Norris widened his eyes. Just what fresh hell was this?
“You’re from Montreal, right? Oh, j’adore Montreal! I visited, gosh, what, fifteen years ago? What a time, I tell you!”
“Yeah, it’s a grea—” Norris started.
“Wait, are you from Montreal or, like, a nearby town?” she asked teasingly, as if she’d just caught him in a lie. “Like how everyone from Round Rock says they’re from Austin because ain’t no one outside of Texas knows what Round Rock is?”
“Um, no. Montreal.”
“Sorry, am I going too fast? Of course I’m going too fast,” she asked and answered in the same breath. “Don’t feel bad, I’m a fast talker. Since I was a kid, they tell me! Right, right: I . . . parler . . . rapide! Since tout petit? Toute petite! Oui!”
She squeezed both hands together to emphasize that petit meant “small.”
“I—”
“Not to worry: we prepared for just this eventuality!” she continued, reaching into her drawer. She wiggled her eyebrows at Norris in a conspiratorial way and pulled out a yellowed translation book. English 2 French & Back Again!!! was splashed across the cover.
“We’re actually a very international school,” Kolb explained, paging through the book. “Why, in my time here, we’ve had students from Beijing to Latin America, and—”
“I speak English,” Norris interrupted on what he erroneously thought might have been a pause for breath.
“Yes. Very well, Norris!” she said distractedly as she continued to page through the book. She made sure to pause between each word. “You speak English very well!”
“Ma’am? Ma’am? Yes, hi,” Norris said, waving his hand to emphasize his existence. “These weren’t three memorized words just now. I speak English fine . . . well, some might even say.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Kolb said, looking at Norris. She seemed disappointed.
“Plus, my mom’s a linguist, so I’m probably one of five kids here that know the difference between who and whom. So, there’s really no need for . . . that.” He gestured at the manual.
Kolb blinked furiously and very slowly closed it.
“’Course this is a good thing!” She began to rapidly flip through a stack of papers that had been preemptively placed at the corner of her desk. “Guessin’ you won’t need these!” She swiftly removed three sheets from the stack, one of which, even upside down, Norris could read to be labeled Translator Request Form.
Kolb stopped and looked back up to Norris, her expression still perplexed.
“I don’t mean to be rude here, it’s just, I was told a French Canadian was coming in and, well—” She motioned to the whole of Norris as if the demand for an explanation were obvious.
“Quebec is bilingual.” He shrugged. “Je parles les deux langues depuis la maternelle. I’ve been speaking both since preschool. It’s pretty common up there.”
“Well, ain’t that a thing!” Kolb exclaimed. “I knew that hoity-toity waiter could understand English! I knew it! I mean, look at you: y’all barely have accents at all!”
“Merci beaucoup, madame Kolb, l’urètre du clown me semble amplement vaste,” Norris answered with a smile, making sure the cadence of his voice in no way reflected “ample clown urethra.”
Kolb laughed as if Norris had just paid her a compliment. Incredibly childish, yes, but he figured he could take some liberties on his first day.
Norris’s starter kit to Anderson High included his locker assignment, a folded football pennant for Anderson’s team—the Bats—and a sizable stack of pamphlets on everything from “pregnancy scare” to “bullying” with pit stops at “homophobia” and one that was simply the outline of a shotgun with a red X overlapped onto it. Norris was beginning to suspect that most of Austin’s city board was in the pocket of Big Pamphlet.
“I was going to alphabetize all of this for you, but I suppose you can do that yourself now.” Kolb laughed, handing it to Norris with two hands.
“Start with A, end with Z, and there’s an N in the middle, right?” Norris mumbled.
Kolb let out a wry cackle that seemed to signal that it was time for Norris to take on the rest of his day.
“Ooh! One last thing,” she added as she saw him getting up to leave. “We had this initiative for diaries . . .” she began, reaching into a drawer.
“I’m not much of a diary keeper, ma’am,” Norris said, taking the proffered notebook. It was small and inoffensive-looking enough.
“Try it! You get to see the school, the city, the state, the entire American experience from an outside perspective!” Her voice had gone higher with every new perspective she’d listed. Jesus. How was this person in charge of children again?
“That perspective—that’s a rare gift,” Kolb continued. “And definitely something worth chronicling!”
“Right.”
“If the urge strikes you!”
Norris nodded a final time, hastily removing himself from view lest she be struck by any other brilliant ideas.
Outside Kolb’s office, he caught a reflection of himself in the metallic doors of the elevator. Generic black T-shirt, forehead glistening with sweat, and looking so out of place with the passing blur of the other students behind him that it was almost comical. He wouldn’t want to be friends with the kid who was staring back at him either.
He had only ever attended two schools in his life—Holy Spirit Elementary and College Français secondary—and had seen enough of Judith’s old movies (she was a bit of a collecting junkie and he had a lot of free time) to grow up with a healthy fear of the American high school. Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Dazed and Confused, Can’t Hardly Wait, 10 Things I Hate About You, Mean Girls, Napoleon Dynamite, The Karate Kid . . . Not to mention the ad nauseam TV reruns of Freaks and Geeks; Beverly Hills, 90210; Gossip Girl; Friday Night Lights; and everything else in between. If the flavors were different—pack of quirky outsiders here, ruthless-borderline-feral popular girls there—it all mostly amounted to one thing: in versus out. And Norris Kaplan—black French Canadian Norris Kaplan—had no delusion about where he would fall in that demarcation.
Here in Austin, the point was not to enter the field at all. Norris didn’t want to join a band of misfit rascals, overthrow the social hierarchy, go to Sectionals, upend the bully, or kiss the prom queen. No, what he needed to do was endure. Seven hundred thirty days with room for summer vacations, Christmas breaks, and the occasional long weekends: that was the number. He took solace in that fact, really. All he had to do was make it through this day for the giant counter he kept in the back of his mind to update to 729. Easy.
3
Jocks and Cheerleaders
IDENTIFYING CHARACTERISTICS: Muscular, rarely spotted without a water bottle, athleisure wear.
HABITAT: The jock table, football stadium or other athletic field, keg parties.
PREENING HABITS: Extensive.
MATING HABITS: Frequency of copulation typically overexaggerated.
It turned out that enduring wasn’t so easy after all. For the next two days, Norris couldn’t seem to stop drawing attention to himself.