Frank Portman - King Dork

Everyone got two results, so you’d have something to fall back on if the other one didn’t work out. No one took it that seriously, but it was supposed to be kind of fun to see what you ended up with. Answer some touchy-feely questions, sit back, and watch the machine reveal your future.

Somehow, I ended up with Medicine (which was normal) and Clergy. Which was not. Clergy was bizarre. I was the only one to get Clergy. What the hell were they doing saying “Clergy” to a seventh grader? My future had never seemed to have much going for it, but this was a dark avenue no one had yet considered. It freaked me out.

There was a Peer Interaction and Response Segment where everyone was comparing answers, and someone saw mine.

“Clergy!”

Most of the kids in the room hadn’t even heard the word before. I played dumb, didn’t say anything. That can make some situations go away, but not all.

Eventually, though, they figured it out and someone said

“Father Tom!” That wouldn’t have been too bad, as nicknames go, though it still would have been pretty weird for a seventh grader. But then someone said: “child molester!”

Then everyone started saying “child molester.” That was 75

shortened to Chi-Mo. And that got shortened to Moe. Or I guess maybe it’s technically spelled Mo’.

The process only took around fifteen minutes, ending when Mr. Bianchi threw an eraser at someone and said “settle down” to signal the beginning of the Pause and Reflect Segment. But by the end of that fifteen minutes I was officially Moe, or Chi-Mo, or sometimes Mo-Ped, and that’s the way it was ever since.

So there you have it. My nickname is an abbreviation for

“child molester,” or just “molester,” whether the people who use it know it or not. As I was saying before, it’s just about the poorest excuse for an insult anyone could imagine. It doesn’t even make sense. Still, anyone who calls me Moe, even when they may mean no harm, is a potential enemy.

That’s just the way it is.

Another thing I’ve got to explain, and now is as good a time as any, is how I’ve got this reputation as a Guns and Ammo guy. Otherwise, some of the stuff that happened in the week or so following the party will be kind of hard to understand.

It started as a matter of necessity, more or less a ploy. I ended up getting kind of into it in spite of myself, I admit, but for the most part it’s still just a means to an end.

The whole thing goes back to early ninth grade, and it started with this one specific incident at the beginning of the year. Matt Lynch and his friends, who had been hassling me as a sort of hobby ever since I can remember, had stopped me as I was coming out of the boys’ bathroom and pushed me back inside.

“Why do you look like a wet rat?” Matt Lynch said, while his friends stood behind him blocking the door.

The question, like all the others of its type, didn’t have an answer. But he would keep asking it over and over to watch 76

you squirm and to see what you would do. Then he’d get tired of that and move on to the conclusion: beating you senseless, or as senseless as he had time for or thought he could get away with.

Biff Bang Pow. In the stomach, in the ribs or head after they trip you over. Maybe stomping on the knees or wrist.

And finally maybe letting a slow, thin string of spit fall down on your face, if they were in the mood for worrying about presentation. You know, like a garnish.

After I had finished vomiting in the toilet stall and cleaning myself up as best I could, I started to ask myself: how can a person prevent Matt Lynch and his retarded subhuman sidekicks from asking you why you look like a wet rat all the time? I knew the answer had to lie not in trying to apply superior force, which wouldn’t have been practical, but rather in figuring out how to mess with his mind.

My idea, which had sounded far-fetched at first, ended up working better than I could have hoped. I started to wear an army coat from the surplus store, and to carry around magazines like Today’s Mercenary, Soldier of Fortune, and International Gun. I’d mention my interest in guns and military hardware and urban warfare techniques at strategic moments when I knew I’d be overheard by people who would mention it to other people who would mention it. And I practiced what I hoped was a wild-eyed, crazy look in the mirror (just the eyes—everything else frozen) till I could do it without thinking. It would have looked better without the glasses, I admit, but unfortunately, I needed them to see. In the beginning, I put on a big pentagram pendant as well, but that was overkill and made me look like a moron, so I ended up ditching the pentagram and just concentrating on the military stuff.

People started to look at me funny. I mean, on the rare occasions that people noticed me at all, they started to look at me 77

in a slightly different funny way than the funny way they used to look at me when I wasn’t trying so hard to induce them to look at me funny. I was still a nonentity. But I believe I managed to introduce enough uncertainty about my stability into the equation to give at least some would-be harassers pause when they might otherwise have pushed me back into the boys’ bathroom without a second thought.

What I learned was this: people like to pick on people of lower status whom they believe they understand. But if something freaks them out enough, it can plant seeds of self-doubt, and sometimes that can be enough to inhibit action, even when you present no real threat to them. Some people are more easily rattled than others, and everyone has a different threshold. But it sure seemed like Matt Lynch’s personal self-doubt threshold was such that his self-confidence started to erode involuntarily when confronted with the guns and ammo trip. I had accidentally stumbled on his number. I lucked out.

There are a lot of factors in the situation, and the gun-freak act may have been only one of them. All I know is that when I started to wear the army coat and carry Today’s Mercenary under my arm and talk about precision sights and shot group training methods and cordite and so on, Matt Lynch seemed to lose interest in trying to push me into bathrooms and beat me up.

Though I’m sure he still participated avidly in the anonymous locker exploits and gum throwing and derogatory Chi-Mo graf-fiti and so forth. He’s only human. In a manner of speaking.

DAZ E D AN D OB S E S S E D

I couldn’t stop thinking about Fiona and her mysterious ways. I could still feel her teeth marks on my neck, from the inside and from the outside. I began to notice this distant, yet 78

somehow intense, constricted feeling in my chest whenever I thought of her, which was—well, a lot.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I was obsessed with Fiona, walking around in a Fiona-addled daze. The reason I don’t want to leave that impression is because it would be pathetic. But I don’t know who I’m trying to fool here: of course I was dazed and obsessed.

The Fiona couch episode had been the most successful interaction with a female in my life, surpassing many of my least plausible dreams. A case could be made that it had been my only genuine interaction with a nonrelated female ever, the previous ones having taken place in my head as pure fantasy or in the real world where I had been an object of amusement rather than a true participant.

How could I not be obsessed? It was the most significant event in my life so far. By far.

But there was a lot about it I didn’t get. She was a mystery. I’m not going to go into all the different angles from which I tried to examine the Case of the Disappearing Fake-Mod Girl. But the central, most important question was: why had Fiona decided to kiss on me and everything, when no previous girl I’d ever come in contact with would have been caught dead in that situation?