The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen (2 page)

Okay. I didn’t say that. But I thought it.

“That’s Troy Vasic,” Farley said after he’d sauntered away. “You wanna watch out for him.” He was quiet for the rest of our walk. “Oh, well,” he said when we reached English class. “I guess there’s a Troy Vasic at every school.”

True
, I thought.

But at Jesse’s school, his name was Scott Marlin.

Farley latched on to me like a leech for the rest of the day. In the afternoon, we had gym together. I’m not very good at sports, but compared to Farley, I’m an Olympic athlete. He’s
awful
. The funny thing is, he doesn’t seem to care. We played volleyball, and when he finally managed to hit the ball over the
net, he shouted, “Yes!” even though it was way out-of-bounds.

And guess what? He wore his gym shorts pulled up to his nipples, too.

So, you could say Farley is my first new friend. But it’s kind of like the first car you buy. It gets you from A to B, but from the moment you own it, you’re constantly dreaming of the day you can get an upgrade.

11:00 p.m.

The water stain on my bedroom ceiling looks like a puffer fish.

1:00 a.m.

I think I’ll write a little story about Jesse. Cecil would probably pee in his pants if he knew. But he never will because I will never tell him.

Why Jesse Larsen Was Never Accepted into a Pod

by Henry K. Larsen

The first week of high school at Port Salish Secondary, the new kids did “bonding activities” with the older kids – bowling parties, pizza parties, that kind of thing. It was the
school’s way of making them feel welcome. On Friday, each new kid had to get up onstage in the auditorium and say a few words, in front of the
entire school
.

When it was Jesse’s turn, he said he liked playing on his PS3, reading manga, and watching the Global Wrestling Federation’s “Saturday Night Smash-Up.”

It was a little dorky maybe, but no big deal. So he couldn’t figure out why the entire audience was laughing like crazy.

When he left the stage, the principal took him aside and said, “Jesse Larsen, XYZ.”

“What?”

“XYZ. Examine Your Zipper!”

Jesse looked down. His fly had been unzipped during his entire speech.

Again – no big deal.

Except it was.

Mom had told Jesse the week before that she refused to do any of his laundry unless he put it into the hamper. And Jesse never got around to it. So when he discovered that morning that he was out of clean Y-Fronts, he decided that
no
underwear was better than
dirty
underwear.

That’s right. He went to school commando. Meaning, every single kid at Port Salish Secondary didn’t see his underwear through his fly.

They saw his you-know-whats: his family jewels, his nuggets, his love spuds. His
balls
.

A kid in the front row took pictures with his phone. I was still in elementary school and didn’t have a cell phone, but a lot of kids in my class did. So, along with every other kid in Port Salish and beyond, I saw the photographic evidence within the hour.

The school went into overdrive, of course. “This is a form of bullying, and we won’t tolerate bullying of any kind,” blah-blah-blah.

The photos got taken down pretty fast, at least the ones that were posted on Facebook. But the other stuff – the stuff the grown-ups couldn’t see or maybe didn’t want to see – had just begun.

Scott Marlin gave Jesse his nickname, the one that stuck through his first two years of high school, until he put an end to it for good.

Ballsack.

For almost two full years, the boy formerly known as Jesse was called Ballsack. Some kids even called him that in front of the teachers, who thought they were calling him Balzac, after some dead French writer.

I’m not saying Jesse didn’t have his quirks. Scott would have found other things to tease him about. His zits, which were bad. His obsession with the Global Wrestling
Federation. The way he giggled when he got nervous.

But the Ballsack event was the biggie. It was the match that lit the fuse that exploded in our faces last June.

As my Enriched English teacher, Mr. Schell, would say: “That, Henry, is what we call an
inciting incident
.”

I stand corrected. Farley
does
have a pod.

It was lunchtime, and we were at our lockers. Troy was across the hall with a couple of friends. When he closed his locker and turned around, he was wearing a pair of “nerd” glasses – the dollar-store kind with thick black plastic rims and fake magnified eyeballs stuck on the lenses.

Meaning, they made him look a lot like Farley.

“Hey, guys,” Troy said, trying to imitate Farley’s Chinese accent. “How’s it hanging?”

His knuckle-dragging friends cracked up. A couple of girls started to laugh a little, too. You could tell they were trying not to, but it was hard. Troy’s impersonation was pretty good.

This was Farley’s brilliant comeback: “So funny I forgot to laugh.”

But nobody else forgot to laugh, because the real Farley sounded a lot like Troy’s fake Farley. Even I had to swallow an involuntary snort.

Troy and his friends walked away. From the back, they looked like triplets – their jean legs bunched at the ankles, the waists stopping midway down their butts, their shoulders sloped.

“What a bunch of Neanderthals,” I said as I turned back to Farley. That’s when I saw the look on his face.

I knew that look. I’d seen it on Jesse’s face lots of times, after he’d had another run-in with Scott. It was a complicated look. Part
I hate Troy
, part
I hate myself
.

“I was born with poor eyesight,” he said. “It’s not like there’s anything I can do about it.”

“At least you weren’t born with two heads, like this Mexican guy in the 1900s,” I told him as I closed my locker door. “Or with hypertrichosis.”

“What’s hypertrichosis?”

“It’s when your body produces crazy amounts of hair, even on your face. You’re like a human werewolf.”

Farley peered at me and blinked. “Why do you know that?”

I didn’t know what to say. How to explain that in our family, our idea of fun was to play Balderdash or Cranium. Or that our favorite TV show after the GWF’s “Saturday Night Smash-Up” was “Jeopardy!” and that we’d try to answer
the questions before the contestants did. Or that our favorite books were
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
s, which were full of weird facts.

So I didn’t explain. I just shrugged. “I like trivia.”

Farley’s eyes got even wider behind his glasses. “You’re coming with me,” he said. Then he grabbed my arm and started pulling me down the hall.

“Where are we going?”

“We need one more member. You’re exactly what we’re missing.”

“Member for what?”

But he didn’t answer. He just took me up the stairs to a classroom on the third floor and pulled me inside.

Six other kids were already in there, eating lunch. They’d pushed eight desks together in the middle of the room so they faced each other – two rows of four. On the desks sat a black box with red buttons on top. It looked like something out of a low-budget sci-fi movie.

“Hey, everyone,” Farley said, out of breath by now, “this is Henry. He’s joining our team.”

“
What
team?” I said.

“Reach For The Top. It’s kind of like ‘Jeopardy!’ for kids, except you compete against teams instead of individuals.”

Meaning, it’s the kind of team that attracts nerds the way dog poop attracts flies.

Before June 1
^st
, this would have been a dream come true. I love this kind of stuff. But I saw what happened to Jesse in high school. High school can be a game-changer.

When you’re little, you can let your freak flag fly. You can tell people all the weird things you know. You can sing in public. You can go to the park wearing tighty-whities over your pants and pretend you’re the Great Dane or another one of your favorite wrestlers from the Global Wrestling Federation. I know this because Jesse and I used to do it all the time.

But when you get older, all that changes. You learn that it’s best to fly under the radar. I know I can’t change my stupid red hair or my stupid freckles. But I
can
lower my freak flag.

So I tried to say thanks but no thanks, but before I could get the words out, Farley was introducing me to the other kids. “Henry, meet Parvana, Shen, Ambrose, Jerome, Koula, and Alberta.” They all smiled and said hi.

Except for Alberta.

Her head stayed buried in a copy of
Us Weekly
. I recognized her; we’re in Home Ec together. I even spoke to her once. We were sitting across from each other at our sewing stations last week, and I said, “Why are you called Alberta? Why not Saskatchewan, or Manitoba?”

And she said, “Wow, new guy. Original. Never heard that one before.”

Rude.

You know that song they used to sing on “Sesame Street” – “One of These Things is Not Like the Others”? Alberta is that thing. Aside from her, everyone in that room
looked
like they belonged on a Reach For The Top team.

Consider these facts:

The boy named Ambrose wore a ratty-looking multicolored toque, with a pom-pom on top. Indoors. He also wore neon-green socks.

The one named Shen clutched a RUBIK’S CUBE. Need I say more.

Parvana wore a T-shirt that read
The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth
.

Koula snorted. I don’t mean once or twice; I mean, all the time. Quiet little snorts, every few seconds. Like a nervous tic.

Jerome wore sweatpants and a shirt that rode up his stomach to reveal layers of flabby white flesh,
and he didn’t even seem to care
. Yeah, yeah, I’m one to talk, but if I’m twenty pounds overweight, Jerome is at least a hundred. And I would never,
ever
let my wobblies show!!

Now consider Alberta.

Her hair is short, brown, and spiky – a lot like the Great Dane’s, just a different color. She has a gold stud in her nose and one above her eyebrow. Some people might call her chubby, but as someone who has been called that once or
twice myself, I prefer the term “well proportioned.” She was wearing a plaid skirt with a big gold safety pin that stopped just above her knees, black tights, and purple Doc Martens. On top she wore a white T-shirt with the slogan
John Deere Tractors
.

She is the opposite of nerd.

Then my Socials teacher, Mr. Jankovich, came into the room. He’s a grown-up nerd. All you have to do is look at his feet: He wears Birkenstocks with white tube socks. Even in winter!

“Coach, this is Henry,” Farley told him. “He’s going to join the team.”

No, I’m not
, I wanted to say, but Mr. Jankovich didn’t give me a chance. “Hey, Henry. That’s great news. Everyone, take a seat.”

I was officially trapped. I wanted to kill Farley, and I think he knew it because, even though he sat right across from me, he wouldn’t meet my gaze.

Mr. Jankovich gave us each a cord, which we inserted into the black box. Each cord had a red button on the end. If you pressed it, it buzzed, and one of eight red lights on top of the box lit up.

Jerome, Koula, Shen, and I sat facing Ambrose, Parvana, Farley, and Alberta.

Mr. Jankovich started firing questions at us. They were broken into different categories, like Open Questions, Team
Questions, Snap-starts, and Who Am I’s. Here are the questions I remember:

I confess: The lunch hour flew by. As Farley and I walked back to our lockers, he said, “Next practice is on Tuesday. Be there or be trapezoid.”

“Huh?”

“Square.”

“I’m not joining the team,” I said.

“Oh, you’ll join,” he said as we arrived at our lockers.

“What makes you so sure?”

As if on cue, Alberta appeared from around a corner, clutching a binder that was covered in doodles.

“Hi,” I said.

She just scowled and kept walking.

Rude.

Farley smirked. “
That
’s what makes me so sure.”

I could feel my face turn red, which, when you already have red hair and freckles, is
not
a good look. “Her? Please. She’s a total stuck-up.”

But Farley grinned smugly as he closed his locker door. “See you in gym class,” he said. Then he walked off down the hall, listing sideways, humming to himself.

INTRIGUING FACT:
Post-traumatic stress disorder (or PTSD) is a severe anxiety disorder that can happen after exposure to a horrifying event.

Or so says Cecil. He talked a lot about PTSD at our
session after school yesterday. Which made me talk to him in Robot-Voice. Which made him change tactics.

“You writing in your journal at all?” he asked.

“No,” I lied.

“Oh. Sorry to hear that.”

“I’m not.”