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Kitabı oku: «Open: An Autobiography», sayfa 6
You never asked.
For me, that’s the definition of being rich: it doesn’t cross your mind to mention it to your best friend. And money is such a given you don’t care how you come by it.
Perry, however, is more than rich. Perry is super-rich. Perry is Richie Rich. His father, a senior partner at a major law firm, owns a local TV station. He sells air, Perry says. Imagine. Selling air. When you can sell air, man, you’ve got it made. (Presumably his father gives him air for an allowance.)
My father finally lets me visit Perry’s house, and I discover that he doesn’t live in a house, in fact, but a mega-mansion. His mother drives us there in the Rolls, and my eyes get big as we pass slowly up a massive front drive, around green rolling hills, then under enormous shade trees. We stop outside a place that looks like Bruce Wayne’s stately manor. One entire wing is set aside for Perry, including a teenager’s dream room, featuring a ping-pong table, pool table, poker table, big-screen TV, mini fridge, and drum set. Down a long hallway lies Perry’s bedroom, the walls of which are covered with dozens and dozens of Sports Illustrated covers.
My head rotating on a swivel, I look at all the portraits of great athletes and I can only say one word: Whoa.
Did this all myself, Perry says.
The next time I’m at the dentist I tear off the covers of all the Sports Illustrateds in the waiting room and stash them under my jacket. When I hand them to Perry, he shakes his head.
No, I have this one. And this one. I have them all, Andre. I have a subscription.
Oh. OK. Sorry.
It’s not just that I’ve never met a rich kid. I’ve also never met a kid with a subscription.
IF WE’RE NOT HANGING OUT AT CAMBRIDGE, or at his mansion, Perry and I are talking on the phone. We’re inseparable. He’s crushed, therefore, when I tell him that I’m going away for a month, to play a series of tournaments in Australia. McDonald’s is putting together a team of America’s elite juniors, sending us to play Australia’s best.
A whole month?
I know. But I have no choice. My father.
I’m not being entirely truthful. I’m one of only two twelve-year-olds selected, so I’m honored, excited, if slightly on edge about traveling so far from home--the plane ride is fourteen hours. For Perry’s sake I downplay the trip. I tell him not to worry, I’ll be back in no time, and we’ll have a Chipwich feast.
I fly alone to Los Angeles, and upon landing I want to go straight back to Vegas. I’m scared. I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go or how to find my way through the airport. I feel as if I stick out in my warm-up suit with the McDonald’s Golden Arches on the back and my name on the chest. Now, off in the distance I see a group of kids wearing the same warm-up suit. My team. I approach the one adult in the group and introduce myself.
He flashes a big smile. He’s the coach. My first real coach.
Agassi, he says. The hotshot from Vegas? Hey, glad to have you aboard!
During the flight to Australia, Coach stands in the aisle, telling us how the trip is going to work. We’re going to play five tournaments in five different cities. The most important tournament, however, will be the third, in Sydney. That’s where we’ll pit our best against the best Australians.
There should be five thousand fans in the arena, he says, plus it’s going to be televised throughout Australia.
Talk about pressure.
But here’s the good news, Coach says. Every time you win a tournament, I’ll let you have one cold beer.
I win my first tournament, in Adelaide, no problem, and on the bus Coach hands me an ice-cold Foster’s Lager. I think of Perry and our pact. I think of how strange it is that I’m twelve and being served booze. But the beer can looks so frosty cold, and my teammates are watching. Also, I’m thousands of miles from home—fuck it. I take a sip. Delicious. I drain it in four gulps, then wrestle with my guilty conscience the rest of the afternoon. I stare out the window as the outback crawls by and I wonder how Perry will take the news, if he’ll stop being my friend.
I win three of the next four tournaments. Three more beers. Each more delicious than the last. But with every sip, I taste the bitter dregs of guilt.
PERRY AND I FALL right back into our old routine. Horror movies. Long talks. Cambridge. 7-Eleven. Chipwiches. Every now and then, however, I look at him and feel the weight of my betrayal.
We’re walking from Cambridge to 7-Eleven and I can’t hold it in any longer. The guilt is eating away at me. We’re each wearing headphones plugged into Perry’s Walkman, listening to Prince. Purple Rain. I tap Perry on the shoulder and tell him to take off his headphones.
What’s up?
I don’t know how to say this.
He stares.
What is it?
Perry. I broke our pact.
No.
I had a beer in Australia.
Just one?
Four.
Four!
I look down.
He thinks. He stares off at the mountains. Well, he says, we make choices in life, Andre, and you’ve made yours. I guess that leaves me on my own.
But a few minutes later, he’s curious. He asks how the beers tasted, and again I can’t lie. I tell him they were great. I apologize again, but there’s no point in pretending to be remorseful. Perry’s right--I had a choice, for once, and I made it. Sure, I wish I hadn’t broken our pact, but I can’t feel bad about finally exercising free will.
Perry frowns like a father. Not like my father, or his father, but like a TV father. He looks as if he should be wearing a cardigan sweater and smoking a pipe. I realize that the pact Perry and I made, at its root, was a promise to become each other’s fathers. To raise each other. I apologize once more, and I realize how much I missed Perry while I was gone. I make another pact, with myself, that I won’t leave home again.
MY FATHER ACCOSTS ME IN THE KITCHEN. He says we need to talk. I wonder if he heard about the beer.
He tells me to sit at the table. He sits across from me. An unfinished Norman Rockwell separates us. He describes a story he caught recently on 60 Minutes. It was all about a tennis boarding school on the west coast of Florida, near Tampa Bay. The first school of its kind, my father says. A boot camp for young tennis players, it’s run by a former paratrooper named Nick Bollettieri.
So?
So--you’re going there.
What!
You’re not getting any better here in Las Vegas. You’ve beaten all the local boys. You’ve beaten all the boys in the West. Andre, you’ve beaten all the players at the local college! I have nothing left to teach you.
My father doesn’t say the words, but it’s obvious: he’s determined to do things differently with me. He doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes he made with my siblings. He ruined their games by holding on too long, too tight, and in the process he ruined his relationship with them. Things got so bad with Rita that she’s recently run off with Pancho Gonzalez, the tennis legend, who’s at least thirty years her senior. My father doesn’t want to limit me, or break me, or ruin me. So he’s banishing me. He’s sending me away, partly to protect me from himself.
Andre, he says, you’ve got to eat, sleep, and drink tennis. It’s the only way you’re going to be number one.
I already eat, sleep, and drink tennis.
But he wants me to do my eating, sleeping, and drinking elsewhere.
How much does this tennis academy cost?
About $12,000 a year.
We can’t afford that.
You’re only going for three months. That’s $3,000.
We can’t afford that either.
It’s an investment. In you. We’ll find a way.
I don’t want to go.
I can see from my father’s face it’s settled. End of story.
I try to look on the bright side. It’s only three months. I can take anything for three months. Also, how bad could it be? Maybe it will be like Australia. Maybe it will be fun. Maybe there will be unforeseen benefits. Maybe it will feel like playing for a team.
What about school? I ask. I’m in the middle of seventh grade.
There’s a school in the next town, my father says. You’ll go in the morning, for half a day, then play tennis all afternoon and into the night.
Sounds grueling. A short time later my mother tells me that the 60 Minutes report was actually an exposé on this Bollettieri character, who was in essence running a tennis sweatshop that employed child labor.
THEY GIVE A GOODBYE PARTY for me at Cambridge. Mr. Fong looks glum, Perry looks suicidal, my father looks uncertain. We stand around eating cake. We play tennis with the balloons, then pop them with pins. Everyone pats me on the back and says what a blast I’m going to have.
I know, I say. Can’t wait to mix it up with those Florida kids.
The lie sounds like a deliberate miss, like a ball off the wooden rim of my racket.
As the day of my departure draws closer, I don’t sleep well. I wake up thrashing, sweating, twisted up in the sheets. I can’t eat. All at once the concept of homesickness makes perfect sense. I don’t want to leave my home, my siblings, my mother, my best friend. Despite the tension of my home, the occasional terror, I’d give anything to stay. For all the pain my father has caused me, the one constant has been his presence. He’s always been there, at my back, and now he won’t be. I feel abandoned. I thought the one thing I wanted was to be free of him, and now that he’s sending me away, I’m heartbroken.
I spend my last days at home hoping that my mother will come to my rescue. I look at her imploringly, but she looks back with a face that says: I’ve seen him break three kids. You’re lucky to be getting out while you’re whole.
My father drives me to the airport. My mother wants to go but can’t miss a day of work. Perry takes her place. He doesn’t stop talking the whole way. I can’t decide if he’s trying to cheer me up or himself. It’s only three months, he says. We’ll write letters, postcards. You’ll see, it’s going to be fine. You’re going to learn so much. Maybe I’ll even come visit.
I think about Visiting Hours, the cheesy horror movie we saw the night our friendship was born. Perry is acting now the way he acted then, the way he always reacts to fear—twitching, jumping out of his seat. And I’m reacting in my typical way. A cat thrown into a room full of dogs.
5
THE AIRPORT SHUTTLE pulls into the compound just after sunset. The Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, built on an old tomato farm, is nothing fancy, just a few outbuildings that look like cell blocks. They’re named like cell blocks too: B Building, C Building. I look around, half expecting to find a guard tower and razor wire. More ominously, stretching off into the distance I see row after row of tennis courts.
As the sun sinks beyond the inky black marshes, the temperature plummets. I huddle into my T-shirt. I thought Florida was supposed to be hot. A staff member greets me as I step out of the van and marches me straight to my barracks, which are empty and eerily quiet.
Where is everyone?
Study hall, he says. In a few minutes it’ll be free hour. That’s the hour between study hall and bedtime. Why don’t you go down to the rec center and introduce yourself to the others?
In the rec center I find two hundred wild boys, plus a few toughlooking girls, separated into tight cliques. One of the largest cliques is pressed around a Nerf ping-pong table, screaming insults at two boys playing. I press my back against a wall and scan the room. I recognize a few faces, including one or two from the Australia trip. That kid over there—I played him in California. That evil-looking homey right there—I played a tough three-setter against him in Arizona. Everyone looks talented, supremely confident. The kids are all colors, all sizes, all ages, and from all around the world. The youngest is seven, the oldest nineteen. After ruling Las Vegas my whole life, I’m now a tiny fish in a vast pond. Or marsh. And the biggest of the big fish are the best players in the country--teenage Supermen who form the tightest clique in a far corner.
I try to watch the ping-pong game. Even there I’m outclassed. Back home, nobody could beat me at Nerf ping-pong. Here? Half these guys would cream me.
I can’t imagine how I’ll ever fit in at this joint, how I’ll make friends. I want to go home, right now, or at least phone home, but I’d have to call collect and I know my father wouldn’t accept the charges. Just knowing I can’t hear my mother’s voice, or Philly’s, no matter how much I need to, makes me feel panicky. When free hour ends I hurry back to the barracks and lie on my bunk, waiting to disappear into the black marsh of sleep.
Three months, I tell myself. Just three months.
PEOPLE LIKE TO CALL the Bollettieri Academy a boot camp, but it’s really a glorified prison camp. And not all that glorified. We eat gruel—beige meats and gelatinous stews and gray slop poured over rice—and sleep in rickety bunks that line the plywood walls of our military-style barracks. We rise at dawn and go to bed soon after dinner. We rarely leave, and we have scant contact with the outside world. Like most prisoners we do nothing but sleep and work, and our main rock pile is drills. Serve drills, net drills, backhand drills, forehand drills, with occasional match play to establish the pecking order, strong to weak. Sometimes it feels as though we’re gladiators, preparing underneath the Colosseum. Certainly the thirty-five instructors who bark at us during drills think of themselves as slave drivers.
When we’re not drilling, we’re studying the psychology of tennis. We take classes on mental toughness, positive thinking, and visualization. We’re taught to close our eyes and picture ourselves winning Wimbledon, hoisting that gold trophy above our heads. Then we go to aerobics, or weight training, or out to the crushed-shell track, where we run until we drop.
The constant pressure, the cutthroat competition, the total lack of adult supervision—it slowly turns us into animals. A kind of jungle law prevails. It’s Karate Kid with rackets, Lord of the Flies with forehands. One night two boys get into an argument in the barracks. A white boy and an Asian boy. The white boy uses a racial slur, then walks out. For a full hour the Asian boy stands in the middle of the barracks, stretching, shaking out his legs and arms, rolling his neck. He runs through a progression of judo moves, then carefully, methodically tapes his ankles. When the white boy returns, the Asian boy spins, whipsaws his leg through the air, and unleashes a kick that shatters the white boy’s jaw.
The shocking part is that neither boy gets expelled, which greatly adds to the overall sense of anarchy.
Another two boys have a low-grade, long-running feud. It’s mostly taunts, teases, minor stuff—until one boy ups the ante. For days he urinates and defecates into a bucket. Then, late one night, he bursts into the other boy’s barracks and dumps the bucket on his head.
The jungle feeling, the constant threat of violence and ambush, is reinforced, just before lights out, by the sound of drums in the distance.
I ask one of the boys: What the hell is that?
Oh. That’s just Courier. He likes to pound a drum set his parents sent him.
Who?
Jim Courier. From Florida.
Within days I get my first glimpse of the warden, founder, and owner of the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. He’s fiftysomething, but looks 250, because tanning is one of his obsessions, along with tennis and getting married. (He’s got five or six ex-wives, no one is quite sure.) He’s soaked up so much sun, baked himself so deeply beneath so many ultraviolet sunlamps, he’s permanently altered his pigmentation. The one portion of his face that isn’t the color of beef jerky is his mustache, a black, meticulously trimmed quasi-goatee, only without the chin hair, so it looks like a permanent frown. I see Nick striding across the compound, an angry red man in wraparound shades, berating someone who jogs alongside, trying to keep pace, and I pray that I never have to deal with Nick directly. I watch as he slides into a red Ferrari and zooms away, leaving a dorsal fin of dust in his wake.
A boy tells me it’s our job to keep Nick’s four sports cars washed and polished.
Our job? That’s bullshit.
Tell it to the judge.
I ask some of the older boys, some of the veterans, about Nick. Who is he? What makes him tick? They say he’s a hustler, a guy who makes a very nice living off tennis, but he doesn’t love the game or even know it all that well. He’s not like my father, captivated by the angles and numbers and beauty of tennis. Then again, he’s just like my father. He’s captivated by cash. He’s a guy who flunked the exam for Navy pilots, dropped out of law school, then landed one day on the idea of teaching tennis. Stepped in shit. Through a bit of hard work, and a ton of luck, he’s turned himself into this image of a tennis titan, mentor to prodigies. You can learn a few things from him, the other kids say, but he’s no miracle worker.
He doesn’t sound like a guy who can make me stop hating the game.
I’M PLAYING A PRACTICE MATCH, putting a fairly good whooping on a kid from the East Coast, when I become aware that Gabriel, one of Nick’s henchmen, is behind me, staring.
After a few more points Gabriel stops the match. He asks, Has Nick seen you play yet?
No, sir.
He frowns, walks off.
Later, over the loudspeaker that carries across all the courts of the Bollettieri Academy, I hear:
Andre Agassi to the indoor supreme court! Andre Agassi, report to the indoor supreme court--immediately!
I’ve never been to the indoor supreme court, and I can’t imagine there’s a good reason for my being summoned now. I run there and find Gabriel and Nick, standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting.
Gabriel says to Nick: You’ve got to see this kid hit.
Nick strolls off into the shadows. Gabriel gets on the other side of the net. He puts me through drills for half an hour. I sneak occasional glances over my shoulder: I can vaguely make out the silhouette of Nick, concentrating, stroking his mustache.
Hit some backhands, Nick says. His voice is like sandpaper on Velcro.
I do as I’m told. I hit backhands.
Now hit some serves.
I serve.
Come to the net.
I come to the net.
That’s enough.
He steps forward. Where are you from?
Las Vegas.
What’s your national ranking?
Number three.
How do I reach your father?
He’s at work. He works nights at the MGM.
How about your mother?
At this hour? She’s probably at home.
Come with me.
We walk slowly to his office, where he asks for my home number. He’s sitting in a tall black leather chair, turned almost away from me. My face feels redder than his face looks. He dials and speaks to my mother. She gives him my father’s number. He dials again.
He’s yelling. Mr. Agassi! Nick Bollettieri here! Right, right. Yes, well, listen to me. I’m going to tell you something very important. Your boy has more talent than anybody I’ve ever seen come through this academy. That’s right. Ever. And I’m going to take him to the top.
What the hell is he talking about? I’m only here for three months. I’m leaving here in sixty-four days. Is Nick saying he wants me to stay here? Live here—forever? Surely my father won’t go for that.
Nick says: That’s right. No, that’s no issue. I’m going to make it so you won’t pay a penny. Andre can stay, free of charge. I’m tearing up your check.
My heart sinks. I know my father can’t resist anything free. My fate is sealed.
Nick hangs up and spins toward me in his chair. He doesn’t explain. He doesn’t console. He doesn’t ask if this is what I want. He doesn’t say a thing besides: Go back out to the courts.
The warden has tacked several years to my sentence, and there’s nothing to be done but pick up my hammer and return to the rock pile.
EVERY DAY AT THE BOLLETTIERI ACADEMY starts with the stench. The surrounding hills are home to several orange-processing plants, which give off a toxic smell of burned orange peels. It’s the first thing that hits me when I open my eyes, a reminder that this is real, I’m not back in Vegas, I’m not in my deuce-court bed, dreaming. I’ve never cared much for orange juice, but after the Bollettieri Academy I’ll never be able to look at a gallon of Minute Maid again.
As the sun clears the marshes, burning off the morning mist, I hurry to beat the other boys into the shower, because only the first boys get hot water. Actually, it’s not a shower, just a tiny nozzle that shoots a narrow jet of painful needles, which hardly gets you wet, let alone clean. Then we all rush to breakfast, served in a cafeteria so chaotic, it’s like a mental hospital where the nurses forgot to hand out the meds. But you’d better get there early or it might be worse. The butter will be filled with everyone else’s crumbs, the bread will be gone, the plastic eggs will be ice.
Straight from breakfast we board a bus for school, Bradenton Academy, twenty-six minutes away. I divide my time between two academies, both prisons, but Bradenton Academy makes me more claustrophobic, because it makes less sense. At the Bollettieri Academy, at least I’m learning something about tennis. At Bradenton Academy, the only thing I learn is that I’m stupid.
Bradenton Academy has warped floors, dirty carpets, and a color scheme that’s fourteen shades of gray. There isn’t one window in the building, so the light is fluorescent and the air is stale, filled with a medley of foul odors, chiefly vomit, toilet, and fear. It’s almost worse than the scorched-orange smell back at the Bollettieri Academy.
Other kids, non-tennis kids from town, don’t seem to mind. Some actually thrive at Bradenton Academy, maybe because their life schedules are manageable. They don’t balance school with careers as semipro athletes. They don’t contend with waves of homesickness that rise and fall like nausea. They spend seven hours a day in class, then go home to eat dinner and watch TV with their families. Those of us who commute from the Bollettieri Academy, however, spend four and a half hours in class, then board the bus for the long slog back to our full-time jobs, hitting balls until after dusk, at which time we collapse in heaps on our wooden bunks, to grab a half hour of rest before returning to the original state of nature that is the rec center. Then we nod over our textbooks for a few futile hours before free hour and lights out. We’re always behind on schoolwork and falling ever further behind. The system is rigged, guaranteed to produce bad students as quickly and efficiently as it produces good tennis players.
I don’t like anything that’s rigged, so I don’t give much effort. I don’t study. I don’t do homework. I don’t pay attention. And I don’t give a damn. In every class I sit quietly at my desk, staring at my feet, wishing I were somewhere else, while the teacher drones on about Shakespeare or Bunker Hill or the Pythagorean theorem.
The teachers don’t care that I’ve tuned them out, because I’m one of Nick’s Boys, and they don’t want to cross Nick. Bradenton Academy exists because the Bollettieri Academy keeps sending it a bus full of paying customers every semester. The teachers know that their jobs depend on Nick, so they can’t flunk us, and we cherish our special status. We feel a lordly sense of entitlement, never realizing that the thing to which we’re most entitled is the thing we’re not getting—an education.
Inside the metal front doors of Bradenton Academy stands the office, the nerve center of the school and the source of much pain. Report cards and threatening letters emanate from the office. Bad boys are sent there. The office is also the lair of Mrs. G and Doc G, married coprincipals of Bradenton Academy, and, I suspect, frustrated sideshow performers. Mrs. G is a gangly woman with no midsection. She looks as if her shoulders have been set directly on her hips. She tries to disguise this odd shape by wearing skirts, but this only accentuates the problem. On her face she wears two gobs of blush and one smear of lipstick, a symmetrical triad of three circles that she color-coordinates the way other people do their shoes and belt. Her cheeks and mouth always match, and always almost distract you from the hump in her back. Nothing Mrs. G wears, however, can distract you from her gargantuan hands. She has mitts the size of rackets, and the first time she shakes my hand I think I might faint.
Old Doc G is half her size but has just as many body issues. It’s not hard to see what they first found in common. Frail, gamy, Doc G has a right arm that’s been shriveled since birth. He ought to hide this arm, keep it behind his back or shoved in a pocket. Instead he waves it around, brandishes it like a weapon. He likes to take students aside for one-on-one chats, and whenever he does so, he swings his bad arm up onto the student’s shoulder, setting it there until he’s said his piece. If this doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, nothing will. Doc G’s arm feels like a pork tenderloin lying on your shoulder, and hours later you can still feel it there and you can’t help but shiver.
Mrs. G and Doc G have instituted dozens of rules at Bradenton Academy, and one of the most strictly enforced is their ban on jewelry. Thus, I go out of my way to pierce my ears. It’s an easy show of rebellion, which, as I see it, is my last resort. Rebellion is the one thing I get to choose every day, and this rebellion comes with the added bonus that it represents a neat little fuck-you to my father, who’s always hated earrings on men. Many times I’ve heard my father say that earrings equal homosexuality. I can’t wait for him to see mine. (I buy both studs and dangly hoops.) He’ll finally regret sending me thousands of miles from home and leaving me here to be corrupted.
I make a feeble and insincere effort to hide my new accessory, wrapping a Band-Aid around it. Mrs. G notices, of course, just as I hoped she would. She pulls me out of class and confronts me.
Mr. Agassi, what is the meaning of that bandage?
I hurt my ear.
Hurt your--? Don’t be ridiculous. Remove that Band-Aid.
I pull off the Band-Aid. She sees the stud and gasps.
We do not allow earrings at Bradenton Academy, Mr. Agassi. The next time I see you, I will expect the Band-Aid gone and the earring out.
By the end of the first semester I’m close to failing all my classes. Except English. I show a strange aptitude for literature, especially poetry. Memorizing famous poems, writing original poems, it comes easily to me. We’re assigned to write a short verse about our daily lives and I set mine proudly on the teacher’s desk. She likes it. She reads it aloud in class. Some of the other kids later ask me to ghostwrite their homework. I dash off their assignments on the bus, no problem. The English teacher detains me after class and says I have real talent. I smile. It’s different from being told by Nick that I have talent. This feels like something I’d like to pursue. For a moment I imagine what it would be like to do something besides playing tennis—something I choose. Then I go to my next class, math, and the dream dies in a cloud of algebra formulae. I’m not cut out to be a scholar. The math teacher’s voice sounds as if it’s coming from miles away. The next class, French, is worse. I’m très stupide. I transfer to Spanish, where I’m muy estúpido. Spanish, I think, might actually shorten my life. The boredom, the confusion, might cause me to expire in my chair. They will find me one day in my seat, muerto.
Gradually school goes from being hard to being physically harmful. The anxiety of boarding the bus, the twenty-six-minute ride, the inevitable confrontation with Mrs. G or Doc G, actually make me ill. What I dread most is the moment, the daily moment, when I’m exposed as a loser. An academic loser. So great is this dread that over time Bradenton Academy modifies my view of the Bollettieri Academy. I look forward to all those drills, and even the high-pressure tournaments, because at least I’m not at school.
Thanks to one particularly big tournament, I miss a major history test at Bradenton Academy, a test I was sure to fail. I celebrate this dodging of a bullet by eviscerating my opponents. But when I return to school my teacher says I have to take a makeup.
The injustice. I skulk down to the office for the makeup test. Along the way I duck into a dark corner and prepare a cheat sheet, which I stash in my pocket.
There is only one other student in the office, a red-haired girl with a fat, sweaty face. She doesn’t blink, doesn’t register my presence in any way. She seems to be in a coma. I fill out the test, fast, copying from my cheat sheet. Suddenly I feel a pair of eyes on me. I look up, and the redhaired girl is out of her coma, staring. She closes her book and strolls out. Quickly I shove the cheat sheet into the crotch of my underwear. I tear another sheet of paper from my notebook and, imitating a girlish handwriting, I write: I think you’re cute! Give me a call! I shove the paper in my front pocket just as Mrs. G storms in.
Pencil down, she says.
What’s up, Mrs. G?
Are you cheating?
On what? This? If I were going to cheat on something it wouldn’t be this. I’ve got this history stuff down cold. Valley Forge. Paul Revere. Piece of cake.
Empty your pockets.
I lay out a few coins, a pack of gum, the note from my imaginary admirer. Mrs. G picks up the note and reads under her breath.
I say, I’m thinking about what I should write back. Any ideas?
She scowls, walks out. I pass the test and chalk it up as a moral victory.
