So I clipped that article and put it in my book. Then I started stealing looks, which was not as easy as it may sound. I was a sophomore and James was a senior, and we didn’t have any classes together.
On account of that, getting my daily fill of James required me to first nail down his schedule. For a full week, I carried my entire class load of books around in my backpack, so that I could stand down the hall from his locker and follow him to his classes. If my fellow classmates hadn’t already taken to ignoring my silent presence, my stuffed-to-the-gills backpack might have drawn stares or, even worse, questions. But luckily they had grown disinterested in me over the years and had ceased believing that I could get any stranger. It lent me a certain invisibility, which I used to my advantage in tailing James that first week.
He had three classes in the same hallways as me.
So every day in chemistry, at 11:05 a.m., I raised my hand. From the very first time I did this, Mrs. Penn could tell that this meant I needed a bathroom pass. All the teachers at Glass High knew/were warned that I didn’t ever speak, so this would be the only reason for me to raise my hand. Within a month, it became so clockwork that Mrs. Penn would hand me the pass without breaking from her lecture.
I would then walk down the hallway and crouch outside the door to college biology and look in on James.
He usually sat slumped back in his seat, taking notes while the teacher talked.
I would stare at him for three minutes, which I timed on my green plastic watch. Then I’d walk back to class, because I didn’t want to spend so long away that Mrs. Penn started suspecting that I was doing something other than using the bathroom and stopped giving me passes.
I would have done this during gym and advanced algebra, too. But unfortunately his calculus teacher kept the door closed with the window shade pulled down, so that was no good. And a bathroom pass during gym only meant that you could go back into the locker room to do your business.
So 11:05 cued my best three minutes of the day, the time I looked forward to the most.
When I sat alone at lunch, I thought about the next day’s three minutes. When I fell asleep at night, watching Sixteen Candles or Pretty in Pink or whatever Molly Ringwald movie I had chosen for my bedtime story, I also thought about those three minutes.
And when I woke up in the middle of the night because of Cora’s dramatic moans—she always laid it on real thick for the new guys, like this was the best sex of her life—I’d just lie there, listening to her performance and thinking about James.
Then I’d fall back to sleep with a smile on my face.
. . .
The reason that James and his sisters had been transferred from their nice private school in Texas to our real less academically stellar public school in Mississippi became apparent about two months into the semester when signs on wooden sticks started popping up like flowers all over town, just a few months after our local congressman died unexpectedly of a heart attack.
They said: “FARRELL III,” in large white letters, “JAMES C.” above that in smaller white cursive, then “U.S. REPRESENTATIVE ’91” in red letters across the bottom.
At first it was just the signs in yards. Then they started appearing in store windows, then regular people’s windows, then the next thing I knew, it seemed like the town was fair to wallpapered with them.
I liked that they all said “James C. Farrell,” even if it wasn’t my James. I took to brushing them with my fingers whenever I saw them hung up on a gate. Without exception they were all cool to the touch, even though the summer heat had yet to let up and the air was still hot and sticky.
“That’s why he put them kids of his in this monkey house,” I heard a lunch lady say to another lunch lady while I was waiting in line with my red Free Lunch ticket in hand. “It don’t matter if he a Farrell. People ain’t going to vote for him if his kids ain’t in school just like the rest us kids.”
My James, I had figured out from the signs, was a IV. I wondered if when we got married, I would have to take the IV along with his last name.