The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin (2 page)

I decide to amuse myself by stealing a glance at the seating chart so I can learn some more of my classmates’ names—-just the sort of sneaky deaf detection I’m aces at. My desk is close enough to the teacher’s that I can see part of it. A few things become clear regarding my classmates, and I make copious notes.

The beautiful girl from history is Leigha Pennington, an
appropriately lovely name. The scary guy who loves his fingers is Chuck Escapone. Dwight Carlson is a sort of clueless-looking nerd. One of the large football guys is named Travis Bickerstokes. A name that belongs to an empty seat reads “Pat Chambers.” Where have I heard of him? And then I spot a name that has to be a typo: Purple Phimmul.

Can a person’s name really be Purple? I look up. The person, a girl, who presumably really is named for a crayon, sits right next to Leigha. The two seem to be friends, even though Purple is hardly one of the pretty girls. She does seem rich, though, with what look like pricey clothes and pricier jewelry. Purple is round, and her lump of a head is framed by hair that has the frizzy and stringy appearance of a scarecrow caught in a windstorm. She, in fact, sort of looks like a female me.

The math teacher, who has just written her name on the board and dotted the
i
with a heart, is named Miss Prefontaine. Prefontaine eventually stops the book tossers, and when class begins, I am happy to see that she is very good at speaking clearly; I can see her lips and read every word. However, I feel like I should get my eyes checked when the
content
of her words registers. She is blatantly flirting with some of the football player guys in the back of the class. Like,
really
blatantly.

“Now, boys,” Miss Prefontaine says, taking the pen she had been sucking on out of her pinkly lipsticked mouth, “settle yourselves down.”

“Why don’t you come over here and help settle me?” says a football guy, walking in late. It’s Pat Chambers, the quarterback.
Of course
. That’s where I know that name. Football is huge around here, and his exploits throwing a ball make the news all over Pennsylvania.

Pat tosses wink after wink at Miss Prefontaine like she’s his personal wide receiver. Leigha Pennington looks like she’s going to gag. This makes me strangely happy.

Miss Prefontaine is young for a teacher but definitely much older than the high school student she apparently wishes she still was. She wears questionable makeup and way too much perfume. I have a good sense of smell and am sure that Prefontaine wears the exact same perfume as Leigha—a burnt roses scent. (What? So I happened to sniff Leigha’s hair in the hallway.)

I get the distinct feeling that Prefontaine used to be ugly and went on one of those TV makeover shows or got a face transplant or something. She seems to be trying to use her newly minted hotness to live a better version of her passed youth. I mean, she couldn’t have been cool in high school if she loved math, right? But now she has power. And a huge amount of cleavage. Which might be the same thing. Ah, such luscious power …

I add to my notebook: MISS PRE-FAB-VAIN = FORMER NERD? and MISS PREFONTAINE’S KNOOBS = FORMER A CUPS?

She is wearing a low-cut silky shirt unbuttoned to its plunging depths. When she bends over, I catch a glimpse of her tattoo: a dolphin leaping out from the left cup of her lacy black bra.
Distracting
. I look over at the paper of the guy next to me to try to catch an equation I missed. His whole page is filled with drawings of tiny leaping marine mammals.

“I would come over there and settle you down,” Prefontaine says to Pat, flicking her tongue against her top teeth, “but you’d like that too much.”

The dolphin drawer sees me looking at his paper. He whispers something to me. I point to my ears and make a head-shaking face.

“
Y-O-U M-U-S-T B-E T-H-E N-E-W D-E-A-F K-I-D
,“ he signs. Well, how about that? It isn’t real sign language, just the one-letter-at-a-time version that hearing people (usually girls) learn sometimes. We call it finger spelling. He continues, pointing to himself: “
D-E-V-O-N
.“

I finger-spell back: “
W-I-L-L
.”

We talk back and forth like this for a little while, me giving everybody a chance like good old Mom had suggested. His last name is Smiley, which makes me laugh. Then he asks for and receives my screen name so we can chat online sometime.

“
C-A-N Y-O-U B-E-L-I-E-V-E T-H-E-M
?” he asks me, pointing a thumb toward Pat and Prefontaine. I shake my head.

And then Miss Prefontaine catches Devon and me signing to one another. She says something to the class that I don’t see. Maybe: “Well, well, well, it seems our hefty deaf newcomer and Mr. Smiley are an item.” Hopefully
not
.

Now there’s a disturbing soundless chorus of shaking faces. A girl named Marie is scribbling something down. What is she, a reporter? Is the alleged romance between me and Devon Smiley going to be front-page news in the
Coaler Chronicle?
Beautiful Leigha is laughing. At me. Pat Chambers and his football friends are punching and slapping each other happily.
Pat actually laughs so hard that he literally falls off his chair in his unbridled glee. Damn.

I make another addition to my notebook: STAY AWAY FROM SMILEY GUY. If he is at the bottom of the food chain, so low that even teachers and C-listers rip on him, Devon is someone I can’t
afford
to be seen with. I spend the rest of the class with my head down learning very little math. Finally, the bell rings (sound-impaired discriminators!). Time for lunch.

I sort of want
to skip lunch and find somewhere to be alone and clear my head, but I am freaking hungry. It has been, after all, about two hours since I last ate. And, besides, who among us can pass up the culinary delights offered in a high school cafetorium? This is a strong draw despite the well-documented and universally known social horrors of high school lunch. Who do I sit next to? What if I can’t find a seat? What if I spill Sloppy Joes on my special first-day outfit?

My plan B is to smuggle my food into the bathroom, hole up in a stall, and eat atop the toilet like a smack-shooting junkie. Crap. It seems this will be thwarted by a large, shiny-headed bald man patrolling the perimeter of the cafetorium. Name badge check: Mr. Yankowski, a teacher. Yanky-Wanky seems to take his duty as lunch proctor as a sacred sojourn, prowling around like an attack dog aching to pounce. This
goes in my notebook: YANKOWSKI = YANKY-WANKY = LORD SHINY-HEAD OF THE CAF.

I really feel like I just need a minute to collect myself, but it’s too crowded to hide out solo in a corner. God, where do I go? I know there isn’t going to be a big table filled with cool deaf people to sit with. I’m not that dumb. Or am I? What am I doing here?

I plop down at the edge of a table with a few open seats and look around furtively. Bodies turn from me as if we are oppositely charged magnets. Chairs scoot. Eyes avert. Chatty people are everywhere. It can be really overwhelming for a lip-reader to be in such a hivelike atmosphere. See, I can’t turn off my ability to read lips, so it is like “hearing” a thousand conversations at once. A million voices, snippets, and fragments overlapping—getting lost, then standing out, then getting lost again. Someone says, “Wasn’t that test terrible?” But I can’t see/hear the response of the person she’s talking to, so I read as response the non sequitur from the guy next to her: “Tim’s the balls on drums!”

It’s like watching TV while someone else works the remote. No, better yet: imagine yourself sitting in a room with a hundred TVs turned up loud while you whirl around on a Sit& Spin at a dizzying speed, trying to follow the plot. The only way to not totally lose my head is to intently focus on one person and—here’s the trick—not get caught. Most folks aren’t too keen on having a big deaf fatty eyeballing them. I’d love to be wrong about this, but it is unlikely.

I scan the room for someone interesting. Immediately in
front of me is my classmate from math, Dwight Carlson. It is sort of fun watching him try to figure out how to open the milk carton. Is he really that stymied? Noted: DWIGHT CARLSON = OUTWITTED BY BEVERAGE CONTAINERS. Chuck Escapone is also visible, but do I want to know what that guy has to say? What goes on in that mind? Look around … look around. OK, Purple Phimmul it is. Congratulations, Ms. Rich But Not So Pretty.

My target jams a pair of enormous gold sunglasses onto her face—a dangerous turn of events because now I can’t tell if she sees me staring at her. Still, I press on. I have so many questions. Why is she named Purple? Is there a whole rainbow of Phimmuls at home? Is there an Uncle Aqua? An Aunt Chartreuse?

Purp is talking on her cell, eating candy bars, and ignoring her Fawning Public. FP will have to make do with whatever crumbs of attention she gives them while she gabs with a mysterious stranger on the other line. I suspect it is her father.

“Daddy,” she whines (a telling clue, no?), “my balance is low again.”

Daddy’s response appears to be less than satisfactory.

“But I need a new dress for the party. I need to go shopping!” she yips. “Shopping, dammit!” She is yelling this consumerist battle cry, this war whoop of the mall. “Shopping, dammit! Shopping, dammit! Shopping, dammit!” She then snaps the phone shut like a queen snapping her fingers at a servant.

She glares at one of her minions as if it’s
her
fault the Phimmul account is low. The minion lowers her eyes and scrambles
to appease her. How does Purple do this? How does she get these people wrapped around her pudgy finger? And is the dress possibly for that party the people on the bus were talking about? What
is
this party that has my non-peers so wound up?? For a second I feel one of Purp’s friends staring at me, so I look quickly away.

But, still, I’m thinking: What is your secret, Purple Phimmul? What is your secret?

Gym is bad
for any fat kid just on principle. When I found out that at CHS I would have to swim (and that, no, there really was no way out of it), I considered getting one of those old-timey bathing suits with shoulder straps in order to provide adequate man-boob coverage. Maybe I’d grow a handlebar mustache too and pretend it was part of a 1900s revival look I was going for. But it turns out that they don’t sell 1900s-style bathing suits at Wal-Mart, and I couldn’t get my mom to order me one on eBay. Perhaps, I think, I should go to the other extreme and don a Speedo. Might it be awesome to see my classmates’ expressions as I strut out sporting a banana hammock? But I only have the gut, not the guts. So I just wear a regular pair of green swimming trunks, which offer neither fat concealment nor risk-taking pride. As I emerge from the stall, I notice a few pointings and laughings. One or two guys try to slap
me on the love handles. Being fat might not be that great of a thing to be, but it sure seems to bring joy to certain others. Glad to oblige. Turd bags.

Devon Smiley is skinny but in a droopy sort of way. He seems to have no muscles. Pat and his jock buddies, including a rodent-looking football guy whose jersey identifies him as D. JONKER, apparently find his body hilarious. After I finish accepting my hazing, I slink into the corner, fashion my Phillies beach towel into a sarong, and watch the two of them screw with Devon. I’m guessing at the exact wording here, but the spirit of the conversation is clear.

“Hey, Dev,” Pat says, approaching Devon with a look of mock seriousness on his face. “You been working out?”

Devon narrows his eyebrows like he is looking down a microscope at a confusing specimen. “How’s that?” he says.

“He said,” declares D. JONKER, “that you’re looking diesel (
something something)
.”

I slide around to the other side of the room and focus hard so I can continue to see this fascinating exchange.

“Hey, are you using the juice?” D. JONKER asks.

“Come again?” Devon says.

“How exactly do you get pecs like that?” Pat says, poking Devon’s pale and sunken chest. “Me and Derrick are dying to know your secret.”

I make a mental note. The
D
in D. JONKER is for Derrick. I had been thinking Dick.

“I think he’s
(something something)
steroids,” D. JONKER says.

“Only one way to find out!” they yell in unison, pouncing on Devon like a murder of crows on a field mouse.

After one impressively smooth movement (what, do they practice this stuff?), Pat and D. JONKER are holding Devon’s shorts like a championship trophy while Devon, nude except for flip-flops, scrambles back into the stall.

“Yep,” D. JONKER says, although I’m sure he didn’t actually see anything. “You don’t get balls that tiny unless you’re juicing. Are those your nads, Smiley, or are you smuggling peas?”

Devon’s retreating form makes me think of office supplies: two scrawny pencils jammed into eraser-pink trapezoids of butt.

Mr. Fatzinger (who introduced himself to me earlier, inspiring an addition to my notebook: GYM CLASS COACH = FATZY McFATPANTS) hears the commotion and sticks his head into the locker room and yells something like “Knock it the hell off and get out here for class or I’ll
(something something)
Principal Kroener.”

Apparently, this threat holds more water than the pool because everyone shuts up quickly. We all begin filing out, as orderly as soldiers, except for Devon, who is still hiding au naturel in the stall. Pat has Devon’s shorts behind his back. He then passes the shorts to D. JONKER, who pretends to dribble them. He jukes left, jukes right, and throws them into the toilet. And then he flushes. Score: Usual Jock Jerks 1, Usual Hapless Victims 0.

When the day
is finally over, I find my bus and crash into the first seat like a wrecking ball. I am shell-shocked and stunned, rattled by the enormity of it all, wondering what the fudge I have gotten myself into. I thought it’d be easier to enter this world, but I am now even more of a watcher, spying on my own life.

No one has exactly walked up and introduced themselves. Still, my notebook is slowly filling with names and critical information. Thanks to peeking at seating charts, checking out football jerseys, some lipreading, and the weird trend of girls wearing jewelry with their names spelled out in big gold script, I have started to piece together my class roster.