Good for the Jews

4. February 2006

Chapter Four February 2006 The Sudbury auditorium was full. All junior and senior classes cancelled for the assembly. On the stage, three men stood below a “Bus of Peace” banner. One—a smiling, broad-chested kid in a sleeveless red tshirt —looked little older than Doug. Dark-haired and dark-skinned, he seemed to be part Native American, or Mexican, or Filipino. Something , at any rate. Or so Doug ‹gured. The kid might have been a football player, if not for the metal peg below his meaty left thigh: his reward (Brandi Carter said) for signing on for two tours in Iraq. Next to him, there was an old hippy type with a frazzly gray beard and a red bandana twisted into a headband and wrapped about his forehead. The third man was Sudbury’s principal, Hyman Clark, who kept pressing a ‹st to his chest as if he had indigestion. The lights dimmed, and the three men stepped to the side of the stage. A screen came down, and two upside-down images ›ashed from slide projectors at the back of the auditorium. The lights came back up, someone ‹ddled with the slides, then the lights dimmed again. “Welcome,” the principal ‹nally coughed into a microphone on the side of the stage. “Welcome to a presentation by Bus of Peace, which has been touring the country to talk about non-violent solutions to Mideast con›icts. They’ll be presenting a brief slide show and then Sudbury’s own Band of Peace will be playing for you.” 129 “The Bus of Peace tour,” said a slide on the left-hand screen. On the right was a picture of the colorful bus that Doug had passed on his way into the building. “You are the only person I know who would skip school to go to school,” Brandi leaned over to whisper in Doug’s ear. “Got to check out the guy you’re seeing,” Doug said and nodded toward the stage. Brandi was dating HoHo Coombs, a member of Band of Peace. Doug thought he knew what was out there, music-wise. In town, that is. But he’d never heard of Band of Peace till Brandi said HoHo played with them. “I dumped HoHo,” Brandi said. “Since when?” “Since he went around telling everyone I had nice tits.” “Well, let me see,” Doug said, pulling back, as if he needed distance to get a really good view of her chest. “They’re all right.” “Oh, shut up,” Brandi said, slapping his forearm. “They’re fabulous , and he’s a dickwad.” HoHo had been talking about Brandi, but what he’d been saying was that her left breast had a mole with three dark hairs sticking out of it and that you couldn’t have her breast in your mouth without one of those dark hairs poking at your face. Kind of like sucking on a witch’s warty nose. Or so HoHo said. That was how gossip was in high school. You could learn something this intimate without ever having met the guy who said it. Up on stage, the hippy guy said he wanted to talk about non-violent solutions to the war in Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. On the left-hand side of the screen was the word “Peace.” On the right, “Truth-telling.” The hippy guy was saying that he’d driven a truck with a napalm thrower in Vietnam. Apparently, you had to do something ugly like that to really know about non-violence. “So HoHo the dickwad is history?” “That’s right,” Brandi said. “And now I have to sit through this stupid assembly?” “But with such good company,” Brandi said, smirking and batting her eyes theatrically. “I’m in love,” Doug declared, the same sense of play in his voice. The truth was he’d always had a thing for Brandi since she’d been, ever 130 so brie›y, a neighbor, living with a foster family who turned out to be brain farmers, illegally selling organs for medical research. “If only I wasn’t already spoken for,” Brandi said, hands to her chest. Girls who had seen her naked in the gym locker room said Brandi’s breasts were just ‹ne, thank you. There was nothing on them, save an occasional red welt, courtesy of HoHo. He’d rather give a breast a hickey than a...