Dave wears the same suit as I wear when neither of us ever
wears suits.
I used to wear ties in Catholic grammar school, feeling as
if a noose hung around my neck, which makes everybody wonder why we wear suits
now that we are in Junior High School when nobody has to, which is why we do
it, because we can, and must, drawing stares, not merely because we look the
way we do, or sound like we do in the echoes of these marble halls, where my
mother and uncles walked and talked, not even because we are who we are and
people always stare to see what we will do next, but because this time we’re
doing something nobody ever expected, and because we look like we shouldn’t
look, and act the way teachers, administration, truant officers and police want
us to act, at least, on the surface and everybody sees that and laugh and never
stop staring.
I don’t even know whose idea this is, Dave’s or mine, only
that we both have ties and suit jackets back home some family member gave us in
the hope we might accomplish something significant enough to deserve to wear
them, knowing we won’t, and he or I or both, decide not to let the garments go
to waste, to wear them at school, pretending to deserve wearing them, when
everybody from the cafeteria service workers to the vice principal for our
class knows better.
We don’t even see what the other looks like until we show up
at school dressed like this. Drt5ave laughs at me; I laugh at him; we plunge
through the front doors and into the student population, passing security guard
and a teacher, neither of whom recognize us at first, and then don’t believe what
they are seeing when they do, then ask what we are up to; we don’t tell them,
we just march on, going up the down staircase the way we usually do, to classrooms
we are supposed to go to, getting the same strange looks on the second floor as
we get on the first, the hall monitor – a teacher – ordering us to the office –
so she can figure out what it is we’re up to and stop us before it gets out of
hand.
The principal has a person vendetta against me. And maybe I
deserve it. I’m always testing the limits of her patience, and she always
fails. She gets that look in her eyes every time she sees me, and seems to take
pleasure in taking me to task.
Of course, my cutting class gives her excuse, but she’s more
riled by the fact that she doesn’t always know when I’m doing it, until long
after she can do anything about it, since the best way to cut a class is to not
show up for the first period and so you’re marked up as absent for the day.
This puts you on a list that has someone calling home to find out why I’m not
as school and if I’m really ill, and if my uncles know I’m not in school that
day.
The principal issues suspensions like she’s invented the
word, one day for cutting class, another for faking illness, and this wouldn’t
be bad if I actually got to stay out of school, but she’s invented a new system
called in house suspension so I get to sit in a classroom somewhere with a
teacher glaring at me, often after school hours.
I have a good gig with one of the girls who works in the
office making the phone calls home, a girl named Rita whose had a crush on me
since the first day of school, agreeing not to call home when I cut first
period, but then, she black mails me, saying that if I don’t go out with her
she’ll report the whole thing to the principal, I try to pawn her off on Dave,
but he’s in love with someone else, so I give up what is otherwise a nearly
perfect scheme, and try to find some other way to get out of classes.
We do not go to the principal’s office; we go to Little
Sue’s locker on the third floor the way we’ve been doing for a whole week, each
of us dropping a penny through the air slot in the door just to annoy her, and
we know it does, a ritual so fixed in our habits now, it seems like the
offerings we make in church, we, not laughing at all as we perform it,
stern-faced, serious, until later when she sees us in the hall and growls at
us, saying we will be sorry for pestering us, and she even more annoyed because
she does this in front of friends she sees as cool, and since we are so uncool,
just acknowledging us taints her, and she is forced to explain to her cool
friends how we all live on the same block and how our parents all know each
other, even though her parents rarely talk to my uncles, and her family has
never met Dave’s mother at all.
Sue’s ranting hurts Dave, and he tells me we ought to stop,
hoping that if we do she might like him better when he’s the last person on
earth that she will ever like, having hated his puppy affection for her when
both attended School No. 11 together, and though she once had a crush one me
when she was still too naïve to know better, she eventually realized I’m not
the kind of boy she should hang around if she wants to get ahead in the world;
I’m not a son of a doctor or lawyer, I don’t even pretend to be hip the way
some of her hip friend do. For Sue, everything is about the future, and she’s
latched on to the popular crowd hoping she can be popular, too.
Sue always led the chants of “Jolly Green Giant” after Dave
got left back for the second time in grammar school, already too tall for his
normal grade, towering over tots two years his junior, and suffering daily
abuse to and from school and in the school yard for standing out like he does,
and he, begging to accompany her despite the taunt, each day offering to carry
her books up the hill they both had to climb from the school to Crooks Avenue
where we all live.
Maybe he thinks she will see him differently, dressed up the
way we are, more worthy than he was in sneakers and jeans, less lean or green,
a gentle giant she can trust when all the cool kids turn out mean, each penny
dropped into her locker as if into her head, to remind her that he still exists
and me, going along with it all just for kicks, knowing it won’t work anyway
after having lived next door to her for all these years, seeing her come and go
with her pretty little nose elevated, needing to see her get peeved for
something simple as a few pennies, we disguised in suits we have no business
wearing, no future to justify, no vision beyond the 3 p.m. bell and our own
charging out of school tearing off ties and jackets to roll again in the dust
near the tracks – and yet we parade, too many months after to Halloween to use
costumes as an excuse, drawing stares and curses and laughs, but not from Sue,
who promises she will get even, and she does, when the hall proctors stop us to
tell us the principal wants to see us in the office, where Sue stands among a
flock of teachers and tells outrageous lies about how we follow her everywhere
she goes, and how we broke into her locket and stole all her books, and how
much she hates both of us, especially Dave, and wants us expelled, the
principal glaring down at us as she always does when we do stupid things like
this, telling us we’ve gone too far this time, then frowns at us when we stay
silent, since we usually deny doing what we’ve done and so don’t know what to
say when we are really innocent, and the outraged Sue glaring at us and the
principal, saying she must do something or we won’t stop, saying we are bad
kids, who ought to be punished, but saying not one word about the pennies.
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