The Schernoff Discoveries Read Free Page A

want to put in too little and have them not be affected and I wasn’t sure how much it would take to make it really dramatic.”
    I had an uncle with problems who used that kind of laxative. He would take one little square and the effect was very dramatic.
    “There are twelve doses per box,” I said.
    He nodded.
    “You gave thirty-three football players over … let’s see … over four hundred doses of laxative?”
    “Five hundred and sixteen,” he said, nodding. “
Exactly
. But the coach will probably eat some as well, which will lessen the dose level slightly.”
    “Harold, you could kill them!”
    He shook his head. “Hardly. There probably won’t be a football game tonight, and I imagine they will spend an extreme amount of time in the bathroom and no doubt lose some weight. They may even have a strong aversion to chocolate from now on. But that’s only fair.” He took a breath and his eyes grew cold and the smile left him. “After all, they broke my slide rule. Did they expect me to do nothing?”
    If the team had found out the cake had been the cause and that Harold had done it I expect they would have used us for blocking practice.
    But the coach was mental and was convinced that a spy from the White River team—they were “blood-sworn rivals,” as he put it, who would do anything to beat the Tigers—had putsomething in the foot powder in the locker room to make the Tigers forfeit the game, and the players believed him.
    Several of the girls had been in on it, but they never told.

3. On Discovering Interpersonal Relationships

    It is the complete commingling of every aspect of two people. If it happens right. If not it just makes your stomach hurt
.
    —H AROLD ON LOVE
    “All right, how do I look?”
    I studied Harold carefully. This was to be his first date. While it was true that I was hardly the one to judge anybody’s social acceptability—I’d never been on a date myself—I had a raft of research to draw upon. I had read every questionable part of every book then available: Mickey Spillane novels,
God’s Little Acre
and the most dog-eared parts of D. H. Lawrence’s books in the library. Added to this were the stolen moments with magazines in the drugstore, a healthy dose of eavesdropping on the conversations of thepopular boys in the locker room and talk I had heard in bars at night while selling newspapers to drunks.
    So I was ready to give advice.
    But Harold was almost beyond help. For one thing, hair was very important then, and Harold’s hair resisted being combed in any direction. Right now he’d gotten it to go in a slight wave back by applying extra-heavy grease. His head shone.
    “You look great,” I said. “Perfect.”
    He smiled—a flash of crooked teeth, an explosion of huge eyes in thick glasses—and nodded. “I felt as much. I just needed some secondary verification to prove the equation. Arlene is, after all, quite an achievement for a first attempt.”
    “Yeah, yeah.” Harold had a tendency to talk like the most recent book he was reading. He was studying a book on Madame Curie at the moment and everything was an experiment that needed “secondary verification to prove the equation.” And Arlene
was
a nice girl. I would have dated her myself. Actually I would have dated
anybody
myself—if I had somehow had the courage to ask her (I wasn’t exactly good at speaking directly to girls yet, not even in thethird person) and if she had heard me and had not laughed out loud and if I knew what a date was supposed to be or how one went about conducting one.
    I was absolutely flabbergasted that Harold had asked her. He had just stopped by her locker and asked her, right out in the open with me standing next to him wishing the earth would open up and swallow me. I was stunned that she had accepted. Now I was kind of hoping that after the date Harold would tell me what was supposed to happen. Although I couldn’t let him know how little
I
knew.
    “Listen.” I