2
Guidance Counselors
APPEARANCE: Tricolored plumage, “stylish” glasses.
FEEDING HABITS: Half-eaten containers of Light & Fit yogurt known to linger on desk past eleven a.m.; copious amounts of caffeine.
MATING HABITS: Thankfully not observed.
Anderson High looked nothing like a school. At least, not like any that Norris had ever seen. It was a big monstrosity that reminded him of a mall, another one of Texas’s looming brick boxes with long, vertical windows running through it. The sight of it made him sharply miss the cathedral-like exterior of Collège Français secondary with its old brick finish and Gothic archways, remnants from its earlier days as a monastery to Quebec pastors. Norris imagined it now, under piles of bright January snow with a few shoveled entrance points, as their car pulled up in front of Anderson High’s cement exterior the next morning. Distantly, he wondered if his locker, right over Eric’s, would stay empty through the rest of the school year or if it was scheduled to house some new student’s hockey calendar and grimy ice skates.
“Time’s a factor, sweetie,” Judith said as patiently as she could, waving for another unnecessarily large burnt orange pickup truck to drive around them.
“I know, I know,” Norris said in a huff. His mother did not seem to get that this was a decision that could come to define his next two years of existence. Dad being in Ottawa with Janet, the baby, and “no real room for a teenager to stay more than a few weeks at a time” had closed that door pretty quickly, meaning he now had to clock two years in Texas—or 11.7 percent of his total life experience so far, not that he was counting.
“Norris.”
“Fine, okay!” Norris swiftly removed his Canadiens T-shirt. As their flight in had proven, a bright red T-shirt with the letter C on it was not the best way to fly under the radar here. The fabric was already damp against his skin; he had only been away from conditioned air for that short walk from their new front door to the car that morning. God, what if he was dying or something?
“I’m buying you some medical antiperspirant on the way home today,” Judith said. Mind reading: today of all days.
“You know, you could stay home if you wanted,” Judith said. “Just today. Nothing happens on the first day back.”
Norris paused, shocked. In response to this clear ripple in the reality matrix, he imagined a violent car crash suddenly taking place on some distant highway somewhere. School was never optional in their household. Colds, swollen gums from dental surgery, hockey playoffs, divorce court hearings: unless there was a discernable fever, Norris couldn’t remember the option to skip a day ever being on the table. If he needed a sign that she was as nervous as he was, this was it.
“No point in putting off the inevitable,” he answered with a shrug. This wasn’t simply to soothe her nerves; tolerance for new faces was probably as high as it would ever be on the first day back from Christmas break. Tomorrow, Norris would be even more of an intruder to the school than he was now.
“That’s my boy!” Judith answered with a smile.
Norris pulled a fresh, label-free black T-shirt from his backpack, bundling the wet mess of his 1993 Habs tee and discarding it in the back seat. With prayers and offerings, the hockey gods would hopefully forgive this betrayal in time for the Stanley Cup.
“The other parents are going to think my kid gets dressed in the car,” Judith said with a chuckle that conveyed she would not particularly care if they did. As if on cue, Norris pulled his head out of the shirt just in time to catch a Texan mother in white capris and high red hair stunned by his momentarily exposed nipples.
“We’re black foreigners in a rental car, Mom,” Norris said, pulling the shirt down. “They probably already assume we live in this Toyota.”
“Now, honestly, you shouldn’t—”
“I know, I know,” Norris said. “I shouldn’t go in expecting to hate it.”
“Well, no,” Judith scoffed. “Of course you’re going to hate it!”
“Reverse psychology. Controversial but effective parenting strategy, researchers say.” Norris smiled.
Judith continued as if he hadn’t spoken at all. “You’re going to hate it the same way you’ve hated absolutely everything from the moment we got here. From the ice the new fridge makes . . .”
Crushed, not cubed.
“. . . to the smell of the grass here . . .”
Artificial and plasticky.
“. . . to the layout of the grocery stores . . .”
What respectable community put Cleaning Products between Fruits & Vegetables and Canned Goods?
“. . . Even the fact that people here like football!”
Okay, that one was an exaggeration. It wasn’t the fact that Austinites liked football. There was nothing philosophically wrong with the practice of football itself; Norris had been known to catch the Super Bowl here and there back home. It was that there were seventeen fantasy football leagues in their zip code alone.
“So, yes, you’re going to hate it at first,” Judith concluded. “And that’s fine. It’s not ideal—Lord knows it can be trying—but I understand that’s how you’re processing this, which was . . . big. Is big. It’s a big change I sprung up on us, this Texas thing. So, it’s okay if you need to fuss through it for a little while.”
Norris gave his mother a look that could curdle ice cream and swallowed his five-prong reply lest it be classified as “fuss.”
“Anything else, Mother?”
Judith drummed her fingers alongside the steering wheel as if trying to remember a specific chapter of an old parenting book. Behind them, another car gave up on the honking and took the hint to go around. Burnt orange minivan with a Longhorns sticker on the bumper.
“I love you,” she suddenly spit out.
Norris paused, shocked. Another ripple in the matrix.
“I love you too? Jesus—why are you being so weird?” he asked.
“I love you,” Judith repeated as though the first one had been for Norris’s sake and this one was for hers. “So if you really can’t stand it”—she nodded over to the school—“if you give it a real shot, your best shot, and being here away from your friends and hockey and Montreal makes you truly miserable, as opposed to just regular teenager miserable, well . . .”
“Well?”
“Well, that will be a conversation. Canada isn’t going anywhere . . . but you have to try, okay?” Judith said. “I mean it, Norris. Try to make friends, try to get along with teachers. No international incidents on day one because you couldn’t control your, y’know . . .” she added, moving her palm haphazardly.
“My what?”
“Your mouth, boy!” Judith said, stopping short of poking Norris in his chest. “Your fricking mouth. This is a new school, and these people don’t know you yet. So watch what you say to them. There are no such things as second impressions. And if we’re going to pack it all up and go back home, which I’m putting on the table, then you have to actually try.”
Ugh.
Just like that, “not trying” was no longer an option. Because Norris knew she’d meant it all. The way his mother loved him was occasionally vexing in how overwhelming it could be. Like the sun or some other celestial body; facing it too directly might kill him.
“Fine,” Norris conceded, one foot already out of the car. “I’ll try.”
“Bienvenue, Norris! Bienvenue!” exclaimed admissions officer Laura Kolb. Through the glass door, she’d looked like one of those impossibly compact elderly women who only managed a single city block every day to stave off death. But as soon as she’d spotted him, Laura Kolb had sprung to life.
“Welcome to Texas! We are so happy to have you!” she said, vigorously shaking Norris’s hand from across her plexiglass desk and pulling him down onto a chair in a single motion. Her cheerfulness went right past caffeinated to medicated.
Like everything else in the school, the office itself was sleek and modern, at complete odds with the framed photographs, teddy bears, and stacks of mugs that had been added in to suppress this cold, contemporary look. Going by the photos lining the walls of her office, Laura Kolb was definitely a lifelong Texan. There was a lot of posing in front of various landmarks in sunglasses.
“Nous sommes thrilled . . . happy? Joyeux? Joyeux! Joyeux de te recevoir ici,” she said pointing both index fingers downward. “Ici, Anderson High!”
Norris widened his eyes. Just what fresh hell was this?
“You’re from Montreal, right? Oh, j’adore Montreal! I visited, gosh, what, fifteen years ago? What a time, I tell you!”
“Yeah, it’s a grea—” Norris started.
“Wait, are you from Montreal or, like, a nearby town?” she asked teasingly, as if she’d just caught him in a lie. “Like how everyone from Round Rock says they’re from Austin because ain’t no one outside of Texas knows what Round Rock is?”
“Um, no. Montreal.”
“Sorry, am I going too fast? Of course I’m going too fast,” she asked and answered in the same breath. “Don’t feel bad, I’m a fast talker. Since I was a kid, they tell me! Right, right: I . . . parler . . . rapide! Since tout petit? Toute petite! Oui!”
She squeezed both hands together to emphasize that petit meant “small.”
“I—”
“Not to worry: we prepared for just this eventuality!” she continued, reaching into her drawer. She wiggled her eyebrows at Norris in a conspiratorial way and pulled out a yellowed translation book. English 2 French & Back Again!!! was splashed across the cover.
“We’re actually a very international school,” Kolb explained, paging through the book. “Why, in my time here, we’ve had students from Beijing to Latin America, and—”
“I speak English,” Norris interrupted on what he erroneously thought might have been a pause for breath.
“Yes. Very well, Norris!” she said distractedly as she continued to page through the book. She made sure to pause between each word. “You speak English very well!”
“Ma’am? Ma’am? Yes, hi,” Norris said, waving his hand to emphasize his existence. “These weren’t three memorized words just now. I speak English fine . . . well, some might even say.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Kolb said, looking at Norris. She seemed disappointed.
“Plus, my mom’s a linguist, so I’m probably one of five kids here that know the difference between who and whom. So, there’s really no need for . . . that.” He gestured at the manual.
Kolb blinked furiously and very slowly closed it.
“’Course this is a good thing!” She began to rapidly flip through a stack of papers that had been preemptively placed at the corner of her desk. “Guessin’ you won’t need these!” She swiftly removed three sheets from the stack, one of which, even upside down, Norris could read to be labeled Translator Request Form.
Kolb stopped and looked back up to Norris, her expression still perplexed.
“I don’t mean to be rude here, it’s just, I was told a French Canadian was coming in and, well—” She motioned to the whole of Norris as if the demand for an explanation were obvious.
“Quebec is bilingual.” He shrugged. “Je parles les deux langues depuis la maternelle. I’ve been speaking both since preschool. It’s pretty common up there.”
“Well, ain’t that a thing!” Kolb exclaimed. “I knew that hoity-toity waiter could understand English! I knew it! I mean, look at you: y’all barely have accents at all!”
“Merci beaucoup, madame Kolb, l’urètre du clown me semble amplement vaste,” Norris answered with a smile, making sure the cadence of his voice in no way reflected “ample clown urethra.”
Kolb laughed as if Norris had just paid her a compliment. Incredibly childish, yes, but he figured he could take some liberties on his first day.
Norris’s starter kit to Anderson High included his locker assignment, a folded football pennant for Anderson’s team—the Bats—and a sizable stack of pamphlets on everything from “pregnancy scare” to “bullying” with pit stops at “homophobia” and one that was simply the outline of a shotgun with a red X overlapped onto it. Norris was beginning to suspect that most of Austin’s city board was in the pocket of Big Pamphlet.
“I was going to alphabetize all of this for you, but I suppose you can do that yourself now.” Kolb laughed, handing it to Norris with two hands.
“Start with A, end with Z, and there’s an N in the middle, right?” Norris mumbled.
Kolb let out a wry cackle that seemed to signal that it was time for Norris to take on the rest of his day.
“Ooh! One last thing,” she added as she saw him getting up to leave. “We had this initiative for diaries . . .” she began, reaching into a drawer.
“I’m not much of a diary keeper, ma’am,” Norris said, taking the proffered notebook. It was small and inoffensive-looking enough.
“Try it! You get to see the school, the city, the state, the entire American experience from an outside perspective!” Her voice had gone higher with every new perspective she’d listed. Jesus. How was this person in charge of children again?
“That perspective—that’s a rare gift,” Kolb continued. “And definitely something worth chronicling!”
“Right.”
“If the urge strikes you!”
Norris nodded a final time, hastily removing himself from view lest she be struck by any other brilliant ideas.
Outside Kolb’s office, he caught a reflection of himself in the metallic doors of the elevator. Generic black T-shirt, forehead glistening with sweat, and looking so out of place with the passing blur of the other students behind him that it was almost comical. He wouldn’t want to be friends with the kid who was staring back at him either.
He had only ever attended two schools in his life—Holy Spirit Elementary and College Français secondary—and had seen enough of Judith’s old movies (she was a bit of a collecting junkie and he had a lot of free time) to grow up with a healthy fear of the American high school. Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Dazed and Confused, Can’t Hardly Wait, 10 Things I Hate About You, Mean Girls, Napoleon Dynamite, The Karate Kid . . . Not to mention the ad nauseam TV reruns of Freaks and Geeks; Beverly Hills, 90210; Gossip Girl; Friday Night Lights; and everything else in between. If the flavors were different—pack of quirky outsiders here, ruthless-borderline-feral popular girls there—it all mostly amounted to one thing: in versus out. And Norris Kaplan—black French Canadian Norris Kaplan—had no delusion about where he would fall in that demarcation.
Here in Austin, the point was not to enter the field at all. Norris didn’t want to join a band of misfit rascals, overthrow the social hierarchy, go to Sectionals, upend the bully, or kiss the prom queen. No, what he needed to do was endure. Seven hundred thirty days with room for summer vacations, Christmas breaks, and the occasional long weekends: that was the number. He took solace in that fact, really. All he had to do was make it through this day for the giant counter he kept in the back of his mind to update to 729. Easy.