1
NORMAL
Wait. That wasn’t a very normal place to start a story, was it?
I’ve been working really hard on this normal thing. It’s pretty much become my whole focus in life. But it’s turned out to be something I’m quite bad at. And I have no idea why, because I’m a completely normal kid.
But for some reason I have a hard time getting others to agree. Look, this is me in school trying to throw a note to my best friend, Simon. I’m faking a yawn and pretending to scratch my armpit as I launch the note because I need to get it way over to the other side of the room now that Miss Chips moved Simon as far away from me as possible.
Simon was part of my new plan to achieve normality. It was a bold plan, considering my old plan for normality was doing nothing. I was under the impression that the best way to be average was to just keep your head down and mouth shut and coast along in the middle. But nope. Turns out that just makes you sink to the bottom.
When I moved to this new school a few months ago I thought maybe I’d have a fresh chance at normalness. Nope again. The bottom has a distinct reek to it, and my Cross Creek Middle School classmates sniffed me out on day one. Somebody had already called me “Under-smelly” before I’d even reached my chair.
To make things worse, since our move to this new neighborhood there’ve been a number of additional uncooperative developments. The kind of developments that are decidedly unhelpful to a kid who has made “being normal” his primary goal. I don’t know why, but weird things seem to be drawn to me. It’s like weird things sense where other weird things already are and then just pile on, like some kind of snowball effect. Except something less pleasant than snow. A mud-ball effect. And let me tell you, it’s no fun at the bottom. Everything lands on you.
So about a month ago, I decided that instead of continuing to do nothing, I was going to make some moves. I came up with a checklist of things that regular kids did: Talk. Belong to groups. Live in a regular-looking house. I recently heard it was normal for seventh graders to have crushes on girls, so I developed one of those. I picked Becky Binkey, the girl everyone else already has a crush on, just to be as normal as possible about that too.
And have a best friend. I picked Simon. He was a good choice because he was right around the mid-level I was aiming for. I was in no way looking for actual popularity. That would be like a caterpillar wanting to be an airplane. I just wanted to be, say, a moth. That’s what Simon was—a plain, simple moth. He offered me a piece of gum one day and we’ve been best friends ever since.
But Miss Chips had made Simon move to the other side of the room, which made me have to throw notes. Miss Chips had just finished giving us an assignment. We had to interview someone who we thought was “The Most Interesting Person You Know.” Everyone grumbled because kids hate assignments, and I grumbled the loudest just to be even more normal than everyone else.
This was a “make-work” assignment, which is a term I’d picked up from Simon.Simon was a “Brainer,” so liked to learn things. Miss Chips hated her job, so didn’t like to teach things. She’d give us assignments like this one that didn’t require any preparation on her part. Sometimes she even got us to mark each other’s assignments so she didn’t even have to do that, a system that was ripe for injustices. One of the Brainers asked who’d be marking things this time, and Miss Chips said she would. Ed yelled, “Then I pick you, Miss Chips!” and the class burst into laughs.
“I pick Principal Wiggins!” I shouted, but nobody laughed, even though it was the exact same joke. I can’t stand Ed. Ed is a jock and he’s super popular and all the girls love him. He’s also my bully. I didn’t have it on my checklist, but having a bully is another thing some regular kids have.
“Are you sure you don’t want to pick your girlfriend, Magda?” Ted said to me, and the class erupted again. Ted is also a jock and super popular and all the girls love him. And he’s my backup bully. I don’t know how normal it is to have a backup bully, but Ted is almost a carbon copy of Ed, so if one of them is sick or something, I’m covered.
Being on the receiving end of a lot of jokes, I’d figured out one way to get more popular was to make people laugh. But it soon became clear that I’m not good at making jokes. So I got a joke book. I used to tell jokes from the book to Simon when he sat beside me, and he loved them, even though he wouldn’t be able to laugh because he might get in trouble. He’d squirm uncomfortably without smiling and do a really good job of holding the laugh in.
Jokes that were made at someone else’s expense seemed to get big reactions. So I scribbled one out on a piece of paper:
Then I crumpled it into a ball and did my fake-yawn-armpit-scratch thing and let it fly toward Simon. But I put so much effort into my theatrics that my aim was off, and it landed on the desk of Magda.
If you want to see someone who isn’t normal, check out Magda. She always dresses in black and her hair looks like a melted package of licorice and her eyes are like two ping-pong balls floating in cups of oil. Her primary interests are talking to herself, and ghosts. She’s the only person in the school who associating with would cause me to sink even lower. So of course she’s always trying to talk to me. Like I said, weird things seem to find me. I’m not even going to risk drawing a picture of her.
Magda picked up the note and looked at me with her little ping-pong eyes and smiled. Oh no, I thought. She thinks the note is for her!
I pointed vigorously at Simon, and she made a “Wha—?” face, so I pointed more vigorously at Simon and she pointed at Becky Binkey and mouthed the word “Her?” and then at Ed and mouthed “Him?” and then at several other kids. By the time I was jabbing my finger toward Simon like I was doing a shadow puppet of an angry woodpecker, I realized she was pranking me, and that I’d drawn the attention of my surrounding classmates.
“Geez, Underbelly, at least wait till after class to start interviewing your girlfriend,” said Ed. Another eruption of laughs.
“She’s not my girlfriend!” I shouted over the laughs. Lousy Ed. What I should have done was turn the comedic tables against him and said something like “Maybe she’s your girlfriend!”
“Underbelly,” said Miss Chips without looking up, and the laughter halted abruptly. Miss Chips had the world-weariness of someone who had been through several wars and the crustiness of someone who could have won them all single-handedly.
“Quit passing notes to your girlfriend,” she droned, as if simply echoing fragments of things that had recently invaded her ears. Another round of laughs, which caused me to panic and respond defensively with the last thing I had teed up in my mouth: “Maybe she’s your girlfriend!”—which didn’t work at all. The laughs accelerated, but they were still aimed at me. Humor is like a soccer ball. It’s hard to get it to go in the direction you want it to.
“Magda,” said Miss Chips, rubbing her temples. “Read what’s on the paper.” For someone who never lifted her head, she had pretty amazing perception.
Magda uncrumpled the paper. “Hmmm … seems to be a drawing of Ed and Ted…”
“What—?” I stammered. “Ed and—? It’s not—”
“Yeah, it says it right here: ‘Who’s got four thumbs and four butts? Ed and Ted.’ The implication being that their heads are also butts.”
The class laughed a little, but it wasn’t a pure laugh. It was more the laugh of a group of people about to witness something bad happening to someone whose welfare was of minimal consequence to them. There was a built-in problem with jokes that were at someone else’s expense: they potentially caused manslaughter.
“That wasn’t even meant for her, Miss Chips!” I said, my face now streaked with sweat. “It was meant for Simon! And I wouldn’t have had to throw notes if you hadn’t moved him to the other side of the room!”
Miss Chips seemed to suddenly remember she was in a classroom full of kids. “I didn’t move anybody! But I’m going to move you to the roof if you cause any more disturbance! Now put that note in the trash!”
Dang creepy Magda! This was all her fault! Her ping-pong eyes glimmered at me as I took the note from her desk. I cast a look toward Simon as I headed to the trash can, but he slunk down in his chair, avoiding eye contact. Good play, Simon. No sense calling Miss Chips out on her lie about moving your seat away from mine and risk both of us getting in trouble because of our friendship and our love of jokes.
Ed and Ted glared at me as I passed. “Who’s got two thumbs and one butt?” said Ed.
“That’s about to be dangling from a goalpost?” said Ted.
I glumly pointed my thumbs at myself as I shuffled past. Could the day get any worse?
That’s when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. A familiar shape, drawn on the outside of the window next to my desk. It was the shape of a crown. Drawn in mud.
I reached under the window with my shirtsleeve and smeared it away. Great. Now I was going to die with mud all over my shirt.
Copyright © 2019 by Paul Gilligan