how i became friends with an idiot by marni graham

kimm brockett stammen

A flaming red box hung on the wall in the main hallway of my elementary school. Above its red lever, white painted letters taunted:

FIRE ALARM

PULL

You weren’t supposed to do what it said. We all knew that. But the box was low on the wall, the lever right under our fingers as they skimmed the green cement block on the way out to recess. And the command was so bossy, but at the same time it practically begged. Naturally, everyone pulled the fire alarm all the time.

Everyone was mostly Dickie Green. He’d yank on anything if it hung within reach: ponytails, fire alarms, his own crotch zipper. Also, he pulled faces, his eyes rolling up and his index fingers pulling his drool-y lower lip down, and sometimes he did what he called pulling a fast one. I sat in the front row, never got in trouble, and always got 100% on spelling tests, so I thought, what an idiot. He’s going to grow up to be a paint scraper or something.

A guy had come the previous week to scrape the peeling paint off our house, and I thought it looked like the worst thing to do ever. That’s why we pay him, said my dad. If it was fun we wouldn’t need to. And taking care of your home has always been fun, my mom said to him, in her voice that meant Be Careful, It Might be the Opposite. Don’t Start, said my dad, which was the way all their arguments started.

The thing that I hated about the paint scraper guy was not so much the scratchy sound of the metal scraper thing, or the way grit flew about when he pulled it against the worn wood, flakes of gray jumping around and sticking to his overalls. The thing that got me was the disappointment of it. My parents had said we would paint the house a bright pretty white, and make it look like it was new. But the first thing that happened was this sad-looking guy came out, and he didn’t even have paint cans, he just had a metal tool and a ladder and he spent a week making the old gray paint all splotchy, and our house looked much, much worse than before. So I thought probably Dickie Green would grow up to be that.

When Dickie Green pulled the fire alarm lever the first time, I was out on the playground on the other side of the school.  I heard the clanging and saw the teachers walking fast and stiff-legged in the way that meant something was up but they didn’t want us to think so. They made us line up by grade, and then alphabetically, and there was a lot of confusion around the MacDonalds and McKenzies, and some of the little kids forgot which name was their last, and the teachers waded in and took kids by the shoulders and adjusted them like chess pieces. I was in the third-grade line near the front, thinking that if there really was a fire we would all be burnt up.

All through the raggedy lines, the news traveled that it was Dickie Green who had pulled the alarm. Kids whispered and pointed. He was standing in line behind me looking extra innocent, poking an ant into the ground with his toe. I frowned hard at him; we were missing all of recess. When he noticed, he glanced around to see if a teacher was looking and then smirked at me and hitched up his pants zipper.

“Idiot,” I hissed.

“Takes one to know one.”

Principal stomped out from his little office behind the main secretary place. His shiny not-gym shoes got wet grass stuck to them, and his forehead bunched up like a cauliflower. He demanded to be told Who Was Responsible for This. No one said a word. We scuffed the dirt with our shoes, and the result was we all had to miss recess for the rest of the week.

Because of Alphabetically, Dickie always stood behind me in lines. And I always turned around and faced backwards, watching him, because otherwise he might stick something to the back of my jacket. Or put a bug down my shirt. Or just say something dumb. Maybe it was Dickie Green who first taught me it's better to keep an eye on stupidity than wonder what's going on behind your back.

A week after the fire alarm, on the last day of no recess, we all lined up in the hallway, waiting to go home for the day. The line of waiting kids flexed and wriggled like a snake with its head caught. There started to be giggling. A teacher near the door yelled that we wouldn’t get out until it was Silent In Here. The cement wall was cool when we bumped against it, the indentations between blocks just wide enough to run our small fingers along. Some kids were absent for some reason, so Dickie and I ended up closer than usual to the front of the line, right next to the little red box.

Even I could feel my fingers itching for the alarm's lever. It was maybe that I hadn’t had recess for a week. Or that the paint scraper guy had finished, and the real house painters had come with buckets of white and ladders and big cloths and calling bad words in the yard, so I hadn't been able to play outside at home, either. In fact, I’d had to stay inside by myself nearly every day after school because my parents had something called Counselor Appointment. And inside was always a mess because dad left things sitting around everywhere, which made mom mad so she put things away in random places, and then dad would yell and pull everything out of drawers and closets looking for stuff so I couldn’t run around without tripping on something. In short, I was stuffed full of unused running around. I would have complained, but dad had his grumpy face on all the time lately, while mom kept saying, This is a Good Thing. I didn’t believe her; appointments were never good things, especially dentists.

So, when I saw the white painted letters spelling out “PULL,” my fingers itched to do what they said. I was starting to feel very annoyed at things that said the opposite of what they meant.

Just then Dickie Green yelled, “Don’t do it!” as he grabbed my hand, put it over the lever, and yanked.

I yelled, “Hey!” just as the clanging started.

Instead of a semi-calm line there was instant chaos in the hallway, with giggling and pushing and teachers yelling Who Did This? One of them screeched, all shocked, “Marni!”

The alarm jangled and jangled, although another one of the teachers called it some bad names she maybe learned from a painter. No one could think until Principal came out of his little room and said Where’s Mr. Wu? which is what everyone said when anything got broken or dirty. A group of us bigger kids got asked to go to the end of the hall, past the bathrooms, and knock at the metal door that said Janitor. That’s where Mr. Wu hid, with the boiler and the tools and the all-different-sizes-of-mops. He came out after we hurt our fists pounding on the metal door, his big ring of keys that he kept attached by a chain to his belt loop jingling. We all crowded around him, yelling and fidgeting and imploring, with the alarm clanging and knocking all our brains into mush, but he stayed calm like always. He just turned around silently and went back into his boiler room, us kids trailing after like buzzing flies. We crowded in there after him, and from a nail in a secret cupboard in the corner, we saw him lift a teeny tiny key. It was so small it looked like a toy in his big calloused hand. And then the group of us kids—which surprisingly somehow included Dickie and me—saw him stick the key in a tiny lock in the same cupboard, and like magic the alarm shut off. The school plunged into a silence so deep it was like a snow day when everyone stayed home under blankets.

The quiet only lasted a minute. Then Dickie and I got grabbed and led to Principal’s little office. Dickie had been there many times but I hadn’t. Ever. My palms felt sweaty and there was fear in my stomach; it felt like the only way to get rid of it would be to throw up.

Dickie whispered, “Don’t worry.”

I stuck out my tongue.

In Principal’s office there was a lot of silence and foot shuffling and I noticed that Dickie’s sneakers had holes in them. Principal boomed, Tell the Truth, and Nothing Will Happen. Which was so obviously not true that Dickie and I looked at each other and made surprised eyebrows. The colored parts of Dickie’s eyes were flecked with copper.

He winked one and said, “She did it!”

I shoved him. “I did not! You made me!”

We both had to stay in the office until our parents came, and then they put us two small kids in the big office and all the adults crowded into Principal’s tiny room. Adults get everything backwards. After a while they all came out and told us it was decided: Dickie and I had to stay after school every day for a week and help Mr. Wu empty waste baskets. The adults thought there was some logic to that, too.

“At least someone will set an example for you on how to clean up after yourself,” said mom.

“Don’t Start,” said my dad.

Dickie left with his adults, and I started to leave, too, but my parents, without explanation, went back into Principal’s room without me and did Closed Door Talking. I started to tremble, in the empty secretary place, because on the list of things I hate, Closed Door Talking is right up there with Saying the Opposite. 

When they came out and we got in the car to go home, both mom and dad were like statues, not talking and looking straight ahead.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t do it!” As soon as they came out of my mouth I heard that the two exclamations were complete opposites, and that made me mad. But my parents ignored me and continued to be statues the whole ride home, even though I did sniffling and some weird kind of choking and tears without even trying. By the time we pulled up in front of our house I was mad and scared at the same time, which I didn’t know was a thing you could do.

Dad turned off the car and in the weirdly clean garage finally said something. Except it made no sense. “It’s not your fault. We told Principal the circumstances.”

And then my mom said something that made even less sense than that: “It’s really nothing to do with you.”

The whole school got a lecture about Emergencies and When To Pull Fire Alarms and To Basically, Don’t. We had to sit on the gym floor, which was always gritty, and if it was just gritty you were lucky because sometimes it could also be sticky, and then you didn’t know what it was sticky with but you did know Mr. Wu had been too busy doing something else to clean it. I sat crisscross waiting for everyone else to get sat down in the right place, which always took forever. While I waited, I did what I’d been doing since the ride home the day before: puzzling about Circumstances, and why they weren't my fault, and if it had nothing to do with me, why did they tell Principal? And if it wasn’t my fault, why did I still have to clean wastebaskets?

Principal stepped to the front, making a crunchy sound with his stiff dress-up shoes. He said we are having this assembly because someone—no—two someones have Not Behaved Wisely. Everyone glared at me and Dickie. Alarms. Are. Not. For. Pulling, he said. I sat on the gym floor looking at my knees and wondered how much dumber Principal could get. Why have an alarm that said PULL if it was not for pulling? If it was not for kids why put it at kids’ level on the wall? Dickie Green, crisscross next to me, spelled out HI with his finger in the dust of the floor. I gave him a tiny smile and decided maybe he wasn’t such an idiot; he was smarter than Principal. But even a paint-scraper was smarter than Principal. I sat there glowering and decided that when there really was an emergency, I would make the biggest noise possible, and no one would stop me.

The wastebaskets smelled bad and Mr. Wu mostly grunted at us, but staying after school was better than being home alone because of Appointments. Which were for Counselor and now also something called Lawyer. After school one day that week, Principal came out of his tiny room, said hello to me, and put his hand on the top of my head. Which was unheard of. Also, my teacher started smiling at me in a sad way. By Thursday I felt like a hundred recesses were pent up inside me. Dickie and I laughed sometimes when we were emptying baskets, making up some games and jokes about garbage, and all my classmates started teasing me that he was my boyfriend.

“Not that idiot,” I said.

Dickie just made farting sounds through his lips.

On Friday, the last day of our punishment, Dickie and I were with Mr. Wu in the second-grade room. It was always the messiest room with brown banana slicks on the floor, waste cans overflowing with smushed construction paper and crumbled goldfish crackers, and a gerbil in a cage that plain stunk. Dickie and I held our noses and peeked in at the gerbil, and then we ran out of the room and slammed the door and collapsed, gasping, in the hallway. After we sat awhile, Dickie told me he lived with his mother one week and went to his father’s the next and how it was OK because he got candy at both places and his parents couldn’t keep track of if his homework was done.

I looked at him, straight into his copper-flecked eyes. He wasn't pulling anything.

"I have to go," I said.

I ran down the hall, passed The Girls and The Boys, and slipped through the metal Janitor’s door that was locked during school but unlocked afterwards so Mr. Wu could get stuff in and out of it. I opened the secret cupboard and I took the tiny key, putting it in my pocket, and when I went home, it went with me.

Why do third graders do things? All I can tell you is that we know when something is our fault and when it is not. We know when people are Saying the Opposite. And we know when something is strange, and has been strange for too long, and will only get stranger, and that we might soon need a magic key.

When I got home, our house sparkled all over with bright white paint. The painters were gone and I could run in the yard. But there was a big red sign stabbing the front lawn that said:

FOR SALE

Because of the sign, I guess, which was there in red and white and could not be ignored or have a door closed on it, my parents told me what a divorce was. They said it was Not So Bad. Instead of a house they would get two apartments. And I would get two rooms, one on either side of the city. They said, with completely straight faces, that this would be a Good Thing and that Two Rooms are Better than One.

My parents thought I was an idiot.

I waited three days. I kept the tiny key in my coat pocket and wore my coat all day long. When I thought of signs or paint scrapers or parents or Principal, or other things that straightforwardly said exactly what they did not mean, I pressed the key into my palm until it hurt. If anyone had thought to pry open my fingers they would have found the imprint of a tiny red key in my skin. But no one did. The closest anyone came was the second-grade teacher, who stopped me in the hall, smiled like she might care, but instead asked if I had Learned Something. Suddenly it felt like all the recesses squished inside of me burst out all at once. Learned Something? I said real loudly. The Something I Learned is your room is the messiest and also the smelliest. And then my voice got squealy but it kept going. The Something I Learned is you should take care of the place where you are or no one will want to be with you in it! She looked shocked. She backed away. The Something I Learned is that adults lie and I hate them. And then I ran. I ran into The Girls and I flushed the key down the toilet and then I sped out and pulled the fire alarm lever as hard as I could.

The alarm screamed and clanged, so long and so loud that I heard Principal yell at Mr. Wu and then at the secretaries, and the second-grade teacher grabbed onto my arm and yanked me down the hall towards the office with all the kids in the school gaping at me, their doofus mouths hanging open. Principal called my parents while the alarm just kept on yelping. He had a hand over one ear, and he was yelling into the phone and his face got purple and his nostrils flared. Mr. Wu came in, jangling his enormous, useless key ring. A secretary lady searched my pockets and then the adults, buzzing like a wad of hornets, searched all the rooms and The Girls and The Boys too, and then they remembered that I had been helping empty waste baskets so Mr. Wu got told to go and paw through the dumpster. He did a very big frown. The teachers took all the other kids outside in frazzled lines. I could see out the office window the MacDonalds and McKenzies started shoving each other, and then all the kids were shoving each other, and the teachers got out their whistles which worked about as well as you’d expect—which was Not. The clanging knocked everything around in my head and all I could hear, like gongs being whacked over and over, was Divorce and Two Rooms, Divorce and Two Rooms, It’s Not Your Fault. I squirmed away from the secretary lady who was holding onto me and I put my hands over my ears and I started to scream.

I didn’t have to go to school for a week, and my parents took me to my own Counselor Appointment, which was not quite as bad as the dentist. She told me it was OK to be angry and OK to be scared and OK to yell. Which was nice but kind of too good to be true. I said, Is It My Fault? and she said, No It Isn’t, and maybe I partly believed her. And then I cried a little.

When I went back to school, the first thing I saw was a new fire alarm in the hallway. It said:

IN EMERGENCY

BREAK GLASS

Dickie told me that Mr. Wu used a bent metal bar to pry off the old one, and it made shrieking sounds all during spelling so he got 23% percent on his test. He said for three days after that there was a hole in the hallway wall and a pile of concrete grit underneath it, and then the new alarm appeared. We peeked into it. There was a little glass window and a tiny silver-colored tapping hammer on a cute little chain.

“Why would broken glass help in an emergency?” I whispered to Dickie.

He followed me around all the time now, whether we were in line or not.  His eyes were pretty.

“I don’t know," he said.

Which was, I decided, the most honest answer anyone had given me in a long time. There were way bigger idiots in the world than Dickie. I could tell his fingers were itching for that hammer, so I took them in mine and pressed them, as if they too might unlock something.