How to Win at High School (2 page)

Steph's watching the boys too.

One of those boys is Rob Thigpen. He's surfer-preppy cool, shaggy blond hair and a pastel polo shirt. He pauses the football game to watch Steph cross the lawn.

Adam's too busy taking in the girls to notice. But the girls aren't returning the favor.

Adam's small. He's unremarkable. His clothes are
off-brand, Walmart.

Girls can smell “loser” a mile away.

Adam's a loser.

He's also a virgin.

Neither is likely to change anytime soon, not here at Nixon.

The second thing you need to know is: Adam Higgs has a history.

This is his first day at Nixon. Freshman year, sophomore year, he went to Riverside, across town. Kind of an average school. Bricks and mortar. Not so many iPhones.
No
BMWs.

He was a loser at Riverside, too—nearly flunked out.

(Not so much because he's stupid. It's more, you know, who
cares
?)

Adam's dad is a decent guy. He worked at the Chrysler plant until the Chrysler plant shut down. Now he sits at home and cashes his measly settlement checks. He has a bad back anyway. Most days, he doesn't get off the couch.

Some days, he doesn't bother with pants.

Adam's mom is an administrative assistant. She works three times harder than her boss and makes about 10 percent of his pay. She doesn't complain. Adam's dad does. Adam's dad has time to complain. It's his luxury. Adam's mom needs the job, though. It's not like her husband's settlement is paying the rent.

Third thing: Adam has an older brother too.

Adam's brother's name is Sam. Sam Higgs. He's twenty-two years old and he works at the Tim Hortons doughnut shop across from city hall. He lives in an apartment a few blocks from the doughnut shop. Somebody from the hospital got Sam his job.

(Sam's obsessed with being independent.)

Fourth: Adam's brother is in a wheelchair.

He wasn't always.

Adam's brother was a really good hockey player when he was a teenager, assistant captain of the Riverside school team. Some people thought he could maybe turn pro.

Then this asshole from Nixon hit him into the boards from behind. Sam fell face-first, fucked up his spine.

So much for hockey.

So much for
walking
.

Sam's in a wheelchair now.

Adam goes to visit Sam a couple times a week.

Sometimes they watch movies—
Scarface
is their favorite.

Sometimes, hockey games—

(You would think Sam would kind of have a hate-on for hockey, seeing as it pretty much ruined his life, but not so much. Sam's still the biggest Red Wings fan Adam knows.)

—and sometimes Adam takes Sam down to the river and wheels him along the trail and they look at pretty girls and watch the freighters drift by,

but mostly,

Adam and Sam hang out in Sam's room in Sam's apartment, watching funny videos on YouTube and playing PlayStation, and Adam listens to Sam talk about his glory days in high school.

See, Sam Higgs never had a problem in high school.

(Until the accident.)

He was taller than Adam.

Better-looking.

Athletic.

Sam got his looks from the same lottery-ticket gene pool as Steph, but Adam?

Adam, not so much.

Adam looks a lot like his dad.

And these days, Adam's dad looks a lot like,

well,

a
loser
.

Sam Higgs could have been a god in high school.

He could have been
the man
.

He was well on his way to
owning
Riverside High.

Sam made the hockey team freshman year.

Sam had scouts watching him as a sophomore.

Sam was dating junior cheerleaders. Going to the right parties.

Sam Higgs was groomed for success.

(Until, well, you know.)

The thing is, if everything had gone the way it was supposed to, Adam is sure that not only would
Sam's
life be different—
his
life would be different too, guaranteed. When your older brother's a hockey star, you have it made. You don't even have to try. You're just a god by association.

But Adam's not a god.

Sam was never
the man
.

Nothing turned out the way it was supposed to.

Now Sam lives in a shitty little apartment. He's still good-looking, and he's funny, and he plays wheelchair basketball, but he's not the man anymore. He's just some guy in a wheelchair.

Sam doesn't tell Adam how unhappy he is, how

cheated

robbed

frustrated

he feels. He doesn't tell Adam how sad he gets when he thinks about the accident and everything that came after it, when he thinks about what a waste his life is, but Adam knows.

Adam can see it.

Adam feels pretty fucking sad about it himself.

Anyway, that's the home life. A mom who busts her ass and a dad who kinda sits there. An older brother who can't walk anymore. And Steph.

Steph is pretty. She's fun. She plays volleyball and served on the activities committee at her middle school. Steph has nearly seven hundred Facebook friends.

Adam has one real-life friend.

Not enough to justify a Facebook account.

Adam's one friend is a guy named Brian O'Donnell. He's a chubby stoner back at Riverside and even his friendship status, most days, is uncertain.

Mostly, Brian's just a dude. He shares his joints with Adam when they cut class. Sometimes they shoot hoops after school. Maybe they eat lunch together. It's not like they're hanging out on weekends, though. No slumber parties. No Xbox. No chasing girls.

They're not BFFs.

Anyway, Brian goes to Riverside, halfway across town. And Adam, by virtue of strange and unhappy circumstance, finds himself at Nixon.

Brian's not around.

Adam's alone.

Nobody at Nixon even knows who he is.

Nixon is weird. Adam figures this out within a couple of days.

Mostly, it's rich kids.

There's Rob Thigpen and his daddy's BMW. There's Paul Nolan, whose parents are doctors. He anchors the swim team.

(Nixon Swim: pride of the school. Undefeated at Regionals the past twenty years. Paul Nolan: Nixon swim god.)

There's Alton Di Sousa, starting point guard on the basketball team. Still a junior, but already seeing offers from Division One schools.

There's Jessie McGill. She's dating Paul Nolan. Tall, gorgeous brunette. She looks like that movie star, you know the one. The one who looks like the pop singer.

There's Leanne Grayson and Janie Ng. The original BFFs. Their dads work together, some biotech firm. They vacation together in Maui.

And then there's Sara Bryant. Sara Bryant rolls into school every day in a cherry-red Porsche convertible. Her dad's the personal-injury lawyer you see on all the billboards. Big, cheesy smile. Thousand-dollar suit. A full office of rich mahogany and leather-bound books in the background.

(“Sam Bryant: Help me to help you win the settlement you deserve.”)

Sara
freaking
Bryant.

And she's beautiful—your prototypical California blonde,
somehow marooned up here in the Rust Belt. But not for long, though.

She's going to be in movies.

Everyone knows it.

She already has an agent and everything.

Sara
freaking
Bryant, it turns out, is Adam Higgs's lab partner. Physics, second period. This would be good news, except that she sits beside him and texts on her iPhone and files her nails and does everything except talk to Adam Higgs.

She doesn't even know his name.

But Adam knows her name. He knows every popular kid's name. And every day when Sara Bryant breezes into physics and sits down beside him, he watches her and waits. Waits for her to notice him. Waits for a smile. A kind word.

Anything.

He's still waiting.

How Adam Higgs came to be at Nixon Collegiate with all these rich kids:

Easy.

His dad was laid off.

His dad was laid off and his measly settlement checks couldn't cover the mortgage, even with Adam's mom busting her ass.

Adam's parents owned a nice house. East side of town. Three bedrooms upstairs. A finished basement. An aboveground pool and parking for two cars.

Too expensive.

The real estate agent didn't even try to sound hopeful. “Bad timing,” he told Adam's mom. “The plant's closing. Nobody's buying houses right now.”

What are you going to do, though?

They took a bath.

Packed up the nice East End house and migrated westward, to Remington Park. Sounds decent, right?

Wrong.

I mean, it's not dangerous or anything. Just, you know, the houses are small.

Really small.

One-story bungalow thingies with one bathroom and
shitty little kitchens. Peeling linoleum. Paper-thin walls.

Adam can hear his mom and dad arguing—

(About Sam, mostly, because:

                
-
  
Adam's mom doesn't think Sam should live on his own, but:

                
-
  
Adam's dad says there's no room to keep him in the house, and:

                
-
  
anyway it's not like he's
completely
a cripple, and:

                
-
  
this is usually the point where Adam's mom starts to cry.)

He can hear Steph's awful pop music, loud and clear. And she's wearing headphones, two rooms away.

Every morning, there's a line outside the bathroom. The hot water runs out about two showers in. You're third in the shower, you're freezing.

Remington Park.

The new 'hood.

Just so happens, a couple streets in the Park fall into the Nixon school zone.

Just so happens, a few poor kids each year get signed up for Nixon.

Just so happens, Adam Higgs is one of them.

Sam doesn't have much to do but work at the doughnut shop and think about how great his life was back when he could still walk.

He's always talking about how amazing high school used to be. How every year at Riverside just got better.

The parties.

The girls.

The relentless adulation.

“It's unbelievable,” he tells Adam. “Freshman and sophomore years were okay and all, man, but junior year is where it really gets dope. You'll see.”

Adam just laughs. “Yeah, right.”

“I'm so fucking jealous of you,” Sam tells Adam. “I could have been king of that school.”

Adam just laughs.

Sam laughs too. But it's kind of a hollow laugh.

It gets to Adam, you know? It just feels like such a waste.

(After the accident, Sam:

                
-
  
left Riverside

                
-
  
spent months in the hospital

                
-
  
spent
years
in rehab

                
-
  
stopped going to parties

                
-
  
stopped dating pretty girls

                
-
  
stopped
winning
.)

(Hell, even his friends stopped coming around eventually.)

And meanwhile, here's Adam, as able-bodied as can be, a loser. Two years of high school wasted. Another two years left to waste.

Adam looks at Sam and feels like they're supposed to trade places. Like the universe would be a better place if Sam Higgs was a junior at Nixon and Adam was just some mope selling coffee at a drive-thru—

(Cream and sugar?)

And the worst part is, Adam knows Sam feels the same way.

Adam Higgs is sick of being a loser.

That's the last thing you need to know.

So, some kids, they get sick of being a loser, they take things to the extreme. Maybe they bring a gun to school. Or maybe they hurt themselves.

(It's not like Adam has never thought about it.)

Real talk? High school is hard. It's hard for everyone. It's especially hard when you're the kid nobody likes, when you're getting your ass kicked by some Neanderthal every day, when you can't get a date to save your life.

When the only way to make it through the day is to cut out and smoke a jay in peace somewhere, and even then you're watching your ass for the vice principal because he already suspended you once this year and the next time they're talking about kicking you out.

So yeah, Adam's thought about going drastic. Couple problems with that strategy, though:

        
a)
 
He doesn't really want to hurt anyone.

        
b)
 
He doesn't really want to be dead.

That destructive shit, it's the wrong vibe. Not even an option. It's like, you're thirsty, you don't blow up the water fountain. You sure as hell don't slit your wrists.

You're thirsty? You fucking fight your way up to that water fountain and you
drink
, motherfucker. You quench your thirst.

Adam's thirsty.

He's ready to drink.

Maybe you know that movie
Scarface
.

(If not, you have homework tonight.)