Watchers

Stupid Questions

There is such a thing as a stupid question. There are tons of stupid questions. So whatever teacher gives you the old "There's no such thing as a stupid question" bit is downright lying. Take the one guy in my math class, for example. In the middle of some lesson on integers or something, he raised his hand, got called on, and asked if he could go outside for a smoke. Or Dylan Doyle in gym. While running the mile, he asked the teacher if next time he could bring his roller blades and skate the whole way. Teachers get mad at kids for asking those sorts of questions, so why do they try to say there aren't any stupid ones? Obviously they think that there are. And I think that there are too. Sometimes the question isn't exactly stupid, but the way it comes out sounds bad, or the time you ask it isn't the right one.

I was starting to make mistakes with questions when it came to Adam, and they were happening more and more often. He was just getting so touchy about everything. The smallest mention of certain things could set him off into a no-talking zone. Sometimes I wondered if it really was me, and I really was just being a jerk all the time. Because that's how he was starting to make me feel—like a jerk who always said or did the wrong thing. And it hadn't been like that before, not really. I mean, he'd always had his moments, but who didn't? It was just that over the past couple of months, his moments had turned into much longer periods. Hours, days, even a week at one point. He was just acting weird.

I asked my mom about it (and I don't enjoy having to admit that to anyone). Moms just know things sometimes, though, and since I couldn't really figure out Adam, I gave her a shot. I'd chosen to forget the fact that she'd let Corey call the cops about Adam vandalizing our garage. If I hadn't forgotten it, I'd never be able to talk to her. She couldn't tell me much, though. All that she hinted at was "the adolescent years," whatever that referred to, and said Adam was just growing up. She added that it was harder on him than it was on me because he didn't have a dad, and that made some sense. That was the only real difference between me and him—having a dad. Otherwise, we were a lot alike. So his weirdness had to be about his dad.

It wasn't like his dad had just left, though; he'd been gone for years, but Adam was just now starting to act strange about it. That part confused me, but my mom just said that it was Adam's age that made him more sensitive to everything. I didn't exactly think that was true.

Whatever Adam's problem was, we started to see each other less. We talked at school and we walked to and from it together, but besides that, we only really did stuff once or twice a week. We hadn't been paintballing in nearly a month (which was killing my inner warrior) and we definitely hadn't talked about the treehouse or stories we'd found. Even though Adam had told me he wanted all the papers I had, he must've forgotten to get them, because I still had them in my room. I'd divided them into two piles: the stories of people I could guess and the stories of people I couldn't guess. So far in my first pile I had the Ham's story, Doyle's story about his crazy grandma, the story of Pete Kristo (which was about a scientific genius in disguise), Adam's dad's story, my story, and some others about people that were so obvious I'd guessed them right away. The rest of the papers were interesting, but I just couldn't figure out who they were about. I didn't know everyone in Goldenrock, though, so they might have been about kids or adults I'd never met.

I'd started to look at people differently if theirs was one of the stories I'd read. The guy at the grocery store who I'd never thought anything about suddenly struck me as someone who was saving for a vacation he'd probably never take (before reading about him, he'd never struck me at all). The zoned-out guy who sat behind me in math—his name was T.J. Donalds—became a lot more scary when I read what I figured was his story. My gym teacher turned into someone I felt kind of nice toward; I'd always thought of him as an insensitive guy who liked jocks best. It was weird, the way things started to look just because I'd read a bunch of made-up stuff. Of course, I didn't think it was all made up anymore, because they seemed to fit the people they described.