Adam Selzer (11 page)

The next morning I was in the media immersion room fifteen minutes before the bell, using the editing machine to splice everything together into a rough draft of the movie—though it wouldn’t have music or the narration. Just a rough cut of the shots I had. Like a demo version. I kept working all through activity period, and fifteen minutes before the bell rang, I had a cut ready to show to the class—it would just need sound, the kiss scene, and the explosion before anyone outside the class could see it. The kiss/explosion thing would make or break the whole movie, honestly. It had to go out with a bang.

It was only when I got up to tell Mr. Streich I was ready to show the movie to the class that I noticed that Mrs. Smollet had been sitting in the room the entire time.

“Finishing up, Leon?” she asked, trying to seem friendly and doing a lousy job of it.

“It’s a rough cut,” I explained. “It still needs a couple of important shots, but I’m going to show this version to the class today.”

“Mind if I watch it with you?” she asked, as though I had a choice.

“I can’t stop you,” I said. Mrs. Smollet had a weird sort of position. Since she was just a program director, not a regular teacher, she really didn’t have as much power as most of the people in the school. But what power she did have followed her everywhere she went, unlike some teachers, whose power was greatly diminished outside of their classrooms. Mrs. Smollet’s even stretched to the high school, where she ran a couple of other programs.

Mr. Streich wheeled a TV to the front of the room, and everybody gathered around to see how my movie looked. Despite the fact that I knew I was going to have a lot of explaining to do to Mrs. Smollet, possibly including the very facts of life, I had rarely been more excited in my life. I was a filmmaker!

The movie started with just a few seconds of the words “La Dolce Pubert” on a plain screen, and I started to read the narration aloud. Then the first shot of naked artwork came in. There were a few paintings in a row, followed by a shot or two of bad-looking food, one shot of the dummy, then some footage I’d shot the night before of boiling water, which represented hormones that were about to go out of control. I was surprised by just how much it still really needed the music and the kissing and explosion scenes; those would tie it all together.

Everyone thought it looked pretty cool, though, whether it was tied together or not.

“Right on!” said Brian. “I wish they’d shown that to me when I was in sixth grade!”

“It’s not really done yet,” I said, for the second or third time. “It still needs those two last scenes, and then I’ll probably change a bit more when I edit it again. Then there’s the music.”

“Still,” said Edie, “it looks great the way it is! I can’t wait to film my scene!” She grinned at Brian like a cat in heat.

Even Mr. Streich was about to say something nice when he was interrupted by Mrs. Smollet, who had been taking notes the entire time, only occasionally looking up at the screen.

“I’m going to need a copy of that,” she said. She didn’t seem happy. Then again, unless she was making some kid dress up like a famous composer or something as part of a project, she never seemed all that happy.

“What for?” I asked. She started to fumble around a bit.

“I’ll need to submit a copy of it to the school board before they can show it to the younger kids,” she said. “That’s all. It’s just a formality. And I’ll need a copy of the text you’re using for the narration.”

It was clear from her tone that that certainly wasn’t all, but I had no choice but to give her the tape.

“I’m not sure I know about that policy,” said Mr. Streich. “Are you sure that’s standard?”

“With sex ed it is,” said Mrs. Smollet. “The board reviews every sex-ed film before it gets shown to make sure there’s nothing that’ll get us sued.”

“I’ll need it back tonight, if that’s possible,” I said as politely as I could manage.

“We’ll see,” she said.

I took the narration over to the copy machine and ran off a duplicate for her.

As she walked out of the room with the tape and the text, I ran over to the editing board to grab the master tape. I didn’t know what the hell Mrs. Smollet really wanted a copy for—maybe it turned her on or something to see all the paintings of naked guys—but I was certainly glad that all she had was a copy. If I never got that one back, I could make another from the master in no time.

The whole thing about having to have the video reviewed by the school board didn’t please me much, though the image of all of them sitting around eating popcorn and watching every sex-ed movie under the sun to decide what was appropriate and what wasn’t sort of amused me. I’d hoped they’d just have an assembly where they’d pop the student-made movies in, one after the other, and I’d take them by surprise. If I had to be approved by a board, I knew that I might not make it. If I didn’t, would that affect my grade?

It didn’t matter. I’d manage to show it to the kids somehow.

Two hours later, while I was in history class, one of the kids who worked in the office came in and handed Coach Wilkins a note, who handed it to me.

I was to report to the office immediately. It seemed I was being suspended.

Getting suspended in middle school is not the sort of disaster than can genuinely ruin your life. A lot of kids worry that getting suspended will go on their permanent record, but that’s a bunch of crap. Even by the end of elementary school, I knew that there wasn’t really any such thing as a permanent record, and further knew that no prospective employer or college was going to call up the school asking for a copy of my record and then decide to reject my application because I once got in trouble in eighth grade. I mean, really! How would that work? If there was some great folder of everything I had ever done in school, which I could never access or see, why would some McDonald’s manager be able to get a copy on demand? It’s all just silly, if you think about it. I suppose they probably keep a record of your grades, address, and all that in their filing cabinet, in case you get famous and people in the future need proof that you went to school, but that’s all.

That, however, did not mean I wanted to be suspended. As I took that long walk to the office, I felt for a second like a condemned criminal, which I was starting to feel like more and more often, but then I shook that off and made myself feel as though I was an alleged felon walking into the courtroom to argue my case. I wasn’t going to go down without a fight—whatever I was fighting over. As I reached the office door, I realized that I wasn’t exactly sure which offense they were suspending me for in the first place. Was it illegal to use a CPR doll for something other than its intended purpose? Had they found out that I’d spent the last third of math class in the bathroom on Tuesday? That was probably it.

When I walked into the office, the principal, Dr. Brown, was sitting at his desk, and Mrs. Smollet, surprise surprise, was sitting next to him.

“Ah, Mr. Harris,” said Dr. Brown, “nice of you to join us.” Dr. Brown was a friendly sort of guy, but none of us really liked him much because we could always tell that he just didn’t take us that seriously. After all, he didn’t give us enough credit to know that we could tell he was wearing the worst hairpiece in town.

“What am I in for?” I asked, sitting down on the other side of his desk.

“Well,” he said, “we have a little complaint from Mrs. Smollet here.”

“Oh?” I asked. “Do tell.” I was trying my best to act all casual. Had I been braver, I would have said, “Why should today be any different?” But seeing as how I was nervous, I wasn’t in the kind of mental shape you need to be in to come up with anything brilliant on the spot.

Sitting on a chair much nicer than the one I got, she was looking very stern, like one of those old paintings of Puritan women. She would have made a good Puritan; she and Joe Griffin would probably think that burning witches was fun and educational for the whole family.

“Well,” said Dr. Brown, “it’s all to do with your video project for advanced studies. She tells me that she warned you not to do anything inappropriate with it.”

“That’s right,” I said. “And I didn’t.”

“Well, that’s where we sort of disagree,” he said. “I think you’ve done a very good job on the movie, but it’s clearly inappropriate for a middle school project.”

“It’s not inappropriate!” I said. “It’s art! Most of the suggestive images come from some of the greatest paintings ever produced.”

“Well, her problem isn’t really with the nudity,” he said.

“Actually,” Mrs. Smollet interrupted, “I do have a problem with the nudity. And with this thing you intend to use as narration. This…film”—she acted like saying the word “film” was physically painful to her—“is simply vulgar.”

“There isn’t any real nudity!” I said. “The only naked things in it are paintings and a CPR dummy.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “Nudity is nudity.”

“But great paintings aren’t obscene!” I said. “They’re works of art.”

“It’s still not appropriate,” she said. “If I were a mother, I wouldn’t want my children to see this sort of thing.”

“Well, there are points that can be made on both sides,” said Dr. Brown, breaking up the argument and trying to be my pal. “But the real problem is with the, uh…the masturbation references. There are several in the text.”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Smollet. “This film goes out of its way to promote masturbation.”

“It doesn’t promote it, exactly,” I said.

“We got a complaint about it already,” she said. “One student came to me and told me that you described it as ‘pro-whacking-off propaganda’ and that you’d personally told him that you were using it to encourage students to masturbate. I have it in your handwriting, in fact.” He held up the note he and I had passed back and forth.

Somewhere, Joe Griffin was sitting with that obnoxious smirk of his on his face, knowing that this was happening. I would have decided then and there to kick his ass, but if I gave him a personal injury, his dad would probably sue me. I guess nothing says “protection” like having your dad advertise on TV that he sues people over minor injuries.

“I was joking around!” I said.

“I think it’s obviously promoting the…practice,” she continued. “The scenes of the dummy doing it are absolutely inappropriate.”

“What?” I asked. “The dummy isn’t doing anything! It doesn’t even have a crotch!” This was true—it was a waist-up dummy. The people who built it probably figured that legs were rarely involved in mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“Well, let’s take a look,” said Dr. Brown. He got up from his desk and walked across the room to the TV that was set up in the corner and put my tape in the machine. He fast-forwarded to a shot of the dummy that showed it only from about the chest down.

“See?” she said. “It’s clearly…well, you know….”

I looked closely. The dummy’s hand was indeed right about where the crotch would have been, but it wasn’t moving around or anything.

“It’s not, either!” I said. “It just happens to have its hand where its crotch ought to be. What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is that this film promotes masturbation,” said Mrs. Smollet.

“No, it doesn’t!” I argued. “It just says that it’s normal, which it is. Dummies don’t usually do it, of course, which is why the dummy in the movie isn’t, but it’s pretty normal for people.”

“Well, be that as it may,” said Dr. Brown, “it’s not an appropriate topic for this grade level. And please try to keep the sarcasm down so we can have an open dialogue here.”

“I don’t see why it’s not an appropriate topic,” I said.

“It’s
never
an appropriate topic,” said Mrs. Smollet. “Morals are morals, and this movie is simply immoral.”

“That’s absurd!” I said. “How is middle school an inappropriate time to talk about that subject? If anything, it’s the most appropriate time of all! You know how many kids are probably stressed out about that?”

I sort of wondered what exactly she found immoral about masturbation in the first place. Who did it harm? I’d seen the thing in the Bible about spilling one’s seed instead of using it to get someone pregnant, but that surely didn’t mean that eighth graders in this day and age should be going around getting people pregnant. Maybe back in biblical times it was okay, but not now.

“Still,” said Dr. Brown. “It’s not the sort of thing that we’re allowed to discuss in schools. Parents will complain. I could lose my job.”

“Parents like her?” I said, pointing to Mrs. Smollet. “They probably don’t want sex ed in the schools to begin with.”

“Well, if you ask me,” she said, stepping onto the soapbox I’d set out for her, “it’s just providing a how-to manual. But that’s not the point here.”

I made no secret of the fact that I was rolling my eyes. “You’re in charge of the gifted pool,” I said. “Do you honestly think kids don’t already know the basics?”

“Well, there’s a lot of merit in your argument, Mr. Harris,” said Dr. Brown, trying to shut us both up. “But the fact remains that I can’t allow this sort of thing in the school, and since you were warned not to do anything that could be seen as inappropriate, we have no choice but to take action.”