The Boy Recession Read online

  “Senior Girls Lobby to Take Over, Convert to Lounge Boys’ Bathroom in South Hallway”

  “The Boy Recession©” by Aviva Roth, The Julius Journal, November

  It’s November in Wisconsin and I’m in a T-shirt, trying to rush into school, but Amy and Pam stop me before I get inside the building. Usually before school they like to sit on a bench, smoking and insulting people’s clothes. I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to smoke outside school, but I guess it would be pretty hypocritical for Dr. Nicotine to say anything about it. Or maybe he’s scared of Pam, like everyone else is. I usually ignore her and Amy, but today they stop me.

  “We need to talk to you, Hunter,” Pam says.

  “We have a request,” Amy adds.

  Gross. Pam and Amy are blowing cigarette smoke in my face, and it smells like ass. Do girls seriously think smoking makes them look hot?

  “We heard you sing at Open-Mic Night,” Pam tells me.

  “And we love your voice,” Amy says.

  “Oh! Well, cool, thanks.”

  “We want you to try out for the musical,” Pam says.

  “The what?”

  “The school musical,” Pam says. “The play. Didn’t you see The Music Man last year?”

  No. But since Pam’s holding a lit cigarette four inches from my eye, I say, “Oh, uh, yeah. It was good.”

  “I’m the choreographer this year,” Amy says. “And I’ll probably be a lead.”

  “I’m in charge of costumes,” Pam says. “And I’ll probably be a lead, too.”

  Behind Pam’s back, Amy shakes her head no. Pam doesn’t notice because she keeps talking.

  “So we don’t want the show to suck. And we need boys who can actually sing, because Brad’s gone.”

  Oh, right. Now I remember the school shows. This kid Brad Farina was always the star of them; last year, in The Music Man, he was the Music Man.

  “I dunno,” I tell them. “I can’t act or anything.”

  “Well, the other guys trying out can’t act or sing,” Pam says. “So you’ve got a leg up on those losers.”

  Amy’s cigarette has gone out, and she gives up on trying to relight it. “Please, Hunter,” she begs, playing the good cop. “We really, really need you.”

  “Well, I dunno,” I say, exhaling. Damn. I can see my breath. “What show is it?”

  “Chicago!” Amy says brightly.

  “Like, as in Chicago the band?” I ask. I know a few Chicago songs on the guitar.

  “No,” Pam says. “It’s about women who murder men who deserve it.”

  Pam and Amy asking me to try out for the show wasn’t the only weird thing to happen to me this week. The other day, in U.S. history, a girl asked to borrow a pen. From me. No one has ever asked to borrow a pen from me before. Girls have been touching me, too, bumping into me in the hallways and smiling afterward. Now I know what the flirtation is about: my voice. I’m like a dude version of one of those Sirens from The Odyssey, which we got assigned sophomore year.

  I know I don’t seem like a musical-theater guy, but it was a pretty nice ego boost to hear that I’m a good singer and to hear that Pam and Amy “need” me. So I decided to go for it and try out this afternoon. It’s better than having Ms. Duff lecture me on what a huge disappointment I am.

  So far, there are four guys here for the audition: me, Chung, a freshman whose balls haven’t dropped yet, and this other weird freshman, George, who used to be in spelling bees or boy pageants or some crap.

  As we stand there onstage, I turn to Chung and ask, “Did Pam put a gun to your head about this shit, too?”

  “What? Nah,” he says. “I like musicals! Who are you trying out for?”

  “Amos.”

  “Who?”

  “Roxie’s husband, who doesn’t know she’s cheating on him. Ya know, he sings that ‘Mr. Cellophane’ song about how everyone ignores him?” I say. I had rented the Chicago movie from Netflix earlier in the week to figure out what the story was about. It’s actually a pretty good show.

  “Oh,” Chung says, nodding. “In the movie, he’s the guy from Step Brothers.”

  “Exactly. Amy and Pam want me to sing, but I can’t act, and Amos just kinda stands there, so I won’t have to do that much acting.”

  “All right, young men! Are we ready?” Mrs. Martin calls up from the orchestra pit.

  Mrs. Martin is the oldest teacher at our school, and there’s a rumor she got her job by banging Julius P. Heil himself.

  “Okay, we will begin with those auditioning for the role of Billy Flynn,” Mrs. Martin says. “All my Billy Flynns, please step forward.”

  Billy Flynn is the male lead. He’s the defense lawyer with sketchy ethics, and he’s always wearing suits. Basically, he’s a good-looking version of Eugene.

  It’s a killer part, but only George steps up for the role.

  “Only one Billy Flynn?” Mrs. Martin says. “All right, let’s hear it.”

  George starts to sing and strut all across the stage, spreading his arms, pointing at random people in the audience, and belting the notes so loudly that you can hear them in the back seats of the auditorium.

  He’s also totally off-key.

  After the first verse and chorus, Mrs. Martin calls from the orchestra pit, “Stop! Stop! Stop! Look at the music! We’re in the key of C!”

  “What?” George says.

  “Look at the music!”

  “I can’t read music,” George says, waving the score. “I’m just looking at the words.”

  “You can’t read music? Get back in line,” Mrs. Martin growls. “Who can read music? Young men, who can read music? None of you?”

  “Uh…” Squinting down at Mrs. Martin, I raise my hand halfway. “I read music. But I want to play Amos, so…”

  “I’ll tell you who you will play,” Mrs. Martin says. “Take the music.”

  She gives me a few minutes to look over “Razzle Dazzle.” The song is a piece of cake. So I sing it.

  After two verses, I figure that’s enough, and I stop. “Oh my God!” Mrs. Martin says to the piano player. “He did the staccatos! He did the crescendos!”

  Okay, she liked it. That’s good news. But George’s gotta be pissed off, and he’s standing behind me.

  “You have a magnificent voice!” Mrs. Martin tells me.

  “I told you!” Amy calls to Mrs. Martin, popping her head out from behind the stage curtain.

  “No, I told you,” Pam corrects her, popping her head out, too.

  But Mrs. Martin ignores them.

  “You are my star!” she tells me. “You are the silver-tongued lion of the law, Billy Flynn!”

  Silver-tongued? Definitely not me.

  “I dunno about Billy Flynn,” I tell Mrs. Martin, shading my eyes from the spotlights. “What about Amos? Is he still available?”

  “You’re not changing my mind,” says Mrs. Martin. “I’ve found my Billy Flynn!”

  CHAPTER 16: KELLY

  “Girls Go Gaga for Gas Station Gang: Saturday Sees Record Crowd Outside Shell Station”

  “The Boy Recession©” by Aviva Roth, The Julius Journal, November

  Aviva has the worst parking spot at Julius, and today, as we walk the mile from her car to the school, we’re huddling against each other to keep the freezing November wind off us, and I’m really regretting wearing a skirt.

  “Is that Derek’s car?” Aviva asks through chattering teeth.

  Aviva points toward the first two rows of spots, at a silver car. On the hood of that car is Derek Palewski.

  “No, that’s a hybrid. That’s Pam’s car.”

  Derek’s stretched out with a cigarette lighter in his hand, and he’s reaching out to light Amy’s cigarette. You’re not technically supposed to smoke on school property, but somehow spandexers always get away with it—maybe because teachers don’t want to come out here and bust them because it’s too cold.

  Derek says something, and a couple of senior spandexers wearing puffy winter c
oats with big fur-trimmed hoods laugh as if he said something hilarious.

  “This looks like a scene from the Inuit version of Grease,” I say.

  “Ew, look at them,” Aviva says, her voice muffled by her scarf and her collar. “They’re worshipping him like a skeevy god.”

  “A skeevy god in a T-shirt,” I add, taking a sip of Aviva’s coffee before handing it back to her. “What is he doing?”

  When we walk by, he’s explaining his lack of a coat to the spandexers, who are bouncing up and down to keep the feeling in their legs and dragging on cigarettes.

  “I’m impervious,” Derek declares, raising his cigarette lighter. “I’m impervious to pain, and I’m impervious to cold. Here—feel my arm. No goose bumps!”

  He holds out his arm, and the girls actually touch it, like it’s a dinosaur bone during show-and-tell.

  “What’s your secret? How do you stay so warm?” one spandexer asks in awe.

  “Here is a wilderness survival tip,” Derek says very seriously. “The best way to share body heat is to get naked.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Pam, surrounded by a cloud of clove cigarette smoke, looks skeptical.

  “Swear to God!” Derek says. “Skin-to-skin. Naked-to-naked. It’s like electricity. You gotta connect to transfer the heat. And me? I got a lotta body heat.

  “Who wants some?” he asks.

  “That makes me so mad,” Aviva says, holding her coffee away from her body as we jog the last few steps to the doors of the school. “No one whistles at me in the hallways anymore, and all these gross boys are getting attention they don’t deserve.”

  The heat vents right inside the main hallway doors feel amazing. As we head to homeroom, Aviva continues her rant.

  “Look at that! Robbie Hartmann is getting tongue!”

  Kristin Chung is pressing Robbie Hartmann against the first locker in the south hallway and making out with him. Robbie Hartmann isn’t completely gross, but his personality is about as exciting as clear nail polish.

  “And Pirate Dave is getting free coffee!” Aviva fumes. “He’s a pirate!” she calls out to two girls, who are delivering a hot drink and a scone to Dave at his locker.

  Dave takes one sip from the paper cup and then gives it back, saying disdainfully, “I said soy milk.”

  “Spandexers always look for boyfriends when it gets cold out,” I remind Aviva. “These girls want warm bodies to get them through winter.”

  “It’s ridiculous!” Aviva says. “They’re turning these slimeballs into kings.”

  Believe it or not, Aviva isn’t the angriest person in the south hallway this morning. As we pass the senior lounge, Pam comes storming down the hallway. Inside the lounge, a group of girls surround Josh and Chung, who are sitting in the only two big comfy chairs. If Pirate Dave has groupies, you can imagine how well Josh and Chung are doing—they were both cute and popular before the boy recession.

  “What’s up, Pammy?” Josh asks as Pam storms in.

  Pam drops a stack of papers and a pen in front of Josh.

  “What’s this?” he asks.

  “A prom contract,” Pam says.

  Josh takes his feet off the table and glances at Chung, who’s playing a game on his cell phone and only looks up to give his standard clueless shrug.

  “In August, we agreed to go to the prom together this year,” Pam reminds Josh. “So I’m just formalizing the agreement. You sign here”—she points to the first page—“and initial here.”

  “Shit,” Josh says, shaking his head. “This thing is four pages? What does it say?”

  “The first page is the agreement to be each other’s dates,” Pam says. “The second page says you’ll pose with me for at least twenty-five pictures. The third page lists acceptable colors and styles for your tux. Read that carefully, because if you show up wearing a ruffled shirt, I am legally entitled to kick you in the crotch.”

  Josh is starting to sweat. He flips frantically through the contract. “Where was that part about my crotch? And what kind of shirt? What? I don’t even remember talking to you about prom.”

  Pam pulls her agenda out of her bag and opens to a dog-eared page.

  “August twenty-fourth, after two SoCo Lime shots at Amy’s house party, you and I agreed to go to the prom together. Your verbal agreement constituted an oral contract.”

  “Wait, what?” says Chung, who’s suddenly paying attention. He snaps his phone shut and grabs the contract from Josh. “There’s oral stuff in here?”

  Chung looks through the contract for about three minutes but doesn’t find anything interesting, so he puts it down, saying, “No oral stuff.”

  “Maybe there should be,” Josh says slyly, looking sideways at Pam. “Is there any, uh… hanky-panky clause in here?”

  “Hanky-panky clause?” Pam asks in disgust. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I have options, ya know,” Josh says. “I’m a hot commodity. A lot of girls would take me to prom, even with a ruffled shirt on.”

  Pam looms over Josh and starts to raise her voice.

  “This is my senior prom. I’ve been on a diet for nine years, I already bought my dress, and I am not going alone. Now, you are a gigantic idiot, but you are a gigantic idiot who looks good in pictures, so sign this prom contract! Sign it!”

  Josh ducks his head while he signs the first page and initials the rest. Chung waits until Pam is a safe distance away, and then snickers. “Sucker.”

  “I usually hate Pam and her vegan bitchery,” Aviva tells me as we stop at her locker so she can take off some of her layers. “But at least someone’s laying down the law around here.”

  Just then, I see Hunter. He’s leaning against a doorway across the hall from us, and there are three girls with him, one of whom is touching his hair.

  “Do you use conditioner?” she asks.

  “Nah,” Hunter says. “I just rub a bar of soap on my head.”

  The girls crack up laughing. At first Hunter looks confused, but then he smiles. Next to me, Aviva starts to say something, but then she sees Hunter.

  “He’s not a slimeball,” Aviva reassures me.

  He’s not a slimeball, I think, as we walk into our classroom, but he is a king.

  CHAPTER 17: KELLY

  “A World Without Men: Singletons, Sperm Banks, and the Soon-Approaching Man Apocalypse”

  “The Boy Recession©” by Aviva Roth, The Julius Journal, December

  Kelly, do you have SAD?” Darcy asks me from across our cafeteria lunch table.

  “What? Why?” I ask, looking up from the pasta that I’m pushing around with a plastic fork.

  “You seem kind of… blah,” Darcy says. “And your lunch is ninety-eight percent carbs.”

  SAD is seasonal affective disorder, a mild depression you can get in the winter if you don’t get enough sunlight. We read about SAD last year in one of Aviva’s Glamour articles—actually, we read about the “SAD diet,” which is supposed to help you fight the urge to eat carbs all day.

  “I’m going to get that light box back,” Darcy tells me, jotting a note to herself in the presidential-seal notebook she always carries around. “I’m going to lobby with the administration.”

  Last year Julius had this huge fake-sun lamp in one of the exam rooms of the nurse’s office. The school imported it from Sweden or Norway or whatever scarily northern country Björk comes from. They set it up in December and posted this sign-up sheet on the door so we could sign up for fifteen-minute slots of time with the light. That’s how pathetic life is in Whitefish Bay—you have to sign up for a fifteen-minute time slot of fake sunlight. But this year is even more pathetic—we can’t even afford fake sunlight. I guess it was part of the budget cuts.

  “Okay, I’ll use you as my case study,” Darcy tells me. “Tell me about your symptoms. And how does it start? What triggers your depression?”

  It’s our last week of school before winter break, which is also the darkest week of the year, so I guess technically my
mood could be caused by SAD. But I’m pretty sure that events that took place this morning actually triggered my depression.

  I was in PMS, and Hunter called me over to use me as an example for his drum lesson. Hunter was showing our kids how to use brushes, instead of sticks, to play the drums. Hunter had me stand in front of his students, and he played my head with the brushes. They actually felt kind of nice in my hair, but they tickled, too. So I was laughing and looking up at Hunter, and all of the kids were laughing, and even Johann was smiling as he watched, when Diva burst in through the door that connects the band room with the stage.

  “Hunter,” she announced. “We have rehearsal right now.”

  “What?” Hunter stopped playing on my hair and handed the brushes down to one of his kids. “I’m teaching right now.”

  “Well, according to your schedule in the guidance office, you have a study hall now,” Diva said. “Mrs. Martin looked it up.”

  I hated her so much. I hated her bossy voice and her too-tight pants and how you can always see the outline of her thong. The point of a thong is so people can’t see your underwear, right?

  “I don’t have a study hall anymore. I just didn’t have time to change my schedule because I’m busy,” Hunter said. “And I’m busy right now, too.”

  I think that was the first time I ever heard Hunter sound pissed off. Actually, he didn’t sound pissed off. He sounded… strict. He even turned his back to Diva and bent down to help his girl student use the brushes on her drum pad.

  But Diva didn’t leave. She came over to us and tried to put on her nice voice.

  “We really need you, Hunter,” Diva said. “Mrs. Martin wants to do our song. Plus, George is off-key on ‘Mr. Cellophane.’ He needs your help.”

  Hunter looked up, but not at Diva—at me. He sighed and gave me an apologetic look.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just… They need me.”

  I was thinking I need you, too, so hard that I couldn’t open my mouth or I would have said it out loud. But Johann spoke up before I could.

  “I can take over the drums,” he said.

  Hunter walked out with Diva but turned around and said, “I’ll be back—like, twenty minutes, tops.”