Patty Villa was the new girl. She’d shown up the day before and made enemies with every single person in the class by assuming she was smarter than them, which was the worst thing you could do.

And Abdoul missed all the drama and for such a stupid reason: He was at the hospital.

The morning before, while looking at some Trig, reviewing some equations before he started with some Physics, Abdoul cracked his knuckles from left to right, just like he did every morning. He was barely awake after a late, late shift at the market and four hours of sleep, and when he got to his pointer finger, the same finger he’d already messed up at work a few times, he cracked it anyway—cracked it way too hard. He knew he’d done something wrong, and he knew it was serious when the skin loosened up and became the color of death, the destroyer of fingers. Now that dead finger was taped to his middle finger, forcing his hand into the shape of a gun. If he had been nine years old, packing a pretend gat might’ve been cool. But he was almost seventeen, and therefore an idiot. To make everything worse, the doctor told him to keep his hand above his shoulder if possible. And if it wasn’t, he should rest his fake gun on a pillow, which was the only think that could’ve made him look more ridiculous, as if he were some James Bond villain wandering around with his prized weapon on a cushion. Too lame.

So Abdoul was sure that he was the stupidest person in the world, even if he wasn’t technically stupid. Technically he was gifted or at least in a program for highly gifted students who wanted to work independently most of the time. That separated him from the rest of the school except for breaks and lunch, which he usually just worked straight through so he’d never have homework. But the program was mostly a good thing, except there were only four girls he saw on a regular basis, and they were all in a relationship or lesbian or pregnant or all three. So when he made eye contact with Patty Villa for the first time, he didn’t want to believe that she was an idiot—even if she’d referred to John Locke as John Locker and called Mitchell “callow” for believing in God. Mitchell was the smartest kid in the school and the only one who’d gotten early acceptance to both Harvard and MIT, but he did get preachy and annoying especially since he cleared his throat whenever he spoke and enunciated mostly through his nostrils. Besides arguments make life interesting. Everyone in that class climbed all over each other to agree. Even Mitchell sort of believed in evolution and thought the war in Iraq was inane if not criminal. Still they didn’t do shit about it.

Abdoul stared at his desk, hoping she wouldn’t notice him until he was healed. A whole week, at least. A week that would be the slowest week of his life. He couldn’t work or write. All he could do was read and listen and talk. But he barely talked, at least at school. So really, all he could look forward to was a week of his hand in the air and people clowning him about it. It was a week he wished he could skip, or sleep through.

When Josh told Abdoul about this new girl who couldn’t shut up, he said she wasn’t fine, but she was cute. But Abdoul disagreed. She was fine, seriously. There was a gold tint to her skin. She must’ve been wearing colored contacts because the blue in her eyes was a bit supernatural as she stared down at the fancy journal she was sketching in. Her eyebrows were thinned but apt, not contorted into ultra-orbital arcs like most girls he knew. Plus she had a sly way of scanning a room without turning her head or stopping her pencil from moving. But Abdoul could tell she was checking him out.

Who wouldn’t check out a freak with a pretend gun dangling next to his ear?

He wished he could just point at her and say hi, but you didn’t do things like that in his class; you were supposed to pretend everyone was asexual—it was a respect thing. Plus she was young. Sixteen? Probably. That’s the problem with everyone being in the same room, you never know.

The bell rang. It usually didn’t matter, most kids just started working as soon as they got in. But that day it did, at least to Miles, which is the name their teacher was known by. It was a nickname he discouraged around other faculty and staff but enjoyed since he was a nerdy white guy who loved Jazz music and black people in general. “OK,” Miles said, asking for the whole classes attention, which was something he did about twice a week. “Essay contest. We should do this one; it’s from Cisco. Five k for you. Ten k for the community or the school; I’m not sure how that works. Abdoul, you have a question.”

Abdoul knew Miles was just fucking around so he looked down and shirked his head.

“Sorry,” Miles said. “Anyway, the prompt basically is ‘Why is change so difficult?’ Broad enough for you? Is that another question, Abdoul, or are you celebrating July 4th early?”

Abdoul shook his head again as everyone around him laughed. He rubbed his forehead on his shoulder to see if she was smiling. She was and still drawing.

“So, quick, let’s do a Braincrap. Throw something out. Why is change so hard?”

“Laws,” Josh said. “Or ethics.”

Miles wrote it on the board.

“Well,” Mitchell said and cleared his throat. “Complacency.”

It went on the board.

“Hate,” Patty Villa said. Everyone turned and looked at her. She sat up a bit and tried to seem serious by squinting her eyes and straightening her mouth.

“Interesting,” Miles said, suspiciously and a couple of people laughed, including Mitchell. “Can you say any more?”

“Yeah, OK,” she said. “There’s this story. It was in some movie I saw on cable about the Nazis having a meeting to plan the Final Solution. At the end Kenneth Branning, that Shakespeare guy, well, Branning’s character, he’s a Nazi, tells a story about a kid who loved his mother so much. But he hated his dad.” She sat up even more and set her pencil down in the crevasse of her book’s binding. She used her hands when she spoke in a smooth sort of conductor-like way. “Really, really hated him because he beat him all the time. And the mom tried to protect him, but she couldn’t. And when his mother died, the kid was sad but he went on. But when his dad died, he was all destroyed. Like he couldn’t go on. He’d based his whole personality on hating his dad. So, like, I think people do that. They live in this rigid, impractical way because they’re living out of hate. They can’t get past it.” You could see she was sort of embarrassed for talking so much, but she couldn’t stop herself, “Like the Nazis and the Jews. The Nazis probably could’ve won the war if they didn’t care so much about the Holocaust. Sartera writes about it, I think.”

“Right,” Miles said and set down the chalk. He rubbed his hands, “I think I’m getting it.” A couple of people laughed in a way that suggested they were holding back more laughs. Abdoul hated laughing just meant to be mean. Like when people laugh at someone who trips. It’s not funny, unless the person was trying to be all bad or holding dozens of eggs. Then it might be.

She picked up her pencil again and focused herself entirely into her little book.

“She’s right,” Abdoul said and the squeaky, serious sound of his voice even surprised him.

“I’m sorry, Abdoul, I didn’t see your hand.”

Abdoul waited for the laughs to settle. “But really,” he said, “there’s this comic on YouTube, Bill Hicks, he died of cancer. He’s like Dennis Leary but funny. Anyway, he talks about how stupid patriotism is.” As his words came out, he looked around. Everyone was staring at him like he was a house pet that suddenly learned to speak. “Like we should just love our country because our parents happened to have sex here. It’s all this same mentality where people don’t question what they think. It’s because of fear, which leads to hate or the other way around. I forget what Yoda said.”

Everyone liked that. You always got extra points for quoting Yoda.

“Totally,” Patty Villa said, still drawing, and Abdoul could tell that she’d killed it for every one else. They didn’t want to agree with her no matter what her point was.

“OK, y’all. That’s a great start,” Miles said. “So everyone bring in two pieces on Change for Friday. One art, one theory. Can someone explain that to Patty? Abdoul are you volunteering?”

“I get it,” Patty Villa said, leaning back into her chair. “Art is like a poem or a story and theory is an essay or analysis.”

“Right on,” Miles said and scanned the room, trying to absorb some of the class’ disgust. But it didn’t work; they were all too focused on the subtle permission being passed around to hate someone who wasn’t them. Miles pressed play on his iPod and some spooky, laid back drums kicked in followed by the typical, old whispery trumpet sound heading down some path to some mystical place.
*********
It was just like Abdoul hoped; Patty Villa was the only one who stayed inside for break. Even Miles went for coffee. They were all alone for eleven whole minutes, her drawing and him quietly pretending to read Brave New World but really just making a list of words to look up.

After eight minutes, Abdoul couldn’t focus anymore. “You’ll learn to ignore them.”

“What?” she said and placed her pencil behind her ear.

He repeated himself.

“Already have. I’m just afraid my counselor must think that I’m a pseudo-intellectual, and that’s why she put me here.”

“Nah, they’re smart. They just say dumb shit.”

“Consistently.”

He laughed. “Yeah, pretty consistently.”

“Are you always packing?” she asked, making a little gun and pointing at his.

“You know how us gangsters do it.” He laughed at himself. His laugh ended, and he tried to make it go on a little longer until she said something else. She reached for her pencil instead. “So, whatcha drawing?”

“You’ll hate me if I show you,” she said, looking toward the door of the classroom.

“Too late.”

She liked that. Abdoul got up and walked to her desk. She held out the book to him, maybe so he wouldn’t get too close. It was a drawing of Mitchell, very clearly Mitchell. He was puffed up, had a bad guy mustache, was behind a pulpit and in front of an American Flag with a swastika instead of stars. The caption said, “Well, umm hmm, this is what God told me to tell you,” and that even sounded like Mitchell.

Abdoul was too happy to laugh and he didn’t even have time for a reaction because the bell rang and the people started filing in.

“Draw me, alright? Peace,” he pointed the barrel of his fake gun toward the ceiling like that could approximate a peace sign. She laughed at that. She got it, he thought.

He walked back to his seat very slowly then sat down, pretending like he wasn’t in love.

********
The next morning Abdoul came in about fifteen minutes early. He wasn’t able to sleep and had read the entire plot of Brave New World on Wikipedia. Now he was just staring at the book’s cover trying to decide if he should ever open it again. Was there anything more to a book than what the story was? If you knew that, did you really need to read it at all?

Patty Villa walked in. She walked right up to Abdoul’s desk and dropped a piece of fancy, folded, torn-out paper right near where Abdoul’s handgun was resting on his bunched up pillow of a jacket. She smiled at him and backed up to her seat. He smiled too until he saw Mitchell and Josh walk in the door. Then he just looked down.

With his good hand, Abdoul unfolded the paper. It was him, him with imagined facial hair and sad, sad eyes. His forehead was wrapped in an American Flag bandana. And he was wearing a little pin that said, “I’m Certified Gangster.”

She was watching him and drawing in her little book.

When he read the caption, “Draw me ight pce,” he started laughing, laughing in a way that made his mucus uncontrollable. He had to cover his mouth and his nose.

And she started laughing too as everyone—everyone watched Patty Villa and Abdoul like they were stupid and insane.

This story was based on Jeff Hurlow’s Myspace Portrait Project.

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