The Other Normals Page 2

  “There are people who call me … Mini Pecker.”

  “Really? How did that begin?”

  I sigh. I’ve told this story many times to people who I wanted to be my friends. They never became my friends. The story entertains me, though, so I keep telling it. Is this a disorder?

  “This guy Justin Racho. He ran up on me in first grade. I was at a urinal in the bathroom. He shoved me on it so I hit the cold white part. I sprayed pee all over myself, and he yelled, ‘Perry Eckert, Mini Pecker!’ A friend of his named Jacoby Myers heard it in a nearby stall. He started laughing. Now they still call me that.”

  “Mini Pecker?”

  “It doesn’t help that I’m short. I’m a late bloomer.”

  Roland doesn’t look more inclined to be my friend, but he does look more inclined to make money off me at Phantom Galaxy. “I’ve got the perfect name for you,” he says. He writes on a scrap of paper:

  Pekker Cland

  “Pekker?”

  “Like they make fun of you for, but you spell it differently, to reclaim it, like queer.”

  “What’s a Cland?”

  “Cland sounds like clan, so maybe with a character named Pekker Cland, you can attract a clan and not just play Creatures and Caverns by yourself.”

  I stare at the name. You know what? There’s something to it. I wouldn’t mess with a person named Pekker Cland.

  “As for a C and C expansion, have you heard of the Other Normal Edition?”

  Roland steps out from behind his glass case and leads me down an aisle. We aren’t alone; there’s a hidden customer who potentially just heard everything that transpired, including the Mini Pecker stuff—a skinny black kid, about my age, with a shaved head and oval glasses and big ears. He tosses a bag of glass beads up and down. As we approach him, he examines a book on the shelves—a thick hardcover with a genie laughing over a pirate ship on the cover. Maybe, I think, he’s the person I felt spying on me before.

  Roland grabs the book. It’s the last copy. “Sorry, I have a customer interested in this.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I say, pushing the book away. “You take it,” I say to the kid. He clearly wants it.

  “No, you take it,” Roland says, “because he’s here all the time and he never buys anything.”

  The kid pitches his bag of beads on the floor. “Fuck you, Roland. I don’t even want it.” He stalks away down the aisle.

  “Drama!” Roland calls. “Outta here!” He picks up the beads.

  “Do you know him?”

  “That’s just Sam. Don’t worry about him. Check the book out. It’s an alternate-universe thing they’re doing based on Arabian Nights.”

  As I open the Creatures & Caverns Rule Book: Other Normal Edition, the raga climaxes.

  5

  SOMETIMES WHEN YOU OPEN A BOOK, time stops. I know this is supposed to happen with great novels, but to me it happens more with role-playing-game manuals. Honestly, I can’t tell you how long I spend looking at the Other Normal Edition because I am immediately lost in the game world, which is called Enthral Moor and is centered in the folklore of classical Baghdad. I find a chart with sixty-four different types of scimitar on it. Sixty-four—26! An old friend, sixty-four. I look at the book’s authors.

  “‘Gerard Hendricks and Fayid Ahmed. Special Consultant: Mortin Enaw.’ What kind of a name is Mortin Enaw?” I ask Roland.

  “Don’t ask me. Very gifted people write these books.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “You want to buy a mini, too?”

  I shake my head. Figures like Roland of Cornwall are expensive. Besides the free legal advice, another thing that keeps my parents’ divorce going is that they’re both very cheap, so they keep finding new things to fight over. They keep me on a tight leash. Financial requests have to go through the lawyers. If I get a job this summer (computer programmer? cashier?), I’ll be able to afford one of the figures, but I know this is the last summer before the summers that really count for college, and the idea of getting the Other Normal Edition and reading it every day alone and stopping time is beautiful to me. I’ll wake up when the light comes into my room(s) and track the angles, reading the book in a sunbeam, understanding the sun the way the ancients did, leaving the house(s) just once to get on the subway because at least with divorced parents I have a reason to get on the subway anytime, to be “going home,” and then … maybe I’ll spot the Jane Eyre girl again! Only when I see her next, I’m going to ignore her and do something with my body that attracts her—blow hair across my brow or smile so that wrinkles crinkle at the sides of my eyes … something that works like it does in the movies.

  6

  I DECIDE TO MAKE MY NEW CHARACTER, Pekker Cland, reflect me as much as possible. It isn’t a pretty picture. In Creatures & Caverns, a strength of 99 means that you can lift boulders and bend iron bars; I figure I’m a 2. A speed of 99 means you can outrun a cheetah; I figure I’m a 7. The only stats I think might be high are my intelligence, which I peg at 65, and my honor, which I figure is 50.

  I’m going to make Pekker Cland human—until I read in the book that besides the usual options of human, elf, and dwarf, I can make him a ferrule. Ferrules are like humans except they have red skin, yellow hair, and tails. They are highly intelligent, live underground, and are impervious to fire. After I make Pekker Cland one, I have to find a profession for him, but based on my stats the only thing he’s qualified to be is an artisan.

  The artisan is a master of fine craft. Renowned for his/her skill at the forge, he/she creates weapons and armor and understands the principles of runecraft. An artisan may not fight in battle, but through his/her handiwork, a certain artfulness is always present in the blood that dots the land of Enthral Moor.

  I think, Epic. I’m not sure if Gerard Hendricks, Fayid Ahmed, and Mortin Enaw went to writing school, but as far as I’m concerned they’re better than anybody that teachers make me read. The book says things like “the tempestuous force of high-level magicks” and “the fickle bodies of maidens in the chambers of slavering warlords.” Though it starts out glossy and smelling like wax, as I read it in bed and get crumbs in the spine and dog-ear the pages and underline the important parts, it blooms into a danker, older smell.

  7

  “WHY AREN’T YOU ASLEEP?” MY BROTHER asks from the top bunk. The clock reads 3:35.

  “I’m reading my Rule Book. Learning about lock picking.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you know about lock picking?”

  “I’m sure it’s like sex.”

  “I’m sure it’s not like sex.”

  “How would you know? Everything’s like sex. It’s the universal metaphor. To pick a lock, let me guess, you have to go slow at first, but then you have to pull off some fancy moves, and you have to stay concentrated, and you have to stick something in something, right?”

  “Jake, stop. What are you doing up anyway? Drinking schnapps?”

  He climbs down and wrestles my flashlight from me. “Only pussies drink schnapps!”

  He kicks me out of our room, so I have to go read the Rule Book in the bathroom. I get so into it that my legs fall asleep on the toilet. When I get up, I collapse on the floor. All this happens in Mom’s house in Manhattan, where the neighbor’s bathroom is six inches from our bathroom, and as I lie on the floor unable to move my legs, the neighbor’s cat perches in the window and mews at me. Then Horace, who was busy sleeping with my mom, decides he has to use the bathroom, so he shoves open the door, whapping my skull to crinkle my neck into an unhealthy position. “Ow!”

  Horace closes the door and goes back down the hall as if nothing happened. He doesn’t like to stay in places where he might be liable for things. I sleep on the bathroom floor curled around my book and wake up with bruises.

  8

  AT SCHOOL, MR. GETTER CORNERS ME AFTER an Intro to Logic class. “Perry, um, we need someone, um, for the meet this weekend.”

  “I’m not on math team anymo
re, Mr. Getter. You kicked me out when I failed to qualify for Summer Scholars.”

  “You’re still a, um, reserve member.”

  “Like an understudy? Since when?”

  “Michael Imperio is, um, sick, understand?”

  “Michael Imperio is never too sick to do math.”

  Behind me, the students have all left and gone home or to a ninth-period class or to a club or to a sports team because it’s 2:55 and they have better places to be than talking to a teacher who says “um” every other word. I think about camp. Will it be like being sent to a 2,048th-period class?

  “All right, um, he’s not sick, he has an, um, issue with qualifying for this meet.”

  “You mean like not having a green card?”

  Michael Imperio comes from a country in South America that doesn’t have good diplomatic relations with the US. Despite his lack of proper American entry protocol, he was accepted into my school, Simmons Leadership Academy, due to his math skills, which are the sort of skills that might help steer the future of America.

  “Um,” Mr. Getter says.

  “Yeah, fine, I’ll sub for you. Where’s the meet?”

  9

  I WILL PROBABLY NOT DO WELL. I WILL probably be humiliated by a greasy student next to me with a boil; this has happened. One math whiz from Cambodia via Bronx High School of Science has a boil on his forehead, right of center; when I sat next to him at a meet I began wondering about the way a particular drop of sweat was likely to run down the surface of the boil and lost my train of mathematical thought.

  I walk into the classroom where we’re having the meet with my face buried in my Other Normal Edition. Although it’s at a different school, the room is as familiar as the role-playing-game floor of Phantom Galaxy Comics, as comfortingly sealed from the outside world and climate-controlled, even if it is a tropical sweatbox climate. The boil Cambodian is nowhere in sight. I set my cell phone to “off” and sit. I look up, shocked—I’m right next to the kid I saw in Phantom Galaxy. Sam.

  “Hey,” he says. “What’s your name?”

  He seems a lot calmer than he was in the store when he threw down his bag of beads. He’s at the back row of desks; he’s an understudy like me. I put my Other Normal Edition away.

  “You been playing?” he continues. “My name’s Sam.”

  “I know, Roland said—”

  “Screw Roland. Fat bastard.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I got accepted to my school’s math team. You have a problem with that?”

  “You’re not following me?”

  “Why would I follow you? Why would anyone follow you?”

  “You could be planning on ridiculing me in some elaborate way.”

  “Get over yourself. You been playing the Other Normal Edition?”

  “Just by myself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just read the book and make up characters by myself.”

  “What, you think you get points for being sad?”

  “No, I’m just telling you the truth—”

  “Where do you play?”

  “Everywhere. Mom’s house, Dad’s house, school …”

  “What school?”

  “Simmons.” I know his school from the blackboard at the front of the room: Xavier in Brooklyn.

  “I hang out near Simmons. You want to play sometime?”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I can’t find that book anywhere.”

  “Why?”

  “Look it up on the internet. Try A-Plus Comics in Flatbush. Prison Planet. It’s nowhere.”

  “Why not? It’s a great expansion.”

  “It’s sold out. How spoiled are you? You never heard of something being sold out? Where do you play in Simmons?”

  “At the bottom of the fire stairs by the science labs.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Excuse me? Mr.... Eek-er?” the proctor says.

  “Eckert.”

  “Mr. Eckert, can you please come to the front of the room with your answer sheet?”

  “I didn’t get an answer sheet yet. We haven’t started.”

  “This will serve as your answer sheet,” she says. She’s a prim woman with skin that’s wrinkled and tight at the same time. She writes Disqualified for speaking on a piece of paper and passes it to my team captain, the assiduous and silent girl Min, who is so brilliant that she has rendered herself asexual (and whom I always feel guilty about characterizing this way).

  “If your group has no other team members to take your place, you’ll have to forfeit the match,” the proctor says.

  “I, uh—”

  Mr. Getter steps into the room; he was outside pacing by a bench with the other math coaches.

  “We have one, we have one!” he says, and produces Michael Imperio, who produces a Police Athletic League card. I’ve been told that these are get-out-of-jail-free cards if you ever get busted for pot or jumping turnstiles in New York. Apparently they work at math meets too. Michael Imperio takes my seat. I wave good-bye to Sam, who’s now sitting with such attentiveness and rectitude that apparently he can’t be disqualified for speaking.

  10

  I HAVE A GOOD THING GOING ON THE fire stairs. No one messes with me; I can set up my dice and my Other Normal Edition and my graph paper and mechanical pencils and create characters to my heart’s content. A few times since I got the book I had the feeling I was being watched again; once I heard the skritch-skritch pencil noise like in Phantom Galaxy … but it was probably just me making the character sheets.

  As I’m setting up my area a week after the disastrous meet (Mr. Getter isn’t talking to me at all now, not even a single “um”), Sam opens the gray metal fire door. “What’s up?” he asks.

  “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “School ended.”

  “Five minutes ago! Your school is in Brooklyn, I thought!”

  “I cut some classes, calm down. I’ve been looking for you.”

  “You must be really obsessed with this book.”

  He pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his hoodie. “You want?”

  “What? To smoke it?”

  He scowls and creaks open the door he just entered. This door has an angry red bar on it that says EMERGENCY—ALARM WILL SOUND, but now Sam has opened it twice, from inside and outside. Why did I never try?

  Sam blows smoke out the door. I watch it curl away into the spring air. He looks nervous while he smokes, but then he looks very relaxed. He asks, “You chill here, but you don’t smoke? You could sell drugs in this piece.”

  “People do that. And there’s a couple that comes here to make out some days, and yesterday the girl told the guy she was pregnant.”

  “So? Is it your baby?”

  “No!”

  “Then how come it’s your business? I don’t want people to know I play C and C. If you’re the kind of person who spies on people and talks crap about them, I don’t want to even start this.”

  “Sorry.”

  “All right.” He shakes my hand, still smoking. “Now, what kind of character do you play?”

  “Artisan. Named Pekker Cland.”

  “Artisan? What’s wrong with you?” For a minute I think he’s going to ask, “You gay?”—but he doesn’t and I like him for it. “You got no business playing RPGs unless you’re a magic user.” His glasses slide down his nose. He motions for the Other Normal Edition. He turns to the runecraft section.

  “You know what the best spell is? There’s one that makes people fall in love with rocks. You cast it on them, and they’ll fixate on the next big rock they see, and they’ll think that rock is a beautiful man or woman, and they’ll marry it and give up everything that they have going in life, and they’ll stop fighting if they’re in the middle of a battle, just to be with the rock. It’s an eleventh-level runecraft. Rock Spouse.”

  “Do you play a certain character?”

  “I got a bu
nch. One of them’s a mystagogue. She’s like a fortune-teller with the skills of a highly trained assassin.”

  “What level?”

  “Thirteenth.”

  “Wow!”

  “I got another who’s a seventh-level thief. But the best is a fifteenth-level barbarian I got. Peter Powers.”

  Sam reaches into his hoodie and takes out a black velvet drawstring bag. He opens it to reveal a perfect pewter miniature: a bald giant with a huge beard standing in a pile of snow, snorting in the cold air, holding a mace high, about to bring it down on an enemy.

  “How’d they sculpt his breath?” I peer in fascination.

  “I don’t know.” Sam puts him back. “Maybe if you look at it too hard, it’ll go away.”

  “Sorry. Where do you get the money to buy figures like that?”

  “What’d I tell you about being nosy?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You just told me sorry three times, and we haven’t even talked for two minutes. What, you think if you say it enough, the Candyman is gonna come?”

  “Candyman?”

  He tosses his cigarette out the door. “Let’s start playing an Enthral Moor campaign. I’ll run the games.” Sam sits down—and it turns out he can stop time just as well as the book.

  11

  SAM MAKES UP A LOT OF RULES AS WE go along. Role-playing games are meant to be played with more than two people, so to help me out, he invents a character to accompany Pekker Cland on his adventures: a beautiful woman named Ariane who’s escaped from prison.

  In our first game, Ariane accosts Pekker while he kneels at his forge trying to make a scarab-shaped cigarette holder in the market in town. (Sam tells me that ornate cigarette holders are big sellers and if I don’t want my character to be poor, I’d better make them.) Ariane has long dark hair and a robe that reveals more of her to those with more honor. Innocent men see her naked; hardened criminals see her in a full dress and veil. Since Pekker has a 50 honor, he sees her in Leia’s slave outfit from Return of the Jedi.