Adam Selzer Read Free Page A

“activity period.” The first week of school, we’d each signed up for an activity. Most people had signed up for team sports or Ping-Pong, and a couple of the truly sick had signed up for “good grooming.”
    I’d gotten my homeroom teacher’s permission to sign up for the advanced studies activity, which was a fancy way of saying “the smart class.” This really should have seemed un-cool, but it wasn’t, because I knew it would just be all the kids from the gifted pool who met with an old bat named Mrs. Smollet once a week. It was kind of fun; we sat in the couches that had been set up, and while we were supposed to be doing brain teasers or crossword puzzles or something like that, we made it our business to try to bug the crap out of Mrs. Smollet, who was kind of a goody-goody religious type and was a little bit afraid of us. I’m not sure where they came up with a name like “gifted pool.” It’s the kind of name only a teacher at the end of his or her rope could have devised.
    Now, on TV or in the movies, whenever the main character is a boy genius or something, the smart classes are made up of dorks who tuck their shirts into their underwear, do math in their heads, and might actually sign up for the good grooming activity. In reality, our advanced classes and gifted pools were always made up of a bunch of miscreant kids who just happened to read books from the adult section of the library. Many of us even read newspapers. That was all. The real dorks weren’t smart enough to get in.
    My activity group was meeting in the media immersion room, which is what they called the room that used to be called the library. During the previous couple of years, they’d added a whole bunch of new computers and other high-tech stuff and changed the name, but it was basically the same place.
    I saw right away that the advanced studies activity was the usual band of troublemakers, all sitting in chairs that had been arranged in a circle. There was James Cole, who spoke fluent French and was the first kid in school to smoke pot. Next to him was Dustin Eddlebeck, who had graduated from writing naughty limericks on the bathroom walls to writing naughty sonnets, which were much longer. Then there was Edie Scaduto, the school communist, sitting next to Brian Carlson, her boyfriend, who was really into fire, and a handful of other kids I didn’t know quite as well. If it wasn’t for the fact that we were gifted-pool kids, I’m sure the school would have gone to great lengths to keep us far away from each other at all times. I guess you could say we had a pretty good scam going.
    My friend Anna was already there, too. She had cut her blond hair to her shoulders—it used to be down to her butt—but I decided not to mention it. She hated it when people rambled on about her long hair.
    “Hey, Anna,” I said, sitting down next to her, and enough chairs away from Brian Carlson that I didn’t have to worry about getting my shoelaces set on fire. “How was your summer?”
    “Pleasurable,” she said.
    Anna is the one person in school who has weirder parents than mine. They were in college for about twenty years each and probably know just about everything in the world. Her dad is a professor of something or other in the city, and her mother occasionally flies to Europe to see if some painting that turned up at a flea market in Amsterdam is actually a Cézanne or just a fake—I suppose you could say she’s like an art detective. The one time I’ve been in Anna’s house, when I went to deliver homework to her when she was sick, there were framed prints of weird paintings all over the walls and incense burning on the kitchen table, and she called her parents by their first names. And her father had a bookshelf covering one entire wall, filled with books about the eighteenth century. There were a whole bunch of musical instruments in the living room, and apparently Anna’s parents play all of them and have made Anna take