One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy by Stephen Tunney

substitute teacher being told that
sorry, today you get the Loopies, and the sub just sighed and cursed and complained that it is going to be a long day today, I can’t believe that I’m stuck with the Loopies again, those kids are really horrible, oh innacaws it, on second thought I’m not doing this, no way
and the sub stormed out and the payroll secretary had to make a few more phone calls to find another substitute teacher.
Hello, this is Lunar Public 777, we have a call for a last-minute substitution, are you available. Yes? Good. Well actually, you will be subbing for section 241…yes, uh, that is correct, that is the Loopie section, but — wait, you just told me that you were available…
    Nobody wanted to teach the Loopies. Some teachers did not even last a day. Substitutes never wanted to come back. That troubled class full of troubled kids went through at least fifteen teachers a year. Not counting the endless times substitutes had to be called in because teachers simply walked out.
—

    Luckily, most of the students at Lunar Public 777 were not of the Loopie persuasion. Hieronymus was aware of this fact, but for half of every school day it seemed to him he was living in a world of Loopies. Their highly vocal concerns and reactive behavior over every tiny detail in front of them, their need to shout constantly about inane things that would never matter in a middle-class setting, their extreme physicality, their inability to stay seated for more than thirty seconds, their abusive name calling, all of it, the rudeness and the anarchy and the idiomatic expressions he failed to understand, the whole Loopie experience began to take a strange place in his heart. He was quietly becoming a part of their existence. Sitting in that crowded class placed him in a very privileged spot: he could observe, only because they left him alone — and they left him alone because he was a killer and a demon.
    He took advantage of the easy work and he was the only one in class who bothered to do any assignments. He scored very well on the remedial exams and quizzes. With time, the students gradually stopped ignoring him, and through the ear-aching chaos, he found out he had some friends. Many of them had qualities he found lacking in some of the kids from the Advanced Honors class. None of the Loopies were pretentious, for example. They were all brutally, horribly honest. They never pretended to like you. Beneath the shifting waves of illogic and anarchy and cruelty and sentimentality was a code — the Loopie Code — and after his first few months among them, he began to understand the basics of it and how to communicate with them. It was fun. He became "the smart one" in class, and slowly, ever so slowly, some of the Loopies actually put the occasional schoolwork question to him. Once that started to happen, he almost became a type of liaison between the students and whoever the teacher happened to be at the time. He became one of them. He even had a Loopie name. The Loopies, in line with Loopie reasoning, simply dropped the first three syllables from Hieronymus. He simply became Mus. He was the Loopie who proved the schoolwork in remedial math and remedial science was not the problem, the problem was with the
goddamned way the innacawsing wrackball teacher was looking at my EEE shoes, what, does he think he can find foot houses that can crimp his pan-handle like that?
    As his social status in the Loopie world rose to new heights, he was a little worried his cover might be blown — that he was not fully a member, that he was only there for half the day. They had no idea he was in the Advanced Honors class. Would his carefully cultivated status, his rise from victim to demon to semi-tutor, be compromised were they to discover his secret?

    The concept of
extreme academic schizophrenia
was outside the understanding of the Loopies. But indeed, what would they do if they found out? Nothing, of course, because they had a million other