Free King Dork by Frank Portman

that Molli
    Miklazewski specifically made a point of saying that it’s not seeing just anyone’s balls per se that grossed them all out.
    The girls in her circle, she wanted to emphasize, quite enjoy seeing someone’s balls in many situations. Sometimes they
    see a person’s balls and throw a big party in the spirit of reverent and enthusiastic ball admiration. Whether it’s gross and makes them want to throw up or not is all dependent on
    whose balls they are. Now, maybe she was saying this in part just to make sure Scott Erdman knew that she felt okay about 58
    his balls, but the message was clear. The entire second-period sophomore girls’ PE class thought my balls were uniquely
    and supremely beneath contempt. Great.
    Never mind about the date-rape prevention from this
    end, Ms. Rimbaud. I got you covered. There will be no dat-
    ing, school district approved or not, going on in the general vicinity of my balls for a long, long time.
    But the Lord never closes a door without opening a win-
    dow, and on the bright side, it could have been much, much worse, as this would have been the perfect opportunity for someone to propose a groundbreakingly embarrassing new
    nickname. But fortunately, just at the point when the discussion in the band room would have reached the all-important nickname development stage, in walked Pierre Butterfly
    Cameroon.
    Needless to say, Pierre Butterfly Cameroon is cursed with
    one of the worst names ever misguidedly foisted upon a poor, defenseless kid by adoring, clueless, hippie parents. He’s also the shortest kid in school (another wonderful gift from
    the Whole Earth Mom and Dad: stunted growth owing to
    a protein-free vegan diet in his formative years). Plus, he had been insane enough back in elementary school to have
    chosen to play the flute rather than some more gender-
    appropriate instrument, so when he walked in someone lifted him by the legs of his jeans and shook him upside down till he fell out of his pants and hit his head on a saxophone case and lay there crying in his underwear and everyone started chanting, “Get a belt! Get a belt!” So my balls were forgotten in the excitement. Like I said, doors and windows.
    So I guess I ended up having a slight change of attitude
    about that CHS party. I mean, I was kind of looking forward to it, suddenly. It had disaster written all over it, but really, how much worse could anything get?
    59
    TITS, BAC K RU B S, AN D DRY C LEAN I NG
    I had, of course, brought all the CEH books up to my room
    right after I found them at the beginning of that week. I had cased out the Catcher pretty thoroughly, but it wasn’t till the Thursday just before the party that I got around to examining the rest of them closely as a set. Sam Hellerman had had to skip band practice to do something with his parents (an obligation I wouldn’t wish on a dog—his parents are no pic-nic). I was on my own. So I put on Rocket to Russia and began to go through them.
    A couple of the books were familiar from school as
    Catcher in the Rye alternates or runners-up. That is, if Catcher is for any reason unable to perform its official duties, they make you read one of the other ones instead. There was A Separate Peace, which is about this irritating guy who keeps trying to make this other irritating guy fall and break his leg until he finally does and ends up dying. And there was Lord of the Flies, which is kind of like Hillmont High School meets Gilligan’s Island, except that the goons in charge are prissy English schoolboys instead of normal red-blooded American
    alpha psychopaths.
    There was one pretty cool one, though: Brighton Rock.
    Reading books can be a lot of fun when they’re not the same ones that they make you read over and over and over till you want to shoot yourself. Brighton Rock seemed pretty interesting. I opened it and read the first couple of pages. But knowing it was my dad’s book gave me a weird feeling that kept distracting me from the story,