Justin Halpern: More Sh*t My Dad Says

My mom looked at me sympathetically. “We’ll get you there as early as we can, but not if you don’t put some pants on before you come to dinner.” My evening wear that night was a pair of Transformers tighty-whiteys and a T-shirt featuring Walter Mondale’s silk-screened face over the slogan MONDALE’S GOT THE BEEF.

The next morning, when my dad woke me up the way he did every weekday morning—by ripping the covers off me and hurling them to the floor while loudly humming “The Ride of the Valkryies”—I burst out of my bed and looked at the clock. 7:30 A.M.! School started at 8:00!

“Dad, you said you’d wake me up really early!” I yelled in outrage.

“Bullshit. I distinctly remember saying I would do the exact opposite of that.”

I got ready as fast as I could, but by the time my mom dropped me off at school and I sprinted to my classroom, clutching my backpack to my chest to maximize my speed, I was horrified to discover that there were only three empty seats left. I stood behind the thirty or so desks that faced the long green chalkboard at the front of the class and carefully considered my next move. The first empty seat was in the front row, directly facing Mrs. Vanguard’s desk. That would be social suicide. No one wanted to come near her desk. It’d be like buying a house underneath a freeway overpass in Detroit. The second was next to a chubby kid who’d had two accidents in his pants the year before, both of which required the chair he was sitting in to be hosed off and disposed of in the Dumpster by a janitor wearing surgical gloves and a mask.

The third seat was next to a red-haired girl I’d never seen before. She had a smattering of freckles across her face and a button nose that made her look like she’d been created by a Disney animator. I didn’t like girls—not because I thought they were gross or had cooties, but for the same reason I didn’t like underwear: they seemed unnecessary and mildly annoying. But this seat appeared to be the least of the three evils, so I headed in that direction and slung my backpack over the chair. My red-haired classmate turned and smiled at me, and for some reason, I was taken aback. I tried to greet her, but my brain couldn’t decide whether to say “hi” or “hello.”

“Halo,” I spluttered.

“Hi. I’m Kerry Thomason,” she replied brightly.

That was all she said to me that day, but it was enough to make my stomach feel a little queasy. I didn’t know why, but I wanted Kerry to pay attention to me. And, as the weeks went on, it seemed like antagonizing her was the best and most fun way to get her to do so. I spent that first week poking her sides with my pencil eraser, stealing her My Little Pony–themed Trapper Keeper, and generally doing anything I could to get her to notice me, except for actually speaking to her. The only words she said to me that week were “please stop,” and that only made me want to keep doing whatever I was doing.

About two weeks into the school year, I finally pushed my luck too far. I brought into school a drawing I had spent half the night and a full carton of crayons creating and plopped it down on Kerry’s desk before the first bell rang. She took one look at it and burst into tears. At the first sound of crying, Mrs. Vanguard popped her head up from her prepackaged weight-loss meal and rushed over to Kerry. She was asking Kerry what was wrong when she saw the drawing—and gasped in horror.

She turned to me and asked, “Did you do this?”

“Yes?” I responded hesitantly as I began to realize that my plot to impress Kerry might not come off as planned.

“That is disgusting,” Mrs. Vanguard said. She grabbed my arm above the elbow, her fingers cutting off my circulation, and walked me straight down the hall to the principal’s office.

I had never seen the inside of the principal’s office before, but I’d always imagined it would be like a king’s chamber in a palace, complete with fresh bowls of fruit, a throne, and a small disfigured man who did all the principal’s bidding. Instead, the waiting room was disappointing: a drab ten-by-ten room featuring a framed poster of a bodybuilder struggling to deadlift a huge weight bar, captioned with the slogan BELIEVE IN YOURSELF AND ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.Mrs. Vanguard dumped me in a metal folding chair next to a desk, behind which sat the principal’s secretary, a short, squat woman in her sixties with a huge nose and ears like a fifty-year-old prizefighter. She looked at me and shook her head, and it was at that moment that I realized I was in pretty big trouble. I managed to keep my composure until Mrs. Vanguard said, “We’re going to call your parents, Justin.”

“No! Please, no,” I said, starting to cry and shaking my head in fear like someone pleading with a killer for his life. She stepped out of the office, and when the door shut behind her it was so quiet that I could hear my heart pounding in unison with the ticking of the wall clock. The secretary consulted her ledger, picked up the phone, punched a few numbers, and said, “Can I speak to Mr. Halpern, please? It’s about his son.”

The hours that followed were some of the longest of my life. Every time I heard approaching footsteps, I was sure they belonged to my parents, and my muscles tensed in fear. As frightened as I was, though, I also found myself thinking about Kerry. I didn’t want her to see I’d been crying, so I dried my tears with the backs of my hands and used my shirt cuffs to wipe the snot that was running down my nose. I thought about how she smiled at me on the first day of class. I thought about how I liked the way she dotted her I’s with hearts, and the way she sneered at me every time she came back from the bathroom and I asked her if she had taken a poo. I thought about Kerry so intently during those two hours that I almost forgot how terrified I was that my parents were coming.

And then the door opened, and my dad entered. I had prayed my mom would arrive first, but she was never as punctual as my dad. He was carrying his brown leather briefcase, and his eyebrows were like two tiny arrows pointing almost straight down toward his nose. He was not happy.

“Okay, I’m here. What in hell is going on?” he asked, looking at me and then the principal’s secretary.

I sat quietly, staring at the ground, avoiding eye contact with my father.

“Hi, Mr. Halpern. Thank you for coming,” the secretary said.

“Yeah, no problem. Just a thirty-five-mile drive in the middle of my workday. Goddamn pleasure.”

The secretary shot me a look, a silent cry for help. I glanced back at the floor; she was on her own.

“Uh… well… Justin acted incredibly inappropriately in class, and his teacher had no choice but to remove him,” she said.

“Ah, hell. What’d he do? He pull out his pecker and show it to somebody?” my dad asked.

“Uh, no,” the secretary said, between deep breaths. “His teacher will be with you shortly. She can explain,” she added quickly.

My dad plopped himself down in a chair directly across from mine, so that he could focus his intense stare on me without any obstruction, and silently mouthed the words “You’re in deep shit, chief.” I don’t think I saw him blink or look away once. A few minutes later, when my mom entered the small office, the secretary stood up from behind her desk, reopened the door, and walked us back down the hallway to my classroom. With every step my throat tightened. It was recess, so my classmates were playing outside; at least Kerry wouldn’t be privy to my humiliation. When we got to the classroom Mrs. Vanguard was sitting behind her big wooden desk, and she motioned for us to sit down in front of her. As my mom and I quietly took our seats, my dad wrestled to squeeze himself into one of the tiny chairs. Finally he just said “Screw it” and sat on top of the desk.