The Obstacle Course (14 page)

“Thank you, ma’am.” I felt kind of self-conscious, not being used to this kind of praise, not for schoolwork.

She still wasn’t finished; she turned to the class. “This is a wonderful example of how a student can do well when he puts his mind to it.” She looked around the class, stopping her gaze on several of my friends—the ones, like me, who never do any work. “Roy should be an inspiration to you all.”

Before, the praise had felt good, but now it was getting embarrassing. Doing the work was one thing, because of my promise to the admiral, but being gushed all over for it was something else; something I wasn’t all that keen on. Being a good student at Ravensburg Junior High is not very cool, to put it mildly. Swindel was talking about me like I was one of the grinds, a first-class brown-noser. That’s the kind of praise I can definitely do without.

Everybody was staring at me: Joe, Burt; even Danny Detweiler, that moron. Served him right—I was king shit in the class for once, instead of him.

“Perhaps you could stay after school and explain to some of your classmates how you were able to get this work done when they weren’t,” Swindel added, digging them good.

What the hell—in for a dime, in for a dollar.

“Sure,” I said, giving off a shit-eating grin like I was an innocent little church choirboy. “Especially Vernice, ’cause she’s helped me out so much.”

I looked over at Vernice. She was blushing so bad she looked like she was sunburned.

“I’m sure Vernice would appreciate that.”

“I’m busy after school today,” Vernice managed to choke out.

“Anytime, Vernice,” I said, winking at her, “just let me know. Anytime, anyplace.”

That was the wrong thing to say, which I knew as soon as it came out of my mouth, she was the wrong person to joke with like that, especially in front of other people. Some of the boys laughed, which made it extra-bad. She turned away when I looked at her again—I really felt bad then, it was a cruel thing to do, it isn’t her fault she’s a skag, it doesn’t make her a bad person, she’s like me in some ways, she just shows it differently. Being an ugly girl can be a real bitch—even worse than being the class joke.

I’ll be nicer to her, sit next to her at lunch or something. After all, she loves me.

W
E WERE DOWN IN
the boys’ shower room, showering off after gym, which had been wrestling, since it was raining out and we had to stay indoors. You have to shower after gym whether you’re sweaty or not, it’s another one of the stupid rules they have at this stupid school.

Like always, it was a complete clusterfuck. Try taking a decent shower when there’s six rusted-out showerheads for twenty guys and the water pressure goes down every time a toilet gets flushed anywhere in the school, it’s like standing under an elephant pissing. The walls are cracked and the plumbing looks like it’s going to fall apart any second, it’s worse than the goddamn county jail, I shit you not. It’s like something out of
Tales from the Crypt.
The room gets all steamed up and the floor’s slippery as hell, you can’t hardly see across the place it’s so steamy, someday one of us is going to slip and break his neck and sue the school, which they deserve for making us shower in this dump.

“Hey,” a voice called out from somewhere in the steam, “lend me your twelve-inch raping tool, Stovall, I got me a hot date with Ginger Huntwell tonight.”

All the guys in my class call their dicks “raping tools.” That’s because of this book in the library,
The Southpaw.
It was put in the sports section by accident because technically it’s about a baseball player, but what it’s actually about is fucking chicks and talking about guys’ cocks and stuff like that. If Miss Hughes knew what it really was about she’d have a hemorrhage, because a junior high isn’t supposed to have books like that in its library. Every guy in the class has read it, even the ones who can’t read.

The boy that got called out, Stovall, is this retard in our class. He’s flunked about three times, he’s older than my sister I’ll bet, he shaves every day and has his driver’s license already. He’s extra-dumb, he’s by far the dumbest kid in the class, which he should be, since he really is a retard, but he’s got the biggest tool anyone’s ever laid eyes on, it’s as big as my forearm, practically.

“You wouldn’t know what to do with it if he lent it to you, you three-inch wonder,” somebody else called out in answer.

All that talk is ninety-nine percent bullshit. Everybody in here was a virgin, except Stovall and maybe Burt, who talks about how he gets it but never offers up any proof, because you’re not supposed to talk about who the girl is, according to him, like it’s a code of honor: you can fuck a girl, but you can’t say her name. Maybe Burt has gotten laid, he sure talks about it enough; but deep down that’s all I think it is—talk.

Everybody’s ready, though, that is for shit-sure. Even the few poor bastards who don’t have any hair on their balls yet and are always trying to hide what little they’ve got, even they talk about getting a piece. It’s like until you get laid you’re not a man, which is true in a way, although you can get laid and still not be a man. You can be old enough to be one but not be one if you know what I mean, there are guys who live their whole lives and never grow up. Most of the guys in this sorry town, for example. That’s another reason I want to go to Annapolis—you’ve
got
to be a man there, they make you whether you like it or not.

The most stupid thing about this shower room is there’s only ten towels, which means half the kids have to use a wet one somebody else already used. The school does it deliberately just to piss us off, I’m convinced of it. The way it actually works is the tougher you are the more often you get a clean one. For instance, I haven’t gotten a soiled one this year. It’s kind of cruel but when it comes to towels it’s a dog-eat-dog world.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Lewis Sarkind, who definitely fits in the used-towel category, sneak a clean one off the pile and start drying off, hoping to get done and out before anyone caught him, since the rest of us were still fighting for water to rinse off with, and horsing around in general. He froze for a second when he caught my eye but I just turned away. Who gives a shit about a crummy towel, I’ll snag a dry one anyways, and if I had to have a wet one one time what difference would it make?

“Sarkie, what the fuck’re you doing?” It was Danny numb-nuts Detweiler. He’d caught the poor bastard in the act.

Sarkind froze. He held the towel up against his pudgy little stomach for protection, not that he has much to protect.

“You ain’t finished showering yet, Sarkie,” Danny yelled.

That got everybody’s attention, him yelling real loud like that, sound bounces off these concrete walls like an echo chamber. The horsing around stopped as the other boys turned to see what was causing the ruckus.

“Yes, I have,” Sarkind answered weakly.

“Who says?”

“Leave him alone, Danny, for Chrissakes,” Joe called from inside the steam.

“Why should I?” Danny demanded. “He doesn’t even take a decent shower, then he takes a clean towel and wipes all his dirt off on it.”

He moved closer to Sarkind, who hunched up behind his towel.

“That’s
my
towel, you bastard,” Danny said, “and you’ve got your cooties all over it.”

He pushed Sarkind against the shower-room wall; the little jerk hit hard against the concrete, his body’s as soft as a bowl of mashed potatoes.

“I ain’t gonna dry myself off with that scum-rag towel you used,” Danny told him, hovering over the poor, pathetic, frightened kid, raising his fist to throw a punch.

That’s when my wet balled-up jockstrap smacked Danny hard on the back of his head. It sounded like a baseball hitting, it hit him so hard, it practically knocked him over.

Danny spun around. Man, was he furious!

“There’s your towel.” I stepped out of the steam so he could see me clearly. I didn’t want to fight him, but I’d had it with his whole bullshit attitude.

Joe, Burt, some of the others laughed. They hated Danny’s guts, too.

“Nobody asked for your opinion, Poole,” Danny said, rubbing the back of his head where the jock hit him. One thing I can do good is throw hard, baseball’s one of my best sports.

“That’s okay, I’m giving it free of charge.”

“When I want advice from you, fart-breath, I’ll ask for it,” Danny said back. One thing you can say about him, he’s original as hell on the comeback.

“Okay,” I grinned, “if that’s the way you want it.”

I bent over, spread my cheeks, and laid a real loud one in his face. Everybody was howling with laughter, even Sarkind, who’d been down on his knees in the fetal position to protect himself from Danny.

Like the coward he is, Danny turned to Sarkind.

“You think that’s funny?”

“Yeah,” Sarkind answered, finding bravery in numbers.

“You little asshole. I’m gonna give you something you can really laugh about, you turdbrain.”

He started kicking Sarkie, kicking him up against the wall.

I’d been wanting a chance to put that prick in his place and this was it. I grabbed Danny from behind and spun him around.

“How’s about trying me instead?” I challenged him. I was dripping from head to toe, bouncing on the balls of my feet like Sugar Ray Robinson, ready to move in any direction.

“I don’t want to fight you, Poole, this ain’t none of your damn business.”

“I’m making it my business. What do you want to do about it?”

Danny backed away. “Nothing,” he muttered.

“Nothing is exactly right.”

He couldn’t let that go; he had to come back on me, or be a pussy. We’ve got an unwritten rule in our school: don’t let your mouth make promises your fists can’t deliver. Danny had broken that rule.

“I don’t fight brown-nosers, anyway,” he spat out, trying to salvage some small part of his bruised manhood; the part between his ears, not the part between his legs.

When he said that, it burned my ass something fierce. “Who the fuck’re you, calling me a brown-noser, you asshole?” I really was getting pissed—if he was going to make this personal, he could kiss his sorry ass goodbye, because I wasn’t about to cut him any slack, not one inch.

“You,” he spat out. “In math. You had your nose so far up Swindel’s fat butt she probably thought it was your dick.”

We stared at each other. The room was quiet.

“Chickenshit,” I threw in his face. “Like you never have?” That was Danny every time; assholing out on somebody for something he does all the time himself.

He stared daggers at me. He was burning inside, you could almost see the smoke coming out of his ears.

“Fuck this shit,” I said. Dismissing him: “And fuck you.”

With that I deliberately turned my back on him, like I was going to finish showering off, and as soon as I did, the prick tackled me from behind, thinking he could catch me unawares. He hit me like he wanted to drive my head right into the tiles on the floor, but I twisted away, because I’d figured he might try some petty shit like that. We got into it tooth and nail, swinging at each other and twisting on the floor, banging up against the walls, slipping and sliding from the water beating down on our bodies.

The rest of the guys immediately formed a circle around us, yelling and egging us on. Everybody likes a good fight. We slid and fell as we tried to pound the shit out of each other. This was a real fight, because we hated each other’s guts, we weren’t going to fight for a few minutes and then give it up, there was going to be a winner and a loser.

Then in one sudden moment the room became quiet, but Danny and me didn’t stop, because we were too busy trying to kill each other. Finally we realized it, but it was too late, way too late.

Mr. Henry, the gym teacher, was standing in the doorway. He’s one of those short, bald men who’re built like a keg of beer and have hair all over their bodies except on their heads. We call him Knobby Walsh behind his back. Sometimes he’ll take his shirt off when he’s teaching wrestling, it’s like he’s wearing a rug. One thing everybody knows about him is his temper, it’s legendary.

We struggled to our feet. The others were pressed up against the walls, as far from Mr. Henry as they could get.

“Which one of you started this?” he asked Danny and me.

We looked at each other; neither of us spoke out.

He turned to the others. “Who started it?” he demanded.

Everyone was dead silent.

“Nobody saw it start, huh?”

Everybody kept quiet. You can hate another kid’s guts but against a teacher you stick together.

“Fine by me,” he told us. “I’m going to give you all a chance to improve your sorry memories. I’ll be back later … maybe.”

He went out and closed the door behind him. We heard the lock click.

“The bastard’s locked us in!” Joe cried in amazement.

“What’d you expect, flowers?” Burt asked, pissed to shit.

“That’s really great,” Danny said disgustedly, “we’re going to freeze our asses off in here. Way to go, Poole.”

“Hey, shut your fucking mouth,” I shot back, “you’re the asshole started it.”

Danny turned to the others.

“Let’s take a vote on who turns himself in. I vote Sarkind started it.”

“You’re full of it!” the small boy screamed, outraged.

“I vote to kick your teeth in after school,” I told Danny.

Danny glowered at me, but didn’t make a move. “Someday you’ll get yours, Poole,” he said, like he was going to scare me or something.

“Maybe I will, but not from you.”

I turned my back on him and took a leak down the drain.

We milled around, half-dry. The showerheads leaked rusty water. Overhead, the bare bulbs flickered in their wire cages.

“Motherfucker! It’s colder’n shit in here,” Burt complained.

“Get your friend Poole to admit the blame and we can get out,” Danny told him.

“Fuck you,” Burt responded.

We heard the door unlocking. Mr. Henry came back into the room, smiling at how we looked as sorry as dogs left out in the rain.

“You can get dressed now, ladies.”