C, Plus

Continued

Vowing to destroy someone was exactly the kind of thing that C would do, as I learned the following year when our elementary schools graduated us into the same junior high.After a few months, we had somehow become friends, which meant that I witnessed a number of daring evasions, as well as the schemes that necessitated them. Once, when my mother came to pick a bunch of us up from school, all of my other friends and I clambered in and found ourselves waiting for C.Last anyone had seen him, he had been darting through the school halls, with a sizable bully in lumbering pursuit.Bored, we watched the double doors to the building, and at last they burst open to reveal C beaming triumphantly (and unharmed) from a wheelchair pushed by the school nurse, the bully fuming in impotent rage as he rolled safely past. “What is wrong with that kid?” my mother muttered exasperatedly as she started the van, and she wasn’t talking about the bully.

Another time, when a pack of us had secured our parents’ permission to go to the movies and were waiting for our show to begin, C called out (for no reason I can recall) to a much older, bigger teenager surrounded by his own friends, “Hey buddy, has science figured out a name for you yet?”It took some fast talking by another friend of ours to keep C's limbs attached to his body; specifically, I think he told the big guy that C was mentally retarded.

By far C's most successful scheme that seventh grade year was his invention of an aristocracy.One day he simply assigned titles to all of his friends—mine was Countess of Calculations.We were in Miss D’s biology class, and my lab partner, who had known and been irritated by C since infancy, was suddenly begging for a better title.Even the bully who had stood fuming by the door of the school as the wheelchair rolled by was imploring him for an improvement to his station.

The next year, he discovered the music to The Phantom of the Opera.He found in the story of the outcast virtuoso some exposition of the world he, an eighth grader at Memorial High School, inhabited.He learned the music by heart and regularly invoked its themes and phrases, his favorite of which was, “SO!It is to be war between us!”He declared war on O, a small, fretful, argumentative boy, and on various other kids at different times that year.By that time, I was, if not an ally, at least permitted my neutrality.

And so it went, with C smilingly visiting war on all those who were conventional, unreasonable, or irritatingly slow.The particular targets of his wrath were the teachers who pressed boring or pointless assignments on us. Our ninth-grade English teacher forced us to read an abridged version of A Tale of Two Cities, and when she discovered that I had in my bookbag the unabridged version (why miss out?), she held it up and said to the class, "Ohh--our book isn't good enough for Tara!" C had discovered a powder that produced green slime when hydrated, and he sprinkled it generously into the water fountain outside her classroom so that the drain erupted in slime when anyone turned it on.One day, the principal stalked the halls determined to identify the culprit, and our favorite teacher, Mrs. H., pretended not to know who it was.She enjoyed him even as she was appalled by the sagging, stained backpack full of crumpled papers into which he would reach when she asked for our history homework.I don’t know whether he did much homework that year; of course, I did all of mine, a habit he tolerated in me with a touch of sympathy, as one would regard a limp, a twitch.

I remember everything (except how we became friends, strangely enough); these moments form some of my most vivid memories from that period of my life.It may seem odd that they feature somebody else as the star actor, but I think my own character was formed against C’s in some important ways.He did things I would never do: He jumped out of his chair in geography class to declare “Busted!” when disproving an answer that our teacher had accepted from a favorite student, a giggling, blushing girl. He licked a trashcan for a dime, or for the notoriety (not one of his finer moments).Nobody knew quite what to make of him.Of all the ways we deal at that precarious age with our loneliness, the heartbreaking discovery of our separateness, his exuberant defiance seemed for many years to me dazzling, unforgettable.