Antsy Does Time (10 page)

“Just me?” I asked.

“No. You . . . and a date . . . if you like.”

Now I knew what “you're invited” actually meant. “Wow—an invitation to a five-star restaurant for me and a date. Wouldn't it be easier to put one of those electronic tags on my ear before you release me into the wild?”

She huffed into the phone.

“Admit it—you just want to keep track of me.”

She didn't deny it, she just continued the hard sell. “Don't you think whatserface will be impressed if you take her out for a fancy lobster dinner on your first date?”

“How do you know it's our first date?”

“Is it?”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.”

She huffed again. I was really enjoying this.

“C'mon,” she said, “are you going to turn down a free meal at one of Brooklyn's most expensive restaurants?”

“Ooh! Manipulating me with money,” I teased. “You're sounding more and more like your grandfather every day.”

“Oh, shut up!”

“Admit it—you're curious to know what kind of girl would kiss me in a school hallway.”

At last she caved. “Well, do you blame me? And besides, I really want you to meet Raoul. It's important to me.”

“Why? It's not like you need my approval to be dating him.”

“Well,” she said after a moment's thought, “I'll give you mine, if you give me yours.”

 
 
Lexie was right about me not being able to turn down the invitation. She had pushed my buttons, and we both knew it. It wasn't the money thing—it was the fact that I desperately wanted to impress Kjersten.

I arrived at school in full grapple with the concept of going on a date with an ex-girlfriend, a prospective girlfriend, and a guy who clicks. I was so distracted, I had to go back to my locker twice for things I forgot, making me late for my first period. Even before I sat in my seat, the teacher handed me a yellow slip summoning me to the principal's office for crimes unknown. People saw the yellow slip and reflexively leaned away.

This was my first experience in a high school principal's office. I don't know what I was expecting that would be different from middle school. Fancier chairs? A minibar? I wasn't scared, like I used to be when I was younger—I was more annoyed by the inconvenience of whatever punishment was forthcoming.

Our principal, Mr. Sinclair, tried to be an intimidating administrator, but he just couldn't sell it. It was his hair that undermined him every step of the way. Everyone called it “The Magic Comb-over.” Because if you were looking at him straight-on—the way he might see himself in a mirror—he actually appeared to have hair. But when viewed from any other angle, it became clear that he had only twelve extremely long strands woven strategically back and forth over a scalp that had suffered its own human dust bowl.

It was even harder to take him seriously today, because as I stepped into his office I could see his tie was flipped over his shoulder. There's only one reason a guy has his tie flipped over his shoulder. If you haven't figured it out, you don't deserve to be told.

So I'm sitting there, trying to decide which is worse: pointing out that his tie is over his shoulder and embarrassing him, or not saying anything, which would make it even more embarrassing once he realized it for himself. Either way he'd take it out on me, so this was a lose-lose situation. What made it worse is that I couldn't stop smirking about it.

He poured himself a glass of sparkling water, offering me some, but I just shook my head.

“Mr. Bonano,” he said in his serious administrative voice, “do you know why I've called you in?”

I couldn't take my eyes off his tie. I snickered and tried to disguise it as a cough. I sensed myself about to launch into a full-on giggle fit, and I prayed for a light fixture to fall from the ceiling and knock me unconscious before I could—because then I'd become sympathetic.

“I said, do you know why I called you in?”

I nodded.

“Good. Now let's talk about this situation with Gunnar Ümlaut.”

“Your tie's over your shoulder,” I said.

There was a brief moment where I could tell he was thinking,
Should I just leave it there, and insist it's there for a reason?
But in the end, he sighed, and flipped the tie down . . . right into the glass of sparkling water.

By now, my eyes are tearing from holding back the laughter—and then he says, “I never liked this tie anyway,” so he takes it off, and drops it in the trash.

That's when I lost it. Not a giggle fit. No—this was an all-out raging guffaw fest; the kind that leaves your insides hurting and your limbs quivering when you're done.

“HahahahahahahahaI'msorry,” I squealed. “Hahahahahahaha can'thelpithahahahahaha.”

“I'll wait,” said the man who had the power to expel me.

I tried to stop by tensing all my muscles, but that didn't work. Finally I made myself imagine the look on my mother's face when she found out I was expelled from the New York City Public School System for laughing at my principal, and that image drowned my laughter just as effectively as the sparkling water had drowned his tie.

“Are you done?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, I think so.”

He waited until the last of my convulsions faded, pouring the glass of sparkling water into a bonsai at the edge of his desk. “What's life if we can't laugh at ourselves?” he said. Oddly, I found myself respecting him all of a sudden, for the way he kept his cool.

“How many hours?” I asked, not wanting to draw this out any longer than necessary.

“I'm not sure I understand the question?”

“I got detention, right? Because of the stuff with Gunnar. I just want to know how many hours? Does it include Saturday school? Do my parents have to know, or can we keep this between you and me?”

“I don't think you understand, Anthony.” And then he smiled. It's not a good thing when principals smile.

“So . . . I'm suspended? C'mon, it's not like I hurt anybody—it's only pieces of paper—I was trying to make the guy feel better about dying and all. How many days?”

“You're not in trouble,” said Principal Sinclair. “I called you in because I wanted to donate a month of my own.”

I just stared at him. Now it was his turn to laugh at me, but he didn't bust up laughing like I did, he just chuckled. “Actually,” he said, “I'm impressed by what you've started. It shows a level of compassion I rarely see around here.”

“So . . . you want me to write you up a contract?”

“For me, and for the secretaries in the front office—and for Mr. Bale.”

“The security guard wants to give a month, too?”

“You've started a schoolwide phenomenon, Anthony. That poor boy is lucky to have a friend like you.”

He gave me a list of names to write contracts up for, and I was a little too shell-shocked to say much more. Then, just before I left, I looked into the trash can. “Keep that tie,” I told him. “Throw away the yellow paisley one.
That's
the one everyone makes fun of.”

He looked at me like I had just given him an early Christmas gift. “Thank you, Anthony! Thank you for letting me know.”

I left with a list of five names, and the strange, unearthly feeling that comes from knowing your principal doesn't hate your guts.

 
 
Following up on his schoolwide-phenomenon speech to me, Principal Sinclair insisted that I go on Morning Announcements, to make the whole donated-month thing legitimate school business.

Morning Announcements are kind of a joke at our school. I mean, we got all this video equipment, right, but no one knows how to use it. There's an anchor girl who reads cue cards like she's still stuck in the second level of Hooked on Phonics. And let's not forget the kid who has the nervous habit of adjusting himself on-air whenever he's nervous—which is whenever he's on-air. Occasionally Ira would submit a funny video, but lately there hasn't been much worth watching.

“Just read your lines off the cue cards,” the video techie told me, but like I said, public speaking ranks right up there with being eaten alive by ants on my list of unpleasant activities.

After doing my own morning announcement, I now know firsthand why those other kids look like idiots on TV, and I have new respect for Crotch Boy and Phonics Girl.

 
 
Crotch Boy, Phonics Girl, and now the Blithering Wonder.

 
 
It began even before I went to my next class. I was grabbed in the hallway by people who didn't seem to care how moronic I looked on TV. They all wanted to make time donations. Everyone had their own reason for it. One guy did it to impress his girlfriend. One girl hoped it would get her into the popular crowd. Although I didn't want to spend all my free time at my computer printing out time contracts, I couldn't just walk away from what I had started, could I? Besides—there was a kind of power to being the go-to guy. The Master of Time. I even felt like I should start dressing for the part, you know? Like wearing a shirt and tie, the way the basketball team does on the day of a big game. So I found this tie covered with weird melting clocks designed by some dead artist named Dolly. Okay, I admit it, this was really starting to go to my head—like when Wendell Tiggor said he wanted to donate some time.

“You can't,” I told him, “on account of Gunnar needs
life,
not wastes-of-life.”

The thing is, Tiggor's famous for having really lame comeback lines, like, “Oh yeah? If I'm a waste of life, then you're a stupid stupidhead.” (Sometimes the person he was insulting would have to feed him a decent comeback line out of pity.)

This time, however, Tiggor didn't even try. He just pouted and slumped away. Why? Because the Master of Time had spoken, and he was deemed unworthy.

What happened next, well, I guess I could blame it on Skaterdud, but it's not his fault—not really. I blame it on Restless Recipe syndrome. That's something my father once taught me.

It was a month or so before the restaurant first opened, and he was trying to figure out what the official menu would be. It was the first time in his life he'd been forced to write down recipes he had always just kept in his head.

He and Mom were in the kitchen together, cooking one meal after another, which we were giving away to neighbors, because not even Frankie could eat an entire menu. Mom had taken courses in French cooking last year, after finally admitting that Dad was the better Italian chef. It was her way of staking out new taste-bud territory. They had created these fusion FrenchItalian dishes, but that particular night as they cooked, Dad kept having to stop Mom from adding new ingredients.

“You know what your mother's problem is?” he said to me as they cooked. He knew better than to ever criticize Mom directly. It always had to be bounced off a third person, the way live TV from China has to bounce off a satellite. “She suffers from ‘Restless Recipe syndrome.'”

Mom's response was to throw me a sarcastic “Oh, please” gaze, that I would theoretically relay back to my father at our stove somewhere in Beijing.

“It's true! No matter what recipe she's cooking, she can't leave it alone—she has to change it.”

“Listen to him! As if he doesn't do the exact same thing!”

“Yes—but at a certain point I stop. I let the recipe be. But your mother will get a recipe absolutely perfect—and then the next time she cooks it, she's gotta add something new. Like the time she put whiskey in the marinara sauce.”

It made me laugh when he mentioned it. Mom had added so much whiskey, we all got drunk. It's a cherished family memory that I'll one day share with my children, and/or therapist.

Finally she turned to talk to him directly. “So—I didn't cook out the alcohol enough—big deal. I'll have you know I saw that on the Food Channel.”

“So go marry the Food Channel.”

“Maybe I will.”

They looked at each other, pretending to be annoyed, then Dad reached around and squeezed her left butt cheek, she grinned and grabbed his, then the whole thing became so full of inappropriate parental affection, I had to leave the room.

I'm like my father in lots of ways, I guess, but in this respect I'm like my mother. Even when the recipe's working perfectly, I can never leave well enough alone.

 
 
With about a dozen time contracts to fill out—each one a little bit different—I tried to hurry home from school that day, hoping to avoid anyone else who wanted to shave some time off their miserable existence. That's when I ran into Skaterdud. At first he rolled past me on his board like it was just coincidence, but a second later he looped back around. He flustered me with his eight-part handshake before he started talking.

“Cultural Geography, man,” he said, shaking his head—it was a class we were both in together. “I just don't get it. I mean—is it culture? Is it geography? You know where I'm going, right?”