The Unknowns (9 page)

And then in walked Bill Fleig, and before I knew his name I knew that he was going to sit down next to me and determine the direction of my life for the whole of high school and perhaps beyond, and then he did.

He was almost freakishly tall for a fourteen-year-old, with an overbite so intense his jaw seemed to stop halfway to his upper lip. He peered around the classroom, saw the open seat, then made his way over. He had to kind of fold himself at the waist to fit into the chair, and then he didn’t seem to know what to do with his arms; he wound up draping them over the desk. Trying to avoid eye contact I looked down and futzed with my pencil case, which turned out to be my fatal mistake, because it allowed him to see my calculator.

“Is that a Texas Instruments TI-80?” he asked, and I had to acknowledge that it was.

“I had one of those,” he said. “Then I got this for my birthday.” He handed me his calculator right there in front of everyone. I took it as though it were a fish, looked it over quickly, and passed it back to him. “I’m Bill Fleig,” he said, like an adult. “Do you have a computer?”

“Yeah,” I said, hoping no one besides Bill Fleig would hear. The girl in front of me, the one with the hair, turned around, and I was afraid she was about to call me a loser. She turned out to have a big nose and cheeks that looked padded with cotton wool, but she was a girl.

To my relief she addressed Bill Fleig. “You shouldn’t use a calculator,” she said. “You’ll start to depend on it, and then you’ll never be able to do arithmetic without one.”

Bill Fleig had heard this argument before. “I carry it with me, so I won’t need to do arithmetic without one,” he said. I was horrified but somehow unsurprised that this conversation was taking place near me, as if I were sending out invisible, contagious nerd rays.

“What if you’re on a plane and it crashes on a desert island?” the girl asked.

“I’d have it with me on the plane, wouldn’t I?” said Bill Fleig.

“You might forget to pack it,” said the girl. “Or the battery might run out.”

“I’d carry extra batteries with me if I was going on a plane,” said Bill Fleig. He spoke in a breathless, hyperarticulated way, as if his lips and tongue were struggling to keep up with the words.

“It doesn’t matter how many batteries you have,” she said. “They’re going to run out eventually, and then you won’t be able to do math.”

I couldn’t stop myself. “Why would he need to do math if he’s stuck on a desert island?” I said. It came out too loud, and the Asian guy to my right turned to see what was going on.

“I might need to calculate the angle for a lean-to,” Bill Fleig said. “I might need to do long division to figure out how to divide up the food among the people who are on the island with me.”

“He might need to calculate where to put up a sundial,” said the girl.

“I wouldn’t need a sundial,” said Bill Fleig, extending his wrist to display a chunky digital watch.

“You shouldn’t wear a digital watch,” the girl said. “You’ll forget how to tell time.”

Mercifully, the teacher walked in. She was fat, and I hoped that meant she’d be jolly; it would be nice to have a jolly fat lady for a teacher. “All right, you guys,” she said, louder than the situation warranted, since we had quieted down as soon as she walked in. She didn’t sound jolly. She called roll, and I got that slight nervous feeling you get the first time they call roll and you don’t know who’s before you in the alphabet, and you’re afraid you’re going to miss your name or answer too emphatically or you won’t be on the list at all. But she read my name, and I answered fine, and I experienced the tiny sensation of pride and belonging that you get after they call roll for the first time. As we headed out for the first-day assembly, I surveyed the kids in front of me and realized that none of them had ever seen me before. I felt a strange excitement building, the kind stowaways must feel as they watch the coastline recede: my identity was up for grabs.

We must have been the last homeroom to arrive in the auditorium. The student body was catching up after summer vacation, saying
Omigod
and
How’s it going
? to the kids next to them, behind them, several rows away. As I looked down at the crowd I was staggered and overwhelmed by the endless varieties of girls: Girls who were going for cute and girls who were going for sexy and girls who were going for normal. Soccer players in shorts and sweatshirts and future English majors in long Laura Ashley skirts. Girls with big
breasts who were trying to hide them and girls with big breasts who were trying to show them off. Christian girls in button-down sweaters and nerd girls in overalls and rocker girls in black T-shirts with elaborate heavy-metal iconography. Groups of pretty girls, groups of almost pretty girls, ugly girls in ones and twos. It was an impossibly rich and complex zoology. I froze momentarily, and the people flooding in behind me pushed me forward and I stumbled and nearly fell.

I began by gathering data. Accounting for overlaps, my seven classes plus homeroom contained forty-six distinct girls. I listened for their names during roll and wrote them in a notebook, along with a quick notation indicating something about their physical appearance to remind me who was who. Once I’d got the names I started pruning. I wasn’t picky. To the least desirable girls I applied a litmus test: Would I prefer to be involved with her or to graduate high school without ever acquiring a girlfriend? That knocked out seven and left Rita Bambrick, whose head looked like one of the Easter Island statues, on the borderline.

And so I started tracking thirty-nine girls: their friends, interests, cliques, extracurriculars. After two weeks of fieldwork I had compiled a fairly thorough ethnography of the freshman class’s female population. I identified the groups, the pairings, the loners, the girls with steady boyfriends and the girls who dated around and the girls who were concentrating on their schoolwork. I rated them on a few crucial axes: studiousness, athleticism, sociability, sexual maturity (at one end of the spectrum was Erica Watterson, who was famous for her promiscuity; at the other was Pamela Beal, who was obsessed with horses), and social status. I was certain that this data would be useful to me, and that when I had accumulated enough of it I would know what to do with it.

As I walked out of history during the second week, Tara
Pulowski fell in beside me. “How’s it going, Eric?” she said, and I was thrilled to hear her call me by my name. My left hand instinctively reached behind me to verify that the zipper on my backpack was secure. Inside the backpack was the ring-bound notebook in which Tara’s name was written next to the words “curly brown hair” and the glyphs for
pretty
and
rich
.

“So what do you think of this class?” she asked me. I cast about frantically for the correct answer, until she stepped in to help me. “It’s OK, I guess, but there’s way too much homework.”

“Yeah,” I said. We were walking through the hallway to the cafeteria, having a conversation.

“So where do you live, Eric?” she asked me.

“Sheridan,” I said.

“Neat,” she said, waving hello to Becky Busch without breaking stride. “So, I’m running for student council.”

“Oh,” I said.

“The election’s in eight days,” she said. “Yikes!” She held up her hands and wiggled her fingers in a little pantomime of anxiety.

“Wow,” I said. There must have been a better response but I was unable to imagine what it might be or how anyone might be able to calculate it in the time allotted.

We had arrived at the cafeteria. It seemed that we were about to sit together, and it occurred to me that by the end of lunch I might have thought of something better to say than
Oh
or
Wow
. “So where do you want to sit?” I said. I had neglected to inhale for a few minutes, and my voice came out sounding strangulated and glottal. Tara’s eyes scanned the room, then lit up as they landed on Michelle Kessel and Louise Treadwell, over by the big windows.

“So wish me luck in the election, Eric!” she said, then hurried off, smiling and greeting people. I waited in line for lasagna, found a seat alone, and took out my notebook. Next to Tara’s name I drew a little asterisk to signify that I had talked to her.

I voted for her, of course. She came in a very respectable third, after Dean Hoestetler, who had locked up the endorsements of the after-school clubs by sending pizza to their meetings, and Heidi Weir, who was immense and wore headgear and was the subject of a sarcastic write-in campaign.

From there my notes on Tara expanded to take up most of a page. After her defeat at the ballot box she began an equally vigorous campaign to become Michelle Kessel’s best friend. For almost two weeks she and Michelle and Louise were together constantly—in the cafeteria, in class, going into the girls’ bathroom—but Tara’s place in the group was never secure. She was more earnest than the others, and she lacked the talent for exclusivity: during her abortive political career she had made too many acquaintances.

And then one day in biology Tara’s eyes were puffy and red, and she sat apart from Michelle and Louise and stared straight ahead. Mr. McCallum called on her, and when she gave the correct answer—“To increase surface area?”—Michelle and Louise broke into a laughing fit, pitched just below the threshold of acceptable classroom noise. At the end of class they left without her, whispering. Tara took her time assembling her belongings and walked out alone, her back stiff, like a finishing-school girl balancing a book on her head. I followed her out and caught up with her.

“Are you OK?” I asked her. She looked away, with an expression so vulnerable that, for the first time since Bronwen Oberfell had awakened me to the strangeness and terror of love, I was able to talk to a girl without feeling nervous.

“No, it’s fine,” she said. “It’s totally fine.” She hauled a smile into place as if by powerful hydraulics, but as the corners of her mouth reached the apices of the parabola the whole arrangement collapsed and she began to sob. I had never seen a girl cry, but I’d seen my mother cry many, many times, enough that Tara Pulowski’s tears were a lodestar. In uncharted territory I could use them to navigate.

“It’s all right,” I said. “You can tell me about it.” I felt a thrill of sincerity as I spoke, as though the feelings I’d had in the past were a child’s toys and Tara’s grief the first harbinger of adult life. We were standing by the bulletin board, in front of flyers announcing auditions for the musical and meetings of the Italian club. Students flowed past, parting around us, their voices and footsteps bouncing off the cinderblock walls.

“Why are people so mean?” she said, and I had to lean in to hear her. “It’s like, how is it that you can feel so close to someone and then all of a sudden find out that you don’t really know them at all?”

I had no idea what the answer was, but it seemed that what was called for was wisdom, and so I did my best with what I had. “Sometimes people are really mean,” I said. “Some people don’t care about anyone but themselves, and are just out to see what they can get.”

She nodded at me, her eyes wide. She was waiting to hear what I would say next, and it seemed important that I somehow shift into a higher register. “But sometimes, when people act in a mean way, what it really means is that they’re scared,” I said. I don’t know where that came from. Probably TV.

She took it in humbly, as though it were really valuable. “I want to talk to you more,” she said, and inside me something leapt in the air and punched the sky. “But I have to go to math.”

“I could meet you after school,” I said. It did not occur to me that my mom would be waiting for me after school.

She said nothing for a minute—whether evaluating my offer or lost in her misery I couldn’t tell. Eventually she said, “Meet me at the side entrance, by the trash cans.” No one would see us down there, which suggested either that she wanted our encounter to be private and intimate or that she didn’t want to be seen with me.

She was waiting when I arrived. We walked away from the school, down Randall Street, on a grass-lined sidewalk beside a wide, extravagantly cambered road. A commuter suburb at 3:45 on a
weekday is a ghost town. We headed for the little playground two blocks down, its jungle gyms and swing sets hardly scuffed. Families here had their own play structures in their backyards.

“So what happened?” I said.

“It wasn’t like this at my old school,” she said. “At my old school, people were… there wasn’t this
pressure
, you know? Here there’s all this pressure to, to hang out with the right people and stuff. I used to”—she paused and looked down—“I used to be really into My Little Ponies, OK? I mean, I know, it’s dumb, whatever.” I smiled as if to say
It’s OK, I know all about embarrassing childhood passions
. “But I had sixteen My Little Ponies and I loved them.”

“Sixteen?” I asked, wondering what you could possibly do with sixteen My Little Ponies. Tara looked hurt, and I regretted it immediately.

“Yeah, I know, it’s totally dumb,” she said. “Whatever. Never mind.” She was about to shut down.

“No, I just mean, I never had any My Little Ponies, because I’m a boy,” I said. “So I don’t know what you’d do with sixteen of them. Like, did they each have a different name and everything?”

“They each had a different
personality
,” she said. “And they liked to be fed at different times.”

I had no idea what to say to this, so I kept quiet. We had arrived at the playground, and we made our way across the sand toward the swings, the kind whose seats consist of a strip of black rubber suspended between a pair of metal chains. We sat on adjacent swings and flexed our knees, propelling ourselves into tiny, ironic arcs.

“Anyway, I know it’s totally stupid and everything, but I still have them in my room,” she said. “And then there was this slumber party and… I can’t talk about it.”

She was about to disclose something that happened among girls, something that might be important. “No, tell me,” I said.

“Michelle and Louise and Emily were all at my house,” she said.
There were two Emilys in my notebook, neither of whom had been linked with Michelle, Louise, or Tara. “And I was so psyched that they were there, because it was the first time they’d been to my house, so I was really nervous but I was really psyched too. I made my mom promise to stay out of my room and everything. And we were talking about who we liked, and Michelle said she knew who I liked, and I was all,
Cut it out, you do not
! and she was like,
No, I do, I do
, and I was so worried because I thought she knew I liked Leo Garson.” This information appeared with no special emphasis, like a man who brushes past you in a crowd and slides a knife into your stomach. “And then she was like,
And the person Tara likes is right here in the room with us right now
! And I knew it was a total lie, but I started getting really creeped out—like, what if Leo is in the closet, you know, what if they sneaked him in to embarrass me? And then Louise was like,
He’s in the closet, and I’m going to go get him
! And I was really freaking out—I mean, I was trying to be all,
No way, whatever
, but really I was freaking out. And then she went into the closet and she came out and she was holding Sparkler, who was like my favorite My Little Pony. And she was all like,
This is who Tara likes, and she—she does it with him every night
! Even though Sparkler is a girl; all My Little Ponies are girls. And I was like,
Don’t be stupid, how could you do it with a My Little Pony
? And they were like,
You totally do, here’s how
, and they started saying just this really gross stuff? I mean, I can’t even say it, is how gross it was. It really made me ill; it makes me ill just, like, talking about it.”