Not As Crazy As I Seem (3 page)

"Time's up." Ms. Hite sweeps around the room collecting the papers. I hand her mine. She looks surprised. "Oh, Devon, you didn't have to do this assignment." Then she gives me back my paper and laughs like I've done something funny.

EnglishAlgebraBiologyLunch!

I've made it through my first morning of classes at The Baker Academy. It's one of the best private schools around Boston—that's what Dad says. Nobody calls it Baker or even Baker Academy. It's always The Baker Academy, or just The Academy, as if there aren't any others.

I felt panicky only twice so far today after coming in the front door. Once was in advanced biology, where there are these giant posters of different life forms hanging on the walls. The amphibians poster is crooked. The right corner is an inch higher than the left, maybe more. Crooked things didn't used to bother me that much, but I couldn't stop staring at that poster this morning. I tried looking at primates and reptiles, which were straight, but my eyes kept going back to amphibians. Finally I leaned down a little and put my hand over my eyes. After a minute the teacher, Mr. Torricelli, asked me if I was sleeping. I said no, and to prove it I repeated everything he had just said—that humans have only fifty percent more genes than a roundworm, twice as many as a fruit fly, and five times as many as slime mold. I can remember stuff like that, no problem. He didn't seem impressed. He still told me to keep my head up, so I had to stare at the crooked poster for the whole hour.

Then after advanced biology I was walking down the hall past the gym, and there's a metal railing around the bleachers. I touched the top of the first support post and the second, and the third. But there were a couple of kids leaning near the fourth post. I waited for a minute, figuring they'd soon move away to their class. But they didn't. They were laughing and talking. One of them glanced toward me, and I knelt down to retie the laces of my sneakers. When they were all looking the other way I sneaked along the railing and reached under the kid's arm to touch the support.

He whipped around on me. "What are you touching me for?"

I said it was an accident. I said I was sorry. Then the bell rang, and we all took off running to our classes.

He probably thinks I'm a real wacko. He might tell the whole school. But at least I touched the fourth support.

Now for lunch. I walk down the long back corridor, hunting for an out-of-the-way place to eat. I pass the cafeteria, and it's as loud and messy as I expected. Kids are talking and eating and laughing and playing cards—it's a lot like my old cafeteria, except for the huge flags of the world hanging from the ceiling. And the black kids and white kids are eating together, which is strange. How did the school get them to do that?

At the end of the hallway I come to a door. There's no sign saying "Emergency Exit Only," so I swing my hip against the release bar. The door opens on to a small parking lot full of cars. It's cold, but I've eaten in colder places back at Amherst Regional. I zip up my winter jacket and sit
on the top stone step. When I open my lunch bag I see that Mom gave me exactly what I asked for—four small carrots, one peanut butter sandwich cut in squares, one small bottle of Evian water, four vanilla wafers and four M&Ms, all different colors. She wants me to have a good day, too. I eat the wafers first, then the M&Ms—yellow, red, green, brown. Sometimes I eat them brown, green, red, and yellow. Colors don't really make any difference to me.

"Hi."

I look up and there's a thin black girl in a ski jacket coming through the door carrying a frozen ice cream cone. "Hi."

She peels the wrapping from her cone. "I saw you in English—you're new, right?"

"Yeah, I'm new."

"Don't like the cafeteria?"

I shake my head. "I never eat in cafeterias."

"Me either. How come you don't?"

School cafeterias are disgusting, that's why. If you inspected the tables under a magnifying glass you'd see bacteria that look like buffaloes. The orange plastic trays have probably been thrown up on by hundreds of kids. Think of how many mouths the forks have been stuck in. Think of all the lips that have sucked on the spoons and the tongues that have licked the knives.

I can't really tell the girl any of this, because she'd call me a wimp. Before I can think of a fake reason, she starts talking again.

"Kids don't hassle you much in this school, if that's what you're worried about. They leave you alone."

"It's not that, really. I just like eating by myself at lunch."

She picks up her backpack. "That's cool. You can have this place."

"No, I didn't mean you."

She sits next to me on the steps. Her green sneaker touches my green one. Her thin leg touches my thin leg. I've never been this close to a black girl before, and I think she has the most beautiful skin I've ever seen. It's like dark syrup. I can't stop looking at her thick pink tongue, which turns white with each swipe of the ice cream.

She tilts her cone my way. "Want some?"

"No, thanks." I eat a square of my peanut butter sandwich. I should offer her one, but what if she accepts? What if she takes a little bite and then hands it back to me? She'll think I'm racist if I don't eat it. I'll offer something she can't give back. "You want my carrots?" I pull the plastic bag of them from my lunch bag.

She shakes her head. "I never eat anything for lunch except a vanilla cone."

"
Never?
Every single day you eat a vanilla ice cream cone?"

"Yeah, every school day. Except once last year they only had chocolate, and I was like really weirded out for the whole day. You know what I mean?"

I know exactly what she means.

She licks a drip of ice cream from the cone. "So, what are you into?"

Lacrosse, wrestling, swimming, drama, the Latin club—I could say anything because how would she know I won't do any of them? "Nothing much. I just hang out."

"No sports or clubs or anything?"

I always thought I might go out for a sport where people don't sweat, but I don't think there is one. I don't mind sweating myself, but other people? I'm not into that. Most activities I can think of mean getting so close to someone that you're breathing in the air they're breathing out. That's pretty disgusting. Maybe if Dr. W. works a miracle I could go out for something, but I'm not ready yet.

"I'd be in an animals club, if there was one."

"You mean, like rabbits and frogs?"

"Actually, I'm into predation."

"Predation?"

"You know, wolves, big cats. The world's divided between predators and prey. I like the predators."

She turns over the cone and sucks through the hole in the bottom. The door opens again and a freshman-size kid looks out, sees us, and ducks back in. The door rattles closed.

"You single?"

Me, married? Is she crazy?

She doesn't give me time to answer again. "I've been single since Thanksgiving. It's cool. No hassles, you know? Except now guys try to bust a move on me all the time 'cause they know I dumped Alonzo. He was my main man for three months. He was, like, all hands, you know? I got tired of that."

So at this school
single
means not going steady. There could be hundreds of other words they use differently here. How am I supposed to learn them all?

"I'm single, too. I've always been single."

"I figured."

That sounds like an insult, but I'm not sure, because she isn't laughing at me. Usually I don't care what other kids think, but this girl makes me wonder. "You think I'm hopeless with girls?"

"Not hopeless, just kind of clueless." She pulls off the end of the wrapper and stuffs the rest of the cone in her mouth. Then she hoists her backpack to her shoulder and waves goodbye.

She's leaving too soon. I don't know anything about her. "Hey, how come
you
don't eat in the cafeteria?"

She screws up her face and taps her nose. "Can't stand the smell."

I've never seen a teacher like him. He glides up and down the rows like some large black bird, his robe swirling around him. He pauses and looks at the ceiling, or the blank blackboard, or the empty walls, as if seeing something there we can't. He speaks almost in a whisper, and I'm leaning forward like all the other kids to hear.

"The Greeks were the first intellectuals. They invented philosophy and exalted their philosophers to the height of kings in other lands."

I know about the Greeks, and Romans, too. Mom read Bulfinch's
Mythology
to me every night for months. She made me take Latin in middle school when almost every other kid was learning Spanish or French. I wonder what it would have been like to be born in Greece back then—would I have been a philosopher-king, a soldier, a peasant, a slave, or someone even worse off, like a woman?

The teacher stuffs his hands into the pockets of his
robe, and now he's all black, except for his little white face sticking out at the top. "And yet, the ancient Greeks were profoundly ignorant, in our modern sense. They knew nothing of the world beyond the hundreds of miles their ships sailed and their troops marched. They believed the earth was a circular flat disc divided by the Sea, what we now call the Mediterranean. Surrounding the earth was water, and each morning the sun rose from the waters in the east and each night dipped back into the waters in the west. In this ocean they imagined giants and monsters and enchantresses. Beyond the ocean they could imagine nothing."

How can anybody imagine nothing? If the Greeks could invent gods who disguised themselves as bulls and swans and turned people into spiders and flowers, then they certainly could have dreamed up something interesting for the world beyond the ocean. What kept them from exploring the far-off seas? Maybe they were just happy with the life they had.

The teacher walks to the huge windows at the side of the room and stares out for a minute. The students stare with him. Nobody throws a pencil or makes some stupid noise. I've never been in a class this quiet.

"The Greeks had their gods—Zeus, the most powerful; Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom; Apollo, the god of music and prophecy; Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty; Ares, the god of war. Citizens of Hellas would appeal to one or another of them depending on what favor they needed. But Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle spent very little time considering the nature of their gods. The Egyptians before them focused on the spirit world and the afterlife. But the Greeks dedicated themselves to the matters of this world, the matters of man—truth, beauty, justice, citizenship, happiness."

The teacher picks up his Starbucks mug from his desk and drinks a little. I wonder if it's really coffee inside. '"Know thyself'—these words were inscribed at the Oracle of Delphi. Greeks journeyed there to ask about the future, and the first thing they saw was that saying, 'Know thyself.' Why would the great Oracle give that advice, above all else?"

No one raises a hand. The teacher looks annoyed. "Scholars?"

I'm used to answering at my old school. I always have something to say in class. Sometimes I don't even know what I'm going to say until the teacher calls on me. I start to raise my hand, then remember I'm new here. It's not good to speak up the first day.

"Mr. Brown, do you wish to contribute?"

Everyone turns on me, a blur of strange faces. I try to focus on the teacher in the black robe. "I think the Oracle at Delphi was just saying that people should look for answers about the world inside themselves, because how you look at the world changes it." That's not bad, and I got it out without my jaw locking up. Now the teacher will move on to somebody else. That's the way it works.

Except that he's still looking at me. "Would you say you know yourself, Mr. Brown?"

I think I do. I'm a pretty smart fifteen-year-old kid who
likes the world when it fits together exactly as he pictures it and who gets scared of the world when it doesn't. "Yes, I mean, I know who I am at this instant. But people change all the time, especially kids, because we're growing up. So today I'm different than yesterday, and tomorrow I'll be different than today."

"We all change, even old teachers like me. Perhaps tomorrow I'll come to class in a blue jumpsuit with white buck shoes."

The kids laugh at this weird image of him, and I do, too. It's nice to be able to laugh at a teacher.

"But I know myself, Mr. Brown, and I don't think I'll change that much by tomorrow." With that he turns back toward the front of the room, his long robe dragging behind him.

"Well, Devon, I'm glad to see you again."

I wouldn't be glad to see me if I were Dr. Wasserman. And I'm definitely not glad to be standing in the middle of his crummy little office again. What is
glad,
anyway? It's a stupid word.

"Still don't feel like sitting?"

"No ... I mean yes. I don't feel like sitting."

"What if I throw a blanket over the chair, would that make it okay?"

I shake my head. I'd still know what's under the blanket. The shrink opens his wallet. "You know, I'd feel more comfortable if you did sit down. All of my other patients do. So I'll tell you what—I'll give you twenty dollars if you'll sit in the chair." He points with his hand that holds the money to the shiny vinyl seat behind me.

"I really like standing."

He takes another twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. "How about forty?"

He's messing with my head, I can tell.

"Would you sit for sixty dollars?"

I don't like this at all. What kind of shrink would try to force a kid to do something he really, really doesn't want to do?

"Just so we're clear here, Devon, at some point I'm going to put the money back in my wallet and the offer will be gone. You shouldn't think you can just hold out for more."

I bet Dr. W. will go higher. It would be too weird to stop at sixty dollars. He takes out two more twenty-dollar bills. "How about one hundred? It's yours just for sitting down on the chair, or the sofa—either one, your choice."

When I look at the vinyl chair with the little yellow stuffing sticking out of the rip, I see all the fat old people squatting down in it, all of the squirmy little kids' asses, all of the farting and sweating that has happened on that cushion.