I was a mope when I got into Mrs. Geiger’s Jeep Cherokee. I didn’t even want to run across the grass and get chased by the Safeties (even though they were even fatter and slower than last year) and took the long way around the blacktop.
“I told you. I tollld you, Vic, not to trade Venusaur,” Karl said. “No matter what anyone offered you.”
“I know.”
“And who did you even get for him?”
“… Onix.”
“Onix? Onix?! Vic, I would’ve just given you an Onix. I have, like, three!”
“They said Venusaur wasn’t that rare. They showed me the list.”
“Who did? What list?”
“Jack Yamamoto and Matt Dershowitz. Jack said it was a fair trade.”
“Jack Yamamoto is full of shit!” I waited for Mrs. Geiger to yell at him for the language, but the scolding never came. “Listen, Vic, from now on, don’t make any trades unless I advise you first.”
“Okay, thanks, Karl.”
Although the whole Pokémon craze was growing more insipid for me, the more I replayed my transactional blunders in my head, the more I saw a tiny sliver of a silver lining to the oriental fever that was. The malignants, especially Pierce Stone, were not in any position of power. They had the same starter packs and bought the same booster packs and none of ’em had gotten lucky.
During Jack Yamamoto’s arbitrations, the malignants stood at the fringes of the jungle gym, not saying a single sarcastic or snide remark; they even let Andrius and Arjun speak without disparaging their accents.
But of course this one shred of a psychological ballast could not last, not as long as the current regime was administrating Glenwood school. And just like football and rugby shortly thereafter, they stripped the wheeling and dealing of Pokémon cards away from us—we were forbidden to bring them on school grounds.
The reasoning was to protect the “physical and mental well-being of the students.” There had been one minor tussle between Silas and Brad Knight over the rarity of a Raticate after a transaction had already taken place. Upon examining the card, Silas had decided not to go through with the transaction, but Brad Knight had already declared “no trade-backs,” the equivalent of your signature on a contract. This was one of the more common disputes at the jungle gym, but theirs just happened to get physical. And Jeremy Finklestein, the sock, didn’t help the situation either.
In his first booster pack, Jeremy had nabbed an Alakazam—a Pokémon with psychic powers. He paraded around the school claiming to have the rarest card in the game. I didn’t think it was the rarest; the thing fought with spoons in his hands. Karl explained that Alakazam fought with his mind instead of weapons—a Short Hills Pokémon, perhaps—and was extremely powerful. But Karl didn’t think Alakazam was rarer than any other holo. And what about my Nidoking? Goodbye, dear friend. He was Pokémon royalty, for Christ’s sake! But Jack Yamamoto’s stamp of approval gave the mind warrior credibility.
Needless to say, Jeremy attracted much unwanted attention from the rest of the class, who were salivating at the sight of the shimmering card like it was a relic and we, the faithful. Folded-up pieces of loose-leaf would appear on his desk, his lap, or underneath his sneaker, with sometimes as many as three offers listed in smudged pencil. Some of the guys from the other classes caught on to Jeremy’s urination habits and would ask to be excused at around the same time with the hopes of catching him alone in the bathroom. Pierce Stone even told Louis Martino that if he ate the card he would give him fifty bucks and any sandwich he wanted from the Millburn Deli. But Jeremy kept that card close to his heart—literally—in a traveler’s strap he got for his family’s trip to Cozumel.
Paxton even said that Jeremy’s mom came to Glenwood and could be heard shouting in the principal’s office that Jeremy had to see a psychologist because of the damage these cards were doing to his psyche. That was the last straw; the cards were prohibited the next day.
But come on, you think some bureaucrats who had never thumbed through a freshly opened pack of cards could stop us? I considered slipping a booster pack under the principal’s door to try and get her hooked. We just went underground with the operation—an organic black market.
First we brought our binders stuffed in our backpacks instead of carrying them around as trophies like Romans during a triumph, and we only conducted transactions under the cover of a swirly slide or oak tree. But that didn’t last; one monster of a trade between Maine Ogden and Matt Dershowitz garnered so much attention at the top of the jungle gym that the kids were climbing up the slide and the siding just to bear witness. Mrs. Lydell stormed up the steps like Godzilla, snatching strewn cards out of the air like they were fighter jets—Jack Yamamoto barely escaped with his life.
So we adapted. Binders were out. Most of the cards in each respective binder weren’t placed on the trading block anyway. Everyone just had a few queried cards that could be hidden deep in pockets, in socks, in underwear. We met in bathrooms, designating a time before the Pledge of Allegiance to meet in the stalls—Pokémon fever forced me to learn how to tell time.
“Vic? Vic, that you?” asked Kevin Liu from the adjacent stall.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Alright, do you have who we talked about?”
Despite my rookie mistakes during the first couple weeks of the fever, I had since amassed a roster of desirable cards by following Karl’s advice and with some luck from the boosters. “Listen, Kevin, I don’t know if…”
“Vic, come on, we discussed this yesterday.” Kevin wasn’t lying, but after our negotiation I had discussed it with Karl to get a second opinion, and he vehemently opposed the trade. He used words like “moronic,” “idiotic,”
