All of them seeming normal, non-hysterical, and non-tree-watching, so to speak.
What was Megan Rose talking about?
I left my tray and walked over to the hunger-strike-skinny kid who had waved to me earlier.
“Yo,” I said in his preferred vernacular. “Yo. I’m new here. Can I ask you a few questions?”
He didn’t look up. “You were ignoring me before,” he said.
“Right. Yes. Sorry.”
“Like you were too good for me.”
“No. Not at all. I was…shy.”
His name was Stuart. He really was epic pale and skinny: he looked like a regular skinny kid who’d been stretched out and printed on copy paper. He looked like one of those people who think they’re going to live forever because they’re eating only four apple seeds a day.
Despite his misgivings, he answered my questions about North Homer High. Megan Rose was indeed the school’s organizing celestial body, its student-body president, its sun—or its black hole, from Stuart’s perspective. I should avoid her and her warped gravitational pull, he counseled, and as long as we were on the subject, I should avoid the athletes: they were the worst. And I should especially avoid, if I wanted to survive North Homer in one piece, a football player named Brad Stone.
“But he’ll find you,” Stuart said. “He hates you already.”
“He doesn’t know me,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll get along.”
Melvin, Stuart’s grotesquely mustachioed and elaborately tattooed friend, was silent. He had taken out a pen and was adding to the ink on his left forearm, a rather disturbing rendering of a decapitating sword. I saw now that all of his tattoos were self-administered—not without skill and ambidexterity.
“You don’t talk a lot, do you?” I said to him.
Melvin shrugged.
“He’s got a lot on his mind,” Stuart said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Like trees?” I asked.
“Like trees what?”
“Trees are on his mind?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
Stuart sneezed, vigorously rubbed his nose, and then, unprompted, shared the very core of his life philosophy.
“You’re an oof,” he said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“An Oof. You are. A loser. Your T-shirt looks like you found it in a dumpster. Your hair looks like it was washed with a stick of butter. It’s okay. I’m a loser, too. Cleaner, though.”
“I’m not an oof.”
“You’re forgettable.”
“Dude. Hey.”
“Here’s my point. Megan Rose is not like you and me. She’s going places. Yacht places. Places with million-dollar membership fees and five-hundred-dollar meals that look like dirty water on a plate. They’re waiting for her there, at these first-class places, her reservation’s all ready. She’s just killing time here for a few more months until she finishes the formal paperwork. Then she’s gone. But we’re not. We’re not going anywhere. We’re stuck here. Forever. Because we’re losers.”
The word landed like a sledgehammer at a carnival, harsh and abrupt, with a ringing after. The weight behind it clearly had had time to build.
Stuart had spent many lunches thinking this philosophy through, I gathered.
“I don’t think I’m a loser,” I said.
“No one does,” he said. “It’s best to just accept it.”
Sometimes people get so into their grievances they lose track of how disturbed they are. I’ve learned that it’s best not to argue with such people online or to support their campaigns for higher office. I dropped my objections to Stuart’s philosophy and changed the subject back to what I was hoping to discuss.
“What are the trees like in this town?” I asked.
“The trees?”
“Are they okay? Different from usual? Doing anything weird?”
Stuart looked at Melvin and then at me. “What is it with you and trees?”
“Forget it. The students who got the hysteria—what’s up with them?”
“The students who got what?”
“Hysteria. Ungovernable emotional excess. That’s the DSM definition. I looked it up.”
“What’s a DSM?”
“Doctors, um, Speak Medicine.”
“Again, what the hell are you talking about?”
“The kids who got sick? Didn’t students get sick last week?”
Stuart twitched, a quick, jerky movement of his neck. “They had stomach flu. Principal said they went to Syracuse.”
“They didn’t go hysterical?”
“No. To Syracuse.”
Stuart wasn’t playing dumb. He was truly bewildered and at least mildly freaked out by my questions. He’d never heard of hysterics. Which meant that those kids Dad told me about in the truck…someone wasn’t telling the truth about what had happened to them.
Or was trying to hide it.
What the hell, indeed. A rod of ice stabbed down my spine.
“I don’t think I like you,” said Stuart.
Melvin caught my eye and nodded sorrowfully.
* * *
—
My first-day strangeness didn’t end there. Not hardly.
The bell rang. Students gathered their bags and trays. Social studies, my next class, was at the other end of the school. I quickly got lost, too busy replaying my conversations to keep track of where I was going. Soon enough, the hallways were empty. Pictures of pumpkins and squash, pinecones and oversize turkeys in Pilgrim hats, were taped up on the walls; they felt out of season and creepy, even though it was mid-October. It was that warm.
And then I turned a corner and came face to face with pretty much the largest human being I’d ever seen in person.
Brad Stone blocked the hallway like a skin-covered tollbooth. He started at middle linebacker for the North Homer Fighting Poets and, according to Stuart, had a fondness for Skoal dip, protein powder with dubiously legal ingredients, Red Bull, tight shirts, Ayn Rand, free markets, and picking up students’ cars by their bumpers and moving them a few feet so that getting out of parking spaces was impossible.