Adam Selzer Read Free

choices and discussing them with my friends, I’d decided on “Back in Black,” by AC/DC. I was originally going to go with “Stairway to Heaven,” which seemed like an obvious choice, but “Stairway” starts off pretty slow. “Back in Black” cuts right into the loud electric guitar riff at the very beginning.
    I had a CD consisting of only that song in my dresser, which I’d made a long time before just for this occasion. I dug it out, stuck it in the stereo, and hit Play.
    Exactly one unbelievably loud guitar chord came out of all of the speakers on the wall. I swear the house shook a bit, and I imagine that all the birds in the trees probably flew away in one big flock, like they do when a gun goes off in the movies but the director doesn’t want to show anybody getting shot. But after that one chord, there was a big pop and a bunch of sparks. Most of the sparks were little ones around the speakers, but there was a big one by the electrical outlet where the stereo was plugged in. Then the music stopped, and the lights went out, and all the appliances in the room went dead. Not just the stereo, but the clock radio, the lamp, and the beat-up TV I had that only worked for video games. Apparently I’d blown a fuse or two. All the electricity in the house appeared to be out.
    Five seconds later, through the buzzing in my ears, I heard the voice of my father downstairs.
    “Eureka!” he shouted.

Weekends in the summer are always lame. Weekdays settle into a nice routine in which all the regular reruns are on and my parents aren’t home, but everything gets messed up on the weekends. The best part about being back in school was that my weekends went back to normal. Well, normal for a kid in a house full of escaped mental patients, anyway.
    My father got back to normal (for him) right away, too. At first he was really disappointed when he found out that the electricity going off had been my doing, not his, but after a while, he decided that he was proud of me.
    “My son,” he said, in his best fatherly voice, “some parents might be furious that their child blew a fuse with heavy metal, but I’m not one of those. I’m proud of you. You were trying to invent something, in a way. Even if it didn’t work, it’s a very noble endeavor to try to invent something.”
    I would have been happier if he’d just been furious. I’m pretty sure he was just relieved that I hadn’t blown up most of the house. In any case, I put the wall of sound project on the back burner for a while.
    The weekend passed as quickly as most weekends do, and on Monday morning it was time for school to start back up, and Monday came and went, but it was Tuesday that I was looking forward to. The midweek mornings were different.
    Starting the second week, on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings, instead of homeroom, all of the sixth and seventh graders went to “advisory,” where they sat around and talked about heavy issues like drugs, drinking, and teen pregnancy. I had been convinced, back when I started sixth grade, that advisory would be boring, and had been further convinced that there wouldn’t be anything covered in class that we hadn’t seen a hundred times on after-school specials.
    But there had always been rumors that middle school sex ed, which was part of advisory, involved actual photographs, so I couldn’t help looking forward to it a little bit. Not that I didn’t know what naked people looked like or anything—I had the Internet, after all—but that wasn’t quite the same as getting to see them in class. But it turned out that I had been right all along; there was nothing in the class we hadn’t all heard a thousand times before, and all of the pictures in sex ed were lame diagrams and line drawings.
    While I understood that they still taught the same class under the name “health” at the high school, for some reason they gave us a break in eighth grade, and instead of advisory, we’d be going to