Bad Apple (5 page)

“Makes me dizzy, looking up like this. When you get to be my age, you’ll know what I mean.”

I look at his sparse gray hair, the bags under his eyes, the brown spots dotting his hands. I always forget how old he is. Eighty-something. More than sixty years older than me. Seems like forever. Grandpa came along before everything—before television, computers, cell phones, digital picture frames, iPods. I know a lot of old and not-so-old people who hate a lot of this stuff, who think the whole world was so much better before all the snotty little jerks came along and ruined it with their earbuds and their ringtones and their stupid, incomprehensible gadgets.

But not Grandpa. Grandpa blinks his papery eyelids, the eyes beneath them strong and green as olives. “Things change,” he says.

I’m not sure if he’s talking about Madge or Mr. Mymer or my dad or my mom or me, but it doesn’t matter. “Promise?”

“Before you know it, Madge will stop playing that funeral music. She’ll dance the tarantella and play the kazoo. You’ll be off to college. You’ll study Greek and Latin and art. You’ll paint princesses with bird beaks. The world will be your oyster.”

“I hate oysters.”

“You’ll travel. You’ll go to France.”

“Mom will never let me.”

“By then, she won’t have to let you. It will be your choice.”

My
choice? The idea is so remarkable that I can’t even remark on it. I hold his still-strong hand as we admire the sky’s skill with blue.

(
comments
)

In bio, we are still gearing up for D-day. Dissection. We spend more time hearing about what we can’t do with our pigs than what we can. Even though Mr. Anderson believes in personal freedom, even though he thinks it’s our duty and our privilege to leave our mark on our landscape—in other words, destroy the ozone layer with hair spray and the water with lemon-fresh bleach if we darn well feel like it—he doesn’t mean that it’s our privilege to do whatever our little free hearts desire in his classroom.

“Democracy ends at the door, my friends. Touch someone else’s pig, and you—and your lab partner—fail.
Molest
someone else’s pig, and you and your lab partner fail. This is not a game.”

Miles Rosentople says, “No molesting the pigs!” and tries to spear me with a pencil. Everyone laughs.

Mr. Anderson turns from the board to pin us with
his eyes. “What’s so funny?”

I use Miles’s pencil to sketch little piggies with their houses blown down.

In cooking, we have moved on from plain mayonnaise to flavored, a thrill for the entire class. We will be making blueberry mayonnaise, curry mayonnaise, wasabi mayonnaise. The Duck waddles around the large square tables, passing out copies of different mayonnaise recipes. Today, my partner and I get mango-chutney mayonnaise. My partner, Transformer Guy, grunts his approval. Or disgust. It’s hard to tell. He only speaks in guttural noises and gestures.

I get out the measuring cups and bowls while Transformer Guy splits the recipe in half. The Duck gives a single egg to each team, setting it gently down on the table in front of us as if she had laid each one herself. The rest of the ingredients we have to fetch for ourselves. Salt, powdered mustard, sugar, cayenne pepper, lemon juice, olive oil, hot water, chutney, chives. Almost immediately, one of the teams drops their egg to the floor and the Duck squawks.

After we’ve gathered the ingredients, Transformer Guy and I read the rest of the recipe together: Beat yolks, salt, mustard, sugar, pepper, and lemon juice in a small bowl until very thick and pale yellow. Add about ¼ cup oil, drop by drop, as beating continues. Transformer Guy is happy. I think he’s had much experience with beating.

I dump the stuff in a bowl, and he grabs a whisk and begins the vigorous mixing process. I drop in the oil. Drop, drop, drop.

D

R

O

P

“So,” says Transformer Guy, “I read something about you.”

What is this? Transformer Guy
speaks?
Super storms are gathering over North America. God will break California from the surface of the continent like someone breaking off a piece of chocolate. It will become its own floating paradise of underweight movie stars and dot-commers, like a fat-free Atlantis with superfast Wi-Fi. June’s phone will apply for citizenship.

I find my voice. “Everyone’s always hearing something about me.”

“I didn’t hear it, I read it.” He begins beating again.

“Okay.”

“Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“Not particularly.”

“I think you do.”

“I really don’t.”

“I would.”

“I’m not an industrial refrigerator from another planet.”

“What?”

The Duck peers into our bowl. “The mixture should be thinner,” she says. “Are you adding oil?”

“Yes,” I say, holding up the greasy measuring cup.

The Duck scowls and moves on to the next team. Transformer Guy waits a minute, then says: “It’s about Mr. Mymer. You know Mr. Mymer?”

“Yes, I know Mr. Mymer.”

“Well?” he says.

“Well, what?”

“I heard you guys are…” he says, trailing off.

“Teacher and student?”

“No,” he says.

“Mentor and protégé?”

“No,” he says.

“Father and daughter? Mother and son? Singer and song?”

“No.”

“Coffee and tea? Sugar and spice? Peanut butter and jelly?”

Transformer Guy just smiles knowingly.

I blurt: “Whatever it is, whatever you’re thinking, it’s not true, you idiot. Could you people be more stupid?”

Transformer Guy keeps smiling. He’s a totally infuriating refrigerator. An appliance with an attitude. My mother would be appalled.

He says, “We know what you’re like. You’ll do anything. Probably ’cause you’re short. You know. Overcompensating.”

Overcompensating.
That’s the word Mr. Mymer used when I started showing up in his classroom at lunchtime way back when I was a freshman and the world was new. I didn’t want to eat in the cafeteria, I said. It wasn’t the food I hated; it was the people. Everyone was so
young
and so
dumb
. They never talked about anything interesting. The girls complained about how fat they were—no matter how skinny they were—and the guys made sex or fart jokes. I’d only been in school for four weeks, and already I wasn’t sure how I was going to deal with four years if it.

“Fart jokes,” I said, “are never funny.”

Mr. Mymer laughed. “Oh, sometimes they’re funny.”

“When?”

“So there’s not one person worth talking to in this whole school?”

“There’s you.”

“Thanks. But I meant a student, Tola.”

“No. Well, there’s my friend June. But she joined the chamber choir and has practice during lunch this semester.”

“So you have to eat alone.”

I’d had a fight with my other friend, Chelsea Patrick. She tried to convince me to go to the mall to meet some guy she’d been talking to online, a guy named Spit. She said he would give us weed or pills or whatever we wanted. She thought this was good news.

I wasn’t about to go meet some creep named Spit to get mystery drugs. Chelsea called me a wuss and went by herself.

So I’d tried to eat alone. I’d tried to ignore the swirling chatter of “I feel so fat today!” and “Would you tap that? I’d tap that.” I tried to do what Mr. Mymer had said to do: draw what we know in order to learn what we didn’t know. In my sketchbook, I drew a group of kids sitting at a table, bugs flying from their mouths. I drew until one of them shouted, “What are you
staring
at, Tola? Why are you always
staring
at everyone?”

To Mr. Mymer, I said, “I like to be alone.”

“But not all the time.”

I glanced behind me. There were a few students working quietly at easels or at the potter’s wheels, lost in the whale songs of their iPods. “I heard that you let people come in and work during lunchtime,” I said. “I thought maybe I could eat here. And then I can get some work done.”

“That’s fine with me,” he said. “But is that the real reason you want to be here? To work?”

“What other reason is there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you don’t hate people as much as you say. Maybe you’re overcompensating because you’re shy. Sometimes it’s hard to come to high school and—”

I cut him off. “I am
not
shy.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it. Plenty of people are shy.”

“And plenty of people don’t like fart jokes.”

“I just think it’s a good idea to try to make some friends in the real world. You kids rely too much on the internet for a social life.”

“Now you sound old.”

“I
am
old.”

“Mr. Mymer, you’re nice and everything, but don’t ever become a psychologist. You don’t have the skills.”

He nodded, giving me a lopsided sort of grin. “Okay, Tola. Whatever you say.” His T-shirt had a message,
CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION. I DON’T NEED YOUR ISSUES
. I dumped my backpack on the nearest table and pulled out my lunch.

We have a new sub in art class. She, unlike Rumpelstiltskin, the former sub, loves the colors I used in
Rapunzel Gets a Cat
but has no use for the subject. As a matter of fact, she has no use for any subjects. She shows us photographs of canvases painted entirely blue. And some painted entirely red. A few that look like checkerboards. She says they are “brilliant explorations of pure color.” She says they are “bold and confrontational, humorous and witty.” She gives us paint and challenges us to do the same. I leave my canvas blank and stare out the window. When she questions me, I tell her the piece is called
Irony
. She doesn’t find this humorous and witty as much as confrontational. She sends me to the principal’s office.

The principal isn’t happy to see me.

Later, in the cafeteria, I find out why Transformer Guy broke his silence; June shows me on her NASA phone.
TheTruthAboutTolaRiley.blogspot.com. The posts are snippets of different local newspaper articles; random, pointless videos from
Oprah
and
Dr. Phil
; the opinions of random people who say they know me. In other words, the moronic howls of the attention-starved and insane. According to most of them, I’m the one who’s crazy. They think I should be expelled for sleeping around. Or they think I should be expelled for lying about sleeping around. They say the art room was some sort of sex room, that students hooked up in the supply closet. They think Mr. Mymer should be fired. Or maybe promoted. They want to know if someone will be making a movie and who will star as me. They agree that I shouldn’t be allowed to make any money from the movie. It wouldn’t be fair. They don’t know who should get to keep the money. Maybe Mr. Mymer. Maybe the school. Maybe it should be split among the students, because they’ve had to suffer, too. The students are suffering!

“We are surrounded by lunatics,” I say. As I say this, Seven passes by the table. He frowns, as if he thinks I’m talking about him. I’ve always had impeccable timing.

June and I are eating lunch again. Which means I am the only one eating. June doesn’t look up from her screen. “You already knew that.”

I am distracted by Seven’s eyes, which are a silvery green. “Knew what?”

“Knew that we are surrounded by lunatics.”

“What are you doing?” I say.

“Adding a comment to this stupid blog.”

“What kind of comment?”

“The kind that says you didn’t do anything wrong and they should all get lives.”

“Oh,” I say. I realize that I’m surprised that June believes me. Or at least wants to leave a comment that says she does. “Maybe we could hang out this weekend,” I say.

She shakes her head. “Can’t. Mom signed me up for a retreat.”

“What kind of retreat?”

Her faces squinches up. “Young Leaders of Tomorrow. And if you make fun of me, I’m going to kill you.”

“I guess it will look good on college applications,” I say.

“I guess,” she says. “I’d rather be out with my dad.” June’s dad is a locksmith; he has a set of lock picks and everything. When she’s not texting or attending seminars, she works with her dad, picking locks, replacing them when someone’s house has been robbed or when they’re afraid that their ex-husband is going in and out of the house. She says working with her dad makes her feel like a TV detective.

“So, what are you going to do?”

“This weekend?”

“About this.” She points to the screen.

“I can’t stop them from putting up a website.”

“Didn’t your lawyer make you take down your blog?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“So why do these cheese monkeys get to have a blog and you don’t?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You should at least find out whose blog it is.”

“Yeah, okay,” I say. What I really want is to prick my finger on a spindle and sleep for a hundred years. I want to wake up in a whole different storybook.

A crumpled piece of paper hits me in the chest. I scoop it from the floor and read it.

ART TEACHERS DO IT IN FULL COLOR!

I hand it to June. “This is for you.”

She reads the note and scowls at Pete Santorini, Ben Grossman, and Alex Nobody-Can-Pronounce-His-Last-Name three tables away. “Creative,” she says, “but not funny at the moment.” The three of them look down at their shoes and shuffle their feet, the perfect picture of shame. Except for the snickering.

Something—a hand—drops like a spider on my shoulder. June’s face tells me who it belongs to. I give my shoulder a little shake. Her hand doesn’t move. I shake my shoulder again. She gives me a light squeeze.

I turn as much as I can. Not much, because she’s strong, and she’s putting all her weight on me. “Let me go, Chelsea,” I say. I can’t see her because she’s behind me, but I can picture her: black hair chopped in a mullet, Ramones shirt, ripped tights, boots made for kicking.

And I can smell her. Deodorant and sweat and hot dogs.

“How are you doing, Tola?”

“Get off.”

“This whole thing must be really hard.” She actually sounds sympathetic. I want to throw up.

“I said get off.” I try to sound strong, but I sound like the wuss she said I was. Chelsea’s minions—Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, also wearing their fake punkwear—laugh.

She squeezes even tighter, tight enough to dig her fingernails in. “You poor thing. I feel so sorry for you.”

“Come on, Chelsea,” June says.

“
Come on, Chelsea
,” Chelsea mimics. “Shut up and text. I’m sure your mommy would want to know who you’re having lunch with.”

June blinks furiously behind her retro glasses but shuts up. Chelsea Patrick can do that to anyone. Once, during a snowstorm, she called the school superintendent at five A.M. and told him he should cancel classes. He yelled at Chelsea, saying she was an “obnoxious little witch in need of supervision” and a bunch of other things. Chelsea taped the conversation and put it—and the superintendent’s private phone number—on the internet. Kids cranked the superintendent day and night. The newspapers went crazy. Chelsea’s mother complained at the treatment of her daughter. The superintendent was forced to apologize to Chelsea and her mom. Last year, he moved to another district.

“I’ve heard teachers talking about you and Mymer,” Chelsea says. “Nobody believes a word you say.”

“Because of what you told them.”

“Who? Me?”

“You were at the museum. I heard you laughing. I know it was you.”

“You. Are. So. Silly.” Chelsea punctuates each word with a sharp slap on my back. “Why would I say anything about you? Why would I even care?” She giggles as if she’s never heard anything so strange. “Then again,” she says, “you never know what you can get people to believe.” And then she turns and marches away, the minions scrambling to keep up.