Learning to Swear in America (15 page)

The band teacher stepped onto a wooden box, raised a thin baton, and gave the down stroke. The brass started; then the clarinets came in and Yuri watched Dovie. One drummer beat the bass drum with a muffled mallet, while the guy beside him hit a wood block. A minute into the piece the guy stuck an index finger onto the score and moved it right, one, two, three. He nodded to Yuri. Yuri hit the triangle and Mr. Shekla beamed at him.

Score. He’d conquered music, too.

When the wood block player turned the page, there were little
X
s all over the place, but Yuri had the hang of it now. He counted to four for each measure and struck the little silver triangle whenever he saw an
X
. There was only one more page to turn in the music when the bass drummer nudged the guy next to Yuri and jerked his head toward the cymbals on their stand. The near guy hesitated, then leaned in to Yuri and whispered, “Crap. We forgot to get you the cymbals.”

“I’m playing triangle,” Yuri said.

“You’re supposed to switch to cymbals at the end,” the wood
block player said. “You don’t play anymore until the last measure, but then you’re supposed to be on cymbals.”

Mr. Shekla gave them a sharp look. Yuri wasn’t sure if it was because of the whispering or because he hadn’t switched instruments yet. He didn’t want to embarrass Dovie, or himself, so he laid the triangle down, keeping a finger on it to prevent reverberations, and carefully lifted the cymbals from their stand. He’d seen them played at the symphony—a big crash at the end, each piece held outward to maximize the sound waves. He held them at his thighs, squeezing the handles, waiting.

The piece softened as the brass and percussion dropped out, then the clarinets and bassoon fell quiet. The music sounded like raindrops, slow and soft. Yuri wondered why the composer had chosen to put a crash at the end of the piece. Maybe it was supposed to be a renewal of the storm, or a crack of thunder. Who knew what some crazy musician was thinking?

The drummer turned the last page and only the flutes played, whispering, then faint. The drummer stuck his finger on the last measure and Yuri counted in his head, one, two. He brought the cymbals up. Three. And he smashed them together for all he was worth, moving them outward to let the vibrations bounce off the walls.

The whole row of trombonists in front of him lurched, smacking each other with their slides and knocking over a music stand. One of them yelled, “Jesus H. Christ!” The entire band turned to stare at him, and Mr. Shekla stood with his baton pointing directly at Yuri, a startled expression on his face. The
room quieted, magnifying the last echoes of the cymbals and the clatter as a second teetering music stand fell over. Then everyone began to laugh.

“You see how difficult composition is?” Mr. Shekla said. “You change one note, and it gives the piece a rather different feel. I think we’ll stop there.”

Yuri turned to the drummers. “You tricked me.”

They snorted and draped their arms over each other. “You should see your face, dude,” the bass drummer said. “You’re bright red.” He slapped his friend’s back.

“Come on,” Dovie said, taking his arm. “Let’s get going.”

“I don’t think I conquered music,” Yuri said, waiting while she stowed her clarinet, then walking with her out of the band room.

“Depends on whether volume counts,” she said. “Oh, don’t give me that look. You have to admit it was kind of funny.”

He exhaled in disgust. “High school is boredom punctuated by humiliation.”

“You got that right, Science Boy.”

He followed her down the hall to a set of wide double doors.

“Next class can’t be as embarrassing as that,” he said. “What is next anyway?”

Dovie pushed the doors open. “Gym.”

The gym had thin wooden floorboards lacquered gold, with basketball hoops at each end and a trapezoidal scoreboard looming over the middle of the court. There was a raised stage at the far end of the floor.

“You’ll need to tell Mr. Pisotto you’re here,” Dovie said. “Don’t piss him off. He broke a clipboard over a kid’s head last year.”

“No. Really?”

She nodded.

“He wasn’t terminated?”

“The school board suspended him for a week—with pay.”

“That’s called vacation.”

Dovie tapped her forehead. “Boys’ locker room is in there.”

She walked to the girls’ locker room and left him standing alone in the gym. Yuri fought the urge to follow her. Why did he feel more out of place here, with people his own age, than at
NASA? He pulled out his cell phone and found a text from Fletcher.

It had come in ten minutes before.

He pressed “send” and walked through the swinging door to the boys’ locker room.

He could hear it, and smell it, before he went through the door, and it was an entirely foreign place, like the ocean floor. Guys were changing into gym shorts between stands of lockers. The teacher was leaning against a wall. He was holding a clipboard. Yuri walked up to him.

“Um, I’m visiting school today. I’ll just go sit outside and watch.”

“You have a pass to get you out of gym?”

“A pass?” Yuri thought for a moment about asking Karl Fletcher for a note to get out of gym class. “No, I don’t.” He brightened. “I also don’t have exercise clothing. Maybe tomorrow.” Tomorrow he would be back at JPL. In fact, he really should go in soon. He’d gotten a lot done the previous day and could afford to take a few hours off, but it would still be acutely embarrassing if anyone at JPL discovered what he’d done. Where he’d gone. If
algebra wasn’t the next class, he would have to save those hamsters some other way.

“You can wear what you have on for today. You got gym shoes?”

“No.”

“Then just wear your socks.”

Yuri hesitated. Mr. Pisotto crossed his arms. He was wearing sweatpants and a polo shirt that stretched tight across his chest, making sure everyone saw that he had muscles. The clipboard protruded from his armpit. Yuri sat on the nearest bench, untied the strings of his dress shoes, and placed them under the bench. He spent a lot of time lining up the toes.

“All right, ladies, get on out there,” Mr. Pisotto shouted, leading the way into the gym.

By the time Yuri padded out in his black dress socks, Mr. Pisotto had sent dozens of low, wheeled platforms careening across the gold floor.

“Everybody grab a scooter!” he bellowed, then blew the whistle around his neck for emphasis. Yuri looked for Dovie and found her standing across the gym with the girls. She gave a finger wave beside her thigh.

Mr. Pisotto began a circuit of the floor, dropping orange traffic cones in an oval. “You know how to do this,” he shouted. “Lay on your back, hands up, use your feet only. Ready?”

Yuri hastily sat on the edge of a scooter and looked over at Dovie. She was tying up the long hair of the girl beside her with some kind of hair elastic. He was on his own. Mr. Pisotto blew the
whistle and Yuri was suddenly the only stationary object in an asteroid belt. He lay on his back, crossed his arms over his chest, and pushed off.

He might be able to catch up with Dovie and they could chat while they crabbed around on the ridiculous little platforms. It was undignified, but it was also a little bit … fun. He continued to think that until the girls shot past him. He pushed off on his heels, trying to increase thrust with his thighs, but his dress socks couldn’t gain traction on the lacquer-slick floor.

And then Mr. Pisotto was standing over him, holding a rubber ball the color and size of Jupiter’s red spot. “Keep it in the air,” he bellowed, and dropped it over Yuri’s face. Yuri threw his arms up reflexively, causing the ball to fly into the floor and bounce away. “Good job, cupcake,” Mr. Pisotto said. Laughter rose over the whirring of wheels rolling across the gym floor. Yuri flushed.

It occurred to him that he was better at calculating bodies in motion than being one. He concentrated on speed and avoiding the ball as it arced overhead, batted deftly by some kids, and desperately by others. Nobody else drove it into the floor. He swerved once to avoid the ball and bumped elbows with a guy who glared at him and muttered, “Watch it, prick.”

On the next lap, the guy thumped a wheel over Yuri’s foot. Yuri peeled off his sock, running a finger along the red mark the wheel had left.

James, the guy who’d sung in the hallway, berthed his scooter alongside Yuri. “You okay?”

“That—jerk—ran over me. Intentionally.”

“Yeah,” James said in a low voice. “Watch out for that guy.”

Mr. Pisotto walked over. “Any reason you’re sitting there on your ass?”

“He ran me over!”

“If you moved a little faster, you might stay out of everybody’s way.” Mr. Pisotto started to stalk away, then turned. “Your last school must have had a crappy gym program.”

Yuri paused for a moment. “Yes, it did.”

He put his sock back on and lay down, pushing off as hard as he could. He was almost around another lap when the jerk caught up with him and hooked a foot behind Yuri’s knees, dragging him off his scooter. His head did a double bounce, first on the platform as his butt hit the gym floor, and then on the boards as the scooter flew away from him.

“Oops,” the jerk said as he sailed by.

Yuri crawled back on his scooter and stared at the ceiling. He could just leave. But he imagined Dovie cradling a dwarf hamster in her hand, carrying it to the snake. He had to save the hamsters to save Dovie. He also needed to get back to JPL, but first he had to deal with this guy. Yuri might not have been an especially good athlete, but he did have a fine grasp of momentum and torque and velocity.

Total net force is mass times acceleration. His mass was up by bacon and a short stack from the restaurant by the hotel. They didn’t have kasha. But the acceleration. He exhaled in frustration, stripped his socks off on the fly, and dropped back until his prey was on the opposite side of the oval. He built his speed and then
pivoted and shot across the center of the gym, between the orange cones, driving his heels down together, his thighs bunching. He kept his head tilted back so he could see the jerk, made a slight adjustment to his speed, and saw the guy’s eyes widen right before Yuri T-boned him and drove him through the swinging door of the girls’ locker room.

Yuri’s scooter skidded and slammed the wall just past the door, but the collision had transferred most of his momentum. He jumped up and darted into the boys’ locker room. Behind him the gym erupted in howls and applause. He slipped on his shoes and looked for a second exit—the fire code would require one. He found the door and beyond it, an empty hallway. Yuri grinned and skulked down the corridor, more pleased with himself than was reasonable.

Dovie found him at her locker after gym. Her eyes widened, the movement sending light sparking off her glitter eye shadow.

“Yuri, you are in so much trouble. Also, you’re a folk hero. Nobody knows who you are or where you came from.” She retrieved a book and her pencil pouch from her locker and swung the door shut. “You rode into town, slammed Jake Bortell into the girls’ locker room, and rode off into the sunset.”

“I’m cowboy,” he said. “But my horse is stupid scooter.”

“Wherever the sagebrush tumbles, your story will be told. Also, you should avoid Mr. Pisotto for the rest of the day.”

She led him up a floor. “You think you can stay out of trouble?”

“Is it art? I’ll just sit quietly and observe,” he said.

She shot him a suspicious look.

“No. Now we have algebra.”

Yuri grinned. “Which way?”

“We wait for my friends. None of us walk in alone.”

He checked his phone. He had a text from Fletcher.

It had come in fifteen minutes before—while he was making laps on a scooter.
Mat’ tvoyu.
He showed Dovie his phone screen.

“Oh, no,” she said. “The car will be there by now.” He nodded.

James came up, and the girl with long hair from gym class—Mary, whose photo he’d seen on Dovie’s phone when she left it at JPL. Dovie introduced them. “Yuri’s got a problem,” she said. “He has to get back to work.” She swallowed. “I’ll skip class and give you a ride.”

“You can’t give him a ride someplace now,” Mary said, her eyes widening. “It’ll be unexcused, and you’ll have to see Mrs. Cronick.”

“The principal,” James explained. “Ruiner of futures. Destroyer of civilizations. Where she has passed, you find only flooded fields, burning shacks, and lone dogs howling in terror.”

“I’ll call taxi,” Yuri said. He texted Fletcher:

He hit “send” and wondered how good NASA’s bullshit detector was. Their other detectors were pretty good.

I’ll go to math and leave when taxi gets here.

James called the taxi for him because Yuri hadn’t changed his data plan before he left Moscow.

Yuri, Dovie, James, and Mary walked down the hall to algebra. Time to save some hamsters.