Madame J.-M. frowned at us. We weren’t supposed to speak English in Advanced Conversation. So we continued in French:
“What time is it?” I asked.
“It is 11:05,” she replied.
“Thank you very much,” I said. “What a shame. If it pleases you, what do you call yourself?”
“I am sorry,” said Yasmynne Schmick. “I am hungry. The young girls wear a very pretty dress. They eat and play soc-cer with the mother and the fathers. My name is Yasmynne.
I am four years old.”
“Ah, yes,” I said. “The young people love to buy discs of 145
pop music for dancing and for holiday making.” I chose my words carefully. “They . . . they . . . my God: they eat bever-ages. It is true. My two friends Jean and Claude go to the cin-ema yesterday to view films. What a surprise. They eat. They are flowers.”
Yasmynne Schmick nodded. “Thank you very much. I am sorry.” Her face clouded over. “There is a match between two opposing teams at the stadium. It is true, is that not correct?
Therefore, my little friend,” she said quietly and with a sad smile, “all the world very much loves the automobile who calls himself a cat.”
“You are correct,” I said hopelessly. “I am enchanted. Our little green hat is orange on the head of this very interesting horse.”
“Would you like to sleep with me this evening?”
“Thank you, Mr. Roboto.”
It was kind of fun. That Yasmynne Schmick was all right.
Later that day, I was on my way to Band, running a little late, when something grabbed the back of my army coat, stopped me short, and almost pulled me to the ground. It turned out to be one of Mr. Teone’s large, rubbery hands. He was scratching his butt with the other one. Ugh.
“Henderson,” he said. “Henderson.”
There was something about the way he said my name that made it sound like a particularly nasty swear word. Wait a minute, I thought: you can’t call me that. It’s rude.
He told me that he was writing a book on gifted and talented young men and women, and that he’d like to give me an IQ test and interview me with a group of other kids after school on Friday. At his fucking house. I don’t think so.
“I can give you a ride in my ’93 Geo Prizm if you like,” he 146
said. He was always going on about his ’93 Geo Prizm, like it was some kind of cool car or something. What a moron. He reached into his sports-jacket pocket with the butt hand and pulled out this crumpled, grubby, curling fistful of papers.
Presumably, this was the IQ test. He poked me with it. And I recoiled in horror.
It was hilarious, though. I had serious doubts that Mr.
Teone could write his own name, much less compose a whole book. He had supposedly started out at Hillmont way back as a shop teacher, which I could well believe: he had that air. Then he got some kind of administrative credential and became a principal. So the man had some education. But from what I could tell, he was still more or less functionally illiterate. He looked down at the papers in his butt hand and started to laugh like a maniac.
“No pain, no gain!” he said. “No gain, no pain!” Way to sell your dopey afterschool program to a skeptical student body. Whatever, freak.
Mr. Teone’s afterschool Gifted and Talented program might have been of some use as an anecdote factory, but that was about it, and I felt I really didn’t need the anecdotes at that price. Not that I ever would seriously have considered participating in something like that, even if it hadn’t involved Hillmont High School’s most bizarre and unhygienic administrator. I didn’t need any more self-congratulatory self-esteem baths and collage-making bees in my life at the present moment. Sam Hellerman had attended one of Mr.
Teone’s ill-conceived afterschool activities last year, a sort of science fiction club. He never went back. He wouldn’t say much about it, except: “he’s a deeply weird man.” It hardly needed stating.
147
TH E LOR D RO C KS I N MYSTE R IOU S WAYS
Meanwhile, despite the multifaceted depravity of Hillmont High School, and personal mysteries various and extremely sundry, the band was trying to soldier on. It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t worried that I’d get in trouble for blowing up the Magnavox Astro-Sonic hi-fi console. It hadn’t been used for years and years. Lifting the lid had let loose an enormous cloud of dust. It was just a large piece of furniture from long ago that was used as a thing to put other things on, its original function forgotten. We hadn’t even been sure it would turn on.
However, that still left us with two-thirds of a band and nothing to plug in to. (Some Delicious Sky, aka SDS, Squealie on treble and vocals, Sambidextrous on thick bottom and industrial arts, band name squirted on a tanorexic female midriff in white toothpaste, first album
Till now, Sam Hellerman and I had done all of our band activities at my house because his parents, even though they were almost never home, came from Germany and were all weird and strict. They specifically disapproved of music, it seemed. How he had talked them into buying him a bass I will never know.
Actually, out of the vast universe of things Sam Hellerman’s parents frowned upon, the one they seemed to disapprove of most of all was Sam Hellerman himself. He had to take great care to hide what he did and anything he might be interested in, because if they ever found out about an activity or interest their first impulse was to ban
