Counting by 7s(9)

Dell would have to come up with his own way of sorting through the weeds of messed-up students.



It only took him three months on the job to get the Dell Duke Counseling System in shape.

He placed all of the kids he saw into four groups of THE STRANGE.

First, there were the MISFITS.

Then the ODDBALLS.

Next were the LONE WOLVES.

And finally, the WEIRDOS.

Of course, Dell wasn’t supposed to give the kids any kind of classifications, but what good is an organizing system without methods of separation?

Labels were important. And they were very effective. It was just too crazy to think of these kids on an individual basis.

The way the Dell Duke Counseling System broke it down, the Misfits were the kooky kids who just couldn’t help but dress different and act like fish out of water.

The Misfits had no power dynamic. And some of them may have been dropped as babies. The Misfits, in all likelihood, were trying to fit in, but just couldn’t.

His next group, the Oddballs, were different from the Misfits because the Oddballs were more original and usually somehow ahead of the curve.

They liked being odd. The Oddballs contained the artists and musicians. They had a tendency to be show-offs and eat spicy food. They were usually late, often wore the color orange, and weren’t good with finances.

And then there were the Lone Wolves.

This group had the mavericks. They thought of themselves as protestors or rebels.

The Lone Wolf was often an angry wolf, whereas a Misfit was often calm and contented. And the Oddballs were just out to a lunch where they made their own sandwiches.

Finally, in Dell’s classification of the Strange, there were the Weirdos.

The Weirdos included the Zombies, those kids who stared straight ahead and gave back nothing no matter how hard someone tried to pry emotion out of them.

The Weirdos could be counted on to chew bits of their own stringy hair and fixate, non-blinking, on a dirt spot on the carpeting while a fire blazed right behind them.

Weirdos were fingernail-biters and liked to scratch themselves. They had secrets and were probably late to be toilet trained. The bottom line was that Weirdos were just plain weird because of their unpredictability. And in Dell’s opinion, they could be dangerous. It was always best to simply let a Weirdo be.

Game.

Set.

Match.

Because Dell’s files could end up in the hands of people in higher places than his windowless room in one-half of a converted trailer on the property of the school district administration offices, he made a code for his unique system, which he thought of as FGS, which stood for:

THE FOUR GROUPS OF THE STRANGE.

FGS broke down to:

1 = MISFITS

2 = ODDBALLS

3 = LONE WOLVES

4 = WEIRDOS

He also, after much thought, color coded his unique system.

MISFITS were yellow.

ODDBALLS were purple.

LONE WOLVES were green.

WEIRDOS were red.

Dell then changed the font color on his personal files in his computer to correspond with his categorization.

This allowed him at a glance to know what he was dealing with.

The name Eddie Von Snodgrass appeared onscreen and before the jumpy kid in the oversized jacket had even slid into his seat, Dell knew that he could secretly surf his computer for forty-two minutes and nod his head every once in a while.

Lone Wolves didn’t need much feedback because they liked to rant and rave.

And so, while Eddie V. went off on the chemical taste of soda in plastic bottles, Dell checked out a website that sold bobble-head baseball player dolls at very affordable prices.

And Dell didn’t even like sports memorabilia!

But the Duke Counseling System was up and working, even if Dell was not.

Because once a kid had been evaluated, Dell could complete the district’s form in a flash, giving everyone in a specific category the same rating.

Months passed. Dell kept the kids moving in and out. The trains full of the Strange ran on time.

And then on the afternoon that Willow Chance came to see him, all of his categorization ground to a halt, like a fork thrown into the gears of outdated machinery.





Chapter 6





I sat in the airless office/trailer and stared at Mr. Dell Duke.

His head was very round. Most human heads are not round. Very, very few, in fact, have any real spherical quality.

But this chubby, bearded man with bushy eyebrows, and sneaky eyes, was the exception.

He had thick, curly hair and ruddy skin and it looked to me as if he was at least of partial Mediterranean origin.

I was very interested in the diet of these countries.

The combination of olive oil, hearty vegetables, and cheese that comes from goat’s milk, mixed with decent servings of fish and meat, had been shown in numerous studies to promote longevity.

But Mr. Dell Duke did not look so healthy.

In my opinion, he wasn’t getting enough exercise. I saw that he had a substantial belly under his loose-fitting shirt.

And weight carried around the middle is more deleterious than extra pounds in the butt.

Yet, culturally speaking, today men with big butts are considered less desirable than a man with a potbelly, which is no doubt wrong from an evolutionary point of view.

I would have liked to take his blood pressure.