Never good at accepting serendipity, Hanson Zener cursed his luck as
he felt himself lose balance and fly toward the ground. After impact, he
thought "Damn it!" and then, in case God or the gym teacher had not heard
him thinking, he repeated aloud: "DAMN IT!"
    Then he blacked out.

    Hanson's deliverance from his old life was called a concussion, though
apparently some doctors had argued about this while he was out. In any
case, they gave him three medications to take, and excused him from gym
class and from his job indefinitely. On returning home, Hanson also learn-
ed that he was excused from the company of his friends, who had decided to
dislike him. But he was allowed to walk between classes as slowly as he
needed to, and he enjoyed regularly having a quiet hallway to himself. It
gave him time to think.

    The first supererogatory use of his freedom was camping out in the
boiler room for a few minutes, just because he'd always been told not to
go in. It was boring, too boring to really risk getting caught, but the
idea kept fascinating Hanson once the deed was past.
    In short order he arranged to set foot in the faculty lounges, the
disused extra gym, the chemistry supply room, the girls' bathrooms, and a
number of rooms that, while not technically forbidden to him, he had never
had any scholastic reason for entering. As he left one of the latter (an
orchestra practice space), he heard footsteps and ran, only to be downed
by an unusual headache. The blinding pain was an even better reason for
stealth, he thought, but the luster was gone.

    Instead, his impulse to compass the entire school took on less phys-
ical forms. Never-read library books had some appeal, as did talking after
class with each of his teachers whether he liked them or not. (This alone
made up for any wound he might otherwise have inflicted on his grades.) He
found reasons to stay at school all night, like finishing the papier-mache
Excalibur he was making his kid brother for Christmas.
    Lights low, unsure if the art teacher's okay counted for anything
really, Hanson Zener felt blessed by his school's 4am vastness.
    A few days later, he (without quite meaning to) seduced Ms. Pavan, the
student teacher who was showing him how to paint, and as it was happening
he briefly wondered if the school was thanking him. Ms. Pavan had a first
name, of course, but, lying radiant on the paint smocks, she pointed out
that he had better not get used to using it.

    Through it all, he had to ring the same changes on his pills every day:
blue, white, yellow, white, blue-and-white-both. And his body still deman-
ded the extra five minutes walking to class each hour. Come January, he
was walking past the 5th-grade classroom the day they started the "family
life" unit, two dozen 10-year-olds looking uncomfortable about their first
glimpse of line drawings copulating. Not much nuance, Hanson thought, but
you can't teach some things. He was immediately sheepish about his dopey
crassness, and then altogether sad.

    Callie Pavan had in fact been avoiding him, and Hanson's guess at what
this meant was first rejection, then winking complicity, then a detente
for a fight he didn't know they'd had. When she did approach him, he was up
a ladder, pulling stale Christmas lights off moldings. "Hey," she said,
"thanks. And sorry."
    He couldn't speak, and rushing down the ladder would mean a fall. So.

written for Pierre & Jen in my living room 9/22/08

My school system really began sex ed in 5th grade; I don't know how common that was or is. We also had a smaller second gym that was rarely used. Here, I tried to justify having 5th grade in the same building as the high school by thinking of it as a very small school ("the" fifth-grade classroom, not "a") but in that case, would the high-schoolers be walking back and forth between different rooms all the time? Hm, no. I'm starting to see why a friend of mine has sketched floor plans for every building in her novel.

After a night's sleep, "seducing" and "smocks" jump out at me as misguided words, for different reasons.

My old instincts kept trying to turn Hanson into a nut or an OCD sufferer. I need to remember that, since I write these under time pressure, it's not enough to resist a bad whim at first-- I have to keep doing it!

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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