have a beef?” (Yeah, I’m now allowed to use “beef” when not referring to hamburgers. I beat up Chris Perez! I have street cred.)
Well, the answer is: I cannot defeat the sun. I can defeat Chris Perez, but I cannot defeat the sun. My first few days at Pelham Public I hiked from my crappy parking spot to my first period class. During those ten minutes outside, I didn’t shrivel up and die or anything. But I did get a little itchy. And I didn’t want to be known as that Itchy Kid. I’d be classified in the Untouchables along with Nate Kirkland.
So I retrieved my eighty-year-old-man sunglasses from the doctor and wore them to school every morning. I also wore this big sweatshirt that I stole from Luke and pulled the hood up over my head. Because of my whole incognito look, those skater kids who drew on their shoes mocked me every morning. They always sat on top of cars in the parking lot. They were always there, no matter how early I arrived. For guys who skipped every class, they were ridiculously punctual.
“Hey, it’s the international man of mystery!” they’d call out to me.
Or “Hey, Mr. Hollywood!”
I would just duck my head and wave, as if I were in Hollywood and they were nonthreatening papparazzi.
By staying inside during lunch and slouching in the darkest, creepiest corners of all my classes (which was pretty vampiric anyway), I avoided any itching incidents. Before I realized it, I fell into a routine. And soon it was late October and cold enough that I actually needed my sweatshirt.
One morning Matt Katz told me, “I love this, man. When the weather gets cold.”
He gestured outside, to the lovely autumn trees dropping dark red leaves on Mrs. Rove’s Escalade. Wow, I thought. Matt Katz is deeper than I thought. He really sees the beauty in nature. And all kinds of nature, not just that one type of grass…
“Yeah,” Matt Katz continued. “I get to wear my jacket with the big pockets!”
He flipped his jacket open to reveal two large pockets on the inside. Besides all the contraband he had stashed in there, which I won’t mention for legal reasons, he also had two different iPod Nanos and a bunch of Werther’s Original hard candies.
It was also in October that we realized that our physics teacher, who looked like Albert Einstein if he were a drag queen, was too busy crashing toy cars into the walls and measuring their velocities to notice if we showed up to our lab period. One day Jason Burke, Ashley Milano, and Jenny decided to take advantage of this by going to Dunkin’ Donuts (or, as Ashley had dubbed it, Double D) third period instead of drawing vectors for forty-five minutes.
“Hey, Finn,” Jason called to me on my way to the physics room. He jangled his car keys at me. “Come to Double D with us. Blow off lab.”
I kind of froze in my tracks. This was a dilemma. On one hand, I had worked hard to establish myself as a guy who, as my admirers would say, “didn’t give a shit.” The badass Finbar who schooled Mrs. Rove about poetic erections wouldn’t care if he got in trouble for skipping physics lab.
On the other hand, it was really sunny out today. The kind of sun that would make me break out like a biblical leper. I kind of gave a shit about that.
“Uh, nah, man,” I told Jason. “I’m good, thanks.”
“Come on,” Jason said. “You can’t get in trouble. You choked a guy and Dr. Hernandez just, like, asked you on a gay date.”
“He didn’t ask me on a gay date!” I said.
“Did he take you into his office alone?” Jason asked.
“Well, yeah, but…”
“Did he offer you candy?” Jason continued.
“Just a breath mint,” I said.
“Aha!” Jason said. “The plot thickens.”
Jason and I had kind of become friends. We started off teaming up on projects in physics lab (until he started cutting class), but then he started telling me more personal things. Like how he was hooking up with both Kayla Bateman and Ashley Milano. Not both of them at the same time, though that would have been a much better story. Like a Playboy story. But he just took turns hooking up with them. First Kayla for a few weeks, then Ashley for a few weeks. According to Jason, each girl had both pros and cons. Kayla had… well, two large pros… but aside from that, she was