The Odd 1s Out Read online

  I mean, it’s not my best work, but I still thought it was funny. The joke was that a sympathy rub is weird. I don’t think I’d actually ever try it out on anyone to see how effective it was as a form of apology—especially since it ended up getting me in a whole lot of trouble. But who knows? Maybe it could comfort someone someday.

  Unfortunately, there was a teacher walking by who didn’t appreciate my humor. (This wouldn’t be the first or last time.)She was a middle school teacher, so we’d seen her around before, but we’d never talked to her.

  She stopped and asked us, “Hey, do you two know the school’s policy on public displays of affection?”

  My sister responded with, “Yep,” and started to walk away.

  The teacher said, “Oh, I’m not done.”

  The lady then began to give us a lecture about why we had to keep our feelings for each other outside of school. She said stuff like, “I know you’re both young and in love. But your hormones are all out of whack, and now is not the time to be going steady with someone.”

  Apparently, this teacher had seen us sit next to each other in classes, walk with each other in the hallway, and work on homework together in the lobby, and naturally assumed that we were madly in love.

  Faith and I looked at each other, both thinking, Do we tell her?

  You know, looking back, we probably should have stopped her somewhere in the middle of her speech about why we shouldn’t be going steady, but we didn’t want to make the teacher feel awkward or anything. We both had social anxiety, remember? So we just kept our mouths shut and nodded. And I remember while this was happening, my friend Anthony walked by and, knowing we were brother and sister, he was extremely confused about why we were being told not to show our feelings for each other in school.

  After the teacher was done talking and had left, I thought the experience was hilarious and wanted to tell everyone in the whole school, but Faith was mortified and wanted to keep it quiet.

  Down the hall, Anthony was waiting for us and he asked if we’d gotten called out for PDA. I told him my sympathy rub joke, and Faith made him swear to never tell anyone.

  And this would probably be the end of the story, except the next day, while our geometry teacher was going over another section, the teacher that called us out came in and asked the geometry teacher, “Hey, do you know the blond curly-haired girl with the boyfriend that looks just like her?”

  I’m sorry, but just saying that sentence probably should have triggered some sort of red flag.

  “You mean Faith and James?” my geometry teacher asked.

  “Yes,” the middle school teacher said. “I saw them holding hands.”

  Which we weren’t, by the way. I was giving her a sympathy rub.

  But the entire class burst out laughing anyway. So much for Faith wanting to keep the whole thing a secret.

  The geometry teacher broke the news. “They’re twins.”

  So the middle school teacher ended up feeling awkward anyway. I still thought the whole thing was hysterical. And Faith was glad there were only two more weeks of school left.

  The lesson here is, if you think speaking up to correct someone might make them feel awkward, you should probably speak up and make them feel awkward anyway. Because if you don’t, the whole thing might just become more awkward for everyone. Also, although my studies are inconclusive, sympathy rubs might not be the best form of apology.

  Chapter 6

  PE

  If you grew up in the great American education system, you probably had to take a physical education class to graduate from high school. I actually don’t know if it’s required everywhere in America, but it is in Arizona. Overall, I’m all in favor of lifting weights and running around for no reason. I understand why schools make kids take PE. (Let’s not beat around the bush, it’s because we’re fat.)

  But I think the course could use some changes. Just like with every other class, there should be an honors PE. I’m not saying this because I was a big tough guy who wanted the extra challenge in school. I was just the opposite. Right now, in PE classes you’ll have a two-hundred-pound football player, a one-hundred-pound chess club member, and everyone in between all exercising together.

  Playing flag football and basketball with a group of testosterone-jacked alpha males is never fun, especially if you’re on the “beta” side. And if you haven’t figured this out already, I am very, very beta.

  I just think I would have enjoyed PE more if all the alpha males were in another section. Although, I guess that’s why we have school sports.

  Normally to get the PE requirement out of the way, freshman girls at my school took dance and freshman boys took standard physical education. Although, sometimes the really wimpy boys took dance class too. Maybe they were actually the smart ones, because they got to hang around with all the girls. Maybe I should have taken dance.

  Since I went to a preparatory school in ninth grade, I took PE my sophomore year, once I was back in public school. It didn’t make a difference since I still fit in perfectly fine with the other skinny white boys who weren’t smart enough to take dance.

  During the first ten minutes of class, we were supposed to get dressed. For guys, getting dressed takes about fifty seconds, so we would just goof off until the coach marched into the locker room and yelled,

  Actually, I want to talk about locker rooms for a few paragraphs.

  Who decided it was socially acceptable to get completely undressed in front of strangers just because you happen to be standing in a locker room? You would never do this in, say, English class.

  Luckily, in high school all we did was take off our pants and put on our gym shorts. We were young and awkward so we all silently agreed that we would just look straight forward, no peeking, and we would all put on our gym shorts without talking. Kinda what we men do when we’re at urinals.

  Honestly, that’s a fine and acceptable thing to do in the locker room. What I have problems with is 100 percent, full-on nudity. In college, I signed up to use the school’s gym because I was going to class and drawing all day—meaning I was on my butt a lot and I needed to get my internet-doctor-recommended ten thousand steps in—and I wasn’t eating any healthy food.

  Anyway, one time at college I was in the locker room putting my clothes back on using the same tactic I did in high school: I wasn’t looking around. I was just looking straight ahead. But then someone turned the corner—and I didn’t get a good look at him (thankfully), but as he walked past me, in my peripheral vision I thought I saw some cheeks. I turned my head

  and he was completely naked!

  Aw, James, why don’t you act like an adult? You’re in college. People have butts, get over it.

  Listen, this guy was a complete stranger. For all I know, he could have been in one of my classes (I didn’t get a good look at his face, only his butt). I understand that you’re supposed to shower in the locker room, but towels exist for a reason. Don’t just go flinging your nasties out for everyone to see. Am I making a big deal of this? Because I feel like you’re judging me. That wasn’t even the only time I saw people walking around naked. It happened quite a bit. That’s why I get a locker closest to the door now.

  But back to PE: One day while we were waiting for the coach to come in and give us the “Okay, let’s do this!” line, we got bored. To entertain ourselves, we took water bottle caps from the trash and started flicking them around like they were little tiny Frisbees.

  This progressed into shooting caps at each other. I’m pretty sure I was the one who started this trend because, you know, I was the high-and-mighty sophomore in a sea of freshmen. But whatever. Whoever started it, it was all fun and no one got hurt.

  In that moment, the jocks and the nerds were all together. We’d bonded over turning lids into weapons.

  After the coach came and got us that day, we had an extra hard
workout. We ran two laps instead of one. We had to do wall sits while holding medicine balls. And afterward, when we were all sweaty and ready to collapse, the coach said to us, “You know why today was extra hard? It was because you were flicking bottle caps.”

  How does flicking bottle caps equal fifty minutes of torture? I mean, it was probably healthy for us, but I don’t see the correlation.

  About a month after the bottle cap incident, these two alpha guys got the idea to play a game called “bodies.” If you aren’t sure what bodies is, it’s a game where you punch someone. That’s it. That’s the entire game. You’re not allowed to hit people’s faces, though. Just their bodies . . . which is why it’s called bodies.

  This should be an Olympic sport.

  You’d think at least one of us would have said something like, “Hey, you guys, um, Coach didn’t like it last time when we were messing around. Uhhhh, maybe we shouldn’t do this.”

  I mean, someone could have gotten hurt.

  So, you know, being the older and taller one, I obviously couldn’t let that happen. Without watching.

  These two kids started playing, and one kid wasn’t even punching back, which is a strategy I would not recommend while playing this particular game. Maybe the kid thought he was like Harry Houdini. (Short lesson about Harry Houdini: The man thought that his ab muscles were so strong, he told people to punch him and claimed he would absorb the punch.)

  (Turns out, this also was not a particularly good strategy, because Houdini ended up dying from a ruptured appendix after someone punched him. How embarrassing.)

  Anyway, the dude in my PE class also didn’t fare well at this game. He used the Houdini strategy and was taking the punches, then he fell, hit his head on the tile floor, and didn’t get up.

  Obviously none of us had a medical background, so we just gently slapped the guy a couple of times and said, “Hey, bro, are you gonna wake up, bro?”

  That didn’t work. So we had to tell the coach, and he went and got the nurse. By the time the coach called the nurse, the kid had woken up a little. He was just being a wussy and not moving. I’m pretty sure he was conscious the whole time.

  The coach asked him what happened and the dude knew he would get in trouble if he told the truth so he came up with one of the best explanations I’ve ever heard:

  Although, it’s possible that he wasn’t lying and the head trauma made him legitimately forget.

  The coach sent him to the nurse, then turned to the rest of us and asked, “What happened?”

  Everyone was, like, “Uh, geez, yeah, uh, he just passed out.”

  And we almost got away with it except this one kid—I forget his first name, but his last name was Ferilikins or something—told the coach, “They were playing bodies” and then explained that “Person A punched Person B” (not his exact words).

  Thanks, Ferilikins.

  Fortunately, right then the nurse called the coach and said that the kid was going home and needed his clothes. So the coach told us, “I need someone to bring his stuff to the health office.”

  I yelled,

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get his clothes.”

  I’m told that the class had to do lunges around the track field for the whole class. But I have no firsthand knowledge of that because I took my sweet time walking to the health office.

  I may not have been an alpha male, but I was an upperclassman. Comes with perks.

  And then a year later, our PE teacher got fired. For other reasons.

  The moral of this story is: Don’t play bodies. And if you do, hit back.

  Chapter 7

  Laser Tag

  In other states, summer vacation happens when the weather is at its best. In Arizona, the weather during this period of time is what we call: “Why do I live here?”

  It’s too hot to do anything outside but go to a pool or watch stuff melt.

  Seriously, swimming is the one activity we can do without risking heatstroke (you just get to risk sunburns and skin cancer instead). The thing is, you can only mess around in a pool for so long before it gets boring.

  Fortunately, we’ve got some fun indoor places that have air-conditioning. When I was little, my family and I went to Chuck E. Cheese’s all the time. And nothing says good pizza and good times like a large robotic singing rodent.

  When I got older, the best thing to do in the summers was to play laser tag. If you didn’t know already, “laser” is actually an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.” So really, it should be “labseor” tag, but that doesn’t sound as cool.

  Nobel Prize winner Arthur Schawlow invented the laser in 1957 and, sure, lasers were used in the lunar landing and they have medical and military purposes, but I think we can all agree that their best application is laser pointers and laser tag.

  Lasers can supply you with hours of fun. Unless you’re my coworker who was fired for shining a laser pointer at cars. Don’t do that.

  When I was about fifteen, I went with a group of my friends to a laser tag place for someone’s birthday party. If you’ve never played laser tag, here’s how it usually goes: When you get there, you have to wait for the game inside to finish up before you can play. Since sessions last thirty minutes, the place has arcade games to keep you busy and take more money from you.

  So my friends and I were playing some arcade games, and this group of four guys came in wearing all black. I’m talking black long-sleeve shirts, black pants, and even black gloves. Three of them were wearing some sort of a black hat and the one who wasn’t already had black hair.

  They looked about eighteen or nineteen years old. So they were older than us, but still young enough to go all-out commando at a laser tag place.

  My first thought was, Ha! Look at these goths. They think they’re all cool with their dark clothes. What dweebs.

  But then I remembered that the laser tag arena was dimly lit. These guys weren’t goths; they were wearing camouflage.

  So then I thought, Wow, these guys came prepared. But another part of me thought, Wow, these guys are even bigger dweebs. They came prepared to a laser tag fight.

  I don’t know what these guys’ names were, but I’m going to call them all Hunter. Not because they were prepared to go out and “hunt” people, but because I think only someone with a name like Hunter would do this. It’s just one of those names. If someone named Hunter is reading this . . . I’m not sorry.

  Now, before a laser tag session starts, everyone has to sit in a room while some bored employee tells you, in a very scripted manner, the rules of the game. At one point, they make you repeat the rules back to them. They say, “I will not run, jump, or climb!”

  And then you have to say, “I will not run, jump, or climb.”

  I remember while we were chanting the rules, these four guys were just staring off into space not repeating anything.

  Maybe they thought they were too cool for rules.

  Anyway, it was pretty clear they were planning on running, jumping, and/or climbing.

  After we (excluding the Hunters) were all through repeating the rules, we went to a fairly large, multilevel arena. Some laser tag places are skimpy on the scenery, but this place had towers, pillars, and platforms to hide on. It even had mirrors to make things more confusing. All that was missing was a zipline and a teleporter. Then it would have been really awesome.

  We all started playing the game. Everything was dark except—for some inexplicable reason—the vests we wore. Those had colored lights on them to designate which team you were on. You could belong to one of three teams: the red team, the yellow team, or the blue or green team. I’ve forgotten the actual colors. That’s not important.

  So we were having fun fake-shooting people, when all of a sudden, I ran into this group of people wearing strobe lights on their shoulders. The lights were so bright t
hey blocked out the colored lights on their vests, making them harder to hit. I couldn’t see these guys’ faces or really anything in their direction, but I knew immediately who these guys were. Do you wanna take a guess?

  The Hunters

  The Hunters

  A lightning bug having a seizure

  That’s right. It was the Hunters.

  At first, I stood my ground and shot at the flashing field of light, but I got hit so many times, I broke one of the rules. I ran away.

  Can you blame me? These kids came prepared. If we were using real lasers, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. I found one of my friends and said, “Did you see the guys with the strobe lights?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “They gave me this scar.” And he had a twelve-inch scar on his face.

  I’m just kidding. That didn’t happen. We were fighting with lasers. But can you imagine?

  This meant war with the Hunters. After they’d pulled a move like that, I wasn’t going to let them get away, untouched from my laser.

  Later in the game, I went to one of the towers, got a good vantage point, and waited. This strategy is called “camping” and is universally frowned upon, but if the Hunters weren’t going to play fair, neither would I. I saw a flashing light, followed by darkness, followed by another flashing light very quickly in the distance. And that’s when the Hunters became the Huntered. I was going to straight-up snipe these dweebs. I started spamming my trigger.