Jordan Sonnenblick - Zen And The Art Of Faking It

Scholastic Press New york

To my darling bride, Melissa, who has the patience of a Zen Master

Have you ever switched schools? I have, and let me tell youa school is a school is a school. Every middle school on Gods green earth smells exactly the same, because damp lockers, industrial cleaning fluids, and puke are universal. The lunch is the same: How many ways can you flavor a freakin Tater Tot? The guys are the same: like a show on Animal Planet without the cuddle factor. The girls are the same: Martians with human hormones. And the teachers?

Please.

So when I dragged my feet in their rotting sandals through the gray midwinter slush and up the poured-concrete stairs of Harrisonville Middle School for the first time, I knew exactly what I was getting into.

Sure I did.

So. Eighth grade. Second semester. New state. Math was mathalgebra, of course. They always stick the Asian kid in the algebra class. Science was science. Fortunately I know how to roll a stupid little metal car down a ramp and use a stopwatch, so no problemo there. In English, all I could figure out the first day was that the teacher was nutsso again, same stuff, different time zone. Gym, lunchI honed my skills at standing and sitting in the corner. I also continued my long-standing tradition of eating nothing but pasta and fruit in the cafeteriaId never been to a public school that knew how to cook actual meat. Oh, I almost forgot home economics. Brownies. Made with applesauce. No wonder Americas kids have lost their way.

It wasnt until the last class of the day that I even woke up. Now, back in Houston, we had been studying U.S. history for the whole year. But in Pennsylvania, for some odd reason, this one school had a special Ancient World immersion grant, which meant two things:

one: Wed be spending five months doing the exact same thing Id done in seventh grade. Well, I guess you can never get enough pyramids, right?

two: Id miss the whole second half of my countrys past. Which kinda stinksId been looking forward to learning how that whole revolution thing had turned out.

Anyhoo, I walked into social studies class alone that day, hovered by the door until I could see which seats would be empty, and then eased my way along the wall and into a chair just as the teacher started clearing his throat to get the class quiet. Lucky methe chair turned out to be missing half of one back leg. I hit the floor with a lovely BANG , and the whole class turned in time to enjoy the view of my books, pens, pencils, and transparent backpack tumbling down all over me.

Yay.

The teacher came hurdling over and reached down a hand to pull me up. I couldnt help but notice he had a twinkle in his eye. An honest-to-God eye twinkle: How weird is that? You hear the clich all the time, but in this case, it was literally true. The guy had a white beard on a chubby beet-red face and those sparkling eyes. My arm was being yanked out of its socket by Santa Claus. A little pretend voice in my head was telling me, Stay down! Stay down! But Santa would not be denied. When he wasnt delivering packages down chimneys, this guy must have worked out like an Olympian.

Hello, there! he boomed. Then he paused and twinkled as I tried to be subtle about brushing pencil shavings out of the hair above my left ear. I figured the punch line was coming: Nice of you to drop in-har-har Or, Whoa! Bartender! Ill have whatever this kid is drinking! But after a beat, all Santa said was, You must be San Lee. I got a note that youd be coming some time this week. Im Mr. Dowd. Welcome to Harrisonville! You came at just the right time. Were starting a new unit today, on

I tuned out the educational droning and checked out my classmates. Some of them had that look Id seen in five other statesplus an airbase in Germanylike, The new kid fell. Cooooooollllll! Others just looked through me, like, This new person does not matter in my little Pennsylvania world. And one girl, with an unruly Aztec temple of brown hair and a Beatles T-shirt, peered over a pair of tiny purple-tinted glasses and gave me a smile that I felt all the way down to my soggy socks. She had these shocking gray eyes that locked right onto mine, angular cheekbones, and super-perfect teethwhich added up to a pretty intriguing look. Unfortunately I got so distracted by Beatle-girls face that I must have missed a fairly intense death-stare from the guy to her right.

Oh, well. At least there was one human being in this burg. Two, if you believed the friendly Santa guy was for real. I sat down, and class started. Mr. Dowd made everyone copy down a chalkboard full of notes about Buddhism. It looked remarkably like the chalkboard full of Buddhism I had copied down on the first day of a unit back in Texas. I muttered under my breath, One moon shows in every pool; in every pool, the one moon. My favorite teacher ever, Mrs. Brown, had said that, whenever Id commented on how my school in Houston was just like the school before that in Alabama. Evidently it was the kind of thing that Zen masters went around saying in Japan hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

Mr. Dowd was staring at me. Excuse me. Did you say something, Mr. Lee?

You had to love his smooth use of the rhetorical question trick. I felt like blurting out, No, the fat kid in the corner is a ventriloquist and Im his new dummy. Duh! But my mom had told me not to draw attention to myself, that this school was the end of the line for me. So I played nicely with others. No, sir.

He did the twinkle thing again. Thats funny. I could have sworn youd just murmured a really impressive quotation about the universal nature of reality. Guess its just the wax buildup in my ears playing tricks on me. Anyway

As Mr. Dowd launched into what I imagined was a breathtaking lecture on the various branches of Buddhism, I found myself glancing over at Beatle-girl. She was chewing on the eraser end of a pencil, concentrating intently on Santa Dowds every word. Come to think of it, so was almost everyone else. Maybe his lecture really was breathtaking. The guy next to Beatle-girl flicked his eyes over to me, and this time I caught the intensity, and the message: Back off!

I busied myself with decorating the cover of my new notebook. First I drew three interlocking yinyang symbols. Then I wrote underneath the middle one, half in outline and half regular: THE LAUGHING ARCHER. That was the name of this really cool underground band in Houston that used to play all-ages shows in our neighborhood. The words accidentally filled up the line that said NAME, but since you always put your name in the heading on every page in every school notebook in the world anyway, that didnt seem like a huge problem.

Its funny how innocently things start out.

Before the thing with my dad got really ugly, he used to take me on these little outings. He went through phases, which makes sense in retrospect. So, in Houston, we went bayou fishing in a little flat-bottomed rowboat. In Alabama, it was jogging every Sunday after we got done with services at the Euphrates Baptist Church. Come to think of it, I guess going to the Baptist Church was part of that phase too. In Connecticut, we were Methodists, and I think when I was really little in California we might have been Unitarians for a while.

Whatever, its easy to get sucked into all the craziness just from trying to describe what happened with my dad, but Ill try to stay on topicin every state, Ive noticed thats the most important thing about writing for the standardized test. So: In California, the phase was archery. Dad and I would load our bows, our quivers full of arrows, and this big collapsible metal easel with a target on it into the back of the Volvo station wagon (or maybe California was the purple minivan), and set off for this gigantic field behind a hunting-supply store. When we first started the archery thing, Dad bought one of those five-color five-circle targets to shoot at. I liked that target, because you got to practice math: The yellow bulls-eye was worth nine points, the red ring around it was worth seven, the blue ring was five, black was three, and the outer white ring was one. You got six arrows, for a high score of fifty-four. This was second grade, and doing all that addition made me feel smart. Also, I was dying to shoot a perfect score, so I was psyched to go every week. I noticed that most of the other guys there had targets shaped like animals, though, and one Sunday when Dad unloaded the easel, our target of circles had been replaced by a realistic portrait of a young male deer. I was pretty displeased with this switch from practicing accuracy and computation to puncturing Bambi, so I asked my dad why we had gotten rid of the old target. He made a sweeping gesture toward all the hairy, grizzled-looking guys surrounding us with their paper zoo of cruelty, and said, When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Remember that, OK? When in Rome, do as the Romans do.