King Dork

would set in motion a process that fifty years later would cause a fourteen-year-old rock and roller in suburban California to have as his derogatory nickname an abbreviation for Child Molester. Or maybe he knew all along that that’s what would happen. And wrote the book anyway, the bastard.

So I had to explain to Dr. Hexstrom about Chi-Mo in order to talk about my Seven Storey Mountain theory. I could tell she didn’t believe me at first, but then I could tell she did. She seemed pretty taken aback by it. I can see why. It’s a weird, weird thing.

NATU R E’S MARVE LS

We had known it was coming, and eventually it did, the day after my second Dr. Hexstrom session. To pay us back for 197

skipping boxing to discuss Deanna Schumacher at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway, Mr. Donnelly decided to subject Sam Hellerman and me to this thing they call a “grudge match.”

That’s when they put two best friends in the ring of subhuman PE students. There’s this theory that such fights will be especially vicious and entertaining because of the fighters’

long history with each other and because they’re more likely to react with indignation when attacked by one another.

“Grudge match” doesn’t seem like the most appropriate term for it, but that’s what they call it, being psychopathic semiliterates with vocabularies that are, let’s face it, not all that powerful.

This is the sort of thing that gets everyone really excited around here. The girls took time off from Rape Prevention to crowd around and watch. The normal guys in the class even pushed pause on their “who you callin’ faggot, homo?” tape loop. Which rarely happens: this was a big occasion. Mr.

Donnelly cranked up his facial hue till he was approximately the color of ketchup and opened the proceedings in the usual way: he made us touch our gloves together, bellowed “Don’t bleed till you’re hit, Hellerman! I mean it!” and trotted backward to the corner of the mat. Then he shouted, as he always does: “Commence!”

Well, it was a dumb idea, of course, because everyone knew that bleeding before he was hit was precisely what Sam Hellerman intended to do, and that I wasn’t going to hit him anyway. In other words, there wasn’t destined to be much dork-on-dork drama, and the crowd was going to be disappointed. But in fact Sam Hellerman just stood there for a long while, staring at me. I shot him a puzzled look, and everyone shifted a little uncomfortably, as mystified as I was. I was almost starting to wonder if something had snapped inside his brain and he really intended to go through with “boxing” me, 198

but then I realized what he was up to. He was trying to stall as long as possible, knowing that once he and his spontaneously bloody nose had finally pushed off to the nurse’s office, I might still have to face another opponent. I doubted he’d be able to stall long enough, but I appreciated the ges-ture. I focused my mind on my own nose as though it were Fiona-Deanna’s candle, but try as I might, I just couldn’t make the blood flow Hellerman style— that’s why I don’t call myself a hypnotizer.

The crowd started the customary chant of “pussy, pussy, pussy,” though some were saying “kill, kill, kill,” which was ludicrously wishful thinking, under the circumstances. Some of them started trying to shove us farther into the ring toward each other. Mr. Donnelly, his face now throbbing and glow-ing and looking just a bit like a Lava lamp, was still shouting,

“Commence! Commence!”

It was at this point, amidst all the shoving, that someone successfully “pantsed” Sam Hellerman. That is to say, someone grabbed his gay little blue and white George Michael shorts by the hem of each leg and yanked them down, so that he was standing there with the g. l. b. & w. GMS’s around his ankles, looking extremely ludicrous, wearing nothing but his Boogie Knights T-shirt and his rather ill-fitting jockstrap. A wave of giggling from the Rape Prevention girls swept the room and shook the rafters. I was glad it wasn’t me they had pantsed, not least because of that whole ball-spotting thing, but my heart really went out to Sam Hellerman, especially since he had only been standing there in pantsing position in the first place out of kindness to me.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in Sam Hellerman’s situation, but if you have, you probably already know how difficult it is to pull up any gay little George Michael shorts that may happen to be resting on the floor around your an-199

kles while your hands are encased in boxing gloves. Try it if you don’t believe me. It’s very hard to get a grip. Sam Hellerman, poor guy, gave it a shot, though, exposing himself to even more indignity as he did so. That was enough for him: he looked up at Mr. Donnelly with a transcendent kind of hatred and opened the floodgates. He even leaned his head back so that the blood bubbled up from his nostrils like lava. Mount Hellerman. It was very impressive.

The crowd recoiled and seemed to hesitate between disappointment and disgust, finally settling on the surly, vapid bewilderment that is pretty much the normal person’s natural state. The vein just under the surface of Mr. Donnelly’s shiny burgundy forehead slithered like a shrink-wrapped lizard, and I almost thought he was going to say something like “curses, foiled again!” But he didn’t say c., f. a. Rather, he sputtered inarticulately and turned his attention to me, a snake eyeing a tasty rodent. Fortunately, I was saved once again through the agency of the solid, dependable Mount Hellerman, which even in the midst of a major eruption had the presence of mind to pull the fire alarm on the way out. It was at best a temporary reprieve, but it was almost worth whatever consequences lay ahead to have the opportunity to witness Mr. Donnelly’s face turn from a light burgundy to a hitherto unrecorded shade of deep magenta. One of nature’s marvels.

A B RO OD OF VI P E RS

One thing was certain: the mysteries and puzzles in my life were percolating with more oomph than they ever had previously. Yet I had the distinct impression that I wasn’t getting anywhere with them. At any rate, I now had two people to 200

investigate: Deanna Schumacher, the fake Fiona, and Timothy J. Anderson, the dead bastard. If he was the dead bastard. He probably was. How many dead people could there be in this thing?

Things were pretty much back to business-as-usual between Sam Hellerman and me since he had come clean on the Dud Chart situation. I had hesitated a bit out of lingering resentment, but after he got pantsed in boxing for my sake I relented and decided to let him in on the Catcher code, mostly because I was so pleased with myself for having cracked it and I couldn’t think of anyone other than Sam Hellerman who would be at all impressed by it. And he was impressed, though he claimed he would have easily spotted the French angle—maybe he would have, though I doubt it. I wasn’t planning to include him in the fake Fiona arm of the investigation, but he was totally on the Anderson case and insisted we go to the library the minute I showed him Tit’s note.