Free Stoner & Spaz by Ron Koertge Page B

front of him. I look through the viewfinder.
    “I’m going to ask you some questions, okay?” When he doesn’t answer I glance up. “Okay?”
    “Yeah, sure. I was just thinking your voice is different than I remember. Higher. More like a girl’s.”
    “Very funny.”
    “When’s the last time you talked to anybody?”
    “I talk in class.”
    “That doesn’t count.”
    “Well, I’m talking now. So will you answer some questions? I’m making a movie.”
    “What about?”
    “High school.”
    “Any girls in it? Like, at the beach? Or unconscious?”
    “Try and relax, Artie.”
    “What happened to your face?”
    “Hey, who’s interviewing who here?”
    “You ask me one, I’ll ask you one. I go first — what happened to your face?”
    “I got in a fight.”
    “Somebody hit you? That was chicken shit.”
    “Maybe I’m tougher than I look.”
    “Man, you better be.”
    “My turn to ask a question: What do you want out of high school?”
    Artie pretends to think. “All right. What I want out of high school is to prepare myself for the future in the best way possible.”
    I roll my eyes. “Scene one, take two.”
    “To get out of this place alive, then, okay? That’s my biggest goal.”
    “That’s more like it. And then what?”
    “Are you kidding? Go to college.”
    “So you feel like high school prepared you for college?”
    “Hey, my dad says you get out of things what you put into them.”
    “But what do you say?”
    “I just told you.”
    I look over the top of the camera. “No, no. I mean what do
you
believe?”
    “Huh?”
    I glance at my list of questions, a list Colleen and I thought up together. “Forget it. If you could change one thing about high school, what would it be?”
    “Do you know Stephanie Brewer?”
    “Jeremy’s girlfriend?”
    “That’s the change I’d make. There’d be more girls like Stephanie.”
    “So there’d still be metal detectors and gangs and burned-out teachers but way more Stephanies?”
    Artie leans forward. “But there wouldn’t be gangs then, so we wouldn’t need metal detectors.”
    “Why not?”
    “Stephanie jerks Jeremy off.”
    “So?”
    “So if everybody had a Stephanie, everybody’d be happy.”
    “Can I quote you? I need one more source for my term paper on Utopia.”
    “Hey, you should know what I’m talking about. You had Colleen.”
    “I never had Colleen.”
    “You can tell me, man.”
    “Artie, I know where this is going, so just don’t, okay?”
    “But I heard that Ed said when Colleen was high she’d do any —”
    I loom over the desk and put my bruised face right in Artie’s. “Shut up, man. I’m not kidding.”
    Stephanie Brewer leans against the north wall of the gym, the wall with the big panther logo.
    “Move a little to the left, okay?”
    “Who else is in this movie?” she asks.
    “So far just you and Artie.”
    “Who’s Artie?”
    “A little more to the left.” I look through the viewfinder. “I kind of want that panther’s paw to show up in the frame.”
    “Did Ed do that to your face?”
    “No.”
    “Well, it looks kinda cute.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    “Well, it’s not bad. What’s bad is those clothes your grandma makes you wear. And how you think you’re better than everybody else.”
    “I never thought that.”
    “It sure looked like it. Two years ago I asked you to run for treasurer of the freshman class, and all you did was glare at me.”
    “You just felt sorry for me.”
    “I needed a treasurer, and you’re good at math.”
    I raise the camera. With her blue pedal pushers and banana-colored top she could have stepped right out of an ad. “Ready?”
    “Do you want me to do anything special?”
    “Just answer the questions.” I glance at my list. “Do you feel safe at school?”
    Stephanie frowns. “Most of the time. High school’s kind of like L.A.: you’re fine if you know what you’re doing. And like they say — there’s safety in