Нил Шустерман - Antsy Does Time

“Is it?”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”

She huffed again. I was really enjoying this.

“C’mon,” she said, “are you going to turn down a free meal at one of Brooklyn’s most expensive restaurants?”

“Ooh! Manipulating me with money,” I teased. “You’re sounding more and more like your grandfather every day.”

“Oh, shut up!”

“Admit it—you’re curious to know what kind of girl would kiss me in a school hallway.”

At last she caved. “Well, do you blame me? And besides, I really want you to meet Raoul. It’s important to me.”

“Why? It’s not like you need my approval to be dating him.”

“Well,” she said after a moment’s thought, “I’ll give you mine, if you give me yours.”

Lexie was right about me not being able to turn down the invitation. She had pushed my buttons, and we both knew it. It wasn’t the money thing—it was the fact that I desperately wanted to impress Kjersten.

I arrived at school in full grapple with the concept of going on a date with an ex-girlfriend, a prospective girlfriend, and a guy who clicks. I was so distracted, I had to go back to my locker twice for things I forgot, making me late for my first period. Even before I sat in my seat, the teacher handed me a yellow slip summoning me to the principal’s office for crimes unknown. People saw the yellow slip and reflexively leaned away.

This was my first experience in a high school principal’s office. I don’t know what I was expecting that would be different from middle school. Fancier chairs? A minibar? I wasn’t scared, like I used to be when I was younger—I was more annoyed by the inconvenience of whatever punishment was forthcoming.

Our principal, Mr. Sinclair, tried to be an intimidating administrator, but he just couldn’t sell it. It was his hair that undermined him every step of the way. Everyone called it “The Magic Comb-over.” Because if you were looking at him straight-on—the way he might see himself in a mirror—he actually appeared to have hair. But when viewed from any other angle, it became clear that he had only twelve extremely long strands woven strategically back and forth over a scalp that had suffered its own human dust bowl.

It was even harder to take him seriously today, because as I stepped into his office I could see his tie was flipped over his shoulder. There’s only one reason a guy has his tie flipped over his shoulder. If you haven’t figured it out, you don’t deserve to be told.

So I’m sitting there, trying to decide which is worse: pointing out that his tie is over his shoulder and embarrassing him, or not saying anything, which would make it even more embarrassing once he realized it for himself. Either way he’d take it out on me, so this was a lose-lose situation. What made it worse is that I couldn’t stop smirking about it.

He poured himself a glass of sparkling water, offering me some, but I just shook my head.

“Mr. Bonano,” he said in his serious administrative voice, “do you know why I’ve called you in?”

I couldn’t take my eyes off his tie. I snickered and tried to disguise it as a cough. I sensed myself about to launch into a full-on giggle fit, and I prayed for a light fixture to fall from the ceiling and knock me unconscious before I could—because then I’d become sympathetic.

“I said, do you know why I called you in?”

I nodded.

“Good. Now let’s talk about this situation with Gunnar Ümlaut.”

“Your tie’s over your shoulder,” I said.

There was a brief moment where I could tell he was thinking, Should I just leave it there, and insist it’s there for a reason? But in the end, he sighed, and flipped the tie down ... right into the glass of sparkling water.

By now, my eyes are tearing from holding back the laughter—and then he says, “I never liked this tie anyway,” so he takes it off, and drops it in the trash.

That’s when I lost it. Not a giggle fit. No—this was an all-out raging guffaw fest; the kind that leaves your insides hurting and your limbs quivering when you’re done.

“Hahahahahahahahal’msorry,” I squealed. “Hahahahahahaha can’thelpithahahahahaha.”

“I’ll wait,” said the man who had the power to expel me.

I tried to stop by tensing all my muscles, but that didn’t work. Finally I made myself imagine the look on my mother’s face when she found out I was expelled from the New York City Public School System for laughing at my principal, and that image drowned my laughter just as effectively as the sparkling water had drowned his tie.

“Are you done?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, I think so.”

He waited until the last of my convulsions faded, pouring the glass of sparkling water into a bonsai at the edge of his desk. “What’s life if we can’t laugh at ourselves?” he said. Oddly, I found myself respecting him all of a sudden, for the way he kept his cool.

“How many hours?” I asked, not wanting to draw this out any longer than necessary.

“I’m not sure I understand the question?”

“I got detention, right? Because of the stuff with Gunnar. I just want to know how many hours? Does it include Saturday school? Do my parents have to know, or can we keep this between you and me?”

“I don’t think you understand, Anthony.” And then he smiled. It’s not a good thing when principals smile.

“So . . . I’m suspended? C’mon, it’s not like I hurt anybody—it’s only pieces of paper—I was trying to make the guy feel better about dying and all. How many days?”

“You’re not in trouble,” said Principal Sinclair. “I called you in because I wanted to donate a month of my own.”

I just stared at him. Now it was his turn to laugh at me, but he didn’t bust up laughing like I did, he just chuckled. “Actually,” he said, “I’m impressed by what you’ve started. It shows a level of compassion I rarely see around here.”

“So ... you want me to write you up a contract?”

“For me, and for the secretaries in the front office—and for Mr. Bale.”

“The security guard wants to give a month, too?”

“You’ve started a schoolwide phenomenon, Anthony. That poor boy is lucky to have a friend like you.”

He gave me a list of names to write contracts up for, and I was a little too shell-shocked to say much more. Then, just before I left, I looked into the trash can. “Keep that tie,” I told him. “Throw away the yellow paisley one. That’s the one everyone makes fun of.”

He looked at me like I had just given him an early Christmas gift. “Thank you, Anthony! Thank you for letting me know.”

I left with a list of five names, and the strange, unearthly feeling that comes from knowing your principal doesn’t hate your guts.

Following up on his schoolwide-phenomenon speech to me, Principal Sinclair insisted that I go on Morning Announcements, to make the whole donated-month thing legitimate school business.

Morning Announcements are kind of a joke at our school. I mean, we got all this video equipment, right, but no one knows how to use it. There’s an anchor girl who reads cue cards like she’s still stuck in the second level of Hooked on Phonics. And let’s not forget the kid who has the nervous habit of adjusting himself on-air whenever he’s nervous—which is whenever he’s on-air. Occasionally Ira would submit a funny video, but lately there hasn’t been much worth watching.

“Just read your lines off the cue cards,” the video techie told me, but like I said, public speaking ranks right up there with being eaten alive by ants on my list of unpleasant activities.

After doing my own morning announcement, I now know firsthand why those other kids look like idiots on TV, and I have new respect for Crotch Boy and Phonics Girl.