Out of Order (7 page)

But then I realize it doesn't matter that I screwed up. Chlorophyll didn't hear a word I said. She's got her nose in her book.

I guess the vaccination's already working.

I relax and put my head back down.

And from then till the end of the period, all I hear is the sound of a page being turned every once in a while.

 

After school I bug Grace to call her dad at work and get him to give us the okay to go out for ice cream. I
promise to have her home before he gets off work. It's so all-American, he can't refuse. And he doesn't.

So I take Grace to the Marble Slab. Me personally, I don't like having my ice cream slapped around by some technical-school dropout with zits and glasses like the big end of a telescope. But I do like to watch Grace standing there almost breathing on the glass while she watches the guy mix Hershey's Kisses into her double Dutch chocolate fudge. She gets so happy over little things. I could buy her a Porsche, and she wouldn't be as excited as she gets about a crummy little dip of ice cream.

She's standing there, and I'm standing right next to her, and suddenly it's the best afternoon of my life.

I get a Dr Pepper and we sit down. I'm sipping my drink, but mainly I'm busy not saying much because Grace and I get along a lot better when I keep my mouth shut.

“Did you see that new guy at school today?” Grace asks between bites. “The one who's visually challenged?”

“No,” I tell her. I watch her take another dainty little bite off her spoon. She'll eventually polish off the whole thing, I know, but you would never guess it to look at her.

“Have you ever wondered what it would be like?”

“What?”

“Being visually challenged.”

I think fast. I don't know what visually challenged is. So I've got to decide, quick—which answer is better, yes or no? “Yes” will sound more sensitive, but “no” is the truth and I won't have to back it up with facts.

“Yes,” I try. Going for sensitive.

“Really?” She sounds surprised. “What do you think it would be like?”

Shit. “I dunno.” Jesus, what should I say? “Bad,” I finally guess. And then, when she just takes another bite of ice cream, I give my slow wise nod—twice—and add, “I think it would be really bad.”

“I think the whole world would seem different.” Grace's drifting into analyze mode. “I think you'd perceive things as three-dimensional, as existing in space rather than as something you just look at. I mean, just sitting here, the world out there”—she gestures toward the other tables, the counter, the pimply-faced guy—“could be two-dimensional, as far as we know, until we touch it. It could be a picture, or a film.”

I stir my straw in my Dr Pepper. I nod my head, but I'm thinking about how today Jordan Palmer was telling Gutterson that he and this girl videotaped themselves doing it.

“How can you be sure that something really exists unless you touch it?”

But then, I'm figuring, if I were Palmer, I'd have brought the tape in to show Gutterson. Only Palmer said he'd promised the girl he wouldn't. Which means maybe he was lying about the tape in the first place.

Strange thought, that Palmer could lie the way I do. Probably not as much, though. Nobody could lie as much as I do.

“It could be that blind people actually have greater perception than the rest of us.”

I focus on Grace again. Blind people—that's what this was all about. Good thing I said “bad.” Jesus, can you imagine if I'd said “good”?

And it's a good thing Grace doesn't have a clue what all goes on inside my brain. Nobody has a clue. I'm not even sure most of the time. It's like the Indy 500 with bumper cars in there.

Grace's face is still and stern right now, but not because of me—it's because she's still trying to figure out this idea about blind people. She's so intense all the time, always, about everything.

Her left eyebrow's drawn in a little, the way it gets when she's chasing down some thought. I can see that tiny little line next to the inside part of her eyebrow. I call it her thinking line.

“God, you're beautiful,” I burst out.

The thinking line disappears. Grace looks startled for a second, almost like she'd forgotten I was here. Then
her face softens, and suddenly nobody's smart and nobody's stupid. It's Colt and Grace, on the same playing field.

For once she doesn't gripe about me saying “God” like that. Instead she smiles, like I've given her a present. And then, when I don't say anything else, she asks, “Want a taste?”

I'm not really into ice cream, but she's holding the spoon out across the table—she's offering to feed me herself. So I nod, and she does it, she leans forward and lifts the spoon to my mouth. I take it between my lips and my teeth, and then she pulls it out slowly while I'm sucking off the ice cream. Her little thinking line is definitely gone. And she's watching my mouth the whole time.

“Colt.” Grace says my name like nobody else can. It sounds like something that tastes good when she says it. “You're really a sweet person.” She says it softly, looking at me very intent, the way I guess an artist might, if she was trying to draw the lines of my face. “You've just got this bad-boy façade.”

I'm not sure whether to do my wise nod. I'm not sure if “façade” is something I ought to be nodding about.

“Sometimes it's hard to tell who you really are. You're such an enigma.”

“Think so?” I ask, like I know what she just said. Forget Word of the Day. Her brain's deep into let's-
analyze-Colt mode, so deep that she's forgotten to worry as her body gets totally hot for me.

We're gazing into each other's eyes just like in one of those movies she likes, until Grace realizes that her body's hot for me—you can see the moment it hits her, because her cheeks suddenly turn pink and she ducks her head again and won't look at me for a few minutes.

I think then what I've thought many, many times since Grace and I started going out. She's innocent. And I love her, so I've got to take it slow.

But someday soon, the heat from me and Grace Garcetti is going to melt every drop of ice cream within ten miles.

So I'm feeling okay again, my life is good, I've got Grace again, and I'm one happy guy…until a few nights later, when the shit hits the fan, and suddenly my whole life sucks again.

“No way,” I yell. “No way I'm going to let a eighth-grader help me with my homework.”

Mom's in my bedroom doorway. Cass is behind her.

“Did you think I sign your progress cards without reading them?” Mom starts counting off on her fingers. “Biology—seventy-five. Geometry—seventy-two. English—sixty-eight.” Her voice goes up on the “sixty-eight.” “And now you're asking me how to find the area of a rectangle? Colt, at this point you need any help you can get.”

“No, I don't.” I shoot Cass a “piss off” look. “That last English test was hard. Nobody did good. He said he was
going to curve it.” Which might be true, Hammond might have said that, I just might not have heard him. “And then he didn't. And this…” I bend over my geometry book again. “I can figure it out myself. I just didn't want to take the time.”

I don't look up. A couple of seconds tick by. Will Mom buy it?

“What about a tutor?” she asks.

“Don't need one,” I tell her. “I can handle it.” No way I'm going to sit around with somebody who gets paid to find out how ignorant I am. And who—God!—reports on me to my mom every day!

No fucking way.

“All right,” I hear her say. I can breathe again. “But there's a pattern developing here. Every year you put less and less time into your schoolwork. Every semester your grades slide just a little bit lower. A sixty-eight's not going to cut it, Colt. You're perfectly capable of passing. Tell me what I can do to help you. What do you need?”

“I need peace and quiet,” I tell her. “So go away.”

“Fine. Then I'll tell you what I'm going to do to help you. I'm going make you a promise.”

A promise?

“I promise you that if you fail even one class this six weeks, you won't be playing baseball in the spring.”

It takes a moment for her words to sink in. “What?” I can't even yell—I'm so mad, it takes another moment for my voice to get up to full volume. “What's that going to do? How's that going to help?”

“Don't yell at me,” Mom warns. Cass just stands there, acting like she's real interested in the wall while she soaks all this in, the little leech.

“What's it supposed to do?” I yell anyway. I don't have the words to tell Mom how awful, how more than awful it would make my life, to take away the only thing I'm really good at.

“It'll give you a wake-up call, Colt,” she tells me. “There's more to life than sports.”

“I almost failed English last spring, too—remember? And I passed, didn't I? I pulled it out. You just don't trust me,” I tell her.

“You barely passed. When I had that little discussion with Coach Kline, you managed to summon the energy to pass. You're just going to apply that energy a little earlier this time, that's all.”

I cheat better under pressure, I want to tell her. But of course I don't say that. “The state of Texas says I get to play if I pass the three weeks before the season. I've got till the end of December—and that's just to attend practice. To actually play, the state of Texas gives me till the middle of February.” Don't ask me how come I can't
remember how to find the area of a rectangle, but I remember state law like I'm a lawyer.

“The state of Texas isn't your mother.”

“I have no reason to pass if I don't get to play. That's the law, isn't it? No pass, no play. See, I know my history.”

“Colt.” Mom's got that…Mom look. No way Dad would ever say what comes out of her mouth next. “Baseball is a game. I know you like it. I know you do well. I'm very proud of how talented you are. But it's just a
game
.”

I'll go live with Dad then, I want to say. But I know Dad won't take me. Not that we don't get along, it's just that he travels a lot. He loves me and all—he's just not much of a family guy, Dad isn't.

“Baseball is what's going to get me into college,” I remind her.

“What if you get injured?”

“I won't.”

“But what if…” Mom sighs. “I refuse to get sucked into this discussion. I'm telling you—balance your interests. Balance baseball with your schoolwork. If you can't manage to keep it all under control, then I'll balance it for you. That's the way it's going to be. Not another word,” she adds, as I open my mouth. “Not. One. More. Word.”

I can tell she means it because she's talking through her teeth.

I slam my book shut. I wait till she leaves the room, and that little vulture Cass goes with her.

Then I throw the stupid book against the wall.

 

I'm not going to bother to tell Coach what my mom said—I don't need somebody else on my ass. I know I can work this out. Geometry's not really that hard, it's just the word problems. And there's not all that many of those. I'm pretty sure I can pull a C if I don't even
do
the word problems. And a C is what I need to pass in the state of Texas. Even Mom can't change that.

Biology—well, I've got somebody at my table, now. Somebody smart. I ought to be able to get enough off Chlorophyll to pass biology. If not, Stu's got biology second period. He's not an A+ student or anything, but he'll share his homework for me to copy, and his notes for me to make cheat sheets.

English is the problem. Mr. Hammond doesn't mess with fill-in-the-blank. Never heard of multiple choice. Strictly an essay man, all the way.

In my book there's something wrong when it takes you longer to do a test than it took the teacher to make the test up in the first place.

Looks like I'm not going to be sleeping anymore in
assistant. Looks like I ought to use that time to start figuring out what I need to smuggle in to help me on those extra-long Hammond-style tests.

Looks like there's going to be two of us reading in assistant, from now on.

 

The next morning in biology Haley Turner's telling me how Silver Stanton thinks I'm cute. Hi-yo! Tell me something I don't know. “She told me to tell you that your answering machine's not working,” Haley adds. “She's been trying to get you to call her.”

The only thing wrong with my answering machine is that I have to push a button to get rid of Silver's messages. It doesn't automatically erase them for me.

I ignore Haley. While she's taking the hint, I happen to glance at Chlorophyll. She hasn't even looked in my direction, of course. She must have finished up reading her biology, which I should be starting, because she pulls a different, thin book out of her stack. As she starts reading it, twisting a strand of that half-green hair, one of the other books in her stack catches my eye. It's a junior English book.

But she's in sophomore biology, with me.

The wheels start turning.

“Hey, Chlorophyll,” I whisper.

She doesn't hear me.

“Hey.” She still doesn't know I'm talking to her.

Finally I give her elbow a nudge.

She looks over, startled. She's got that blank-eyed look, the same one Grace has when we walk out of one of those movies where they talk about relationships for the whole hour and a half.

“You a sophomore?” I ask.

She nods.

“You got third period, Mrs. Muldrew?”

“Yeah.”

“Accelerated English?” I ask, to make sure.

She's getting her brain back in gear. “You got a point?”

I'm thinking she's already had everything I'm about to be tested on. That's what Accelerated English means; it means they're all a year ahead of the rest of us.

Grace, she's in that class too, but no way do I want Grace seeing how bad I am at something she's great in.

“No.” I open my biology book too. “No point.” I pretend to read some of the page, because I've got to play this very cool. It takes delicate timing and a perfect hand, to use somebody to cheat off without having them think they got the right to come up and talk to you in the hall.

She settles back into her book. I watch her out of the corner of my eye. I'm thinking. I'm not sure yet exactly what I need her to do.

For the first time, I notice a ring on her left hand. It's
gold, delicate little golden swirls around this milky-colored stone. Doesn't look like anything she'd pick out—I figured her for the skull-and-crossbones type. This looks nice. It looks like a present.

“So, Chlo—Corinne,” I say. I've got to start remembering her name. “You got a boyfriend?”

“Yeah.” She doesn't look up.

“He go to school?”

“TMU.”

Whoa. “A college man,” I say. “You two serious?”

“Uh-huh.”

I wonder what her boyfriend's like, if they've had sex. Looking at her, I'd say yes. I don't know why, but I'd say definitely yes. Although I'd freak if I had to look down at the moment of passion and see that multicolored shit on her head.

Suddenly I'm curious. “What's he think about your hair?” I ask.

She doesn't answer. She's off in that la-la land book people go to.

So I take a minute to try to reason things out. The main problem is how the hell I'm going to pass Hammond's essay exams. The reality is that I need a comprehensive cheat sheet.

I look over again at Chlorophyll, who already knows everything
I
need to copy down. She's one of the few
people in here who's already through reading the biology assignment. She's fast. Fast and smart.

“Hey—” I start, but her real name goes right out of my head. “Hey…Chlo.”

Shit. I wait, to see what she's going to do.

“What,” she says, not looking up.

“Um,” I say. “How long you and your boyfriend been going out?” Lame, lame, lame.

She still doesn't look up. “Little over a year.”

“No kidding. That's a long time,” I tell her. I nod, even though she's not looking at me.

“I got a girlfriend,” I mention, when it looks like the conversation's on the verge of being dead in the water.

She doesn't seem overwhelmed by that information.

“Hey, Chlo,” I say casually. “You save any of your tests or anything from English last year?”

“No,” she says to the book.

“Oh. I thought maybe you were the saving type.”

“No.”

I'm sunk now.

She flips over a page. “You having trouble in English, Terrell?”

“Trammel,” I tell her. I can hear McMillan talking real loud to Haley, so I know they're not listening. “A little,” I admit, keeping my voice low.

She just nods.

“Got any advice?” I ask, just in case she's got some kind of good-grades secret I should know.

“Study.”

“Oh, thanks.” I open my biology book and try to read too. I'm going to ignore her for the rest of the period. She's so fucking helpful. Study.

“Clear your desks,” Ms. Keller calls from the front of the room.

Clear your desks? I look up. She's holding a stack of papers.

“All you need is a pen or pencil.” She starts passing out the papers.

Holy shit.

“A test?” My voice almost cracks. “You never said anything about a test today.”

Ms. Keller doesn't even stop passing them out; she just gives me the eye. “I announced it Friday. And it's been written on the board for over a week. Apparently you haven't been paying attention.”

I pick up my biology book and slam it down.

That stops her. She pauses in the middle of the aisle to give me one look. It's a warning look that's supposed to be aimed at me, but it's so intense that the whole class gets quiet.

Then she gets back to business.

The test is short, one page. It's a front-and-back view of
a human body with the skin stripped off. All the muscles have blanks beside them.

I swear she didn't tell us we were having a test. And all I can remember is that the answers are supposed to be long, doctor-type words. Words that I can't even pronounce.

Thank God for Chlorophyll.

I write my name at the top and look over at Chlorophyll's test. She's writing fast, like she knows the answers. She's got her hand over her paper.

I wait, but she doesn't move it.

I try to see over the shoulders of the people in front of me. No go. The blanks are too small, everybody's writing small; I can't see that far.

“Everyone needs to keep his eyes on his own paper,” calls Ms. Keller from her desk.

I act like I'm working for a few minutes. Till Ms. Keller gets busy with something else.

“Psst,” I hiss in Chlorophyll's direction. When she looks over I make a big show of moving my own hand off my own paper. So she'll get the idea.

But she just raises one eyebrow. Her hand stays right where it is.

I move my hand again, in case she didn't understand. On the paper. Off the paper.

“No,” mouths Chlorophyll, glaring now.

I knew it. “Bite me,” I mouth back.

She ignores me and goes back to her test. Her covered-up test.

Great. I'm screwed. I do
not
know this. Nobody knows this, except biology teachers. And Chlorophyll.

I eye the test again. I'm trying to remember anything, just one muscle, even. Surely one thing stuck in my head from class. Just one thing—how can I not remember even one thing?

And then it comes. The one thing.

Gluteus maximus. The butt.

Maybe I remember because it's funny. For whatever reason, there it is, in my head. Gluteus maximus.

I start to write it down. Out of the whole stinking morning, this is what I'll have to show. Two stinking words.

I'm trying to sound it out so I don't get counted off for spelling, and I'm saying it to myself: Gluteus, gluteus, gluteus. It sounds familiar.