My Aptitude
A short story into a short novel
Originally published in Fence
“My Aptitude” was expanded into the novel “Into It”
“My Aptitude” appeared in SUM FLUX:
My Aptitude
I have a broken drive chain on my car and therefore cannot ask Meredith to the Jefferson High School Renaissance Fair. I know that Meredith and Phil will end up asking John, the freak, to go—that one is easy to solve. A new drive chain costs $218, plus labor. The drive chain goes around 3 pulleys whose centers are 15 centimeters apart, and each pulley is 4 centimeters in diameter. How long should the new drive chain that I can’t afford be?
What’s hard to solve is where I fit in with the rest of them. I am sitting in the orange chair. John is sitting in the maroon chair. Don’t let Meredith sit in the blue chair next to John. John, who owns a cat, lives in the brick house and drinks vodka. Phil lives in the house at the end of the block, drinks soda, and keeps a snake. Phil is Meredith’s friend, but they’re not together. I am out for a bike ride 3 kilometers from home when I run into a tree, dismantling my head beyond repair. If I call John and he picks me up in his car and takes me back to his house, how many kilometers will we have traveled before we prank call Phil’s parents posing as a captain from the police department, and tell them that Phil’s little brother has been in a car accident and is dying?
When they invite John around, Phil seems nicer to Meredith, and Meredith seems nicer to John. They wonder why I’m around, and they don’t change the way they act for me. Phil speaks quietly to Meredith when they are in the kitchen, and they think no one is listening. I don’t need to spy to know what’s happening. I stood there in the hall to understand how Phil talks to Meredith, how he gets her away from John and into a quiet conversation about John. They think they can help John. They think they’re protecting everyone in the school when they help John. John bought a wild alley cat from a man who sells sacrificial pets out of the back of an animal shelter. John keeps the cat in a box in his garage and starves it until he feeds it mice he buys at a pet store.
After the prank calls John showed me his box. It is three feet wide, three feet long, and has sides four feet high. If John drops twelve mice into the box with the cat, and I help him swat down the mice that are trying to jump out of the box and it’s sick, how is it that Meredith wants to sit in the blue chair next to John?
Scott sits in the violet chair, making his excellent sketches. If Ernesto sits next to Scott, Ernesto will become one of the people Scott draws pictures of, dead. I am in the orange chair, and I am on the decorating committee for the Back to the ’60s dance. The meetings are run by Meredith and Phil, and they are held at Meredith’s. Meredith: yellow house, chinchilla, Gatorade. Meredith and Phil got John to volunteer for the decorations committee even though John never goes to dances, and no one would ever ask him to go. There were ten posters for peace and ten posters for free love. General George La Grange knew that the invaders would not attack his fort if they could see five defenders at each side. If La Grange has twenty mercenaries and two posts on each side, and if one mercenary takes a shot in the ear, and bone shards fly crazily around the fort and it’s sick, how many people does La Grange have to shift around his pentagonal desert stronghold so that the filthy pagan barbarians won’t attack again? How many times does John have to prove he’s messed up before they stop trying to fix him? John and I are more alike than we are like them, and we can see through them. People in each class are starting to help the biggest freaks in their class, and in our class it’s Meredith who decided that she should help John. Why can’t John see how pathetic that this is? It was Meredith who told Phil in the kitchen that she won’t run from John’s problems.
Reinforcements to La Grange have just arrived. How many times did the police come to John’s house while we were friends? None: I knew how to route our calls through a trace-scrambler. I’m the one who’s helping John. Anyone would run if they knew what I could do.
Anyone can draw a Satanic star using the following method. Start with a circle and mark a number of points X around the circumference, joining the points around the points marked here with an M. All of us are circling around Meredith, making posters. Anyone can accidentally draw the Mercedes symbol instead of the peace symbol. Is it really that funny? At the decorating meeting I said, “Fine, I’ll switch to the other posters. There should be more for free love, anyway.” Meredith let John drink in her house and hold her chinchilla. “As long as he’s around us,” I heard her whisper to Phil in the kitchen, “he’s going to feel accepted.” But because John makes it obvious, with his sick T-shirts and the way he walks through the hall staring through everyone, they’re trying to help him. I have to sign up for community on my own. I was the one who taught John how to walk so that no one ever touches you or bumps into you. I showed him how to stare at the tops of people’s heads like they’re nothing.
Jeff sits three chairs away from me, next to Jasmine, if Jasmine is not too fucked up again. If Jasmine is too fucked up again, Jeff is sitting in the pink chair next to Charity.
Meredith lightly wrote the word “love” in pencil on ten posters. My job was to take the paint pens and go over what she had written in her girl writing, to color “love” in red, silver, and pink with paint that looked like expensive lipstick. I tried to keep my hand from shaking.
This is how we should be: No one is talking, we’re just following each other’s hands and focusing our attention, and some of us with our tongues poking from the corners of our mouths are a little bit serious. John had her chinchilla in his hands and was zoning out on it, stroking it like it was the most amazing creature, like he loved animals. Meredith took that like it was a compliment, like what she was doing by bringing John into her life was working.
How many cars can be parked in this parking lot if it is switched to a diagonal parking pattern? It was extra credit in geometry to help the school fix the faculty parking problem. There weren’t enough parking spots for the faculty, and they sent the problem to our class. The wires that go up the light poles and to the hooded video cameras above the school parking lot are taking pictures to the security office. But what I know—and what people don’t know I know—is that I am the reason the principal put them in—so they can keep an eye on people like me. But for Meredith and Phil to think it’s about people like John, to act like they’re going out with John, when clearly John is not the real thing, is a tragedy.
I can see that she’s faking it. People confide in me, and I am good at knowing what they’re thinking when they don’t think that I know. For example, if Jeff sits in the pink chair next to Charity, Jeff will think about Charity’s breasts under her wet bathing suit last summer when she was standing in line for hamburgers. Pete is sitting in the yellow chair because Pete is a confirmed homosexual—Jason told me that yesterday. At least one girl must sit next to Jason because Jason needs constant approval. Stephanie wanted to sit in a chair on the outside, but Stephanie is sitting in the purple chair, and she is too shy to make people move so she can go to the bathroom. Amber sits between the white chair and the yellow chair, because Amber goes either way. Allen cannot roll his R’s, sitting in the red chair. There’s still one chair empty next to me. Scott always carries a red pen, to do the blood. Phil’s snake is just a garden snake, and he only feeds it bugs. Don’t let Meredith sit in the blue chair next to John.
The boy who is sitting in the red chair told me he is scared of John. John is sitting in the maroon chair. The boy told me, “I was stupid one day—I had to go to the bathroom at school. John came in while I was inside one of the stalls with the door closed. He turned on all the sinks full blast and started shouting shit and kicking at the stalls.” John thought that I wouldn’t find out, thought that I wouldn’t mind that people thought it was him kicking the stalls, and not me. Also, the girl in the purple chair told me that John scares her.
But it’s easy to act like you’re into it. I took the diagrams of the parking lot from when they wanted help restructuring the faculty parking, mixed them with the right kinds of zines and some of Scott’s drawings—the ones with the men with breasts carrying shotguns and women with penises carrying machetes—and told a few people that my dad keeps guns for home protection. We used to shoot each other with pellet guns when we were kids, but that doesn’t have anything to do with me trashing the boy’s bathroom. Meredith and Phil don’t care because I guess now people make room for only one freak in their hearts. No one wants to sit in the brown chair on the other side of John, but now Phil is sitting in the brown chair next to John because Phil is a better person than we are. I put a note in Phil’s locker that told him there would be a surprise waiting for him at school tomorrow.
I am standing at the refreshments table at the Back to the ’60s Dance. If there are three crackers, and if I hold up one cracker in one way of waving to Phil, and if I hold up the next cracker in a different way of waving to Meredith, and if I use a different gesture for John that’s just between us, how many crackers will I have pointlessly held up by the time I’m old? Especially when, let’s say, holding up a cracker in a private way should mean something a little bit serious to someone like John, who will see the way that I’m holding up the crackers and think to himself, “I’m done with him”? I don’t know: Why doesn’t Phil have a better snake? It’s pathetic not knowing how to answer this, or to why John’s not holding up a cracker to me now.
Let’s say that I am a one hundred percent marksman. Phil is a thirty-three and a third shot, and John is a fifty percenter. We draw for the shortest of three straws to determine the shot order. Who do I kill first? A decapitated Ernesto makes his way into Scott’s sketch, regardless of the fact that Ernesto is sitting four chairs away from Scott. I am sitting in the orange chair. If Meredith sits in the blue chair next to John, will she ever sit next to me again? Someone could tell the difference in the way I waved the cracker—I know that there is one—but I don’t know whether anyone will get the same things as me. Phil said, “I can smell it on John. He’s like someone who’s going to crack.” I think of leaving here like I think about dying; I don’t know what I’d do outside of this school, so Phil telling the faculty about my note, and the faculty conducting a locker search, is just Phil trying to get me out of the way of helping John.
I am sitting in the orange chair, and I am the king. Upon each of your heads I have placed a hat. All I will tell you is this, Meredith, John, and Phil: “At least one of you is wearing a blue hat. There may be two blue hats and one white hat, or two white hats and one blue. But you may be certain that there are not three white hats, Phil and John, and neither of you is wearing a white hat. I will shortly remove your blindfolds. The one to correctly announce the color of his hat shall be my friend but be warned: He who guesses wrongly shall be executed.”
Why they’ve put us together in this place has everything to do with how many centimeters up the side of the tube eight ounces of water will rise when the tube is tipped at a ninety-degree angle, forcing up the water so there is less air at the top, less room for people to float up. If what you’re asking is, Do I know where I will fit with the rest of the students, I have to tell you that I honestly don’t know. What I am certain of is I am sitting in the orange chair, and Ernesto is sitting in the black chair, and Scott is sketching Ernesto going through a car window, and if they let me back into the school, I still cannot ask Meredith to the Renaissance Fair. Phil and John will go with Meredith. The drive chain goes around these three pulleys, and I am like the drive chain. Without me watching them and helping to keep this lie moving that John is dangerous, they would stop calling John, and I wouldn’t have my excuse to go along. What I have that’s broken and costs too much to replace is 58.27 centimeters, and it will keep going around these three pulleys until it breaks again.
INTO IT (a novel)
Two high school boys respond to reports of a school shooting by plotting their own while a classmate secretly plans to stop them.
If you haven't read this novel yet, highly recommend. Some of his best.