Read Online The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfeld - Free Book Online

ass.”
    â€œMr. Schwab. I don’t think ‘grab a-word is a useful teaching expression.”
    â€œBut a ban? On talking to girls? This just seems like an awful lot of punishment.”
    â€œThis is serious, Mr. Schwab. We have a legal responsibility here, as do you.”
    Ah , I think, that’s what this is about. Nobody wants a lawsuit .
    â€œPlease, talk to your son, have a serious talk about this, about sexuality, perhaps, based on his curiosity in the opposite sex. Perhaps it is time to have the talk about contraception.”
    â€œIf he’s not allowed to even talk to a girl, I don’t think Ronin is going to be getting to first base, forget about scoring.”
    There is a long silence.
    Of course they don’t consider the baseball scoring system to be an appropriate method for describing teen sexual behavior.
    IN THE CAR ON THE way home, as we drive down San Vincente, past the artificial palm trees that now line the median island, I ask Ronin for his version of events.
    He is seated in the passenger seat, his backpack at his feet. “I don’t want to talk about it. Dad, it’s embarrassing.” His voice is on the precipice of changing, it slips occasionally, dropping an octave or two, before scrambling back up to his boyish tenor.
    â€œI’ve heard the school’s version of events, and I need to hear yours.”
    â€œWhat did they say?”
    â€œThat you . . . that you grabbed another student.”
    â€œâ€˜Grabbed’?”
    â€œI don’t think they used that word. They said ‘inappropriate touching.’”
    â€œWhatever,” he says, his voice dropping, then rising. “That is so retarded.”
    â€œWas there any touching?”
    â€œI pinched Ashley McDaniels’s butt. Like, once. Hard. She liked it.”
    â€œHow do you know she liked it?”
    â€œShe smiled. She smiled when I did it yesterday, and then we walked together to English.”
    â€œDid you ask her if she liked it?”
    â€œNo, that would be embarrassing.”
    â€œBut it’s not embarrassing to pinch her butt?”
    â€œNo, because she smiled at me afterward. But you can’t go, like, ‘Do you like when I pinch your butt?’ That would be weird.”
    He made sense. In these matters, between a man and a woman, or a boy and a girl, certain things are best left unsaid.
    â€œOkay, but you understand why Vice Principal Nakamura is sending you to Concentration and to that special after-school thing.”
    â€œHe said I have to go to Freaks?”
    â€œNo, it’s this after-school program where you are going to talk about, you know, growing up and stuff.”
    â€œThat’s Freaks. And I’m NOT GOING TO FREAKS.”
    MY EX-WIFE IS ANGRIER WITH the school than with me. She lives a few miles away in a rented house overlooking a canyon where she is waiting when I drop Ronin off and explain the reasons for his suspension. She wants to hire a lawyer, she wants to sue the school, she believes our son is being defamed and the school is overreacting. All of which may be true, but I’m not sure we can make much of a case.
    â€œHe pinched a girl’s butt?” she says. “So what? He’s a boy. Boys and girls are supposed to play with each other in this way. It’s normal.”
    â€œThey disagree. This is the new normal.”
    She studies me. “Have you had a puff?”
    I shake my head. “I was pepper-sprayed.”
    She is about to go down this conversational path but then stops herself, staying on subject. “They can’t do this.”
    My ex-wife has short black hair with fishhook-shaped, skull-hugging curls that hang over her ears, a narrow forehead, the long, slender nose. She has a pleasingly ovoid face, perfectly symmetrical; babies smile when they look at her. Her skin is surprisingly clear and largely unwrinkled, the first infinitesimally small canyons in the flesh now