Guy Langman, Crime Scene Procrastinator (2 page)

Normally I don’t love extracurricular anythings, and I didn’t really want to join this club. But then Anoop told me that Mr. Z was hosting a weekly club starting after winter break that includes Laura Shaw, Aiden Altieri, Scarlett Reese, and Raquel Flores, and somehow I found myself penciling in my name on the Forensics Squad sign-up sheet. The last lass mentioned, the lovely Raquel, is of particular interest to me …

What can I say about Raquel Flores? Eyes like an angel, heart like an angel, and legs like an angel … Wait, do angels have nice legs? Do angels even
have
legs? I know they have wings, so they probably don’t need legs. Forget it. I don’t think Jews believe in angels, anyway. Just know this: There might be other girls who are a bit more popular, but there are none more beautiful or more mysterious than Raquel Flores. If she’s not the sole reason I’m a member of Forensics Squad, her name on that list is certainly the factor that put me over the top. I’m crushing on her hard. I was interested in the topic, yeah, but still, it takes a lot to get me to sign up for anything. I’m not normally exactly what you’d call a “joiner.”

Mr. Z continues. “It’s just awesome that you are all into forensics. I should warn you, though,” he says. “It’s not at all like you see on TV. It’s actually a lot of hard work, nitty-gritty science. We are going to learn the basics of crime scene investigation through a combination of lecture and lab, ending the semester with a simulated scene in the field. I will plant the evidence. You will solve the crime.”

“Dude,” I whisper to Anoop. “There are
four
ensics? What’s an ensic, anyway? It sounds like something from health class.”

“You’re thinking of ‘cervix,’ ” Anoop says, tapping his temple. “And there is but the glorious one.”

“Your mother has four ensics,” I say.

“Shut up your face about my mother,” he hisses. “Or I’ll kill you.” He says “kill” like “keel” and motions with his finger like he’s slitting a throat.

“And then I can figure out exactly how you did it!” I yell. When I think I’m funny, I have a problem with volume control. I slap the table. “Because I know all four ensics!”

The adorable Raquel Flores turns her head in my direction and narrows her dark eyes into a nasty squint. The look on her face lets me know that she is less amused and more confused. Story of my life. My mind goes to a piece of advice my dad gave me once. “Go where the pretty is,” he always said. Worked for him. I’ve seen the pictures. He had some amazingly hot girlfriends before Mom. I cherish all of his advice. Live my life by it.

“What’s all the commotion back there, Guy?” Mr. Zant says. Huh. I haven’t been in any of his classes. We didn’t take roll or anything. How does he know my name?

I wrinkle up my eyebrows and turn my head at a highly confused angle.

“What?” I say. “You must be some sort of genius detective.” Smooth.

“Tell me your name, Guy,” he repeats. Mr. Zant is one of those teachers who always try to be cool and hip and think of themselves as more of a friend than an enforcer, but I can tell he’s getting sort of pissed at me.

“But you already know,” I say.

“Dude,” Anoop says to me in a low voice. “I don’t think he really guessed your name.” Anoop is good at figuring out social
situations, unlike me. “Zant is probably one of those dudes who just call everybody ‘guy.’ He doesn’t realize that your name is actually ‘Guy.’ ”

“What are you whispering about, you guys?” Mr. Zant says, this time to Anoop.

“No,” Anoop says, pointing both thumbs at himself. “Just one Guy. I’m Anoop Chattopadhyay. But you can call me the Bengal Tiger. Everybody does.” Then he points to me with a double handgun gesture. “This goofy-looking Jew is Guy Langman.”

Thanks, Anoop. He could have described me a million different ways. Noted my lovely curls, my naturally svelte build, my nose-of-much-character, my glowing smile. But no: it’s “goofy-looking Jew.” Could be worse, I guess. I smile weakly at Raquel.

Mr. Zant scratches his goatee and cocks his head.

I’ve never heard anyone, including Anoop, refer to him as “the Bengal Tiger.” He’s an Indian guy with hipster glasses and a valiantly-trying-to-be-a-mustache mustache. He dresses like a living Lands’ End catalog. The Bengal Tiger? The whole room has turned tense, silent, and, if I’m not mistaken, a little angry. I stare everyone down and drum a quick rhythm on the table with my fingers.

“Don’t get your ensics in a bunch,” I say. “I’m here all week.”

So, Forensics Squad. Do I go back? First meeting was hardly a success. I should turn and flee, really. My Flores chances, slim as they were, most likely were dashed by that outburst. I try to put it out of my mind. I coast through the week. Math, English, the click of the clock, the hum of school days. One Social Studies class
is
sort of interesting …

We are watching an “educational documentary” about a primitive tribe from an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. But no, that’s not what is interesting. No one is learning anything here. Almost all the boys in class are just obsessed with snickering over the fact that in the movie, the topless tribeswomen’s boobs are flopping around like pizza dough. The girls in class are all laughing about the strange dong bracelets that the men wear. Everyone laughs together when a shaman comes in to chase away evil spirits by biting everyone on the ass. He literally puts their cheek meat between his incisors and chomps down. Okay, this is interesting. Mostly just shocking. How did Mrs. Lewis
think
we were going to react? Did she fail to pre-screen this cultural epic? This is more uproarious than the time Mr. Brock kept talking about Honoré de Balzac in Lit class. (We all
swore
he was saying “ornery ball sack,” and commenced laughing our asses off.)

But here’s the thing: during the film, I find myself having deep thoughts about Dad. I find myself feeling profoundly jealous
of the kids in the movie. The tribe’s leader takes the boys—who are like twelve—and tells them
exactly
how to “turn into men.” It is just so awesome. This leader, an extra tall, extra skinny wild man with eyes that move independently of one another, just sits these kids down, lights a pipe, and lays out the facts about what it means to be a man.

Some of it is fairly dubious stuff about how the world was created by a dragon who pooped fire or something, but most of it is a clear set of “rules for living.” Stuff like how to shoot a pig with a bow and arrow, how to talk to women, how to be a husband, how to deal with disagreements with other men in the tribe. Although shooting a pig with a bow and arrow doesn’t help that much in contemporary New Jersey. You see my point …

Anyway, I think: Why don’t we have anything like this? Why don’t we have a time when we sit down and learn the (narrator’s voice) “rules for living”? We have bar mitzvahs, but all we learn there is how to sneak booze from an open bar. That may be
some
of the wisdom needed to be a man, now that I think of it, but still, I want a lot more. My rabbi isn’t going to show us how to gut a pig (
treyf
), but the Torah portion I read at my bar mitzvah was literally about cattle disease. No doubt this was useful back when the Torah was written, whenever
that
was, but it doesn’t help me that much today. We need new rules, new traditions, new procedure manuals for life.

This is what I am thinking, scribbling in my notebook, sitting there in Social Studies, lost amid the thoughts of Dad, dong bracelets, pizza-dough boobs, and Raquel Flores’s short skirt.

“You look like you’re trying to solve the mysteries of life,” Anoop whispers, in reference to the serious look I must have
adopted while deep in thought. “Or maybe holding back a dump. Either way, let me know how it comes out.”

I chuckle. And then I realize: My own dad, through all his little comments, all his quips, all his asides,
had
left me a kind of procedures manual. He had an amazing life—he was an inventor, a world traveler, a scuba diver who literally discovered sunken treasure. A mensch. He was always spouting gems. Pieced together in the right way, these gems might provide a road map through life’s confusing wilderness. Now that he’s dead, I can’t get anything new from him, but maybe I can still get something … crucial. This thought hits me like a life preserver thrown to a drowning man, a floating inner tube in the raging sea that is my life. I know what I’m going to do: I’m going to write a book about my dead father.
Rules for Living
by Francis Langman, deceased. Maybe no one else in the world will ever read it, but maybe it will be just the thing I need to figure out how to live.

Then I join in laughing about the pizza-dough boobs and dong bracelets. They are pretty awesome. Can I say “dong bracelets” one more time?

Dong bracelets.

After Social Studies, Anoop and I go to lunch. School lunch sucks. Ever since the “healthy lunch” program began last year, there’s no more pizza, burritos, barf-a-roni, tots o’ tater, or even those awesomely gooey chocolate chip cookies. We can’t even have peanut butter anymore, because one kid is allergic to peanuts and apparently can’t be in the same room with even a dab of PB&J without having his face explode or something. That one kid happens to be the super-wealthy Hairston Danforth III. The Danforths donated a million dollars for the healthy lunch
program, with the strings attached that it be peanut-free. There’s no such thing as a free healthy lunch initiative.

Of course, various ingenious methods have been devised to sneak peanut butter into school, resulting in a whole thriving black market, much like the trade in stolen cell phones and prescription pills. And also, of course, now everyone calls Hairston “Peanut-Head.” And, yes, they say it with a lisp on the “t” in “peanut” so it sounds like “Penis-Head.” Mean, yes, but is that really so much worse than the name his parents gave him? Hairston? The only name worse than Guy at the whole school.

I am eating hempseed butter, which, no, doesn’t get you high, and, yes, is disgusting.

“That looks like something that came out of my nose,” Anoop says.

“Thanks,” I say. It really is green and booger-ish.

“So, you staying after for Forensics today?” Anoop asks, chewing on some curried something he brought from home. He always packs. I tried packing my own lunch once, but found it too taxing. All that opening and unopening of jars, spreading things on things. My mom’s not the “make your lunch” kind of mom. She’s the “make it your darn self or take a five from my purse” type.

“I’m not so sure I’m going back,” I say.

“Yesterday
was
humiliating,” Anoop says. “But it really will look good on your college applications. And the ladies are still probably going to be in attendance.”

“I’m beginning to think that chasing girls might be too much work,” I say.

“Now, I know that you are a lazy bastard, Guy, but no one is too tired for girls.”

“Meh,” I say.

He throws down his fork. It’s a plastic fork, which doesn’t really make a satisfying clatter. Anoop doesn’t let the soft plastic clatter slow him down, though. He’s rolling. “That’s what it’s going to say on your tombstone,” he yells. “Here lies Guy Langman. Meh.”

“Well, yours is going to say ‘Here lies Anoop Chattopadhyay: An Indian guy who became a doctor. Real goddamn original! ! ! ! ! ! !’ Man, I feel bad for whoever has to carve that stone. ‘Chattopadhyay’ has a lot of letters. That would take ’em all day. Plus, I don’t know if you could tell, but I said that with a lot of exclamation points at the end.”

“I’m pretty sure they have machines to do that now.”

“We can’t even hand-carve tombstones for the dead anymore? What has happened to us as people?” I ask.

“
Some
of us are incredibly lazy bastards. But you really should come back to Forensics. You need something on your applications under ‘Extracurriculars’ besides video games, cartoons, and bubble baths.”

“I’m learning useful skills playing video games,” I say. It’s not true. I spend most of my time playing an ancient Atari 2600 I bought on a whim. It came with, like, ten games for two dollars total, plus shipping. Obviously, a thirty-year-old video game system isn’t for everyone, but it is pleasingly simple to me. The new video games are a workout. My favorite Atari game is Yars’ Revenge. You get to be a bug or something, and it’s pointless and thus perfect. A minimalist movement among video game players is going to come back. You mark my words.

“I’m working on a new project,” I say, trying to derail Anoop. The book about my dad.

“That’s cool and all, but …,” he says. He clearly doesn’t
believe me, even though it’s actually true. “I can’t believe you’re not even
thinking
about college. You’re smarter than ninety percent of these fancy-pantses who are applying to Ivy League schools.”

“Fancy-pantses?” I say.

“Isn’t that the plural of ‘fancy-pants’?” Anoop says. “We brown people don’t talk English no good.”

Basically, every one of my classmates is certainly rich, and many of them are indeed headed for the fanciest-pantsyest colleges. But they are still putzes.

“What do you mean,
ninety
percent?” I say.

“Present company excluded,” Anoop says.

“You ain’t ten percent,” I say. “Who else is supposedly smarter than me?”

Anoop starts counting on his long fingers. “Maureen Fields, TK, Hairston Danforth the Third.”

This last addition to the list is a joke. Hairston is not at all stupid and is brilliant with computers, but he’s hardly in the academic elite. More to the point, he’s just … weird. “Poor, poor Penis-Head,” I say, mainly just to change the subject.

“So, are you going back to Forensics or not?” Anoop asks. Changing the subject with him is like asking a bulldog to give up his bone.

“Anoop, I don’t care about my college application, I don’t really like science, and Mr. Zant’s annoying,” I say. All good reasons.

“Is there nothing that could change your mind?” Anoop says.

“Shut up,” I say. “What are you so smug about?” He really
does
look smug. He’s doing that thing with his chin that I call “the smug chin.”