Twerp Page 4

  But then Howie brought us back to reality. “Your mom’s going to kill you.”

  That simmered us down right away.

  Quentin looked up at Lonnie. You could see the fear in his eyes maybe for the first time. “What are we going to do?”

  Lonnie gave it a couple of seconds of thought. Then he turned to me. “Is Amelia home?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “She’s got makeup, right?”

  “Sure she does,” I said. “Lots of it. It takes up an entire shelf in the bathroom—”

  “Do you know what eyeliner is?”

  That’s when it hit me. “Yeah, I do.”

  So I took off like I did before. I was still out of breath from the first run … but it was a case where you do what you have to do. My mom didn’t even ask me what I was doing rushing through the house like a maniac. She must have heard me run into the bathroom and figured she knew what I was doing. (I did pee, actually.) Then I ran back out without a word.

  About a minute later, I was back in the playground with Amelia’s eyeliner. Howie was gone when I got there—now it was just Lonnie, Quentin, and me. It took Lonnie at least ten minutes to draw two new eyebrows for Quentin. He did a real good job too. It was a talent I didn’t know he had. I guess he didn’t know he had it either because, after he was done, the two of us were kind of shocked at how good Quentin’s new eyebrows looked. Sure, if you were looking right in his face, staring him down, you’d figure out that his eyebrows were fake. But if you were just glancing at him, you wouldn’t notice.

  That’s what I was thinking when Howie came running back into the playground. He was holding a can of Glade air freshener, which he gave to Lonnie. It took me about a second to realize why.

  “Hey, are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked him.

  Quentin caught sight of the can. “What’s that for?”

  Lonnie got right to the point. “You reek, Quent.”

  “I do?”

  “You reek of burnt hair.”

  “I can’t smell it.” Quentin turned to me. “Do I?”

  “Yeah, you do,” I answered. “But I’m not sure—”

  Lonnie glared at me. “You have a better idea?”

  I thought it over. “What if we take him back to your house and wash his hair?”

  “If we do that, more hair’s going to fall out. It needs time to settle back in.”

  That seemed like bad logic, so I turned to Quentin. “You all right with this?”

  He shrugged. “Well, I can’t go home if I reek of burnt hair.”

  “If you go home reeking of burnt hair, there’s a one-hundred-percent chance you’re dead,” Lonnie said. “If you go home reeking of Glade, there’s a ninety-nine percent chance you’re dead. You can make up your own mind, Quent, but if it’s me, I’m going to choose the ninety-nine percent.”

  Once Lonnie laid it out like that, there was no choice.

  Quentin covered his eyes and smiled. “You may fire when ready.”

  As soon as he heard that, Lonnie let him have it. He emptied the entire can on him. There was a cloud of the stuff hanging in the air around Quentin’s head. It filled our noses, and I thought for a minute Lonnie’s idea might work, but as soon as the cloud began to clear, the smell of burnt hair came back. It was just underneath the smell of Glade.

  Quentin looked hopeful, but in the end we had to tell him that the smell was back, that he still reeked. Plus, now his hair was matted down with a sheen of air freshener. As soon as he washed it, or even ran a comb through it, you could tell that patches were going to come out. Which meant that his mom was going to know. About his hair. About his eyebrows.

  He was dead.

  I said I’d walk him home, and Howie said he would too. Lonnie didn’t see the point of it, but in the end, he said he’d come along if Quentin thought it would make a difference. But Quentin shook his head. What was the point?

  He wasn’t going to rat us out.

  It took six weeks for Quentin’s eyebrows to grow back. He had to get a crew cut to even out his hair. But the worst of it was that his dad took the stereo out of his room. Quentin loves music. He listened to the Beatles’ White Album as he went to sleep. When I heard what his dad did, I wanted to knock on their door and tell him that it wasn’t Quentin’s fault, that if Bernard Segal hadn’t been messing around with that match, nothing bad would’ve happened. But I knew he wasn’t going to believe me.

  I wouldn’t have believed me if I hadn’t been there to see it happen.

  February 9, 1969

  Messing with Mr. Caricone

  I’m guessing you know by now, Mr. Selkirk, that I got thrown out of Mr. Loeb’s social studies class last week. I’m guessing that’s the kind of thing teachers talk about in the teachers’ lounge, especially since it came after the suspension in January. But this is nothing like what happened with Danley Dimmel. The thing in Mr. Loeb’s class was just a joke I should have kept to myself. No big deal. So you guys can go back to talking about the usual stuff, like whether to erase the blackboard from top to bottom, or from side to side, or around and around in a mishmash.

  I’m just kidding, of course. I know teachers have regular lives when you’re not in school. As a matter of fact, my aunt Tillie used to be a teacher. Now she’s a bookkeeper, but she once taught an art class at Queens College. She’s real serious about art—the walls of our house are covered with paintings she did. She’s always taking Amelia to museums, and the two of them come home yakking it up about Rembrandt or Michelangelo. I think Amelia’s going to follow in her footsteps. She doesn’t paint yet, but she draws in a huge sketch pad. She’s getting good too. No matter what she draws, it always looks like the thing. Plus, she’s always borrowing art books from the library. My mom says she’s caught the art bug.

  The only reason I mention my aunt Tillie is so you know I’ve got nothing against teachers. That’s why I feel so lousy about what happened in social studies class. Lots of kids goof on teachers—how they’re hard cases and how they’ve got nothing else to do so they make you work, work, work because it fills the hole in their lives. But I know that teachers are just human beings. Some are downright decent. They make you work hard, but they also let you get creative every now and then. (Which is the reason you’re reading these words, if you stop and think about it, Mr. Selkirk.) My main point is that I wouldn’t disrespect a teacher on purpose.

  That goes double for Mr. Loeb. He’s a decent guy, and a decent teacher, and he’s always been decent to me. Plus, he’s a josher, which I like. He’ll go back and forth with you. Like how he calls Tedd Alford “Mr. Dalford.” As if one of the d‘s in Tedd’s first name is supposed to go at the start of his last name. Like it’s a mistake his parents made on the birth certificate. That sounds kind of cruel written out like that, but Mr. Loeb also teases himself. He calls himself The Ear. Like in Ear Loeb … earlobe. Get it? If he sees you yawning in his class, he’ll lower his voice and call you out right then and there: “Mr. Twerski, The Ear has got his eye on you.” That cracks me up every time.

  But in a sense, that’s what got me in trouble, because social studies is such a joshing kind of class that sometimes it’s hard to remember you’re in school and you have to get down to business. Not that I blame Mr. Loeb for what happened. It was totally my fault. I had it coming. He always said we could josh around with him but not with Mr. Caricone, the student teacher who teaches us on Fridays. I knew what the rules were, but I got carried away.

  So here’s what happened with Mr. Caricone. It started, I guess, a couple of weeks ago, when he taught us about India. I liked the stuff about the caste system—how Indian society is divided up into classes of people with some in the upper class and some in the lower class and the rest in between. You know, the Brahmins versus the untouchables. I like that kind of stuff.

  But it wasn’t just the caste system. We got real deep into India. I think it’s maybe Mr. Caricone’s favorite thing to teach about. We learned how t
here are, like, a hundred different religions in India, and how Indians are always fighting over their religious beliefs. Let me tell you, that made me glad to be an American. Then we talked about overpopulation, and it just amazed the heck out of me how many Indians live in India. It’s got, like, three times the population of the United States. I don’t know how they can live squeezed together like that. Maybe that’s why they’re always fighting with each other. They need more elbow room. But the thing Mr. Caricone stressed is that no one even knows what the real population of India is. Lots of Indians live in tents or in refrigerator boxes or even in drainage pipes, so they don’t have an address, or else they don’t know how to write their names, or else they don’t trust the government, so the census takers go from town to town and make an educated guess about how many people live there. It’s very inexact.

  So that was the week before last. Now remember that Mr. Loeb is real protective of Mr. Caricone—because he’s a new teacher, I mean. He doesn’t want us to razz him. Which I never meant to do. Except then Mr. Caricone began last week’s class with the question “Does anyone remember how the government takes the census in India?”

  I called out, “One little, two little, three little Indians!”

  The entire class cracked up. It was just a tidal wave of laughter.

  Look, it’s not as if I rehearsed the joke beforehand. It just came to me when Mr. Caricone asked that question, and I said it out loud, and the entire class cracked up, and Mr. Caricone’s face went red. I thought for a second he was going to break down and bawl his eyes out. He didn’t, of course. He kept going. But he was shaken up. It was just a joke, but it shook him up. What I said was wrong, and as soon as I said it, I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t take it back.

  So on Monday morning, Mr. Loeb kicked me out of social studies class. He made me drag my desk out into the hall, outside the classroom door, and take notes from there. It was shameful. Principal Chapnick walked past at one point, and she asked me what I was doing out in the hall, and I had to tell her. The look she got on her face—since she was the one who suspended me after the thing with Danley Dimmel—felt like it burned a hole right through me.

  The worst of it, though, was knowing what I did to Mr. Caricone. I mean, I shook him up bad. You could hear it in his voice for the rest of the class, like a rattle underneath the words. I told Lonnie how low I felt afterward, and he told me I was nuts to give it a second thought. He said either Caricone would shrug it off, so there was no harm done, or else it would ruin him as a teacher, so he didn’t belong in front of a classroom in the first place. That’s classic Lonnie, putting things in a logical perspective. But I still felt low about it.

  February 13, 1969

  The Love Letter

  As if I don’t get enough homework from school, now I’ve got to write a love letter for Lonnie. Maybe it’s because Valentine’s Day is around the corner, or maybe it’s just how my luck is running, but for whatever reason, he’s got it bad—not quite as bad as Howie Wartnose has got it for Beverly Segal, but bad enough—for a girl named Jillian Rifkin, who moved here a couple of months ago from somewhere like Ohio. She lives clear across the school district, at the west edge of Bayside. If she’d moved another block east, she would’ve wound up going to P.S. 22, and I wouldn’t be stuck writing a love letter for Lonnie.

  Still, it’s not as though Lonnie doesn’t have good taste. I mean, I get it. Jillian is real gorgeous. She’s got dark brown hair that goes straight down to her waist, big brown eyes, and a perfect dot of a nose. Plus, she’s got the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. She must brush her teeth about ten times a day. So I can’t blame Lonnie for feeling how he feels. I blame literature.

  Yeah, I know, Mr. Selkirk. That’s not what you want to hear, given how you’re always telling us how novels and poems and plays broaden our horizons. I don’t doubt they do. But what if they also make us mental? What I mean is, maybe Lonnie would’ve liked Jillian even if he hadn’t been studying Cyrano de Bergerac, but there’s no way he would’ve asked me to write a love letter for him if not for the part where Cyrano tells the other guy the words to say to get Roxane to love him. It’s just a totally mental plan. Not to mention that it doesn’t even work for Cyrano. I read the book last year. Roxane winds up marrying that other guy, even though Cyrano loves her, and then good old Cyrano gets hit by a log dropped from a window.

  I told Lonnie it was a totally mental plan. I used those exact words. We were walking home from school, and I told him the plan had no chance of working, and I didn’t want to be part of it.

  “C’mon,” he said. “What did I ever ask you to do for me except this?”

  “That’s not the point. I’d do it for you if I thought it would work—”

  “It will work,” he said.

  “How will it work?”

  He stopped in his tracks and faced me. He tried to come up with an answer. The air was cold enough to see his breath as he thought about it, but no words came out. Then at last he said, “It just will. It has to.”

  “Then why don’t you write it yourself?”

  I realized as soon as I said it that that was a mean thing to say to him. Lonnie’s always been self-conscious about his writing, about grammar and spelling and such. I wanted to take it back, except the words were out of my mouth. But Lonnie let it go. He got a real wounded look in his eyes, but he let it go. He just said, “C’mon, Julian! I need you!”

  “Why don’t you just talk to her?”

  “And say what?”

  “I don’t know. Say your piece.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  I had to think about it. “I guess it means say whatever comes to you.”

  “What if nothing comes to me?”

  “Sooner or later, no matter what, you’re going to have to talk to her.”

  “But if she already likes me by then …”

  He let the thought trail off. I knew where he was going with it.

  “Let’s say I write the letter for you. How would we get it to her? Do you know her address?”

  “You could just pass it to her—”

  “Oh, no!”

  “C’mon, I don’t know anyone else in any of her classes.”

  “Lonnie, it’s a totally mental plan—”

  “Maybe if I was in the gifted class …”

  “C’mon, Lonnie. That’s not fair.”

  “But you are in the gifted class.”

  “That’s not my fault,” I said.

  “No one said it was your fault. But it means you’re in a certain position.”

  “What kind of position?”

  “You have responsibilities,” he said.

  “How do you get that?”

  “Not everyone writes as good as you.”

  “So what?”

  “Look, if you needed to drag a couch down the street, you’d come to me, right?”

  “I guess so, but—”

  “Why would you come to me?”

  “Because you’re my friend.”

  “And?”

  I thought it over. “Because you’re stronger than I am.”

  “Exactly!”

  “But—”

  “You’re a better writer than I am,” he answered. “I’m coming to you because I need to get a letter written. The same way you’d come to me to get a couch dragged down the street.”

  “But I’ve never asked you to drag a couch down the street,” I said. “Plus, why would anyone want to drag a couch down the street in the first place? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “That’s beside the point,” he said.

  “How could that be beside the point? That is the point!”

  “No, the point is that you’re my best friend—or at least, I thought you were. The point is that writing a letter or dragging a couch are the kinds of things best friends do for each other.”

  “But best friends also tell each other the truth.”

  “True,” he said.

  “So
if I know it’s not going to work—”

  “Then let me find out for myself. Otherwise, it’ll always be gnawing at me.”

  You know how people talk about the end of the world, how there will be signs like the stars lining up a certain way, and the seas giving up their dead, and lambs lying down with lions? For me, a sure sign of the end of the world will be when I can win an argument with Lonnie.

  So the long and short of it is that I wound up saying I’d write the love letter for him, even though the thing has no chance of working, and even though he’ll likely blame me when it doesn’t. Plus, even if it does work—which, if you think about it, would be another sign of the end of the world—that would only mean Lonnie would wind up doing stuff with Jillian instead of with the guys on the block. So it’s a lose-lose situation, as far as I’m concerned.

  But I’ll give it my best shot. Because it’s Lonnie.

  The first thing I did was borrow a poetry book from the school library. I thought about borrowing one of Amelia’s. She’s got a stack of poetry books in her room. Not even for school. She just reads them on her own. But I knew if I asked to borrow one of her books, she’d want to know why. The point is, girls love poetry. I don’t get it, to tell the truth. Then again, I’m not a girl. On the other hand, Jillian is a girl. So I figured, if you’re going to write a love letter to a girl, studying up on a book of poems seemed like a good place to start.

  But the thing was, once I got going, the poems weren’t half bad. Maybe because I was reading them for Lonnie’s sake instead of for an assignment, which meant I could just relax and take them in. If one of them bored me, I could just turn the page and not worry about getting quizzed on it. But the real ironical thing is that I even read a couple of poems by Shakespeare.