Adam Selzer by How to Get Suspended, Influence People Page B

start to me. I knew I would have to find ways to get a bit odder, and maybe a bit more explicit, but I was off to a good start. I would still have to write a script for voice-overs. I was relying on the fact that Mr. Streich had said we could find a way to blow something up to get the explosion in there. That was really the make-or-break moment of the film, the ending that would determine whether the kids who saw it cheered and clapped or just said, “Well, the nudity was okay.”
    I finished off the rest of my morning by scribbling, in letters too tiny and light to be visible to the naked eye, “Anna likes Leon…. Anna: Ask Leon out…,” and trying to send a psychic message in her direction, which I knew wouldn’t work, but which certainly couldn’t hurt anything.
    At lunch I wandered over to the table where Anna and most of the rest of the advanced studies gang was sitting. If she was going to follow my psychic advice, she didn’t indicate it at all when I sat down. She just said “Hey.”
    James Cole, the French-speaking pot smoker, was wearing sunglasses, probably trying to cover up having been stoned or wasted the night before. Or maybe he’d been stoned a month earlier and was afraid that it might still be showing. “
Bonjour,
assmonkey,” he said. I knew he didn’t mean any offense; it seemed like he came up with a different thing to call people every Monday. “Assmonkey” was just his vocabulary word of the week.
    “Voltaire was the best French-language playwright of the eighteenth century,” said Dustin Eddlebeck. James shrugged. He had learned French as a toddler, when his dad was stationed in the south of France; just because he spoke French didn’t mean he went around reading French plays all the time.
    “Voltaire’s plays sucked,” said Anna, who should know, what with her parents being scholars of the era and all.
    “Maybe,” said Dustin, “but they had a lot of sex in them, right?”
    “Not really. You should read some of them,” said Anna.
    “There’s sex in them,” he maintained. “You just have to read between the lines.” Dustin would not be satisfied until he’d read every sex scene in classical literature, and he was pretty sure that just about every character in every classic book was having sex with every other character if you read between the lines—the writers just had to be sneaky about it in the old days.
    Now, I don’t wish to imply that I don’t care about sex or that I don’t think about it; hell, if I dedicated all the time I spent thinking about sex to working on, say, learning to speak Italian, I would have been fluent by the end of seventh grade.
    Dustin Eddlebeck, however, was just plain sick. In seventh grade, part of sex ed was showing us a video of a baby being born, and though this indeed meant seeing actual nudity in the classroom, and I’m talking full-on shots of parts you don’t normally even see in
Playboy,
it was entirely too disgusting to be arousing. However, whenever they show that sort of thing, there’s always one kid who sits there grinning and going, “Whoa, mama!” or something like that. Dustin Eddlebeck was that kid. You could show him a picture of a shaved camel and it would turn him on, if he had ever been turned off to begin with. Which I doubt.
    Brian slid into the seat right next to Edie and flipped his hair out of his eyes.
    “I think I might get to see Dr. Guff today,” he said, smiling. “Coach Hummel caught me drawing band logos on my jeans with a permanant marker and said he was going to recommend that I get counseling.” Brian’s jeans were regularly decorated with logos of every metal band known to man.
    “He’s probably just joshing you,” said James.
    “Yeah,” said Brian. “But I can dream.”
    A couple of people from the gifted pool had been sent to talk to Dr. Guff, the school shrink, for one reason or another, and they’d all come back with wild stories about what they’d told him. James Cole swore