Jack's Black Book (2 page)

As I ran a sponge over the sticky spot on the floor, BeauBeau licked at my hand. His breath almost blistered my skin. “You're revolting,” I said, turning my nose away from him. “Go outside and dig a hole.”

He didn't need my permission. He squeezed his way through the cat-size rubber pet-door and into the backyard. Digging holes was his obsession. He had dug so many our yard looked like a World War I battlefield. And he dug the deepest holes of any dog I'd ever seen. He could work his entire body below the surface and as he tunneled toward the center of the earth the dirt sprayed up and formed a mound to one side. In his former life he must have been a grave robber who'd been punished when he died by being reincarnated as a dumb dog.

I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and, since I was already dressed, sprayed deodorant on the outside of my shirt. I grabbed my black book from the bedroom floor and shoved it into my backpack. I carried it with me at all times just in case my muse decided to pay a visit while I was on the bus, or trying to figure out how to open my combination lock at school. A muse could strike at any
time, the old writers' magazine had stressed, “even while one was engaged in personal hygiene.” I wanted to be prepared.

I had just slung the backpack over my shoulder and was tiptoeing down the hallway when Betsy cracked open her bedroom door.

“Have a nice day, BeauBeau the fourth,” she sang. She had been calling me that ever since I announced the results of my school aptitude tests at the dinner table. That was a colossal mistake. Telling my family that I was dumb was even more proof that I really was dumb. If I was even a little bit smart, I would have kept my mouth shut.

I faked a lunge at Betsy and growled. I had already pulled the pins out of her door hinges—my favorite trick—and was praying she might yank the door open a little farther so it would fall back and flatten her. But she held her ground and glared at me.

“Make sure your address is sewn inside your pocket in case you get lost,” Betsy advised.

I wanted to scream out, “I'm not an idiot! Leave me alone!” But if I woke the baby Mom would get involved in a bad way. So I just sucked it up, took a deep breath, and thought I'd sew some other family's address labels on me, get lost, and be sent to a home full of nice people. And I'd take BeauBeau III with me, too.

Even when my family was trying to be thoughtful toward me, it hurt. The day before, I'd found a package of alphabet flash cards that Pete hid in my backpack. After I got him in a headlock and had BeauBeau lick his face,
he said he was just trying to help educate me. And for the last two weeks Mom cooked me fish sticks for dinner because she said fish was “brain food.”

Dad was the only one who didn't seem to mind that I was dumb. He said that if I was going to work with my hands for the rest of my life brains would just get in the way. He had taken a new job at a concrete factory and said I could always work in the warehouse as the rat exterminator. “You just take a broom handle and pound a rusty nail through the end. And when you see a rat chewing a bag of “crete you just stab him through the brain.” The thought of rat juice squirting out of a punctured brain gave me nightmares.

I continued down the hall and slipped out the front door before anyone else woke up and gave me a hard time. As I walked down the sidewalk toward the bus stop, BeauBeau was already deep into a hole. I could just see his tail wagging and a fan of dirt overhead.

“Go, BeauBeau, go,” I hollered. “Dig a hole to France and we'll visit your relatives.” He hopped out of the hole and shook the dirt from his coat. I peeled the wrapper off a Slim Jim I had saved for lunch, took a bite, and threw the rest in his direction. He snapped it out of the air and swallowed it whole. “See you later, buddy,” I said. He barked and went back to work.

I began to call myself insulting loser names shortly after I was sent to Sunrise Junior High. It was known as a tough school, full of kids with low potential and no plans for the future. Gary Pagoda had gone there until he failed three years in a row and dropped out. He had already been a veteran juvenile delinquent by seventh grade, and even
he
swore it was dangerous. He called it a school for the “criminally insane.” So I had figured it was like a prison filled with hardened convicts with swastikas tattooed onto their foreheads and homemade knives strapped inside their motorcycle boots. That was only a guess.

What really shocked me was when I found out how true my guess had been. After I had been at Sunrise for a few weeks I'd heard all about the school's peculiar history.
Before it was a school, Sunrise Junior High had been Sunrise State Detention Center. When Florida still had chain gangs working to pick up trash and cut weeds on the side of highways, the criminals had been housed in the same rooms where I now studied English, math, science, and wood shop.

This made a lot of sense when I looked at the school's architecture. The double rows of twenty-foot-high chain-link fences were topped with rusty barbed wire that over the years had snagged a lot of plastic grocery bags. When the wind picked up, the bags snapped back and forth and sounded just like the tough girls smacking their gum as they lined up outside the phone booth. There were steel gates that led into the school, two in the front and two in the back. The stone towers sticking up at every corner had been guard shacks where trained snipers could pick off any escapees. Now one tower was used as a science and weather station, another as a “Time Out” zone for hyperactive bullies, one as the DARE office, and the other as headquarters for the Latin Club. I guessed they were the only club that got a tower because the few token smart kids needed to barricade themselves in from the illiterate Huns all day.

The more I poked around the school, the more evidence I found of the old prison. About every fifty feet down each corridor, there were swinging metal doors with bullet-proof glass panels. Broken security cameras mounted on steel poles were everywhere, inside and outside. There were thick bars over all the classroom windows.
But the strangest thing about Sunrise was the wood and sheet-metal machine shop where prisoners had made institutional furniture, license plates, military dog tags, and other stuff no one else would make unless they were in prison. It was the size of a football stadium. This was why Sunrise was a magnet school for vocational training in
shop.
Kids—mostly guys—from all over Fort Lauderdale were bused to our school just to make benches, picture frames, jewelry boxes, letter openers, salad sets, bedside tables, baseball bats, and other stuff they sold in a little gift store next to the Department of Social Services office, which was next to the principal's office.

There was only one way to escape from Sunrise aside from tunneling under the fences. You had to
test
your way out of the school. You had to
prove
you were smart enough to be sent to a magnet school for the arts or sciences, or a school with a college-preparatory curriculum. And so I had signed up for the tests, figuring I'd be transferred out of there in no time.

Mr. Ploof was the Guidance Counselor. One Monday, as arranged, I went into his small office, which had probably been a padded isolation cell. He had prepared a battery of tests for me.

“Are you ready to exercise your mental muscle?” he asked, and pointed to his own hydrocéphalie cranium, which was as hairless and white as the belly on a watermelon.

“I can't wait,” I replied. “I've been thinking about this all night long.”

“Should have just got some sleep,” he remarked. “‘Cause you're in for a long day.”

He started out by timing how fast I could stack a hundred small washers onto a thin metal rod. I didn't even turn my brain on for that one. Instead, I daydreamed about my future. I figured in about a week I'd be in a school where the teachers actually helped students to write books. All day we'd read stacks of great novels and discuss them inside and out until we knew everything about how they were written. Then we'd write and rewrite our own books until we sent them off to be published.

Afterward Mr. Ploof gave me a tray of fifty assorted nuts and bolts and I had to fit the proper nuts to the proper bolts as quickly as possible. It was a breeze.

“Pretty good manual dexterity,” Mr. Ploof remarked, nodding as he jotted down some figures on a pad.

“I write a lot,” I said, stretching the truth. “Keeps the fingers limber. Besides, our dog can do this stuff.”

“Don't go getting a swelled noggin,” he warned, as his monstrous head wobbled dangerously on his skinny neck. “The tests get harder.”

“Just bring it on,” I said, feeling supremely confident that I was soon going to have my ticket out of this loser school.

I did a test where I read a page of mixed-up information, then summarized it in the most logical order. That took only an ounce of common sense. Then I had a long list of sentences where I filled in the blanks about
my feelings.
That took me extra time to sort through because I
always felt two or three ways about any one thing that happened to me.

After that test I was a bit run down and asked if I could take a break, stretch my legs, and eat a snack. I had a family-size Zero bar stashed in my locker.

“No,” he replied. I had begun to figure out that he was one of those people who stressed every word with a gesture. He said no while at the same time slowly rotating his head back and forth. A double no. Even if you didn't understand English, you would get the universal sign language for no.

“You have to do this all in a row,” he explained. “Plus, you can't be left alone. How can I tell you won't
cheat?”
To illustrate that he had asked a question his hands darted out from his sides like a puzzled Egyptian hieroglyphic.

“How can I cheat?” I asked. “The questions are a secret. Besides, you can come with me.”

“Pull yourself together,” he said, and narrowed his eyes. “Part of this test is endurance.” He jutted out his chin, but his head began to tilt forward so he pulled it back. Then he removed the standard IQ test from its sealed envelope and placed it face-down in front of me. “Now I want you to concentrate,” he instructed, and tapped a finger against his temple. “Of everything you've done today, this is the most important. The IQ results will go on your permanent record and will be with you for the rest of your life.”

It was as if he was reading me my Miranda rights—
you have the right to remain silent, the right to call an attorney, the right to
…

He removed a stopwatch from his pocket. “On your mark. Get set.” He pressed the top button. “Go!” he shouted, and pointed toward an imaginary finish line.

I was so revved up I put too much pressure on my pencil and as I wrote down the first answer my point snapped. I desperately looked up at Mr. Ploof. “Can I start over?” I asked.

He frowned down at me. “No talking. Keep going!” he instructed.

I didn't have a pencil sharpener so I began to gnaw at the wood around the lead, spitting out the pulp, until I exposed the blunt end. I felt even more like a white laboratory rat, but I pulled myself together and raced through the test. For something so important it didn't seem too difficult or take very long even though I got off to a rough start. I found it more challenging when Mom asked me to sort the laundry into lights and darks and I had to decide where to put clothes that were mauve or salmon or chartreuse. But I never thought that sorting the laundry was an indication of my future potential.

When I lowered my pencil Mr. Ploof pressed another button on the stopwatch and wrote the time down on his pad.

“You can go now, but return next week for the results,” he said.

“Thanks,” I replied, picking at a few splinters in my lips. I dashed out the door and down the hall. I was starving, so I got my Zero bar from my locker and went into the boys' toilet. There were a couple of scrawny guys in
there smoking cigarettes and taking turns punching each other so hard in the chest that twin plumes of dragon smoke rolled out their noses. I swallowed my Zero bar too quickly and it got stuck in my throat.

A week later I was back in Mr. Ploof's office.

“Sit down,” he said, and pointed to a ruggedly carved chair that was probably made by a former ax murderer. Then he patted the seat of his own matching chair so I wouldn't misunderstand him. “Take a load off.”

“I'd rather stand,” I said. I was pretty nervous so I jumped to the point. “What about the test results? Can I go to another school?”

He sat down and sighed. “Sorry, kid,” he said, trying to sound cheerful as he opened my file. “You're just normal. Average.”

“That can't be,” I protested. “Just earlier this year I was better than average. In fact, I was
superior.”

He rolled his eyes. “You may have peaked early,” he suggested. “It happens.” He spun my file around so I could read it for myself. “You didn't show us any reason to send you up to the next level.”

I sat down. Typed out on a sheet of paper were my test results.

PHYSICAL DEXTERITY—AVERAGE

LOGIC SKILLS—AVERAGE

EMOTIONAL MATURITY—AVERAGE

IQ—LOW TO AVERAGE
—85

“I don't have a low IQ,” I said with my voice rising. “No way I'm this—”

He cut me off. “Be grateful it's still in the
average
zone,” he stressed. “Believe me, I've seen a lot worse. If anything, this score means you should make something really spectacular in wood shop. Just so you know, before you pitch a fit and insult me, my IQ is also eighty-five.” He gave himself a little congratulatory pat on the back.

I was horrified. He was the pinnacle of what I might become. This couldn't be true. It was a nightmare. I stood up and shuffled toward the door. I felt as though I had just received the worst possible sentence: Simpleton for Life Without Parole.