d say. “I didn’t want that to be me. Everyone in the class called her Wrinkleface.”

My father would always interrupt. “But her last name was
Winkle
face! She deserved it.”

“That’s not the point,” she’d say, and then sigh as she ended with her classic line: “I’ll always be a college dropout.” She
would follow that statement with what could pass as a laugh if you based it on sound alone, but when you factored in her face, you’d know it was actually sadness and regret escaping her mouth with sound attached.

Except now everything was different.

A few months ago, she saw one of those women-talking-about-women’s-stuff TV shows and asked me how to use the “World Wide Web.” Soon, she bought her own laptop and started “Goo-gul-ing” (she drives me crazy by always pronouncing it with three syllables), and now she’s online every day, taking college courses.

However, she’s only taking two classes a semester, so she keeps telling me that she probably won’t graduate college until I do, but “at least I won’t be a college dropout anymore.”

Even though it’s annoying to constantly have her asking me to explain “new math,” it’s pretty amazing that she’s changed what she thought could never change.

Wait a minute … if she can do it, I can do it, can’t I?

YES!

And I don’t want to wait until I’m in my midthirties to get myself together like she did. I’m starting NOW!

Hmm … there’s no online course for unbecoming the school loser, so apparently I’ll have to make it up myself.

OK, I’m writing this down so it’s official:

I don’t think this list is totally impossible. Other kids go out on dates and get kissed. Why can’t I?
Give me one reason!
Besides the Jewfro and thirty-five-inch waist. There must be someone out there who’d find that attractive (hopefully Chuck). And as for becoming popular, it could happen. Granted, I have to somehow magically overcome being disliked by basically an entire school, but I have the whole year to do it. There are 1,300 kids in the school, so … if I divide that by 180 days, which is the typical school year, minus the three weeks I’ve already lost … hmm … OK, I have to make 8.3 kids a day not hate me. “Not hate me”? Why am I thinking small? How about worship me?! And what’s with 8.3 kids a day? Let me challenge myself by bringing it up to 8.6!