The Schernoff Discoveries (2 page)

After gym we went to Mrs. Johnson’s class, and had I been prepared I could have watched more closely, but I know what time it happened—2:23—because the clock stopped.

At that instant Mrs. Johnson turned her back on the room to write something on the board and there was an enormous cracking, buzzing sound, the whole room flashed in a white light—like a hundred flashbulbs going off—and
the pungent smells of ozone and burned flesh and hair filled the room.

I turned and saw Harold sitting straight up, his glasses fogged so you could barely see his eyes opened wide, every hair on his head standing straight out and his mouth in a frozen smile that went from ear to ear. The entire left side of his head was covered in some dark blue fluid.

“Harold,” I whispered. “Are you all right?”

There was no answer. Later I was to find out what he had done, that he had calculated that a dead short would provide almost infinite power to his personal electrons. He’d taken the metal cartridge of a ballpoint pen and a large paper clip he’d swiped from Mrs. Johnson’s desk on the way in and twisted them together. He’d wet his fingers with his mouth—an insane touch, that—waited until Mrs. Johnson turned her back on the room, and jammed the pen and paper clip, twisted together, into the outlet next to his desk.

They said lights in the whole school dimmed and that they read a fluctuation in the power station in Fargo, North Dakota, but I don’t know if it’s true.

I do know it blew ink all over the side of Harold’s head and that the school nurse, who came and took him to lie down for a bit—another benefit of the experiment—said he was lucky it didn’t kill him.

But he didn’t care. Later, while we were walking home and he was trying to comb his hair back down, he was still smiling. His half-inked head made him look goofy.

“Don’t you know how dangerous it is to stick something into a socket?” I said. “I can’t believe you’re still alive!”

He walked on, smiling.

“I understand the experiment,” I said, “or I think I do. You had to do it, right? But why the smile when I looked back, and why are you grinning like that?”

“It was incredible,” he said, the grin widening. “I was looking at Julie Hansen at the exact moment that I made contact and my electrons fused with the electrons of the power station. It gave me X-ray vision. I saw through her clothes.”

I stopped. “You really saw Julie Hansen naked?”

“Well, it was just from the back and I only got through the outer layers. I think I need more
power.…” He paused for a moment, thinking. “I wonder what would happen if I got better contact? Say if I stuck my tongue in a light socket …”

I turned and started walking again.

“Very well.”

“Very well what?” We were walking down the street headed home from school, having dodged Chimmer, walked past Julie Hansen’s house without seeing her, and stopped at Overholt’s grocery, where we bought two ice-pop push-ups, mine green, Harold’s yellow. Since we had not been talking about anything, but working on the push-ups, I didn’t have a clue as to what he meant.

“I am talking about problem solving. I meant
very well, we have taken care of the last most pressing problem, and now we shall move on to the next.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“What was our biggest problem last week?”

That was easy. “The football team.”

“
Exactly
. And didn’t we solve it?”

“Actually I think it’s too soon to know. Seven had to go to the doctor and the rest of them are still too busy sitting to know for certain.”

“Just the same, you’ll see the problem is solved. You’ll see.…”

It had all been perfect Schernoff—turning a disaster into a solution. Harold had come up to me one morning before semester break. His eyes flashed wide behind his glasses the way they did when he had an idea, which was most of the time, and he said, “I know how we can meet girls.”

“Meeting them isn’t the hard part,” I said. “It’s keeping them around long enough to talk to them. They practically run from us.”

“
Exactly
. We must stay in proximity to them until our charms can become evident to
them. That is why we’re going to take home economics.”

“No.” I said it so fast I surprised even myself. “No we’re not.”

“And why not?”

“Only girls take home ec.”

“Exactly. There we shall be, the only two boys locked in a room with all the girls for a whole period. None of the other boys to bother us. It’s classic. Simply classic.”

And he talked me into it. Not right away, not even that day or the next, but by the third day I was not thinking of the difficulties but of the prospect of being with all those girls for a whole period. Shirley and Julie and Karen and Elaine and Devonne—just reeling their names off broke my resistance. Girls I hadn’t dared speak to, girls I hadn’t even dared think of, and we’d be with them.…

So we did it.

This was in a time long ago when there were some very stupid, very defining social rules about the differences between boys and girls. Girls did not play in what were called boys’ sports—baseball, basketball, football, hockey or anything else that required strenuous effort;
women did not get equal pay for equal work (something still not remedied); girls waited for boys to open doors for them; boys took industrial arts (called shop) and made worthless letter openers and napkin holders, and, well …

Boys did not take home economics.

As soon as we signed up and went to the first class I knew we were in trouble. The teasing started immediately, and I thought at once of dropping the class. People who didn’t even know me, had never noticed me before, stopped me in the hall to tell me I was a candybutt or a sissy and even when I wore a pair of aviator sunglasses some bowler left at the alley, I was recognized and poked fun at. It was equally bad for Harold. We started walking home down back streets and bush-to-bush to avoid being seen.

But we
were
there, and the girls
were
there, and some of them had even started to talk to me and Harold as well and this was so startling and wonderful that we stayed in the class.

I can’t say we learned much, or that
I
learned much. I was too busy staring at the girls, listening to the girls, absorbing it all. To come from where I’d been socially—somewhere beneath a
one-celled animal—to being immersed in a room full of girls so rapidly was, to say the least, heady and I heard almost nothing the teacher said. This resulted in a largely failing grade and a set of baking-powder biscuits that could have been used for cannonballs.

For Harold, of course, it was different.

“It’s simply chemistry,” he said one morning while handing me a delicious apple tart that he’d just finished baking. “This whole thing of cooking. You mix ingredients and cause a chemical change. If you have even a rudimentary understanding of organic chemistry cooking is a snap.”

“Well, there you go.” I shrugged. “I’m a little rusty on organic chemistry.”

Before long it seemed our entire life had changed. Girls were actually talking to me—more important, I was talking back to them, something my shyness had kept me from doing before—and Harold was turning out pies and cakes and even whole three-course meals, knew how to do laundry better than a professional (the girls were having him do their ironing) and had become the center of a regular storm of feminine interest. It looked like he’d been right, that taking home economics had been a stroke
of genius. I told him as much and was teetering on the edge of actually asking Clarissa Peterson (not Julie Hansen, I wasn’t ready for that yet) to go to a movie.

Then the football team discovered us.

Not the whole team. Not at first. But Duane Larsen, who played center and had been hit in the head way too many times, heard that his girl, Betty, was spending time talking to Harold. He decided he should investigate the situation. To Duane, this meant stopping Harold in the hall, picking him up off the floor with his hands around Harold’s neck and holding him that way until Harold’s face turned blue and he puked all over Duane.

So Betty told Duane he was an unfeeling animal and that Harold was “sensitive” and “caring” and that Duane could just go jump in something cold and wet and slimy and that Harold and I, far from being geeks, were the hits of home economics.

For a brief time I was happy to be included as a hit of anything, even home economics. But Duane told another football player, who told others.

We became, as Harold put it, “toys for the football team.”

I think we still would have been all right because we could mostly avoid them since they were always at practice or getting pep-talked to by the coach but it all became too complicated. We had to avoid Chimmer, take the teasing of the rest of the students
and
stay away from the football team, all thirty-three of them, while concentrating on meeting and talking to girls in home economics.…

Mistakes were bound to happen and when they did they seemed to grow and feed on each other. I got caught by Duane, who decided to pack me into a trash barrel simply because I knew Harold and could “pass it on.” This threw me off guard and later that day Chimmer caught me in the same place and packed me into the same barrel—I was thinking of setting up housekeeping in there—and a few hours after that, when I was telling Harold about it in the hallway by our lockers, the whole team, or so it seemed, caught us unaware. They shoved me in my locker—only slightly cleaner than the trash barrel—and then played catch with Harold, throwing him back and forth like a lanky, bespectacled ball.

They broke his slide rule.

I think until then he could somehow have dealt with it. I know I was perfectly willing to
not
take on the whole team. They could rip your arms off like picking wings off a fly. But that slide rule was Harold’s soul, and when he landed on it and it snapped, something snapped in him as well.

Nothing happened at first. A day went by, then another and another. I thought it was all over.

But four days later, as we were going home, Harold stopped suddenly, snapped his fingers and smiled. “I’ve got it.”

“What?”

“How to get back at the team.”

“Harold, it’s the
football
team. You can’t get back at them. They’re not like humans. They don’t feel pain.”

“
Exactly
my point, and why it’s taken so long to come up with a solution. I decided we had to escalate.”

“Escalate?”

He nodded. “We can’t fight them on their ground. I’ve been doing research. With such a large and brutal enemy we have to use our brains against their brawn. We have to use technology.
We must”—he took a breath—“escalate and use a weapon of mass destruction.”

“You mean nuclear?”

“
Exactly
.”

“But …” The truth was Harold often dazzled me with his knowledge. He knew things that even adults didn’t know. About the mass of light, the speed of sound in water, how to figure the volume of a sphere, how to do fractions in his head. I had no doubt he had enough knowledge to make a nuclear weapon and I, for one, would have been perfectly willing to use it on the football team—especially if we could throw Chimmer somewhere near the center of the blast. “But don’t you need, you know, nuclear stuff for that?”

He smiled and nodded. “We certainly do. And I know just where to get it.”

“You do? Where?”

“All in good time, my boy—all in good time.”

And he wouldn’t tell me more. The next day in home economics he showed up with two huge cake pans and spent the whole hour making and baking two enormous chocolate cakes. I was busy with my own project—trying to make macaroni and cheese without melting a
pan—and didn’t notice Harold until I saw him off in the corner of the room with half the class gathered around watching him.

“What are you doing?” I approached the group and looked over his shoulder.

“Decorating these two cakes,” he said. “They’re for the team.”

“Team?”

“The football team.” He gave a tight little smile, about as funny as a cobra. “I thought they might appreciate a little peace offering.”

He had used a pastry-decorating device to write on one of the cakes in large precise letters:

GO TIGERS! BEAT WHITE RIVER!

“This,” I said, “is your secret weapon?”

He shrugged, smiling at the girls. “I thought we ought to patch things up if we could. There’s a big game tonight and they might like a bite of cake before they play.”

When he was done two of the girls took the cakes to the locker room by the gym and left them there for the team and we went home, dodging Chimmer and the team, getting teased all the way.

“Nothing’s changed,” I said. “We’re still targets.”

“Wait.” Harold held his finger up as if testing the wind. “Just wait. It shouldn’t take long.”

For a full minute I stood there and then it came to me. “Harold, did you put something in the cake?”