Read Online Do You Think This Is Strange? by Aaron Cully Drake - Free Book Online Page B

was the most interesting surface I’d ever seen.
    Saskia stopped mid-chew, staring down at her phone. Then she put it down and reached into her backpack. She took out her notepad and a pen, and began scribbling.
    â€œA stochastic event,” I said again, “is an event that happens at random intervals but is expected to occur on a dependable frequency. The Tater Tots are a stochastic event.”
    The first time a Tater Tot landed near me, I was startled and looked around for an explanation. Why were little bits of deep-fried potato plummeting out of the air onto my table? The second time it happened, one landed on my plate, and Danny Hardwick laughed with his friends. Then they high-fived each other, and I knew the explanation for why little bits of deep-fried potato were plummeting out of the air was me. I was the target.
    After that, the Tater Tots came periodically, and I paid them no attention. When one hit me on the shoulder, I hardly noticed it. When Danny Hardwick and his friends cheered, I stared at the wall and ate my cheeseburger.
    After a while, Danny Hardwick realized I was a target that would not react. He became bored with me. Periodically, he fired a test shot, to see if I was ready to say something, but I never did.
    To be clear: my lack of response wasn’t a strategy. It wasn’t a plan at all. It was a realization that Tater Tot bombs would rain on me at random, unpredictable intervals. It was a realization that Tater Tots and thunder weren’t too different. Both were distressing. There was nothing I could do about either. That was enough to put me at peace with incoming Tater bombs.
    A second Tater Tot fell on the table near Saskia.
    â€œNinety-five percent of the time,” I said to her, while still staring at the wall, “two or less Tater Tots are thrown at the table.” My cheeseburger was finished. It was time for me to go. But I sat. “They’ve only thrown three or more Tater Tots on four occasions.”
    A third Tater Tot bounced between us.
    â€œFive occasions,” I corrected.
    She glanced at the Tater Tot sideways and started typing on her iPhone again.
    A fourth bounced off my left ear. Danny Hardwick cheered.
    We were now outside the standard deviation.
    â€”
    I didn’t know Danny Hardwick or his friends personally, but I knew who they were, because they made it their business to make sure everyone in school knew who they were. They were the boys who sat at the seventh table on the first row of the cafeteria. No one else sat at the seventh table on the first row, except those who were invited.
    No one was invited.
    It was a loud table. Each lunch hour, they told loud stories and laughed at loud jokes. They ate popcorn and threw Tater Tots.
    Danny Hardwick’s friends deferred to him. When he threw kernels, they threw kernels. When he was quiet, they were quiet. He was the Alpha Tater. He wore a leather jacket and his hands were always stained black with grease and oil from the auto mechanics shop at the end of the school. He was large, with thick dark eyebrows and a face pocked with acne scars. His hair was blond with a thick dyed stripe of black running up the middle, like an etched mohawk. He only smiled when he threw Tater bombs.
    We went to different classes in different ends of the school. Although his locker was on the same bank of lockers as mine, we never talked. We only interacted in the cafeteria. It was our Jerusalem.
    Once, we bumped shoulders walking down the hall, but I didn’t turn to see what his reaction was. I had not bumped his shoulder; he had bumped mine, and I know he bumped it deliberately. At school, if you’re new, you will have your shoulder bumped. That’s residual instinct at work. Young men have been bumping each other’s shoulders for tens of thousands of years. That’s just the way it is. Danny Hardwick likes to bump shoulders. He wins at it a lot.
    Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I