White Man's Problems Read Online Free

you have to hide that you’re intelligent. It’s a dilemma.
    She sits next to me in seventh-period study hall. This gives me the opportunity to wear her down with conversation and jokes. We’ve actually started having real long talks. I try to read up on things that will interest her, like witchcraft and the Rosenbergs. I even watch what I wear, which is tough. To tell the truth, sometimes I worry she won’t stoop down to going out with me because it would be socially unacceptable. Other times I think, what the hell? I’m a pretty cool guy. She should go out with me. I get jealous thinking about her with anyone else. Man, I don’t like the way that feels. It gets me way down deep, like in some molten center of my body, like the ball of fire in the middle of the earth. Sometimes I wake up at night wondering if that ball is going to burn through me and once it’s done turn into a huge, exploding fire that destroys the world. I’m a little nuts like that.
    Music ends at 10:47, and we head to the cafeteria for lunch. We push the orange trays along the aluminum railing, and from behind the Plexiglas barrier they serve us spaghetti with meat sauce. Dessert, their apology for the entrée, is a little square of red Jell-O with some half-assed whipped cream on top. At this point, I’m not that into eating anything, let alone this shit. It isn’t yet eleven in the morning, and I have gone from freezing my ass off to sweating to freezing my ass off and then to sweating again. I’ve taken two showers, been crushed by Logatelli, been treated for fungus, blown through an unsanitary musical instrument, and now I’m supposed to eat hamburger meat from yesterday’s sloppy joes. My legs are badly burned, and I am tired. And there is still the prospect of frog dissection.
    On that front, the girls are all in a lather. Frogs are the talk of the lunchroom, and everyone is yapping about it as I go to my next class, which is called, strangely, Health . That is the catchall term for everything from sex ed to malaria prevention to making pancakes. Don’t ask me why, but health class is taught by a rotating group of gym teachers. That makes sense to someone somewhere, as does the fact that the course also covers driver’s ed. Our teacher for the driver’s ed unit is—you guessed it—the wrestling-obsessed Mr. Lambert. He doesn’t like to talk much off the mat, so he just shows us movies. Today’s is The Smith Method of Space Cushion Driving . Some guy named Smith drives around in a ’57 Pontiac convertible demonstrating his revolutionary style of driving, which mainly consists of giving the guy ahead of you some room. That’s the big deal: don’t tailgate. But the hilarious thing is Smith is talking to the camera the whole time. At one point, he almost smashes into a guy in a Plymouth making a left. I look around to see if anyone else is catching this, but the whole room is asleep—tough to stay awake after spaghetti.
    Then we go to the much-anticipated sixth-period class, biology. We sit at black plastic lab tables that have holes in the middle, which I suppose are there in case we need to build something requiring a large cylindrical tube. Our teacher is Mr. Palmer, a creepy guy who is like six foot five. He is incredibly psyched to be at the frog-dissection part of the year. He gives us a big speech about the importance of what we are about to do, like we’re astronauts or something.
    â€œI have come to see frog dissection as a rite of passage for children in the public-school system,” he says. “Your time in school can be remembered in two distinct sections—dissected, if you will. There are your childhood years before you dissect a frog. At this point, you are young and immature—some of you very much so. Your bodies are not yet developed. Your minds are simple.”
    He begins to go around the room, handing out the poor frogs