Free Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes Page A

makeup and get way too careful about matching colors? Or the way a not-so-smart guy who wishes he was smart will always bring up some really hard book he read, or keeps repeating the only fact he knows about a subject? So you always keep noticing that she’s not really pretty, or he’s not really smart, and they can feel you noticing that, so they get all insecure and keep doing it more?
    That was Larry and weird.
    I think he was afraid someone would notice that he was just a guy with long hair who read a lot of sci-fi, knew all of Firesign Theatre by heart, and stole a lot of one-liners from MAD magazine.
    Larry did lights for the school plays, took photos for the school paper, and was a moderately shitty reliever for our immoderately shitty baseball team.
    I never saw him over a summer; he went to camp. Just this moment in lunch line he was telling me about some girl named Allison that he’d finally lost his virginity to. First thing every fall, he’d have to tell everyone that this year at camp, he’d lost his virginity. He never remembered that he’d said the same thing the year before. I thought about asking him if Allison’d gotten into any fights with Jen, who was the one from last year. But I didn’t; I’m a cowardly shit.
    Anyway, another ten years and he’d lose his virginity for real. Probably three weeks after I lost mine, come to admit it.
    We got up to the head of the line and Larry tried to freak out the cafeteria lady by asking for sea creatures and boiled wheat, with spoiled milk. He looked kind of disappointed when she just plopped a serving onto the tray.
    Since it was the first Wednesday of the school year, we had Wednesday meal number one, tuna noodle casserole, corn, and apple crumb cobbler. They hadn’t changed the rotation since Mom stopped packing my lunch back around third grade. For thirty cents more I could’ve gotten hamburger-with-fries, but I always got the main meal, for variety, because between all my jobs and my hanging out I was already eating like five thousand hamburgers a week.
    Larry and me headed for a vacant table on the main aisle. Paul would have lunch this period too. After a whole morning getting caught up with all the other Madmen, I’d come to see that, like it or not, they were the friends I had—and anyway avoiding my best friend wouldn’t exactly be normal. So I had added another operation to Operation Be Fucking Normal.
    Operation Restore Best Friend would go like this: Paul would sit with me, we’d have a normal conversation, and then on the way out he’d suddenly tell me why he was avoiding me. He liked to drop the big one on you just as you were saying bye—as an actor, he wanted the curtain line.
    Paul came out of the serving line. Larry waved at him. Paul walked right by us and went to the picnic tables outside.
    “Wonder what’s wrong with that there laddie, ’e’s a weird one ’e is, eh, eh, eh? A weirdie you know. Eh?” Larry was probably quoting some movie I hadn’t seen, to judge by the fact that he was doing a really bad accent, bad enough I didn’t know which he was trying to do. He did that a lot. I don’t know if he was hoping people would recognize something he quoted, or afraid they would; knowing stuff nobody else knew was a big deal to Larry.
    “Hunh,” I said. “He seemed kind of fucked up earlier today too. But you know, sometimes Paul’s just like that.” I was lying—I’d never seen him act like this before—but I guess I just wanted to keep it sounding normal. Maybe I wanted Larry to agree I knew Paul real well.
    I ate a couple bites of corn while Larry launched off into some rambling thing about what if all your friends were replaced by aliens, which I think was like his MAD - magazination of a Philip K. Dick book. I was watching my tray like it was naked television.
    When he stopped to breathe, or I think maybe he asked me a question, I said, “Hey, I’m not hungry. You want to finish this for me?”
    “You only