Read Online Adam Selzer by How to Get Suspended, Influence People - Free Book Online

that he answered every question by singing a few bars of “Alice’s Restaurant,” by Arlo Guthrie, which I’d never heard, though Anna told me she’d play it for me sometime. Dustin saw Dr. Guff once and claimed to have told him he’d lost his virginity at nine to a female truck driver in South Bend, Indiana.
    Personally, I wasn’t sure whether to believe a word of it—no one knew much about Dr. Guff, not even where his office was, and there were no pictures of him. I couldn’t find a single mention of him on the Internet. I sort of suspected that he might just be a legend, like Bigfoot or the giant mutant spider some kids in my first-grade class claimed to have found in a drainage ditch one day.
    Whether these stories were true was irrelevant; we spent lots of time thinking of funny things to say to Dr. Guff, like claiming that we were pretty sure that our parents were cantaloupes or that we thought God was a space alien.
    Anna turned to me and said, “Do you have your outline for the video ready yet?”
    “You bet,” I said. I dug it out of my backpack and handed it to her. She looked at it critically.
    “This is a good start,” she said. “But you should really have some people painting each other with their tongues.”
    “Can we work that in?”
    “Maybe. And let’s lose the tadpoles—the sperm symbolism is too obvious.”
    Dustin Eddlebeck looked up from his lunch. “Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “Are you guys doing the sex-ed video together?”
    I stopped myself from blushing, which took a great deal of effort. “Well, sort of,” I said.
    “I’m letting him use some of my parents’ equipment,” said Anna, doing a good job of covering things up. If word got around that we were doing the video together, we’d never hear the end of it. Ever. It was good to know that she recognized this and didn’t want to deal with it, either.
    I turned back to Anna and said, a little more quietly, “So when should we get going on it?”
    She took a sip of her Coke. “What are you doing tonight?” she asked.
    “I’ve gotta stay home,” I grumbled. “I have to help my mother cook dinner, then help my dad in his…garage.” I was going to say I was working on an invention with him but decided against it. Better not to dwell on these things.
    “How about tomorrow?” she said. “Wanna come over to my place? We can dig through my parents’ books and look for ideas.”
    “Sure,” I said. Across the table, Dustin fixed me with a goofy grin, as though I’d just been invited to go over to her place to have a shower with her or something. Not that I didn’t wish I had been. But I gave Dustin a look back indicating that I would have no problem with hiring a couple of the football players to kill him. There were plenty who were just smart enough to know that their best chance for the future was a career as a hired goon.
    “Hey, Leon,” Brian, who was a few chairs down, chimed in. “I keep forgetting to ask you…did you ever hook up all those speakers?”
    “Crap! I forgot to tell you guys!” I said. “I hooked them up last weekend.”
    “Did you have a whole wall?”
    “Just about half, but it was a start.” Everyone had leaned in; this project had taken up discussion time every day at the table the year before, and now that I was getting to the story of how it came out, I had everyone’s full attention.
    “You used AC/DC, right?” asked James.
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, come on! Did it work?”
    “Yeah, for about one second. Then I blew a fuse.”
    “But how did it sound for that one second?” asked Dustin.
    I smiled. “It was the loudest thing you ever heard,” I said. “If I’d finished the song, my family probably would have been kicked out of town.”
    “Rock ’n’ roll, my friend,” said Dustin. “Rock ’n’ roll.”
    “Holy corn bread,” said James, resurrecting one of his favorite expressions from the year before. “That must’ve kicked ass!”
    “Dude,” said Brian,