Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes Read Free Book Online

because Neil had crashed it.
    Darla’s big plan was to go somewhere east to school and never come back to Lightsburg at all, so she played serious-student real hard. Like always, today she sat in the center of the front row, opened a pad to take notes, and set four neatly sharpened pencils beside it to the left. (Paul and me had timed her once: class hours were fifty-four minutes, with six in between for getting to your next class, and sure enough, with Mr. Irish, this one obsessive science teacher we had who always started exactly on time, Darla changed pencils every thirteen minutes and thirty seconds, exactly one quarter of the class time.)
    She stuck the suction cup on Mister Babbitt’s ass onto the desk so he faced her. She plucked at his ears for a moment to make one stand up straight and the other droop at whatever exactly the right angle was.
    Paul came in, and took a seat far away from me, over in the corner behind Danny. He didn’t look at me at all.
    I wondered if maybe he had a crush on that invisible sophomore girl he sat beside on the bus. Normally he got crushes on prom-queen all-American shampoo-commercial girls whose major conversational gambit was “What?” and whose huge boyfriends would beat the shit out of him.
    He was my best friend but he wasn’t perfect, you know? I was worried about him, and, come to admit it, pretty hurt.
    Coach Gratz walked in on the balls of his feet, arms held away from his body like he expected someone to yell, “Ready, Wrestle!” He had gold-blond hair, piercing blue eyes with little crinkles in the deep tan around them, and a hard-edged cleft chin. He wore dorky stretch-knit shirts, the ones that go over your head like a T-shirt but have a few buttons and a collar, to show off his hard muscular body and keep Mrs. Gratz horny. He always wore the same bolo tie with a turquoise and silver slide, because the dress code for male teachers said a tie, but it didn’t say what kind.
    He slung a big stack of books onto the desk with a bang. I don’t think anyone jumped as much as he’d’ve liked.
    “Hi, since I’ve had everyone in this room for one class or another, sometime in the past, you all know I’m Coach Gratz, and I’m not Mrs. Kliburn. For those of you who took this class because you heard Mrs. Kliburn was easy, tough. For the rest of you, we’re gonna learn some stuff. It won’t all be easy, and it won’t all be—”
    “Excuse me, sir,” the new girl behind me said. I looked around. She had very thick, messy, wavy blonde hair that sat on her head like a thatched roof. Her wire rim glasses perched on chipmunk cheeks smeared with acne, above a mouth full of braces. The white T-shirt she was wearing was too big on her; she looked like she’d missed her last three months of meals.
    “I haven’t been in one of your classes before,” she said. “My name is Martinella Nielsen. Most people call me Marti.”
    Gratz frowned. “Well, Marti , that is very interesting. Normally in my class you speak only when there is a reason for you to speak.”
    “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean any disrespect.”
    That was about twice as polite as anything Gratz was expecting, and he kind of half-froze in shock.
    The moment for tearing into Marti slipped right away. When he launched into the tirade for the second time, it just didn’t have that old Gratzical energy.
    Anyway, Gratz announced, “with great pleasure,” that we were going to read Huckleberry Finn first, because it was “the greatest American novel.” We knew that because Hemingway said so. Or something. Then he hollered about how our literature was just as good as anybody else’s literature, so there, and if you didn’t know Huckleberry Finn you “didn’t really know what it was to be an American.” Once he slipped back into his groove, I tuned out.
    One thing about Gratz was kind of funny in a pathetic sort of way—you could tell that he really did like books and poetry by the way his eyes would