Rats Saw God
Authors: Rob Thomas
Thanks to all my students who have allowed me to continue thinking like a teenager. Thanks to my agent, Jennifer Robinson, of PMA Literary and Film Management, for thinking this book was worth her breaking into the young adult market. To my editor and his assistant at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, David Gale and Michele McCarthyâI appreciate your talent, speed, flexibility, and willingness to talk to me for too long and at all hours. Thanks are also due to my friends, particularly Greg McCormack and Robert Young, who read the manuscript and offered suggestions and encouragement. Thanks to my former student James Dawson for the use of his sports column. Most of all, thanks to my friend Russell Smith for teaching me how to write.
SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
Copyright © 1996 by Rob Thomas
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
B
OOKS FOR
Y
OUNG
R
EADERS
is a trademark of Simon & Schuster.
Book design by Anahid Hamparian
The text of this book is set in 11-Point Industria and 10-Point Gill Sans.
Hand-lettering by Chris Raschka
First Edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thomas, Rob.
Rats saw God / Rob Thomas.
p. cm.
Summary: In hopes of graduating, Steve York agrees to complete a hundred-page writing assignment which helps him to sort out his relationship with his famous astronaut father and the events that changed him from promising student to troubled teen.
[1. Fathers and sonsâFiction. 2. High schoolsâFiction. 3. SchoolsâFiction.
4. DivorceâFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.T36935Rat 1996 [Fic]âdc20 95-43548 CIP AC
ISBN 0-689-80207-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-43911-536-7 (eBook)
To Mom and Popâ
for appearing interested
in every cornball thing I've done.
âR. T.
Though I tried to clear my head of the effects of the fat, resiny doobie I'd polished off an hour before, things were still fuzzy as I stumbled into senior counselor Jeff DeMouy's office. I had learned the hard way that Mrs. Schmidt, my physics teacher, was less naive than her Laura Ashley wardrobe suggested. I made the mistake of arriving in her class sporting quartersized pupils and a British Sterlingâdrenched blue jean jacket. In a random sweep of her classroom, she paused at my desk, sniffed, ordered me to remove my sunglasses, then filled out the forms necessary to land me here.
Wakefield High's powers that be, having exhausted all other options in their losing war against us stoners (including locker-by-locker searches, drug-sniffing dogs, and
Untouchables
-style police raids), were now playing hardball. By order of the principal, I was shuffled off to DeMouy, a UC Berkeley product reputed to be an earth goddessâworshipping, bee pollenâeating, swimming-with-the-dolphins New Age flake. I braced for descent into a touchy-feely hell presided over by a lisping sage who would suggest I give myself a big hug. “Go ahead,” I could already hear him saying. “You deserve your share of happiness.”
To DeMouy's credit, his office contained no posters of grumpy bulldogs or gorillas with “I hate Mondays” slogans on them. In this respect he had already exceeded the expectations I had for most educators. His office had more of a comfy, oolong-scented seventies feel: lots of plants and a humidifier purring away on top of a file cabinet. One of those environmental sound-effects recordings was evidently being played; I could
make out the sounds of waves breaking on the beach, and we were a good three miles from the ocean. All in all, a grand spot to ride out the rest of my high. Through my pleasant dizziness and a potted cactus on his desk, I could see only the back of a manila folder labeled Y
ORK,
S
TEVEN
R.
“Tea, Mr. York?” DeMouy asked as he lowered the folder. “It might help you come down a bit.”
DeMouy looked nothing like I had imagined from the reports I had received from my brethren.
This
was our new hippie counselor? Surfer confidant? The man before me wore a woolly, regimental-striped tie with a teed-up golf ball monogram.
“No,” I said, trying to look impatient. “Just put me in detention. I'll try to get in touch with my feelings there.”
“Humor me for a few minutes.”
“Okeydokey,” I said, slouching a bit further down in my chair and staring unmistakably at the clock above him. DeMouy sipped an obscure Asian blend from a Far Side mug and read from my folder.
“You don't much care for school, do you?”
I deadpanned concern. “Is it obvious?”
“Well, let's see here,” he said, thumbing through my portfolio. “In less than a semester you've tallied one
in possession
and three
under the influences.
This is doubly impressive when one considers the nine days of class you've missed⦠ostensibly for health reasons.”
He paused to see if I had a reaction. I didn't.
“And then there are the comments on your report card: âlacks motivation,' âdoesn't turn in homework,' âfalls asleep in class.'”
“Look, this is helping me out quite a bit, but could you just get to the punishment part? We're at the end of World War Two in history, and I can't wait to find out who wins.”
DeMouy shook his head. “You're not in my office because you're high, Steve. For that they just keep sticking you in detention until you see the error of your ways. What I'm interested in is how
this
is possible.”
He threw an envelope across his desk. I eyed it cautiously.
“Read it.”
The letter was addressed generically to Guidance Counselor, Wakefield High School; the return address said National Testing Service. It was a press release identifying two of Wakefield's finest as National Merit finalists, some Allison Kimble as well as one presently detained pothead.
“Those results could be your ticket into an Ivy League school, but the C's you're making in the classes you still bother to show up for around here aren't helping your case any,” DeMouy said.
“Four years without any activities might not have them scrambling for their acceptance forms either,” I suggested, though I was busy picturing myself with a sweater tied around my neck, sailing with Kennedys, desecrating human remains in some arcane Skull and Bones initiation rite.
“What happened in Texas?”
“What do you mean?” I stalled, startled by the new direction of his questioning.
“When this came in I was so sure they had the wrong Steve York that I did some checking into your records. According to your transcripts, you had a 4.0 through your first
five semesters of high school. Near-perfect attendance. Then, the last semester of your junior year, it just falls apart. You even failed English III. Do you mind telling me how someone who makes a 760 verbal on his SAT fails English?”
“I couldn't make it all the way through
The Outsiders
again,” I said. Suddenly I wasn't very comfortable in DeMouy's office.
DeMouy continued digging through my folder. “Your father is Alan York the astronaut.”
“Is that a question?”
“Was he the third or fourth man to walk on the moon?” he said. “
That
is a question.”
“I'll have to go home and check the trophy case. Though if you hear him tell the story, you'd swear he was first. This third or fourth thing may come as a big disappointment to him.”
“You sound like you resent him.”
“I don't
anything
him.”
“Do you still think of Texas as home?” DeMouy asked.
“No.”
I had moved to San Diego from Houston at the beginning of the summer. The astronaut had fought desperately for custody of me at the divorce hearing four years before. Sarah, my younger sister, was free to move with Mom to California, but the old man thought my future too important to trust to any non-hero. I was his heir. As such, I would be disciplined. I would study hard, excel in sports, choose my friends carefully, choose my college even more carefully. In short, bring glory to the York name.
I relocated to California after taking the last final exam of my junior year. I didn't go home or ask permission. I walked out of class, got in my El Camino, and drove twenty-seven hours nonstop until I reached the Pacific Ocean. The astronaut didn't even put up much of a fight when Mom called and told him I planned on staying. I imagine he had already seen his best laid plans turn to shit. My move allowed him the consolation of getting to share the blame.
“Where is home?”
I couldn't help it. I saw Dub's bedroom: the floor covered with jeans, T-shirts, and bras; the corkboard south wall supporting hundreds of tacked-on photographs, poems, and matchbooks from every club and roadside attraction Dub visited; her milk-crate-and-plywood desk supporting her prized PC; and most importantly, the door leading to her backyard. Always accessible, day or nightâhome.
“Wherever I lay my hat,” I answered.
DeMouy glanced up from my file, but he kept his composure. I was certain the teen-hating, self-important, petty bureaucrat trapped inside the bodies of all educational administrators would soon appear. He scribbled something on a yellow legal pad.
“Do you realize you will be one English credit short at the end of the semester?” DeMouy asked.
“Yeah,” I said casually, though I had been dreading that particular hurdle since transferring.
“Maybe we could work something out that would allow you to graduate on time,” DeMouy said.
“Such as⦠?”
I assumed he would want me to sign some sort of contract, something on official-looking stationery promising I wouldn't show up to school stoned. I'd sign it. I'd sign a contract promising not to breathe until graduation if it meant getting out of summer school.