Gabriel Roth - The Unknowns

As I walked the five floors to the bio labs, pressed in by crowds, I kept my head down like a spy, glad for the first time not to be tall. I pushed the door open and everyone turned to see if Mr. McCallum had arrived. Michelle Kessel’s caroling voice filled the lull with the words, “Hey Eric, it’s great that you think I’m a user!”

There was general puzzlement — what possible connection could there be between Michelle and the quiet, doughy kid with the weird clothes? I took an empty seat at the back as though none of this was happening. Finally Angela Martin, who was nice but lacked subtlety of mind, asked Michelle what she was talking about, giving Michelle a chance to say, “Look!” and begin digging in her book bag. I stared at the chipped wooden surface of my desk, where compass points and Swiss Army knives had engraved forgotten initials, geometric doodles, the word RUSH .

“Check this out, you guys,” she said. “This is Eric’s secret notebook.”

“Awww,” said Angela, as though Michelle had taken out a dying bird. “You should give it back to him.”

“Just wait,” Michelle said. She began paging through the notebook. I knew what was coming, but it took her longer than I expected to find the entry. Where was McCallum? “Angela Martin,” Michelle read. “Skinny. Vegetarian. Likes Matt McGahan.” Laughter, shouting. Angela put her hand over her mouth in astonishment. I’d never seen anyone do that except on TV. “Plays flute in orchestra. Asked me how long until class. Seems like nice person. Member of Save the Environment Club.”

Abigail Slott said, “Oh my God, no way !” in a tone of pure joy.

“What is this?” Sean Lippard asked me.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Michelle said. “There’s more!” She looked around the classroom. “Oh, oh, Abigail’s in. Wait.” I tried to remember what I’d written about Abigail Slott. Michelle seemed to be flipping through the pages from the front, which meant she hadn’t noticed the entries were alphabetized by last name.

“Here we go,” she said. “Abigail Slott: Pretty hair. Sarcastic. Plays volleyball. Visible bra straps. Often comments on smells. Mostly friends with guys — Sean L, Steve Olssen (boyfriend?). Can be scary. Ignores me.”

I started to disengage, reducing the classroom to a meaningless array of pure sensory data — light waves at different frequencies hitting my retinae, sonic vibrations in the air’s molecules. If Michelle Kessel humiliates you in the forest, does she make a sound ? It worked for a few seconds, until I became aware that the blur of red and yellow and tan to my left was Molly Clarke, who had never spoken to me before, and who was looking me up and down as though I were something incongruous and threatening, a leopard or a nudist. “What was this for ?” she said.

“Oh, Molly, you want to hear yours?” asked Michelle.

“What did you write about me?” Molly asked me. I began to jiggle my leg rhythmically, counting the beats in groups of four and sets of sixteen.

“Yours is short,” Michelle said. “Molly Clarke: Quiet, shy. Went to Japan on vacation — interested in Japan.” I had thought it might be useful to know that, for some reason.

“Did he really call you a user?” asked Allison Ketcham, who had been omitted from the notebook for her strange pockmarked face and the frizzy hair that exploded from her scrunchie.

“Yeah, yeah, you wanna hear mine?” said Michelle. “OK: Michelle Kessel — smart, pretty. Nice legs—” and here she paused dramatically “—or just short skirts?” There was laughter, maybe more than she would have liked. “Likes to be in charge. Doesn’t laugh much. Lots of makeup. Popular. User.” She stepped on the last word hard, as though killing a bug. She skipped the next sentence: Switches best friends a lot: Beth Gillman/Vicki Gordon/Liz Anderman/Louise Treadwell . I caught her eye and realized that she wasn’t just having fun — I’d made an enemy.

To Louise, in a stage whisper, she said, “Can I read yours?” There was no way the crowd would have let her skip Louise’s entry once she’d announced its existence.

“Louise Treadwell,” Michelle read. “Pretty, blond (dyed?), sexy clothes. Kind of dumb.” She enunciated this last very clearly, looking straight at me. “Always turns in work late, says she left it at home. Mean.” She omitted Always with Michelle .

“I think that’s all the people in this class,” said Michelle. She had left out Tara’s entry, in which I had recorded Michelle and Louise’s corruption of Tara’s innocent love for her My Little Ponies. “You guys want to hear some of the others? You want to hear Vicki Gordon?”

It was in the middle of this speech that McCallum walked in. The room got quiet — McC. was not a teacher to fuck with — but Michelle was already looking through the pages. He hovered behind her for a moment, then reached down and snatched the notebook out of her hands.

Michelle was unflustered. “Sorry, Mr. McCallum,” she said, sticking out her chin like a tiny prizefighter. “But that’s not mine, the notebook, it’s Eric Muller’s.” I admired the way she was careful to distinguish me from Eric Auerbach.

McCallum sighed — he hadn’t even begun teaching and already he was faced with a distracting mess. He gestured with the book as though he was going to throw it at me, then opened it to a random page. After a few seconds he looked up at Abigail Slott and chuckled.

“Mr. McCallum,” Michelle said, raising her hand perfunctorily, “there’s some really disgusting stuff in there. Some of the girls think it’s really inappropriate.”

McCallum raised his eyebrows at me sardonically. Then he took the notebook’s corner between two fingers, as though it were a kitten he was feeding to a tank of piranhas, and dropped it onto Michelle’s desk.

“Put it away,” he told her brusquely. “Now: photosynthesis.”

As far as I could tell, Michelle never allowed the notebook into general circulation. (There were, after all, passages that she didn’t want people to read.) Thus it became a collective fantasy object for the student body, more thrilling than the real artifact could ever have been. Besides the girl profiles, most of what I’d recorded was mundane — who talked to whom, who ate where, who whispered in class. In the school’s dreamlife it was transformed into a deranged epic of perversion and lust. Over the next three weeks I was asked to confirm the following: that I had made a list of girls I wanted to have sex with; that I had spied on girls through their windows and taken photographs of them in the nude; that I intended to drug Angela Martin and force myself on her in the cafeteria; that I had collected and catalogued my masturbatory effluvia and planned to present every girl in the school with the relevant portion, in a Ziploc bag, on Valentine’s Day. I denied each rumor with the kind of embarrassment that looks very much like guilt.

The ordeal was interrupted by a tedious, anxious vacation. I spent it in my room, working through a compendium of programming exercises and reading comic books about superpowered mutants, endowed with genetic gifts far beyond those of their parents, shunned by the fearful and the bigoted. We had Christmas dinner with my father, who announced over turkey cutlets and Stove Top stuffing that he was investing everything he had and everything he earned in the beverage company, divorce settlement be damned, and that the returns from this venture would soon enable him to fulfill his responsibilities to us in lavish style, and that my mother’s failure to support him in his ambitions was the reason he’d left her in the first place, and that apparently even divorce couldn’t free him of her carping and negativity. He finished this speech with the satisfied look of a man who has gotten something off his chest, then took a second helping of instant mashed potatoes. He stayed through dessert.