Jess Walter - Land Of The Blind

It wasn't long before Eli's simple break in the monotony sparked an even more compelling and dangerous concept, an idea that came from the only teenage desire even close to our desire for sex: our need to flout authority.

Open rebellion.

The Eli Movement started slowly but spread exponentially. It was based on a simple idea that had never occurred to the school administrators who decided to combine the Special Ed class with ours. The idea was simply this: what if the SpEds won?

Clearly, the administration had decreed that Special Ed kids be mainstreamed "for their own good," so that in the powerful currents of high school normalcy and conformity, their defects and debilitations might be diluted and they would rise to meet the lowest expectations and eventually blend in. It was as if the administration saw these kids as effluents that we could wash away downstream.

But what if it worked the other way? What if we learned from them? What if they – happily slobbering and babbling their way through life – had it dicked, and the rest of us, with our vain anxieties and ambitions, were the fools? What if we not only failed to raise the SpEds to our level of mediocrity and conformity but giddily fell to theirs?

This idea caught on the way everything catches on in high school, first as a goof – one kid allows a Special Ed guy to hit him in battle ball – and then as a kind of fashion. During one battle ball game, our opponents elbowed each other out of the way to try to get hit by a ball thrown by Curty the blind kid. After battle ball we played football and Hank, our captain, picked the same group of misfits and me, and while Mr. Leggett stewed and paced and yelled, our football team rolled to victories over the other teams, whose non-Special Ed members ran the wrong way and fell to the ground and faked spasms and fits and stumbles and crashed into one another as my teammates, Repeat or Curty or Louis or Hank, ran through their lines for touchdown after touchdown. It became an art form, a contest to see who could give up the most points to the SpEds.

My team won the football league and the floor hockey league and we won the basketball championship, and Mr. Leggett fumed until I thought he'd explode. He made other kids captain and still the teams came out the same way, with the freaks and me on one team. He pulled noted athletes like my friend Tommy Kane aside and challenged their pride, but he underestimated the Eli Movement. Tommy, for instance, responded to Mr. Leggett's challenge by playing an entire game in his jock, with his shorts around his ankles. It was wonderful. The Special Ed kids were now the first ones dressed down for class and the last ones to leave, high-fiving and whooping and talking a kind of trash to their non-Special opponents. "Ha-ha-ha! Goulash goulash goulash!"

Everyone seemed to enjoy the new order except Eli, the one who'd inadvertently started it, but who knew it to be just another kind of joke. He stood off to the side, refusing to have any part of these new games and their condescending rules. Eli believed it was wrong to mess with the rules of games, any games. These were sacred to him. In fact, I don't know who liked this new world less, him or Mr. Leggett. I guess Eli would rather have a beating than this condescension. And Mr. Leggett simply wanted beatings.

Word of this extended prank spilled over the banks of our PE class and flooded the school, and for a brief month or two during the fall quarter of high school in 1981 Special Ed kids had an odd social cachet, a sort of mascot cool. Jocks and motorheads and stoners high-fived the SpEds as they walked down the hall (they low-fived Louis), signed Curty up for driver's ed, and relied on Repeat to tell them what we were having for lunch. Girls pretended to swoon when Hank, our captain, thundered down the hall. A few kids even overdid it and began wearing pocket protectors and black-framed glasses and hemming their pants three inches above their shoes.

For just that one moment Special Ed kids were cool. And they ate it up.

All but one. One Saturday afternoon in February, I was sitting in my room listening to the new Styx album when there was a knock on my door. I took off my headphones and found my mom standing at my bedroom door, looking confused. "There's someone at the door for you."

My brother Ben stood in the hallway. He shadowboxed me. "Good luck," he said. "And remember, stick and move. Use your jab."

I walked to the back door and opened it. There stood Eli Boyle, staring at his black shoes. It occurred to me that although he'd saved my life he'd never been to my house, and I hadn't mentioned him to my family since the day of our fight.

"Clark?" he said, and I realized too that he'd never called me by name.

"What is it, Eli?"

He looked up. Then he looked past me into my house, which I'd always thought of as small and modest – a one-story, three-bedroom war-era starter – but which must've seemed lavish compared with his mother's trailer. Eli pushed up his black-framed glasses and looked down at my shoes. "Do you think you could help me?"

Dana Brett's rack showed up one day that fall, out of the blue and at least three years late, as if it had been held up somewhere in shipping. By junior high school most of the girls who were going to have breasts had them, but Dana remained petite and girlish and generally uninterested in her own looks. So I lost track of her, as did all of the boys, until her rack just arrived one day our senior year, on picture day as a matter of fact, when Dana stepped out of her brother's car wearing a kind of tube top beneath an open button shirt and, well, I don't mean to sound disrespectful, but… Sweet Jesus. That morning, like all mornings, I stood with some of the other football players in front of our low-slung open-corridor high school, hands in the pockets of our Levi's and our lettermen's coats, trying to effect nonchalance and having as much luck as a pack of ass-sniffing puppies. We joked around and made fun of one another, scoffed at the thin tires on Benny Fennel's Javelin, rolled our eyes at the hood scoop on Eric Oliver's GTO, and fantasized about Robert Muckin's Corvette. But mostly we watched – watched young girls get off the buses, watched older girls arrive in cars, watched the two young female teachers at our school arrive for work. Minds that couldn't retain a bit of Pythagoras or Plato or the periodic table easily held a full accounting of every pair of pants owned by every cute girl in school. "Amanda Rankin is wearing her double buckles," Tommy Kane said, and we all turned, riffling our mental catalogs. Ah yes. The double buckles.

So you can imagine the commotion when on that morning David Brett's passenger side door opened and out stepped two breasts that none of us had ever seen before, attached to his sister Dana.

"Holy shit," said Tommy Kane.

This was, of course, the same Dana Brett I had fallen in grade-school love with, whose boots I had fantasized taking off. Dana was cute in grade school, but physically she'd never moved beyond that. While we began looking for "hot" and "foxy" and "stacked" she remained "cute" through junior high, and by the time we got to high school she hid herself in baggy dresses and jumpers and she fell into that strata of students we simply called brains. Most of the girls who'd exhibited grade-school brains pretended not to have them by high school and skidded into second-skin jeans and T-shirts and feathered Farrah Fawcett hair. But Dana only grew smarter as those other girls' clothes got tighter. She devoured chemistry and psychology and advanced composition and became a valedictorian candidate, all the while staying in jumpers and baggy dresses, so that I never stopped thinking of her as a precocious fifth grader under all that fabric. And since there were so many other girls to date, the Stacy Bogans and Rhonda Parsons of the world, the Mandy Landinghams, girls who looked at us in long takes that seemed to promise some eventual business involving the removal of panties, I didn't think of Dana Brett, except as my old grade-school friend. I spoke with her in class, but in the halls and at games and dances and "events" we existed in different worlds.