Autoboyography
Page 3
Before she got pissed at me this morning, Auddy handed me, without comment, a sheet of sparkly dinosaur stickers. So, without question, I pocketed them; Autumn is known to hand me things that will be of use at some unknown point in time, and I roll with it. As I open my locker, I realize her motive: I am notoriously bad about remembering my A and B day schedule—we practice an alternating-day class schedule here, with periods one through four on some days and periods five through eight on others. Each term I need to tape my schedule to my locker, and each term I find myself without any tape.
“You’re brilliant,” Sasha says, coming up behind me to better see what I’m doing. “And ohmygod, you’re so cute. Dinosaurs! Tanner, are you eight?”
“I got them from Autumn.”
I hear Sasha’s reaction to this in her silence, the unspoken, Are they, or aren’t they? Everyone wonders whether Autumn and I are casually banging.
As ever, I leave it unanswered. Her suspicion is a good thing. Unwittingly, Autumn has been my shield.
“Nice boots,” I tell her. They reach a suggestive height: just past her knees. I wonder whose attention she’s aiming for the most here: the guys at school, or her parents at home. I give her a dinosaur sticker and a kiss on the cheek as I slip past her down the hall with my books.
Provo High is not by any means a religious school, but sometimes it feels that way. And if there’s one thing you learn quickly about Mormons, it’s that they focus on the positive: positive feelings, positive actions, happy, happy, joy, joy. So Modern Lit with Mrs. Polo starts out with an unexpected and decidedly unhappy bang: The first book we’re reading is The Bell Jar.
I feel a faint murmur around the room as students shift in their seats to make surreptitious eye contact in such dramatic unison that their covert efforts are wasted. Mrs. Polo—wild hair, flowy skirts, rings on thumbs, you know the deal—ignores the commotion. In fact, I think she’s sort of enjoying it. She rocks back on her heels, waiting for us to return to the syllabus and see what else she has in store for us.
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, and on and on into Toni Morrison’s Sula, and even James Goddamn Frey’s fake memoir. Perhaps most shocking is Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, a novel dealing with fanatical religion and a tent-revival-style creepy preacher. It’s pretty on the nose. Mrs. Polo is ballsy, and I for one like seeing their cages rattled.
At my side, and still giving me the silent treatment, Autumn is sitting up, eyes wide. She’s read almost every book on this list, and if I know her, I know what she’s thinking: Is there time to transfer to Shakespeare with Mr. Geiser?
She turns and looks at me, her eyes narrowing as she reads my mind right back. She growls again, and I can’t help the laugh it pulls from me.
I’ve read almost all these books too. Autumn insisted.
I lean back, lacing my fingers behind my head and giving her another good smile.
Piece of cake. I have an easy semester ahead.
CHAPTER TWO
By the time fourth period rolls around, Autumn is buzzing with nerves. She’s excited for the Seminar, but still irritated that I wormed my way into it. I trail just behind her down the hall and try not to let her see me smile when she purposefully evades me inside the door, moving toward a group of desks where only one seat remains free.
“Over here, Auddy.” Standing in the back row, I hold out an empty chair for her beside one I plan to claim.
She has the option to come join me, or look mysteriously petulant, so she shuffles over, glowering. “You’re a pest.”
“I love you, but only a little.”
She laughs. “Don’t ruin this for me.”
And there, right there, it is. I could ruin this by being a total jackass about something she’s put her whole heart into. She thinks I’d want to?
The way I’m acting, she probably does.
“I won’t.” I slide my good-luck eraser onto her desk, the one she gave me for Christmas two years ago, with the old-school He-Man illustration printed into the rubber. What used to be a white square is now a gray nub. Present-day Eraser He-Man barely has a face, and only one leg.
Her freckled nose wrinkles as she scowls at me without much commitment. I am forgiven.
Mr. Fujita walks in, arms filled with a teetering stack of books. He slides them gracelessly onto his desk in the center of the semicircle of worktables and ignores them when they slide onto a messy pile. A copy of Stephen King’s The Stand slaps harshly to the floor, landing facedown and open. He ignores it; in my peripheral vision I can see Autumn sit up straighter, and I know she is now intensely worried about the pages of the enormous book growing crumpled under its own weight the longer it sits there.
“Morning!” Mr. Fujita sings, and then looks up behind us at the clock on the wall. “Oops! Afternoon! I’m Tim Fujita. Everyone just calls me Fujita.”
I’ve always really liked Fujita, but the way he hands out his own nickname makes me like him about 7 percent less.
We murmur greetings in return, quiet from intimidation or because we’re tired after lunch, and he grins at us, taking in our faces one by one. I glance around too at the class composition: Josh, Dustin, Amanda. Julie, Clive, Burrito Dave. Sabine, Soccer Dave, Asher. Kylie, McKenna, James, Levi.
Every single one of them is Mormon. Trimmed hair, modest sleeves, good posture. In the back row, Autumn and I are a pair of gangly trees looming over a lush, manicured lawn.
Fujita winks when he sees me. He thinks my mom is a superhero. Beside me, Autumn lets out a measured exhale through her nose; because of my mom (a computer genius) and my dad (a highly profiled cardiac surgeon who, according to the papers, saved the governor of Utah), I’ve received special treatment from teachers since the day I moved here. Fujita adding me to the Seminar is clearly one such perk.
“Welcome, guys.” He spreads his hands out and then takes another sweeping glance around the room. “Where is he?”
At our puzzled silence, Fujita scans the room again and then looks at us for answers.
“Who?” Dustin, seated—as ever—right up in the front, finally asks.
Fujita glances at his watch as if to confirm that he’s in the right place. “I had hoped this would be a cool surprise, and I assume it will be anyway, but I guess he’s running late.”
We reply with anticipatory silence as his eyebrows slowly lift skyward. “We’ll have a special aide this term,” he tells us. I can imagine the drumroll he’s intending, but his dramatic pauses give the moment a bewildering, anticlimactic feel instead. “You’ll be thrilled to hear that Sebastian Brother will be mentoring each of you!”
A chorus of excited noises pours out of the fourteen other bodies in the room—a Mormon hero, coming to spend time with us. Even Autumn has clapped her hand over her mouth. To her—LDS or not—Sebastian is a local celebrity.
With his hands laced together in front of him, Fujita rocks back on his heels. “Seb has a very busy schedule, of course”—I mentally groan. Seb—“but he and I both feel that his experience can benefit each of you. I believe he will inspire you. After taking this very course, he is only nineteen and on his way toward a prestigious literary career.” Leaning in, Fujita adds confidentially, “Of course, I’ve read his novel. It is stunning. Stunning!”
“You’re brilliant,” Sasha says, coming up behind me to better see what I’m doing. “And ohmygod, you’re so cute. Dinosaurs! Tanner, are you eight?”
“I got them from Autumn.”
I hear Sasha’s reaction to this in her silence, the unspoken, Are they, or aren’t they? Everyone wonders whether Autumn and I are casually banging.
As ever, I leave it unanswered. Her suspicion is a good thing. Unwittingly, Autumn has been my shield.
“Nice boots,” I tell her. They reach a suggestive height: just past her knees. I wonder whose attention she’s aiming for the most here: the guys at school, or her parents at home. I give her a dinosaur sticker and a kiss on the cheek as I slip past her down the hall with my books.
Provo High is not by any means a religious school, but sometimes it feels that way. And if there’s one thing you learn quickly about Mormons, it’s that they focus on the positive: positive feelings, positive actions, happy, happy, joy, joy. So Modern Lit with Mrs. Polo starts out with an unexpected and decidedly unhappy bang: The first book we’re reading is The Bell Jar.
I feel a faint murmur around the room as students shift in their seats to make surreptitious eye contact in such dramatic unison that their covert efforts are wasted. Mrs. Polo—wild hair, flowy skirts, rings on thumbs, you know the deal—ignores the commotion. In fact, I think she’s sort of enjoying it. She rocks back on her heels, waiting for us to return to the syllabus and see what else she has in store for us.
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, and on and on into Toni Morrison’s Sula, and even James Goddamn Frey’s fake memoir. Perhaps most shocking is Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, a novel dealing with fanatical religion and a tent-revival-style creepy preacher. It’s pretty on the nose. Mrs. Polo is ballsy, and I for one like seeing their cages rattled.
At my side, and still giving me the silent treatment, Autumn is sitting up, eyes wide. She’s read almost every book on this list, and if I know her, I know what she’s thinking: Is there time to transfer to Shakespeare with Mr. Geiser?
She turns and looks at me, her eyes narrowing as she reads my mind right back. She growls again, and I can’t help the laugh it pulls from me.
I’ve read almost all these books too. Autumn insisted.
I lean back, lacing my fingers behind my head and giving her another good smile.
Piece of cake. I have an easy semester ahead.
CHAPTER TWO
By the time fourth period rolls around, Autumn is buzzing with nerves. She’s excited for the Seminar, but still irritated that I wormed my way into it. I trail just behind her down the hall and try not to let her see me smile when she purposefully evades me inside the door, moving toward a group of desks where only one seat remains free.
“Over here, Auddy.” Standing in the back row, I hold out an empty chair for her beside one I plan to claim.
She has the option to come join me, or look mysteriously petulant, so she shuffles over, glowering. “You’re a pest.”
“I love you, but only a little.”
She laughs. “Don’t ruin this for me.”
And there, right there, it is. I could ruin this by being a total jackass about something she’s put her whole heart into. She thinks I’d want to?
The way I’m acting, she probably does.
“I won’t.” I slide my good-luck eraser onto her desk, the one she gave me for Christmas two years ago, with the old-school He-Man illustration printed into the rubber. What used to be a white square is now a gray nub. Present-day Eraser He-Man barely has a face, and only one leg.
Her freckled nose wrinkles as she scowls at me without much commitment. I am forgiven.
Mr. Fujita walks in, arms filled with a teetering stack of books. He slides them gracelessly onto his desk in the center of the semicircle of worktables and ignores them when they slide onto a messy pile. A copy of Stephen King’s The Stand slaps harshly to the floor, landing facedown and open. He ignores it; in my peripheral vision I can see Autumn sit up straighter, and I know she is now intensely worried about the pages of the enormous book growing crumpled under its own weight the longer it sits there.
“Morning!” Mr. Fujita sings, and then looks up behind us at the clock on the wall. “Oops! Afternoon! I’m Tim Fujita. Everyone just calls me Fujita.”
I’ve always really liked Fujita, but the way he hands out his own nickname makes me like him about 7 percent less.
We murmur greetings in return, quiet from intimidation or because we’re tired after lunch, and he grins at us, taking in our faces one by one. I glance around too at the class composition: Josh, Dustin, Amanda. Julie, Clive, Burrito Dave. Sabine, Soccer Dave, Asher. Kylie, McKenna, James, Levi.
Every single one of them is Mormon. Trimmed hair, modest sleeves, good posture. In the back row, Autumn and I are a pair of gangly trees looming over a lush, manicured lawn.
Fujita winks when he sees me. He thinks my mom is a superhero. Beside me, Autumn lets out a measured exhale through her nose; because of my mom (a computer genius) and my dad (a highly profiled cardiac surgeon who, according to the papers, saved the governor of Utah), I’ve received special treatment from teachers since the day I moved here. Fujita adding me to the Seminar is clearly one such perk.
“Welcome, guys.” He spreads his hands out and then takes another sweeping glance around the room. “Where is he?”
At our puzzled silence, Fujita scans the room again and then looks at us for answers.
“Who?” Dustin, seated—as ever—right up in the front, finally asks.
Fujita glances at his watch as if to confirm that he’s in the right place. “I had hoped this would be a cool surprise, and I assume it will be anyway, but I guess he’s running late.”
We reply with anticipatory silence as his eyebrows slowly lift skyward. “We’ll have a special aide this term,” he tells us. I can imagine the drumroll he’s intending, but his dramatic pauses give the moment a bewildering, anticlimactic feel instead. “You’ll be thrilled to hear that Sebastian Brother will be mentoring each of you!”
A chorus of excited noises pours out of the fourteen other bodies in the room—a Mormon hero, coming to spend time with us. Even Autumn has clapped her hand over her mouth. To her—LDS or not—Sebastian is a local celebrity.
With his hands laced together in front of him, Fujita rocks back on his heels. “Seb has a very busy schedule, of course”—I mentally groan. Seb—“but he and I both feel that his experience can benefit each of you. I believe he will inspire you. After taking this very course, he is only nineteen and on his way toward a prestigious literary career.” Leaning in, Fujita adds confidentially, “Of course, I’ve read his novel. It is stunning. Stunning!”
