“We’re both smart enough to know what a clenched hand is. Your fists, do they run into things or people?”
“Sometimes the two are indistinguishable.”
Everybody in the class started laughing—including Mrs. Flores.
“Ari, do you have a reputation for being the class smart aleck?”
“No.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
A hand went up. “Yes? Elena.” She had memorized her seating charts.
“You should believe him. For the past three years, I’ve been in the same classes with him, and in most of those classes he never said a word.”
She looked around the room. “Anybody else want to chime in here?” She saw a hand go up. “Marcos, do you wish to add to the discussion?”
“Well, first of all, it’s freaking me out how you know our names.”
She had this great smile on her face. “When you came in, I had you sit at the desk with your name on it. I have a seating chart. And I memorized my seating chart. Simple.”
“So when you called on me by name, you didn’t actually know who I was.”
“Of course not. But believe me, Marcos, pretty soon, I’ll know who you are.” The way she said that, with the fun in her voice—that is what Dante would call a sincere seriousness—I was going to love this class.
And then Marcos said, “And you should believe Ari when he said he wasn’t the class smart-ass. That would be me. I didn’t even know what Ari’s voice sounded like.”
“Well, apparently, some changes have occurred in you, Ari. Let’s discover if those changes are for the good or for the bad. And, Marcos, it seems that you’re going to have some competition. And I’m not just talking about Ari. I’m talking about me.”
Marcos shot right back. “Is this a competition?”
“No, Marcos. You and Ari don’t have a prayer. Fun is fun—but don’t push it.” She looked around the room. “Why don’t you help me put some humanity behind your names? Yvonne, let’s begin with you.”
She liked us. She didn’t like us in the sense that she knew us and we were her friends. She liked us because she enjoyed her students in the same way that Mr. Blocker enjoyed his students. They were both playful and serious—and always, as if by instinct, they could take a discussion, even if it occurred spontaneously, and point it in the direction where real learning began. In classes like this one, you didn’t just learn something about chemistry or English or economics or how a bill became a law, you learned something about yourself.
* * *
After Mrs. Flores’s class, three of my classmates came up to me together. One guy asked, “Hey, Ari, what happened to you?”
I looked at him blankly.
“I mean, what happened to the old Ari? The one who sat there, socially disengaged?”
“Socially disengaged?” I didn’t remember any of their names—I did know Elena’s name, but only because she’d testified on my behalf in class. And I had no idea how they remembered mine.
“I’m Hector, by the way.” He stuck out his hand for a handshake, which was a little strange to me. He kept talking. “Socially disengaged as in: the Ari who always seemed to connect with the material but had no idea that classrooms were social settings.”
“Elena, why do I feel as if I’m being attacked?”
“I have no idea why you feel the things you feel.”
“You’re screwing with my head.”
“That’s an easy art around guys.”
I took it that Elena was one of those nice people who always had to tell the truth. “You seem like you may have learned to do the lighten-up thing,” she said. “Or is that the wrong assumption? The old Ari didn’t know that that the phrase lighten up existed.”
“The new Ari does do ‘lighten up.’ He’s no expert. Yet.”
Elena gave me that I’m not really all that patient with guys because guys are generally out to lunch look. “We’re here to welcome you to the world of high school. Filled with students. Who are people.”
“So you’re the welcoming committee?”
“Exactly! Self-appointed. Welcome to Austin High School, Aristotle Mendoza.” She looked at me up and down and said, “Even on your worst days, you at least provide the landscape with some eye candy. But you’re an idiot.”
“Elena, there are a lot of reasons why someone might refer to me as an idiot.”
“You want my reasons? You were so completely oblivious to the fact that people liked you, and you seemed not to care. Ari, last year, you were elected junior class prince at Homecoming. And you didn’t even bother to show up.”
“I know this sounds fucked up, Elena, but I found that whole thing humiliating. Everybody always wanted me to be something I wasn’t. I would’ve just fucking died standing up in front of everybody. How could I be someone’s friend when I didn’t know how to be one? It’s not that I was trying to make any of you invisible. I was trying to make me invisible.”
“That’s heartbreaking. And anyway, it’s just not possible to make yourself invisible. You have superpowers—or what?”
I looked into the eyes of the boy who’d spoken those words. His eyes didn’t look all that different from mine. “I’ve had you in some of my classes for three years,” I said. “And I don’t even know your name.” I looked at Elena and I said, “Add another reason to your list of why I’m an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot. Well, at least no more than the rest of us.” He reached out his hand. “I’m Julio.”
A handshake. My second handshake. And I was suddenly in awe of such a simple gesture. Boys didn’t engage in those gestures. Only men did. “I’m Ari,” I said.
“I know. Everyone knows who you are.”
I guess you could say I was a failure at turning myself into the invisible man.
* * *
One of our teachers, Mrs. Hendrix, had moved up in the world. She’d been my ninth-grade math teacher, and now she was teaching a senior-level course in biochemistry. Not exactly my favorite subject. I wasn’t much of a science guy. She’d taken me to the principal’s office once because I had what she referred to as an altercation with another guy in the hallway after school. I thought “altercation” was a pretty big word for saying that I’d popped Sergio Alarcon right in the kisser because he’d referred to a girl I liked (or apparently a girl I thought I liked) as a prostitute. Actually, he’d used the Spanish word “puta.” Mrs. Hendrix was sympathetic, but she was one of those people who didn’t believe that there could be any justification for giving another guy a bloody nose.
When I walked into her classroom, she smiled in that kind of way that was half-natural and half-forced. “Well, Mr. Mendoza, welcome to my class.” She had the habit of calling all her students by their last names, adding Mr. or Ms. as suffixes. She explained that she meant to honor her students by addressing them as though they had already become adults or to remind them that adulthood was a goal. If she’d had any powers of observation, she would have realized that most of us did not consider adulthood a goal worthy of pursuing.