Whatever I wanted I ate. I ate until it hurt to stand up. Finally I went into the bathroom and puked three times.
The first time is hard because you don’t know what you’re doing. Now, in the middle of the night, it’s simple.
I stood over the kitchen sink with my fingers down my throat, watching everything come back up. Afterward I went over to Daddy’s old chair. I picked up the big pile of papers sitting there. I walked them into my mother’s study and dropped them on top of her desk, where they belonged.
But I didn’t cry. Not once.
4
MR. MINX’S CLASS, THURSDAY. Ashley Barnum didn’t speak to me.
It’s not that I expected she’d sit with me or anything. It’s not like I thought we’d be best buds now, just because we talked for two minutes. Still, did she or did she not say “See you in Minx’s class third period”?
Minx’s class, Friday. Not a peep.
Maybe the word see meant just that. She would see me, but not necessarily speak to me. In which case, fine, she was off the hook.
Minx’s class, Monday. Nothing.
Quite possibly, Ashley Barnum was ignoring me on purpose. And could I blame her? Get caught talking to a loser like me, and the popularity rug could be yanked out from under you like that. Poof!
Minx’s class is bad enough as it is. It is the kind of class where you scrunch down in your seat the whole time, praying you don’t get called on. What Mr. Minx loves is books. What he loves even more is the sound of his own voice. Sometimes, when he’s reading out loud, he gets so impressed with himself you can actually see tears in his eyes. On Tuesday, he was as gaga as ever.
“Vocabulary dictation,” said Minx, holding a stump of yellow chalk to his mouth and tapping his upper lip with it. “Adjectives. . . . Alienated. Disenchanted. Disillusioned.”
Another thing about Minx, he loves using big words. Those three he said, I had no idea what they meant. Minx knew it too. “I’m getting some blank looks, people. If you don’t know a word, get out your dictionary. This is Advanced English. Advanced. You are expected to take some initiative here.”
Minx squinted across the room, holding the chalk stump in the air like a dart. “Alienated . . . Disenchanted . . . Disillusioned . . .”
He gave us about ten seconds with our dictionaries before he fired a question at us. “When . . . under what circumstances . . . might one feel alienated? Hmm?”
Minx paced the aisles in his Wal-Mart sneakers, the Velcro kind. He stopped at the end of my row and pivoted, tapping Georgine’s desk with his chalk. “I’m not asking this question for my health, people.” Taptaptaptap. “I’m actually looking for an intelligent response. Ms. Miner, do you have an intelligent response?”
Georgie sank a little lower in her seat. She shook her head no.
Minx gave her desk one final tap and moved on to the next row. As soon as he was out of earshot Georgie leaned over and poked me with her pen. “Alienated, like alien?” she whispered.
I shrugged back.
Georgie is what you would call a worrier. She worries like crazy when she doesn’t know the right answer for something. You can tell she’s stressing by these two little lines between her eyes. Every so often she gets one of her “tension headaches,” as her mother calls them, and has to stay home from school for two days without any visitors. Georgie’s mother is very bugsome, to tell you the truth. If I had to live with her I’d get tension headaches too.
In Minx’s class you have to watch him every second. You never know when he’s going to pounce. It’s best to take certain precautions. Like for instance, you wouldn’t want to be reading a comic book.
“Mr. Fosse,” Minx said, leaning over Dan Fosse’s desk and snatching Spider-Man right out of his hands. “If you would be so kind as to beam the great light of your knowledge upon us.”
Dan Fosse looked up at Minx. “Huh?”
“Huh?” said Minx. “Earth to Mr. Fosse. Come in, Mr. Fosse. We are discussing adjectives, which, as you may recall, are those pesky parts of speech that describe things. Words like Inattentive. Oblivious. Negligent.”
“Sorry,” Dan muttered.
“As am I,” said Minx, not sounding one bit sorry.
Minx may think he’s the coolest thing on the planet, but here’s something most people don’t know. I saw him outside of school once, on a Saturday night. April and I were walking into Movie Mayhem and he was walking out, wearing the exact same getup he wears to school: white shirt with yellow armpit stains and tan corduroys. He even had one of those fluorescent bands strapped to his calf, to keep his pant cuff out of his bike chain. I reached across the metal divider and waved my hand in front of his face. “Hi, Mr. Minx. It’s me, Isabelle Lee.” Minx blinked at me a few times, like a mole. “Oh. Hello there, Ms. Lee,” he said, and he hightailed it out of there, but not before I saw the movie he’d picked out: The Parent Trap.
The Parent Trap!
Minx scuttled over to Ashley’s desk, opened his palms to Heaven. “Ms. Barnum. Please.”
Ashley tucked a piece of hair behind her ear and clicked her ballpoint pen a few times. “I think,” she said slowly, “that I would feel alienated if . . . if I traveled to another country. Like Zimbabwe, for instance? And I didn’t know the language, or the customs. And I didn’t have the right clothes. . . . That would also be, um, a disenchanting experience.”
A disenchanting experience? Come on. Sometimes Ashley Barnum sounds like she is trying out for the part of the thesaurus in the school play.
Minx bobbed his head up and down like a puppet. “Yes. Yesss. Excellent, Ms. Barnum. Excellent.”
Ashley smiled and clicked her pen a few more times. She is so used to being right.
Brian King was practically falling out of his chair, he was so in love with her right then. He was probably composing another love note in his head that very second. Dear Ashley, My love for you is not alienating, or a disenchanting experience. Oh, no, my darling. It is like . . . it is like . . .
Minx walked back over to Dan Fosse’s seat, picked up Dan’s dictionary, and whacked it against the edge of the desk. Wham! “You see, people?” Wham! Wham! “It helps to actually look the words up. The dictionary is your friend.”
Apparently Mr. Minx is in the habit of whacking his friends against his desk.
On and on he went. “There are still a few spots open in Standard English. I believe there are also a few in Basic English. Any takers?”
This, coming from a grown man who rents The Parent Trap. I wanted to climb up on my desk and announce to the world that our English teacher—the one who thinks he’s the Albert
