I’d heard quite a few fifty-dollar words for the problem of Demon. I asked Mr. Armstrong if he was wanting to put me on meds for that.
“It’s not something to fix,” he said. “It means strong. Outside of all expectation.”
I looked at him. He looked at me. His hands were on his desk with the fingers touching, a tiny cage with air inside. Black hands. The knuckles almost blue-black. Silver wedding ring. He said, “You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I’m saying you are that driver.”
He was not from here, he had the northern accent. Draee-ver walks out a-laeeve. I could still understand him though. “You’re saying I’m lucky.”
“Are you lucky, if a drunk comes at you through a stop sign and totals your vehicle?”
“No.”
“No, you are not. You got the wreck you didn’t ask for. And you walked out of it.”
I kind of shrugged him off.
“Well, that’s how it looks to me. I see you here in my office. Showing up. Not out there someplace else trying to smash something or put a bullet in it or set it on fire.”
I smiled, recalling Swap-Out and myself doing those exact three things to a deer head trophy in the garbage pile one time. Ten-point buck, in perfect condition before we had our way with it. Because Jesus, those glass eyes. But Mr. Armstrong was not smiling. He said he’d been advised of my classroom performance. But that people often know more than the teachers are able to measure with their tests. His job was to figure out what those things are, using other methods.
I said if he was aiming to torture me, I’d just confess right off the top: I hated school.
He nodded. “Understandably. Can you tell me what you like?”
Helping with football practice, but I wasn’t giving that up to this guy. He’d probably take it away. I said I couldn’t think of anything I liked doing that was legal for twelve-year-olds.
“So you’re thinking life will get better in the years ahead.”
“Well yeah.”
He nodded. “I hear that.”
Did he mean he heard me, or just that all kids say this, I couldn’t guess. He was soft and hard at the same time, eyes like melted chocolate. No meanness to him. But he’s not giving you a damn thing here if you won’t go first. Heavy glasses, button shirt, more spiffed out than the usual for teachers. Or else a white collar looks that way on black skin. Not something you see much in Lee County. We were used to NBA or rappers on TV, rich guys with gold in their teeth.
Just by waiting me out, he got a few things off me. That I liked to draw. He asked if he could see some of my so-called work, and I said not at this time. Lately I’d been studying on the human form, aka this girl in all my classes they called Hot Sauce that sat in a chair the way ice cream melts. Soft porn basically. He gave me a pass, but said he would need to see some drawings by the end of the week, no excuses. Like it was an assignment.
That freaked me out. I went through all the notebooks I still had, going back as far as Creaky Farm and the every-night comics of Fast Man saving the kids. Nothing for a teacher to see. I got nervous, then pissed off, and then thought fine, the man wants to get in my skullbox, here you go. I brought him superhero shit. Kids getting saved. He studied over my drawings like he’s reading the damn paper, then said he had some assessments for me to do. I thought, Good, we’re almost done here: more tests, more Titanic of Demon going down in a shit ocean.
Wrong. The ones he gave me were all picture tests. Example: here’s some connected squares that are an unfolded box, pick which box it would be after you put it back together. Pages and pages of this crap, so easy it’s like a game. It was the only test I’d finished in forever. I thought it was a warmup for the real tests. Wrong again. Mr. Armstrong tricked me. These were the special ones they use for Gifted and Talented, which he said I was. Which is ridiculous. All the sudden he’s talking about what catching up I’ll have to do, and if I move into this track in middle school, I can take art class in high school instead of making birdhouses in shop.
I was pretty upset about it. Getting used to all new everything was screwing with my head. Clothes, people, house. The one thing I could still count on was being an idiot. Now I was supposed to trash what little there was left of Demon and be smart. Would I still be me? And the main question: Can a Gifted and Talented play football? Doubtful. But Mr. Armstrong moved me into the better English class and signed me up for math tutoring, which turned out to be just me and six righteously hot girls, so I decided what the hell. Next year I’d be on down the road in some other placement and school, where nobody would know how smart I ever was or wasn’t.