Chad and Franks slap hands and then touch elbows before slapping hands again. Man stuff.
Just as I finish the last line of the MC ad, the five-minute warning bell sounds, so I stand by the door and, as they exit, I hand each one of my boys a piece of paper folded into a swan—origami style. Inside all of the swans are coded instructions regarding where to meet and at what time, plus their individual speeches for tonight, written by yours truly. Jared made up our code two years back and we all have it memorized. (It’s just each letter plus 1, so that As are written as Bs and Bs are written as Cs and so forth. Not overly secure, but it stumps most of the morons in our school. True.) And as they walk through Franks’ door, I give each of my boys a pat on the butt too, like I am a football coach or something. The pat on the butt makes my boys blush and smile. I have to pinch Chad on the cheek because he’s in a motorized wheelchair and all, but I get him blushing too.
“Ricky Roberts wants a paper swan–coded message like everyone else in the—”
“How does Ricky Roberts receive information?” I ask him.
“On a need-to-know basis. Yes.”
“You only have five minutes to get to homeroom,” I say, and then Ricky is off.
Back inside of his lair, I hand Franks the Marketing Club ad and say, “Read that over the loudspeaker—if you dare.”
“Cool,” Franks says with a smile.
“Hug?”
“Homeroom,” Franks says, raising his chubby hand.
I slap his red palm, and then I’m on my way to homeroom.
“Rub-a-dub-dub, it’s Marketing Club! What’s the rub, bub? Nada. MC for real, with plenty of zeal—and that’s the appeal! Do you have what it takes—to slake—the growing desire for marketing and advertising fo’ hire? We meet in the basement every day, hey, so what do you say? Drop on down, give Franks a pound. Become a Marketing Club man or woman today. Peace out, homies! And keep hope alive!”
Sitting in homeroom, I smile to myself. Franks read my announcement verbatim, just like he promised. He’s an honorable man, a man of his word, which is rare in this world, or at least that’s what I’ve observed after seventeen trips around the flaming ball in the sky. (That’s the sun, sucka!) Everyone around me is talking and totally not paying any attention to the announcements; not even my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Lindsay, listens or gives a crap, but I know that there are at least four teenage boys sitting in homerooms hysterically laughing at my advertisement and Franks’ awesome delivery—and I know that it might be the only laugh they get today. Franks Freak Force Federation will get a little fuel from this, and maybe that will be enough for them to make it through the school day. “Keep hope alive.” I’m pretty sure Jesse Jackson said that when he was running for president back in the 80s. Yeah, we learned that hip catchphrase in my U.S. History II class a few months ago.
The day passes uneventfully—boring Spanish III, lame-ass gym, boring pre-calc, boring chemistry—and since Mondays and Tuesdays are Ricky’s socialization days, we don’t eat our lunch in Franks’ room, but in the cafeteria, because the special education department thinks that Ricky should interact with the student body more. Great idea, special education people who have no idea how evil the student body can be to special people like Ricky Roberts.
When I’m in the lunch line, watching over Ricky, protecting my boy, Lex Pinkston elbows me in the back and coughs out a disgusting single syllable word for a woman, which I’m not even going to repeat. He pretends to cover his mouth and cough, because he is a moron, but it is clear that he is calling me this worst of all words, so I say, “Like you’d even know what one was.”
“I’ve seen your mom’s,” Lex says, five moronic football players standing behind him. “Everyone in this town has.”
I slap his face hard enough to turn his head—SLAP!—and it makes me smile, even though I’m a Catholic and JC is not down with violence.
And then Lex’s hand is on his face. He cannot believe that I frickin’ slapped him.
The football morons are shocked as hooey—their pieholes wide open, like their eyes.
Ricky is screaming, “Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!”
The lunchroom monitors show up, get between us, and the next thing I know I’m in Prince Tony’s office, waiting for him to finish some stupid phone conversation. When he finishes, he looks at me from across his battleship-size desk and says, “What now?”
“Your quarterback called me a disgusting single-syllable word for a woman—which I’m not even going to repeat—and then implied that he had sex with my mother, so I slapped his kisser,” I say, and then add, “Prince Tony.”
“It’s Principal Fiorilli to you, young lady.”
“Come on, Prince, we’re behind closed doors. Just us here,” I say to the tiny man, because he is weak and can be swayed if you flirt with him the right way—not in a sexy way, but in a father-daughter sorta way.