Adam Selzer by How to Get Suspended, Influence People

Dustin’s parents made him go to church every weekend, but Mrs. Smollet got so freaked out by us just joking about it that we couldn’t help it. Sometimes I worried that it was a bit sacreligious to pretend to be a devil worshipper, but I was pretty sure that if God knew anything about what it was like to be in a class headed by Mrs. Smollet, He wouldn’t mind too much. He obviously knew that we weren’t actually sacrificing goats to anybody.
    This brightened up my day a bit, especially since it reminded me that Halloween, the greatest holiday in the history of the world, was less than two months away, but it didn’t really pull me out of the bad mood I’d been in since hearing that I couldn’t do the explosion. That’s the kind of thing a guy doesn’t get over too quickly.
    The fact that the next class was gym didn’t help matters. Guys like Nick Norton always think gym is the highlight of the day, but I’ve never liked it much. I thought it was okay in elementary school, when all we did was play around with parachutes and stuff, until one day when we were playing elimination, which was like free-form, every-man-for-himself dodgeball, and Todd Moreland cornered me against a wall and threw a ball at my chest. I jumped straight up to get out of the way, and very nearly made it, which would have been really cool. But I didn’t jump high enough, and instead of hitting my chest, the ball creamed me in the nuts. That pretty well killed my appetite for gym. And anyway, some kid a couple of towns over had had something similar happen and had to get one of his nuts removed at the hospital, or so the story went. I preferred classes where I wasn’t in that sort of danger.
    If teachers hadn’t been watching us like hawks and ready to suspend anyone who missed a class, I would’ve cut gym every day. All we did was sit around in some smelly locker room, change into nasty clothes, and then run around the stupid gym while Coach Hunter shouted at us like we were in the marines or something. I swear to God that the maniac once shouted at me and called me a girl when I made a mistake during square dancing. Why the hell did we have square dancing in gym anyway?
    The only guy from my lunch table I had gym with was James Cole, who was about as interested in the whole thing as I was. He was standing next to me while we were all doing the usual exercises.
    “Ten push-ups!” shouted Coach Hunter. “Drop! Now!”
    We all dropped, and, by going at a slower pace, I got away with doing only six or seven. Then he shouted for us all to get up and start touching our toes.
    James suddenly hopped about two feet closer to me and muttered, “Bongos at twelve o’clock.”
    “What the hell?” I asked. “Bongos” must’ve been one of his newer slang inventions; I didn’t know if it meant that he had muscle spasms in his back or someone had farted or what.
    “Bongos!” he said, pointing his chin in front of us. I looked up and saw that Rachel Strutt was touching her toes directly in front of us, and found out right away what “bongos” were. She was wearing this loose-fitting shirt that hung down low when she bent over, and you could see right up it. She was wearing a sports bra and all, but, well, still. It was the kind of sight that helped a guy get through the day.
    A few minutes later the coach was barking for us all to run laps around the gym. As usual, James and I just walked. As we passed the coach one time, he started walking along with us.
    “I’m sick of you girls,” he said.
    “Don’t you worry that calling us girls could leave us with unresolved gender issues?” I asked. I figured that if the school was that concerned about getting sued over an explosion, they wouldn’t want a teacher going around calling us girls when we certainly weren’t.
    “Don’t smart-mouth me,” he said. I think gym teachers don’t like any part of you to be all that smart. “Every day I see you two girls in here giving twenty percent. I