Adam Selzer (14 page)

I didn’t know quite how to respond to that. “Well, thanks,” I said. “I can’t say I was expecting to hear that.”

“I’m not an ogre, Leon. I’m just a principal. And don’t worry; as I said, I’m not letting this go on your permanent record.”

When I stepped outside, probably thirty people were standing around the flagpole, where they were shouting out the words to that Pink Floyd song again. When they saw me, they stopped singing and cheered and clapped. Once again, I felt like I was invincible. As far as I know, I was. No one shot at me, so there was no way to tell for sure.

Coach Hunter, from gym, was standing in the background, watching with his arms folded and looking like he’d rather be shopping for women’s shoes. I guessed that they’d sent him out there in case things got out of hand. In a way, this made him my bodyguard.

More people were chanting. I noticed Coach Wilkins was standing there, shouting, “Give art a chance!” and trying to get a chant going, though no one seemed to be going along with it. Still, I appreciated the gesture, and he looked like he was having all the fun in the world, shouting and carrying on and making a general fool of himself, trying to relive his wild, radical youth, I suppose.

I didn’t have long to figure out who was there and who was doing what, though, because I was getting mobbed by kids who wanted to pat me on the back. I raised my arms and flashed peace signs with both hands. They cheered some more.

“When can we see the movie?” someone shouted.

“Soon!” I shouted out. “Victory party at Fat Johnny’s tonight after the game!”

Technically, since I’d had to serve out the full day, it wasn’t exactly a victory, but I had come out with my dignity intact, and the school sort of had its tail between its legs. That was enough of a victory for me.

All the kids from the gifted pool were there, along with a bunch of kids I just barely recognized, and a few more who I knew for a fact hated my guts. I guess when you’re all going up against the school, no kids are enemies.

Meanwhile, Joe Griffin was standing off to the side, looking pretty pissed. I thought maybe I should go talk to him, but that wouldn’t have been very nice. Like Mr. Streich said, his opinions were valid, too, and going over to rub his nose in the fact that his opinions didn’t rule the world would have been ungraceful, like giving a guy an extra punch in a boxing match when he was already knocked out.

The whole thing didn’t last very long, because half of the kids had to get on their buses before they were left behind. I guess you can’t really get a good riot going when most of the rioters have to catch a bus. Within ten minutes I was walking home alone, but I felt like a king.

Dad was waiting on the front porch.

“You should have seen it, Dad!” I said. “People were chanting and screaming and everything.”

Dad grinned. “It seems like you were a pretty popular guy today,” he said.

“It’s weird,” I said. “I never saw that coming.”

“You wanna know how the conversation went at the school?” he asked.

“More than anything,” I admitted. “I heard the last minute or so under the door, but I didn’t hear most of the beginning.”

“Well, Max Streich met me in front of the office, and we went in to talk to the principal. We were mostly talking about how we thought the school was going too far. Then Anna’s father showed up and said the same thing. Then that one lady, Mrs. Smollet, came in. She’s quite a piece of work, isn’t she?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“She told us that if she had her way, you would be expelled altogether, or at least removed from the gifted program. Then she went into this rant about how your mother and I must be horrible parents.”

“She actually said that?” I asked. “I just heard her sort of hint it.”

“I almost didn’t believe it, but she said that, all right. Then she told Anna’s father he was extremely lucky that his daughter wasn’t in just as much trouble. And something about how expecting a moral, Christian woman like her to work among miscreants like you made it a hostile work environment, which she could sue over.”

“Sounds like her, all right.”

“Right about then, I think Dr. Brown was starting to see that she was a little out of hand.”

“Really?”

“Yes. He suggested we all watch the movie, and we did.”

“Yeah, I noticed you were all watching it. Too bad it wasn’t done or anything.”

He nodded. “It was good, Leon. I don’t know if it will change the world or anything, but it was very creative. I said afterward that I didn’t really see what she was so upset about, and Anna’s father said that it had a lot of artistic merit. Then she really hit the roof and basically blamed us for all the problems of youth and the lack of moral fiber in the community.”

“She really loves to talk about moral fiber,” I said.

“It’s an old trick,” said Dad. “People call their way of living moral, so it looks like everyone who disagrees with them is some kind of criminal. But I told her that she shouldn’t worry, because your mother kept you off the bus so you couldn’t have oral sex on it.”

I laughed. “Seriously?”

“I sure did. Your mother and I sort of disagree on that. I think it’s a bit silly. But it makes her feel better.”

This was interesting news.

“What did Mrs. Smollet say to that? At some point I heard you say we go to church more than she does.”

“I said that, and I meant it,” he said. “I’m not very religious, really. You know that. But I certainly know a bit about the basics of theology, and I know that there are certain people who probably aren’t really religious at all, they just use religion to back up their own agenda, and they usually don’t know a thing about theology. But I said it, and she started playing the victim, saying that we had come in to scream at her and all that, even though we hadn’t raised our voices. After she left, Dr. Brown said that he’d look into the whole thing right away, and herded us out. I think he was a bit embarrassed by the way Mrs. Smollet was acting.”

“I think so, too,” I said. “He sort of even apologized.”

“Really? That’s a step in the right direction.”

“I would have fired her if I were him,” I said.

“I suppose you could make a case for that,” said my dad. “But learning to deal with people like her is just a part of life. If you can learn that, you’ll get a lot more use out of it than most of the stuff they teach you in class.”

We sat silently for a few seconds. “Leon,” he said finally, “I just want you to know that I’m proud of you. I really am. I don’t think anyone can make a living making avant-garde films, but you had an idea and you went for it. That’s worth a lot in this world.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I think I want to go to film school instead of accounting school.”

He looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “You were planning on going to accounting school?”

“Well, no,” I said. “But I sort of assumed that you wanted me to do something like that.”

He sort of chuckled. “Leon,” he said, “you haven’t scored higher than a C-plus in math the whole time you’ve been in middle school. I sort of assumed you weren’t planning on a career in accounting.”

He patted my knee and walked inside.

I didn’t know what to say. Or how to feel.

Thinking back, I realized that he had never actually said I should be an accountant—had never said anything of the sort, in fact. But in the back of my mind, I’d always sort of thought that he wanted me to do something boring. It felt good to have that weight off my back, but I didn’t know if I wanted him to be proud of me any more than I wanted those jerks from school to think I was a hero. Any normal dad probably would have grounded me.

As we have seen, though, my dad was simply not normal.

I walked into Fat Johnny’s feeling like a hero that night, but I wanted to talk to my friends more than I wanted to play the part. I snuck in quietly and joined Edie, Brian, and Anna at a table before anyone could see me.

“Did you hear the news?” asked Anna.

“Which news?” I asked.

“Smollet’s giving up the gifted-pool job!”

My eyes got so wide it’s a wonder they didn’t fall right out into Anna’s Coke.

“Are you serious?”

She grinned. “Dr. Brown called and told my dad this afternoon. She’s going to just focus on whatever it is she does at the high school instead.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Do you know what this means? We actually won. We beat the school system!”

“Cheers!” shouted Brian. And he waved his lighter above his head.

A lot people noticed the flame in the air and then noticed that I was there, and suddenly I had ten or fifteen people coming up to pat me on the back and congratulate me on being free. I knew they’d probably all go back to hating me pretty soon, so I figured I should just enjoy it while I could.

No fewer than twenty people asked when they could see the movie over the course of the night. And these were eighth graders, not the sixth and seventh graders who were supposed to see it—if it hadn’t been banned, they probably never would have even heard of it. Clearly, the school hadn’t been able to do anything to keep people from wanting to see the movie. Coach Wilkins was right about that whole Judy Blume business.

“You know,” said Brian, after people had gone back to talking about the football game and cheating at Skee-Ball, “they say that there’s nothing that’ll make a song a hit faster than banning it.”

“I think you’re right,” I said. “Half the kids in school are probably dying to see what all the fuss was about.”

“More than that,” said Anna. “Probably all of them. So we have to finish up.”

“Mr. Streich’ll still let us use the editing gear for it, won’t he?” I asked.

“He won’t have to,” said Brian. “He already loaned it to me. As soon as we film the kiss scene and you get the explosion and the narration and stuff, I can edit it all together. And I can put it on the computer and make all the hard copies we need.”

“And now that it’s not a school project, I can have the explosion!” I said.

Suddenly there was a tap on my shoulder, and I turned to see Joe Griffin.

“They, uh…they shouldn’t have suspended you,” he said sheepishly.

“What?” I asked. I genuinely would never have predicted that—so much for my psychic powers. “You were the one who told Dr. Brown I was encouraging people to whack off.”

“Yeah, but…I didn’t think he’d suspend you, I just thought he wouldn’t show the younger kids the movie. Sorry about that.”

And, before I could say anything else, he sort of slinked away. Brian, Edie, Anna, and I stared at each other.

“What the hell was that?” asked Brian

“Maybe his dad told him he could get sued for something,” said Edie.

“I don’t care, that was nice of him,” I said. “Man, even my worst enemies are on my side now.”

It was beginning to look like being banned was the best thing that had ever happened to the movie—or to me. I was feeling like the king of all suburbia, and the movie was poised to be not just a film to educate the sixth and seventh graders, but also the biggest film ever to hit Cornersville Trace. All we needed was the explosion, the kissing scene, the music, and the narration.

I wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. If I wasn’t doing it as an official school project, there was nothing to stop me from doing an explosion.

Brian showed up early the next day with a whole box of wires and recording gear.

“I think the way to do it,” he said, “will be to run the mikes through your stereo. That way we can blast the instruments through the wall of sound, and then you can stand in the hall and record the narration, so you won’t be drowned out.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just record it all without any amps? I could just stand closer to the recording mike or something.”

“That might be easier,” he said, “but it wouldn’t be as cool.”

He had me there. He busied himself adding resistors and I don’t know what-all to the speakers and wires, getting everything together and saying that they would help it from blowing a fuse. Midway through, he stumbled upon a book of Dad’s not-quite-self-lighting matches, and I explained what they were supposed to be.

“Dude,” he said, “if he can get these things to work, I’ll buy them by the pound.” Apparently, being able to start a fire with the snap of one’s fingers was every pyromaniac’s dream. He didn’t know exactly how Dad could go about getting them to work properly, though. He was better with mechanics than he was with chemistry.

Shortly thereafter, Dustin came over with a keyboard, Anna brought her cello, and Jenny Kurosawa’s dad dropped her off with her clarinet.

Once everybody was there, Brian went about the process of getting everything rigged up, with microphones all around to catch everything. Dustin, Jenny, and Anna jammed a bit, playing a bluesy sort of riff that sounded a little more coherent than I’d expected. They played together pretty well, and it was pretty rocking, considering that the band was just a piano, a cello, and a clarinet.

“Sounds like early Led Zeppelin,” I said. “Only with different instruments.”

“Classic rock, man!” said Dustin, jamming away and hitting the keys with his elbow for show. Brian, meanwhile, was surrounded by so many cords that it was a wonder he wasn’t choking to death. All the instruments were hooked to pickups that ran into the stereo, and the sound would be blared out on my half wall full of speakers. Brian had added some resistors or something that he said would keep the circuit from blowing again, but he said that the whole thing would probably be incredibly loud anyway. That was fine with me. I rigged up the camera on the dresser to film the whole recording, in case I ever wanted to put together a making of
La Dolce Pubert
movie or something like that.

I went out in the hall with a separate microphone to record the narration, since it was going to be way too loud in the room to read anything.

“Okay,” I shouted. “I’m going to start reading. You guys start playing after the first line.”

“Got it!” Dustin shouted back.

“All the mikes are hooked to the stereo,” shouted Brian, “and we’re recording…now!”

I took a deep breath and read out, “We were weirdos once, and young,” then heard what was absolutely the loudest piano chord I’d ever heard coming through the speakers, so loud that I’m pretty sure the walls rattled a bit, and then everything went quiet.

At first I thought maybe the circuit had blown again, but then Brian shouted, “Leon! Hurry!”

I ran into the room and saw that the entire book of matches had caught fire—apparently, the problem with them was that a snap wasn’t loud enough to get them going.

“Put it out!” I shouted. Brian opened up the can of Coke that had been sitting on my desk and poured it all over the matches, which would probably wreck half of the things on my desk.

It was just then that I remembered that the book on my table was far from being the bulk of the flammable material in the house.

“Oh, no!” I shouted. “The garage!”

We all ran down the stairs to the garage, where, sure enough, Dad was busily trying to put out a whole bunch of little fires with the fire extinguisher. He looked absolutely thrilled.

“They work!” he shouted, between fire extinguisher blasts. “You got them working!” It was just like him to be absolutely delighted that the garage was on fire.

“Dad!” I shouted. “The chemicals!”

One of the lab coats was on fire, and the fire was slowly creeping its way toward a beaker full of the blue gunk that he’d been using for the tips of the matches. He turned to look at the coat, but it was too late—the whole beakerful of chemicals caught fire at once, in a huge burst of flames that went most of the way up to the ceiling and caught the table below it on fire.

“Damn!” he shouted, pointing the fire extinguisher at what was left of the beaker. It was hotter than hell in there, and was starting to look a bit like hell is supposed to look, too. Mrs. Smollet’s prediction that the town was going there in a handbasket might not have been as far off as I’d thought!

A minute later, it was all over. The fire was out, and the whole garage was covered in white gunk from the extinguisher. No one had died, and the only real casualties were a lab coat, the table, and a bunch of lab equipment. It was a miracle that the explosion hadn’t hurt anyone.

It was only then that I realized that Dustin, ever the resourceful fellow, had brought the camera down from the bedroom and, at great risk to his own life and limb, had gotten the whole thing on tape. When we played it back, it looked like one hell of an explosion—it was perfect!

After we all helped clean the garage (before my mother, who, thankfully, was at the mall, could find out), we went back to my room, where we recorded the whole thing straight, without using the wall of sound at all, like I’d suggested in the first place. It sounded fine and was an awful lot easier, even if it wasn’t quite as cool.

That night, my mother grounded me for a week for burning the garage down after she noticed all the char marks on the walls, which made no sense to me at all. Dad had been fine with me experimenting with the speakers before, even after they blew a fuse, and it was his gear, not mine, that had caught fire. It had only been my fault in a tiny, tiny way.

Still, I never thought I would be the one in the family who burned the garage down. Dad seemed to have a lock on that one.

The next day was to be the day we recorded the kissing scene, but Brian called me up in the morning.

“I have some bad news.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked.

“Edie has decided that she’s against kissing.”

“What the hell? You guys kiss all the time!”

“Yeah, but now she thinks that communists shouldn’t kiss. I’m not really clear on why.”

“But that’ll never last, will it? She’ll be kissing you again by Tuesday for sure.”

“Probably,” he said. “But I can’t talk her into doing the scene today.”

My mind started racing. I needed that scene done, and fast. If I waited, interest in the movie might die down by the time we got it finished.

“Well,” I said, “if I get another couple to do it, will you still be able to edit it this afternoon?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll bring it by when it’s ready, then.”

I hung up without saying good-bye and stared at the wall. My hand was shaking. But it was then or never. I knew what I had to do.

I picked up the phone and dialed Anna’s number.

The rest of the day was like a total blur. Talking to Anna on the phone, hearing her say she’d stand in. Waiting for her to come over. Setting up the camera so that you could see both of us standing together. And kissing her. Long and hard and good. On camera.

I had never kissed anyone quite that way before and didn’t have anything to measure it against. But it sure seemed like a good kiss to me. I would have gone for second, third, and fourth takes, but I was afraid she’d call me on it, so I had to be as businesslike as possible. I didn’t let her know that when I hit Record I was so nervous I could hardly stand up. I was afraid my knees, which were knocking like crazy, would bump into hers, and maybe even knock her over. But I got through it. And, in complete defiance of being grounded (we were operating outside the law to begin with, right?), I got on my bike to take the footage over to Brian’s house.

She rode her bike next to me, and then we both watched Brian as he put it all on his computer, then edited all the scenes into the right order and added the music and narration. The kiss looked pretty good to me on the screen, and following it with an explosion, which was almost immediately covered in white gunk from the fire extinguisher, was pretty obvious sexual symbolism, but it worked for me. The explosion was accompanied by one loud, long piano chord that faded out while the white gunk doused the flames, and it smoldered right along with the fire, which was really cool, especially considering that we hadn’t quite planned it that way.

The movie was finished.

A week later, I’m pretty sure that every kid in school, from sixth through eighth grade, had seen
La Dolce Pubert.
Some of them got a copy that Brian posted on the Internet; some saw the copies that we made and passed around. Within a couple of weeks, there wasn’t a kid left who wanted to see it but hadn’t. This probably made it much more popular than your average short avant-garde film, because almost nobody sees most of them.

As I might have expected, most of them hated it and went right back to hating me, on account of its being so weird. Lots of the younger kids thought it was great, mostly because it showed some naked paintings and used the word “whacking” several times. But I think a few of them also really felt relieved about hearing that they were normal, and nobody picked on me over that, which was sort of a relief.

It may not have changed the way people think about puberty or torn down any laws of society, but all things considered, the movie did what I hoped it would in the first place, and it helped get Mrs. Smollet out of the gifted pool at the same time. We’d still have to put up with her in high school, but we would be able to enjoy a good eight months of school without her.