4-SCHOOLING IN SKIRTS

only person keeping three-fourths of the football and basketball teams maintaining a "C" average, that turned out to be a mixed blessing. I tutored most of the players, which kept me from getting beaten up, since they couldn't afford to have me out of commission. But that also labeled me a "teachers' pet", despite the best attempts by the principal to cast a light of "school spirit" on my tutoring. So I was something of a social outcast: My classmates thought I was too much of a nerd because of my brains to be in their company outside of class, the campus nerds shunned me because I associated with the jocks, and the jocks didn't want to be seen with me in any capacity outside of maintaining their marginal grade point averages. Still, I was managing to survive high school, aside from being extremely lonely. (Which is, of course, the worst hell any high school student can be put through.)

And here it was my senior year, and me looking forward to another nine months of the same treatment. I was still hurting from the fact that I was the only junior at last year's prom who hadn't been able to find a date. Even the nerds and nerdettes had gotten matched up. And if the MacArthur grapevine was its usual efficient self, the incoming freshman class would know all about Daniel Nichols before the end of homeroom. If I hadn't become used to being the oddball on campus, I would have been even more depressed. By lunchtime, I was back in my usual groove, eating alone on a deserted corner of the lawn, interrupted only when a messenger from the administration office delivered a message that the coaching staff wanted to see me after school to set up the tutoring schedule for the football team. Big deal. Another endless parade of barely literate jocks taking basic math, bonehead English, and fifth-grade level geography, all needing my help just to get through that minimal curriculum.

At least having my duties to the athletic department had some minor advantages. I had two periods a day off to accommodate the tutoring, and if there was no one on the schedule for a given period, I had pretty much free reign to roam around campus as there wasn't a single faculty member who would question what I was doing in the hallways

CONTEMPORARY TV FICTION 5

during a class period. (Of course, that only irritated the rest of the student body.) And being a surrogate teacher tended to make time go by faster. So fast, in fact, that the first big dance of the year snuck up on me... the annual Halloween dance.

In years past, I'd started planning my costume at the beginning of October, and I'd come up with some pretty clever ideas the past three years. Not that I ever won a prize in the costume contests, since the judging committee was inevitably comprised of five or six members of the senior class, who resented me for being such a "brainy little kid”. (As if they needed another reason to hate me!)

My brain had been particularly overtaxed the past few weeks because our star quarterback had somehow gotten the idea of taking a course in physics, and there seemed to be no way to put even the most basic concepts into terms he could understand. I finally gave up halfway through the period, sent him to study hall, and was headed for my locker when the poster hit me square in the face:

HALLOWEEN

MASQUERADE DANCE THIS SATURDAY, 8 P.M.

I must have stood there for a full minute trying to convince myself that it wasn't REALLY the end of October. (It was a good thing the halls were deserted mid-period, or I would have been trampled standing there.) After I recovered from the shock that it was, I immediately started trying to think of a costume that would outdo the ones I'd treated indifferent fellow students to at the other Halmy loween dances. And I drew a blank. I was so preoccupied with it that I only ate a quarter of my sandwich, two bites of my apple, and drank half a carton of milk at lunchtime. Even Kathy noticed my preoccupation when she came home from work.

"Danny, is there any particular reason why you haven't started dinner yet?" she asked as she came into my