Sorta Like a Rock Star(9)

She nodded appreciatively and led me to a small room at the end of the hall that had no windows and sorta reminded me of a big closet. Inside the room was a round table that took up almost all of the space, and seated around the table were four boys, the very boys that would eventually become my boys—Franks Freak Force Federation.

None of them said anything to me when I sat down at the table and said, “Hello.”

“Boys, this is your classmate, Amber Appleton. Don’t you want to say hello to her?” Mrs. Pohlson said.

“Ricky Roberts says hello to Amber Appleton. Hello. Yes.”

“H-h-h-h-el-el-o.”

“Hi, Amber,” said the boy in the wheelchair.

“Hey,” said the black kid.

“This is Ty, Jared, Chad, and Ricky. All classmates of yours, although they are in the other two fifth grade classes. We’d like you to join our club,” Mrs. Pohlson said.

The only black kid in town. The kid who couldn’t speak properly. The tiny wheelchair kid with a big head. The retarded kid (I didn’t know what autism was back then). And suddenly me. I wasn’t so smart back in the day, but even I knew that I’d landed squarely in Club Freak. I wasn’t all that upset about being admitted into Club Freak, because I was a freak too, and I sorta knew it—word—but I was worried that there would be punishments, like extra homework.

“What sorta club is this?” I asked.

“We play board games twice a week in this room,” Mrs. Pohlson answered.

“Why?” I asked, and then looked around at the other boys who were all looking at their laps. “Won’t we get in trouble for missing class?”

“Don’t you like board games? We can play Monopoly, Scrabble, Life.”

“Why would you take us out of class just so we can play games?” I asked.

“Well,” Mrs. Pohlson said, “we also practice speaking properly and interacting appropriately with our friends.”

“Interacting?”

“Playing.”

“So this is a club where we learn to play games with each other?”

“Kind of,” Mrs. Pohlson said. “Yes.”

All through elementary and junior high school Mrs. Pohlson took the five of us out of class twice a week. Sometimes we played board games, sometimes we read books aloud, and sometimes we just practiced having conversations with each other.

I began to notice that The Five hardly talked outside of Mrs. Pohlson’s room—but when we were there, we sorta talked a lot, or at least more than we did in the lunchroom or gym or in the schoolyard, maybe because there weren’t so many other people to compete with for talking time. I began to really like going to Mrs. Pohlson’s room, and it wasn’t long before our parents were scheduling after-school and weekend events for The Five. Soon I was over at my boys’ houses, like, all the time, and it was like we had been friends since birth. We got tight quick. Word. Suddenly I sorta had four brothers and all these extra parents looking after me. Suddenly, I had Donna too.

Eventually, Jared stopped stuttering, but nothing else major happened through Mrs. Pohlson’s intervention—except that we all became best friends.





CHAPTER 4





Almost magically, just when we had to leave Mrs. Pohlson, our group social sessions, and the elementary/junior high building behind, Franks was hired to teach marketing at CPHS, so he was sorta like a freshman too (only a teacher freshman) when we started high school, which is exactly when me and The Five first started hanging with Franks. Jared and I were in his marketing class, and because Franks was so cool, allowing us to play video games during class and whatnot, we were soon bringing the rest of The Five to his classroom before school and during lunch. The rest is history, as they say.

Franks’ windowless classroom is in the basement of our high school, and you can access his room from outside by descending down into the earth via a set of old concrete stairs, and then knocking on a metal door seven times. Three quick knocks. Two slow, and then two fast. This lets Franks or whoever is inside know that a Marketing Club member is on the other side of the door. There are only five Childress Public High School M.C. members, and all five just happen to belong to Franks Freak Force Federation as well.

After Ricky knocks, we back up two stairs. Two seconds later, Jared kicks open the door, which doesn’t have a knob, but a silver bar that opens it, and then he sprints back to his seat behind one of the six televisions set up high on roller stands—every one of them connected to an Xbox and each Xbox connected to the rest via a crazy web of chords. Ty and Jared are both seated behind the television closest to the outside door—eyes glued to the ass-kicking alien action on the screen. On the other side of the room Franks is sitting next to Chad’s super robotic wheelchair, which we call Das Boot, even though we don’t even know what the hell Das Boot means exactly. All four of them are holding controllers and are trying to kill each other’s spacemen in a virtual world that the televisions bring to their brains.

Ricky sits down at a third television set and turns on a third Xbox. “Ricky Roberts wants Ty Hendrix and Jared Fox to die so that Ricky Roberts can enter into the Halo 3 game and join Mr. Jonathan Franks’ team, because Mr. Jonathan Franks is Ricky Roberts’ very favorite teacher. Yes.”

“Your wish is my command,” Franks says. And then something happens in the virtual world that makes Jared and Ty moan and hold their heads.