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

shaking some of his hair out of his face and starting to get worked up, “all you need are some resistors, and a couple of potentiometers, maybe.” He started getting really into it, spouting off a bunch of technical stuff that might as well have been Greek. You could tell he was getting excited, because without even thinking about it, he’d pulled out his lighter and was flipping it around in his fingers.
    Brian was one of those mechanical-type kids who were always getting stuff at Radio Shack to make their flashlights bright enough to blind their enemies or something like that. I was convinced that if he died in school, it would be from holding a minifan he’d modified to spin so fast that it lifted him off the ground, causing him to fly through the ceiling headfirst. But I was also convinced that there were few more memorable ways to die. It should go without saying that a kid who is into both mechanical things and fire is destined to do great things.
    There must be one of those kids in every advanced studies class, because in seventh grade Mrs. Smollet gave him some information about some camp for kids like him. The top of the flyer said, “Do you always have to know how things work? Do you have a tendency to tinker?” Any teacher who thinks it’s wise to give a kid a flyer that asks him if he has a “tendency to tinker” should be fired in a large public assembly. In any case, Brian passed on the camp.
    By the end of lunch I was on enough of a high to get through the rest of my day without too much trouble. Even though I wasn’t entirely sure what Brian was talking about with all the gears and stuff, just hearing him yammering on made me excited about trying to get the wall of sound working again, and the video was starting to feel like it was back on track. Not to mention that I had an invitation to go over to Anna’s house the next day. With all those things, I had enough going on in my head to sit around pretending to be taking notes while I was actually drawing up plans for the wall of sound or writing down more movie ideas. It was almost enough to make me forget all about the hell that surely awaited me at home that night, cooking and inventing.
    Almost.

Most of the cookbooks in my parents’ collections aren’t really cookbooks so much as advertisements. Like, Crisco put out whole cookbooks in which every recipe called for an obscene amount of “Crisco ® Brand Shortening.” The idea behind it was that if people kept cooking things out of the books, they’d run out of Crisco faster and have to buy more of it. That’s all very well and good, but the problem is, a lot of products can’t really be made into all that much stuff, so the people writing the cookbooks really had to stretch for ideas after the third or fourth recipe. I hope against hope that they didn’t really expect people to eat some of the recipes they came up with; they were just doing their job, coming up with as many ideas as they could. They probably didn’t count on people like my parents.
    I was able to hang out in my room for a couple of hours after school, poking around with the wires on the speakers to see if anything was broken or burned all to hell, and trying to get them back into shape instead of being a tangled mess, which they seemed to have become all by themselves. Then, just as the clock struck six, I was called downstairs.
    My mother was dressed in one of her food disaster costumes, which she only wore on special occasions, when she was really trying to make cooking into a chance to spend quality time with my dad and me. On these occasions, when she cooked one of the horrible meals, she liked to dress up like a housewife from whatever decade the cookbook of the night came from. Tonight she was dressed in a costume from the 1950s, with a long dress and a yellow apron, and she was wearing hideous, pointy red eyeglasses. I was convinced that this did not make the meals any more edible, and further convinced that anyone