The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin Read Free

for a little while, me giving everybody a chance like good old Mom had suggested. His last name is Smiley, which makes me laugh. Then he asks for and receives my screen name so we can chat online sometime.
    “ C-A-N Y-O-U B-E-L-I-E-V-E T-H-E-M ?” he asks me, pointing a thumb toward Pat and Prefontaine. I shake my head.
    And then Miss Prefontaine catches Devon and me signing to one another. She says something to the class that I don’t see. Maybe: “Well, well, well, it seems our hefty deaf newcomer and Mr. Smiley are an item.” Hopefully
not
.
    Now there’s a disturbing soundless chorus of shaking faces. A girl named Marie is scribbling something down. What is she, a reporter? Is the alleged romance between me and Devon Smiley going to be front-page news in the
Coaler Chronicle?
Beautiful Leigha is laughing. At me. Pat Chambers and his football friends are punching and slapping each other happily.Pat actually laughs so hard that he literally falls off his chair in his unbridled glee. Damn.
    I make another addition to my notebook: STAY AWAY FROM SMILEY GUY. If he is at the bottom of the food chain, so low that even teachers and C-listers rip on him, Devon is someone I can’t
afford
to be seen with. I spend the rest of the class with my head down learning very little math. Finally, the bell rings (sound-impaired discriminators!). Time for lunch.

CHAPTER FOUR
    I sort of want to skip lunch and find somewhere to be alone and clear my head, but I am freaking hungry. It has been, after all, about two hours since I last ate. And, besides, who among us can pass up the culinary delights offered in a high school cafetorium? This is a strong draw despite the well-documented and universally known social horrors of high school lunch. Who do I sit next to? What if I can’t find a seat? What if I spill Sloppy Joes on my special first-day outfit?
    My plan B is to smuggle my food into the bathroom, hole up in a stall, and eat atop the toilet like a smack-shooting junkie. Crap. It seems this will be thwarted by a large, shiny-headed bald man patrolling the perimeter of the cafetorium. Name badge check: Mr. Yankowski, a teacher. Yanky-Wanky seems to take his duty as lunch proctor as a sacred sojourn, prowling around like an attack dog aching to pounce. Thisgoes in my notebook: YANKOWSKI = YANKY-WANKY = LORD SHINY-HEAD OF THE CAF.
    I really feel like I just need a minute to collect myself, but it’s too crowded to hide out solo in a corner. God, where do I go? I know there isn’t going to be a big table filled with cool deaf people to sit with. I’m not that dumb. Or am I? What am I doing here?
    I plop down at the edge of a table with a few open seats and look around furtively. Bodies turn from me as if we are oppositely charged magnets. Chairs scoot. Eyes avert. Chatty people are everywhere. It can be really overwhelming for a lip-reader to be in such a hivelike atmosphere. See, I can’t turn off my ability to read lips, so it is like “hearing” a thousand conversations at once. A million voices, snippets, and fragments overlapping—getting lost, then standing out, then getting lost again. Someone says, “Wasn’t that test terrible?” But I can’t see/hear the response of the person she’s talking to, so I read as response the non sequitur from the guy next to her: “Tim’s the balls on drums!”
    It’s like watching TV while someone else works the remote. No, better yet: imagine yourself sitting in a room with a hundred TVs turned up loud while you whirl around on a Sit& Spin at a dizzying speed, trying to follow the plot. The only way to not totally lose my head is to intently focus on one person and—here’s the trick—not get caught. Most folks aren’t too keen on having a big deaf fatty eyeballing them. I’d love to be wrong about this, but it is unlikely.
    I scan the room for someone interesting. Immediately infront of me is my classmate from math, Dwight Carlson. It is sort of fun watching him try to figure