Out of Order (2 page)

I'd never driven so carefully in my life. I'd just laid myself out at her feet. She knew everything. Almost.

And all the way to her house I was thinking, maybe if I tell her
that
, too, she'll understand that I really do love her.

Or maybe she wouldn't believe
that
, either.

When I got to her house, I stopped the engine. Before I could even move, she was out the door and heading up the sidewalk.

I got out anyway. I didn't follow her, I just stood looking over the car, resting my elbows on the roof, watching to see that she made it to the door.

Her strappy little sandals made angry slaps on the concrete. I was probably the only person in the world who noticed she had her toenails painted pink. Her calves were bare—I knew her legs were bare, though they were only a blurry dark movement under the gauze of her skirt, against the porch light.

“Hey,” I tried, calling out so suddenly that it surprised
my vocal cords and came out as a croak. “You're right. I'm a liar. I don't love you. Okay?”

It didn't fix anything. She didn't look around. Didn't say anything, either. The front door wasn't locked—she just opened it and walked in. She didn't slam it but shut it firmly.

“See you tomorrow,” I whispered, even though I knew that nobody could hear me. Because tomorrow I'd work hard and get her to soften up and give me one of those smiles that flashed the message for the whole world to see:

Colton Trammel is somebody special
.

I waited, elbows resting on the car roof, until I made sure she got in okay. And when the door shut behind her, I pounded the roof with my fist: one, two, three. Just to get under control enough to crawl back in the car and drive off, so I didn't go up and knock on her front door and say something stupid like the rest of the truth. That I, Colt Trammel, Studly Hombre, have never gone all the way. Right up to the edge, but I've never tasted the whole tuna taco.

Because I've always wanted Grace to be my first.

 

When you're in love with somebody and they're mad at you, two things happen. One is that every second hurts. If you weren't in love, you never would have
noticed these seconds passing, but now you can feel every single miserable one of them, like you ate some bad chicken enchiladas at a Tex-Mex buffet.

The second thing is that you are being pulled against your will toward the person you love, like a moth to a bug zapper. For example, even though I haven't seen her all day, I know exactly where Grace is, and I can feel every inch of space between us trying to get smaller.

As I'm walking to fourth-period English, I know that she's just on the other side of the school—down the hall, turn left, cross the breezeway, left again, through the double doors on the right—that's the cafeteria where
she's
sitting down with her little brown lunch sack. I know she's there, eating and talking and breathing.

Of course, I can't even think about going to see her, because if I think about it, I'll end up doing it. And deep down, I know exactly what I really need to do about Grace. I know—I'm just not sure I can manage.

Because what I've got to do is…nothing. Stay away from her; let her be the one to crawl first, for a change. That's the smart thing. After all, most people would say that
she's
the one who's not good enough for
me
. I mean, Grace is good-looking—but I am too. It's a simple fact: I'm a stud. I've been out with plenty of other girls, while I'm the only guy Grace's ever dated. So I know a lot of
stuff, while she's lived a pretty protected life, guywise. Her dad's real strict, so she couldn't even go on a real date till she turned fifteen. Her first date was me, her second date was me, all the dates she's ever had have been me. I'm all she knows.

There's no need to break down and call her like I always do. No point in humiliating myself by hunting her down at school. She'll come around, if I can just lay off.

I go on to fourth period alone, walk in the classroom, sit down. My desk is by the window because I do better in wide-open spaces. Or at least next to them.

The bell rings. Mr. Hammond walks in a moment later. Damn. If there was any mercy in the universe, we'd have a substitute today.

Mr. Hammond's okay, as far as teachers go. His only bad point is that he hasn't cut me any slack yet. My mom about had a stroke when she saw that 68 he gave me for the first six weeks.

Grades aside, Mr. Hammond's got some good points. He doesn't call my mom and complain about me. He lets me run errands for him, which most teachers don't once they get to know me. He doesn't say stuff like “This is
easy
, Colt, it's
simple
,” so that I feel like an asshole when I don't get it.

So I like Hammond okay, and though I'm not doing
too good in here at the moment, I have hopes that he won't play hardball when the next progress reports come out.

“Open your books to page ninety-seven—‘The Chimney Sweeper,' by William Blake,” Mr. Hammond says. “I think you all are going to like this one.”

He starts reading it out loud, with lots of pauses and expression. Grace would love it, all that expression in his voice. Me, I think it's pitiful. A grown man devoting his whole life to trying to get teenagers to care about literature.

It's hard to watch sometimes, how bad Mr. Hammond wants everybody to love this stuff, this English stuff. Sometimes I think how happy he'd be if he could have a bunch of students like Grace in here, who'd appreciate all his hard work.

Because to a guy like me “The Chimney Sweeper” is some piece of shit. It doesn't make a bit of sense. Of course, it would to those High Academic Program types. They'd take one look at it and see the secret meaning that Mr. Hammond has to explain to the rest of us, that it's about boys who clean chimneys for a living.

He says how the boys are like lambs. As in baby sheep. That's right…baby sheep. It doesn't
say
that, of course; you're just supposed to
know
.

“What are some words in the poem that could be asso
ciated with lambs?” Hammond is asking.

“His hair curls like a lamb's back,” some girl says.

“Yes!” Mr. Hammond's fist pounds the desk. He's like one of those motivational speakers. “Any others?”

He looks around the room. Everybody else is like me; nobody raises a hand, nobody makes a sound.

Still, Hammond waits, like if he gives us a little thinking time, we'll all suddenly turn into geniuses.

“Look at the verbs,” he hints after a moment.

Still nothing. It's so quiet, I can actually hear a cricket chirping outside.

“If you saw a group of lambs out in a field, what kinds of things would they be doing?”

The girl next to me yawns so wide, her jaw creaks.

Hammond's in a tailspin, poor guy. I feel sorry for him—I'm having a bad day too; I know how it feels.

So now I take a look for some lamb words in case it might cheer him up to see me looking. And God, can you imagine if I was actually the one who found a lamb word? He'd retire on the spot. He'd have reached the peak of teacherhood.

I'm looking for something like “Baaa,” I guess, but there's nothing there. Just regular words.

“What about ‘down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run'?” Mr. Hammond presses. “‘And wash in a river, and shine in the sun'—they used to wash sheep by
taking them to the river. Once the sheep were clean, they'd take them in for shearing. Look at the fifth stanza; ‘Then naked and white—'”

I perk up a little at the word
naked
, and find it on the page.

“‘—all their bags left behind, / They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind.' How do you think a sheep would feel, to be rid of all that heavy fleece? What do you think it would do, once the shearers released it?”

Silence in the classroom. It's like the man is speaking a different language. Nobody has any idea what he just said.

“To ‘sport'—what does that mean?” Hammond asks, but this time he gives up and answers himself. “To frolic, or play. Can't you see the lambs frolicking, playing once they're relieved of their burdens? ‘Sport in the wind'?”

He quits with the questions and starts talking again. About child labor laws or something. I like him okay, but I hate this class. English has always been a nightmare to me. It's a battle for me to stay in regular and not get stuck in remedial. I've always kept ahead of the game, but I still hate English, I hate books, I hate school in general. Always have. Any minute somebody could be expecting you to read out loud, or to explain something.

“Mr. Trammel,” Mr. Hammond says. “How do you think you'd feel, spending all your days inside dark,
cramped chimneys, breathing soot and coal dust?”

“Like Santa Claus.”

A couple of giggles behind me. Mr. Hammond just looks at me and waits. Unlike all the other English teachers I've ever had, he only asks me stuff I can answer.

So I give in. “Bad,” I tell him. “I'd feel bad.”

“That's right,” agrees Mr. Hammond, nodding. Then he moves on, going off on another subject,
blah blah blah, blah blah blah.
And after a while I forget to try to listen, and look outside. I'd rather be someplace that doesn't have a ceiling or floor, where the air is fresh and not canned. I'd rather be anywhere, walking around or running or hitting balls, than be in here having to sit in the same place and keep my comments to myself and my hands and feet still.

Hammond's on the other side of the room, still talking. I pick up my pencil, hunch over my folder so my body looks like I'm taking notes.

The grass outside is the same color as honey. The sky's got no clouds, it's blue like the soft little sweater Grace wore last night, the one with no sleeves.

I wish I could not care about her at all. Just until she gets over being mad.

Anybody besides me, he'd have already moved on—or he'd be able to at least act like he had.

It ought to be easy to move on. Grace wouldn't know how to flirt if you handed her written instructions. Her number-one handicap is that she's very intellectual and serious-minded.

Me, I
do
know how to flirt, and I'm about as unserious and unintellectual as you can get. I can hardly keep up with all her bullshit talk about writing and books and movies, excuse me,
films
.

Maybe that's why I've got to prove to myself and everybody else that I can have her.

A hand gently comes down on my pencil—and I realize I've been tapping it on the desk.
Ratta-tat, ratta-tat, ratta-tat.
Like a very small machine gun.

“‘He was energy itself,'” Mr. Hammond's voice booms, because he's the one looming above me—Pay attention, Colt!

I put my pencil down and Mr. Hammond's hand leaves, but he stays there, inches from my desk, reading from the piece of paper in his hand. “‘…and shed around him a kindling influence, an atmosphere of life.'”

He always does this—somehow he knows when I'm not really paying attention, so he brings his lecture over right in front of my desk.

“‘He was a man,'” Mr. Hammond reads off the printout, “‘without a mask.'”

I do what I always do—I stare right at him, so nobody
knows I have no clue what he's talking about, and nobody can complain how I'm not paying attention. It's an old trick—just look the teacher right between the eyes, just keep your own eyes glued to that one spot on the bridge of their nose, and then your mind can wander wherever it wants.

Where my mind wants to wander is Grace.

That's the story of my life. The same thing's always going to happen. No matter what I do or don't do, I'm always going to end up right back where I started, with Grace stuck inside me like an arrowhead broken off the whatdyacallit. The stick part with the feathers.

 

Fifth period, I'm an assistant. That means instead of taking a regular class, you sign up to help some teacher; grading papers, running errands, whatever. Usually you have to be an honor-roll student before you get to be somebody's assistant, but Coach Kline talked Miss A., who teaches English, into taking me on. Coach knows I don't do too good in some of my classes, and his thinking was that I could use this time as a study hall, plus get help from Miss A. if I need it.

At first I thought it was cool. Not only would I have a free hall pass, but Miss A. also teaches journalism, so I get to be all by myself in this little room that joins Miss A.'s classroom. It's the one where the newspaper staff
has their meetings. There's a door that opens out into the hall, and there's also a phone in here.

It's not so cool now. There's usually nothing to do because Miss A. doesn't let me run errands anymore. Not since the time she sent me to the attendance office and I forgot to come back. And it turns out the hall door's always locked to keep people from coming in and messing with the newspaper stuff, so I can't sneak out. And I'm not supposed to use the phone; Miss A. caught me the only time I tried, and she told Coach and he made me run laps during sixth.

After that, Coach said he'd bench me if Miss A. complained one more time, and maybe even get me moved to a real class instead of assistant.

My guess is Coach Kline and Miss A. have a thing going, but I haven't gotten up the nerve to ask.

Now I mostly just put my head down and sleep in here. Nobody bothers me, except every once in a while Miss A. has some homework she wants me to grade. She won't let me grade tests, although I'm good at that—I like checking off other people's mistakes.

Today, as usual, nothing to do. I put my head down on my arms. I like this room, even if those High Academic Program types do work and write in it. It's in the old part of the building, the part that was built back before sheetrock and particle board, so it has a little personal
ity. There's wooden cabinets all around the walls, ceiling to floor, and the floors are wood, too, and the air smells like musty shellac. It's cozy, too—the sun comes straight in the windows and the only thing moving is the dust in the sunbeams.