Chapter 6

If we'd had an impartial referee, I have no doubt that the contest would have been declared a complete and total mismatch and never allowed to begin. As it was, it was nearly over before I even realized that it had started. In one corner, you had a sophisticated high school senior, a seductress who had spent the last three years navigating her way through the complex social webs that connect the various groups at a suburban high school. In the other corner, a ninth-grade naïf who had no memory of how he had spent those same three years. I was doomed.

In retrospect, of course, Saturday and Sunday had probably been my last chance to sue for peace, or more accurately to grovel before the throne of Stephie van Carlen. A simple apology might have sufficed on Thursday or Friday, although I might have hurt my chances for that by sitting with Tanya Szerchenko at lunch both days. By Saturday, though, that ship had undoubtedly sailed. As it was, I spent both days, Saturday and Sunday, watching the NFL playoffs.

And in any event, I hadn't entertained any idea at all of apologizing, let alone groveling. With no idea what kind of relationship Stephie and I had had before Christmas, my impression of her was based entirely on our single encounter in the cafeteria on Wednesday, and as far as I was concerned, it wasn't a relationship I saw any reason to continue.

Monday started on a high note, a very high note, although I did have to wait until third period. I had already figured out that that was probably going to be true every day. There weren't likely to be high notes during first or second period. In Government, I was quickly learning that Mr. Kennedy was happy if you copied down everything he said during class, mostly from the way he paused to let us keep up with his pearls of wisdom. I had every expectation that the tests would require that and little more; as long as you knew what a bicameral legislature was, it didn't really matter whether you knew why the Founding Fathers thought it would be a good idea. A cynical view, sure, and one based on only three classes, but I was fairly confident it would hold up.

Mr. Anson's history class was a little better, but I still had the feeling that we were going through the motions of rote learning. Here, for example, is where you needed to know that the Founding Fathers wanted a bicameral legislature. You just didn't need to understand what it was.

Third period was when the day started to get interesting.

I'd read "Bartleby" over the weekend, but Mrs. Palmer started class by asking those of us with front row seats to pass back a Xeroxed paper that she was handing out. I took one and turned around to hand the stack to Missy, who gave me a little smirk and snatched them from my hand, apparently upset now that I had one of her jobs, that of the first passer-backer. I turned back to my seat and was mortified to see my own handwriting on the piece of paper that Mrs. Palmer had been distributing. I looked up to find her standing directly over my desk, just in case anyone had missed my name scrawled across the top of the essay.

"Mr. Sterling has favored us with his attendance for the fourth day in a row," she said to giggles from the class, "a season-best, if I'm not mistaken, Mr. Sterling?"

"Yes, ma'am," I felt my face flushing with heat.

"As well as an excellent example of the kind of essay I was looking for," she pulled me back from the edge of humiliation. "He selected a single fact from Melville's life, the scarlet fever from which he suffered as a young boy. From that, he created a hypothesis, that Melville would feel more sympathetic — although I believe a better word would have been empathetic, Mr. Sterling — toward the weak and downtrodden in society, toward people whose afflictions might make others view them with pity, or even with scorn. And in his next paragraph, he explained what he would look for in Melville's work to support his hypothesis. Beyond that, he did me one better; he explained what he would look for to dispute his hypothesis. I would ask him to read his paragraph to you, but I've embarrassed him enough already and you're all perfectly capable of reading. What some of you are going to need practice on is writing. Miss Smith, did you read the Bartleby?"

With that, we plunged into a discussion of "Bartleby, the Scrivener." At the end of class, Mrs. Palmer passed back the papers, and mine had a red A-plus circled in red. All right! I was on my way. Let the games began.

Without my knowledge, though, a different game had already begun. By the time I got to lunch, not only had Tanya run out of Religion before I could even turn to talk to her after the bell, but the radioactivity of my table had spread to all the surrounding tables as well. With Tanya's table full, and with its occupants, like the rest of the crowd, glancing at me with expressions that ranged from discomfort to outright hostility, I simply reclaimed the seat I'd taken on Thursday. After a few minutes, I realized that nobody was sitting within twenty feet of me. Some people, in fact, left the cafeteria altogether when all of the other tables — the ones not near me — had filled up.

I'd been getting dirty looks from other people all morning, growing in number and intensity as I passed through my classes, but I just shrugged them off. Sure, Stephie was obviously a popular girl. Sure, I was going to have to suffer a little purgatory for breaking up with her. But I was a popular guy, too, right? I mean, I was a star athlete. So eventually, the little Stephie circle would go its way, and my little jock circle would come around my way, and things would settle down to normal. As I looked around the cafeteria, though, I had the distinct feeling that that was going to take a little longer than I thought.

I spent the rest of the day in study hall, trying to figure out the retrograde motion of Venus, something that Mr. Carruthers had started lecturing on today, and that nobody else seemed to have as much trouble with as I did. It took me the rest of the afternoon to figure out, interrupted only a summons from Coach Torianni to remind me that "we" had a tryout for a scout from the Atlanta Braves tomorrow afternoon.

Even my own family was cool toward me. Jeanne had eagerly accepted my offer to drive our car to school on Monday morning, and had expertly placed the car in the seniors' parking lot. After school, though, on my way to the lot, I watched as she almost ran to the line of buses. Thinking that perhaps she'd just forgotten we drove in together, I managed to drive myself home without, as far as I knew, breaking any laws.

Dinner that evening was no different than "usual." As we had every evening since the day after Christmas, we all listened to Tiffany describing in minute detail what she did during the day and how the pregnancy was affecting every organ of her body. Since the organs under discussion invariably included her boobs — their growing size in particular — it wasn't a subject that drove me from the table as quickly as it usually did Jeanne and Jill. This time, though, they departed with even more haste than usual, both of them glaring at me as they retreated to their rooms. After I'd done the dishes — without Jeanne's help this time — I knocked on her door. No answer. I called her name. Still no answer.

I was seriously bummed. This was the week that I was going to start tracking down the mystery of life. Or at least the mystery of my life. Who the hell was Patrick Sterling, and how the hell did he get that way? I already had a pretty good answer to the first question. He was an arrogant asshole who said "That was great, baby" to a woman he'd adored since the seventh grade, and who'd dumped Cammie Rowe when she wouldn't put out. He'd had at least one affair with a married woman, and at least one session with his current stepmother, I hoped to God before she married to his dad. He hadn't visited his relatives in a year and a half, and, oh yeah, he'd been dating a bigot.

How he got that way, though, was a little more difficult to figure out. I figured that Jeanne would be the best source of information, and while I had no intention of actually telling her the truth, I kind of hoped that if I enlisted her aid in my reformation project, I could sneak in a few questions about the downward spiral that my life had taken in the last three years.

I hadn't broached the subject up until now because frankly, I hadn't had the time. I think it was Socrates who said that the unexamined life isn't worth living. Easy for him; he didn't also have to spend time examining physics and baseball and American history, not to mention writing a paper on T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral." And in any event, I think what he had in mind was an examination that was a little more introspective than I was capable of at the moment; with respect to the last three years, at any rate, I was solely depended on extrospection, or whatever the opposite of introspection is. And of course, that was dependent on Jeanne's actually talking to me. For the life of me, I just couldn't understand why my breaking up with Stephie would make Jeanne mad. The way she'd said Stephie's name when we were waiting for the bus last week, in fact, had led me to believe that she would welcome my breaking up with her.

Jill's reaction was a little easier to understand. She was more than likely the Queen Bee of her own class, and my horrible faux pas had probably, through some strange commutative property of high school transference, been considered some sort of reflection on her. I didn't know that for a fact, though, because I still hadn't really gotten to know Jill yet. She'd obviously grown up, as evidenced by the fact that she'd had dates every night between Christmas and the start of the school year. And not with the same guy, either; I don't think I'd seen the same car yet pull into the driveway and honk its horn to summon my hot youngest sister. Since school started, we simply hadn't been in the same room long enough for me to start up a casual conversation about the last three years of her life.

Jeanne continued to scorn me the next morning. She responded to my offer to once again let her drive our car to school by turning her back on me and walking to the bus stop. I was unwilling to drive myself in, so I hurried after her. Once on the bus, I found all the other kids turning their heads to look out the window as I walked down the aisle. Even Bobby Bunt, who'd made a complete nuisance of himself the week before by sitting in front of me and explaining his athletic prowess every morning, found a seat at the front of the bus.

The rest of the morning followed a similar course. Nobody would initiate a conversation with me, and the responses to my own openings were brushed aside as quickly as possible. Tanya, in fact, bluntly told me to "fuck off" when I tried to talk to her before Religion Class. As a result, the only people I really talked to on Tuesday were Coach Torianni, and the guy from the Braves. Even Tommy Narburg, whom I didn't knock backward this time when he caught my tryout, responded to my banter only with grunts and single-word answers.

By Wednesday, it had spread to the faculty. Mr. Anson and Mr. Kennedy both looked at me like I was the lowest form of life on earth, and Mrs. Palmer refused to look at me at all. Mrs. Jenkins met my eyes in Religion, but her eyes were filled with such pain and such disappointment that I found myself unable to hold her gaze for any length of time.

Mr. Carruthers spoke to me, but only because we had lab on Wednesdays and he had to assign me a lab partner. Or assign me no lab partner, as it turned out. My classmates were already sitting next to their first choice in lab partners, and he eagerly ratified their choices.

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A Stitch in Time

Marsh Alien

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