School commences in just two weeks. New shoes, a fresh lunch pail, binders stuffed with pristine new materials. What’s not to love?
Ms. Visikich: eighth grade science. Famously cranky and droll, her excruciatingly bad breath had us gasping through the necks of our sweaters all year long. If we’d had more entrepreneurial moxie at twelve, we could have bottled the noxious cloud she emitted during lectures and marketed it as a toxic room-clearer to military and law enforcement entities. Oh well.
Holly Fabuloso: android classmate disguised as human perfection personified. It wasn’t just that she was more beautiful than every other thirteen-year old female in the entire world. She was smarter, too. And athletic, though prettily so. Faint, somewhat tardy consolation for all the little girls who cried themselves through middle school with frustrated dreams of somehow morphing into Holly? She’s grown a bit chunky of thigh in her thirties! Sweet, sweet revenge at last!
Alan Fuugelseph: math brain. Always, always in the front row, fingers twitching in anticipation like the Sundance Kid in a Wild West showdown, cracked glasses sliding down the beaked nose, ready-willing-and able to fly into action when Mr. Lowell asks for a volunteer willing to calculate the area of rhombus. Or recite pi to its fiftieth place. Or graph some obscure linear equation. Ha ha, Alan. You grew up to preside over some silly billion-dollar internet startup, and I’m here making ten bucks an hour doing something worthwhile. Told you math was for suckers!
