Geek

I hate Mr Gurvitz. He says things like 'Rad'. Lame, huh? He is Acting Head of Information Technology. We call him the Geekmeister. But we are the geeks. AP s, Advanced Placements.

'AP s?? More like SR s ', they say in the halls, while we hide our embarrassment behind open locker doors. It means “Social Retards”.

Gurvitz, of course, has a beard. And a pony tail. And something that looks like his barber couldn't quite hack that weird shaved bit on top, like monks have - you know, so he kept going all the way to the forehead. He wears gym shoes with dull brown pants and a a sports jacket that could frighten a cow. No tie, although everyone but the Gym guy wears one. Gurvitz 's shirt is buttoned right to the top.

See? The man is so...hell, I can't think of anything sad enough to tell you.

AP Information Technology- Sophomores: there are no girls. Big surprise. The class does not take place in the Technology Suite: that is - the entire contents of the Tecumseh Block, which was built in 2001 when the widow of some big chief over at the Ohio Supercomputer Center died and left all his money to the county to build it. Guess she didn't like cats. No; APITS , as we like to call it, takes advanced place in an old store-room in the original stone-block building of Mentor Johnson Memorial High. It doesn't have air-con. Just those high, old windows you need a pole with a hook to open. APITS is taught in the Pits, ha ha.

It's a Tuesday; but, since it's the day- after- Labor Day, it's the first school day of the week. I knock on the door of Gurvitz's lair. You have to knock. Always. We don't know what would happen if we didn't, no-one ever has entered, just like that. I did use to think of just skipping, say, Gym class and breezing in like I was on my way to 'Shop and had taken a wrong turning. Not now; I don't want to know what he's doing in there.

We are late. That's U Thant and me: he's an Asian-American - you can't say Burmese. Not allowed. I never met anyone from there before. Can't say Myanmar, either, but then that's probably 'cause it's hard to say. Still, Asian-American is better than what the Jocks say, when there are no adults around. They like to call after him, 'U Slant.' Thant just pushes his glasses up his nose and shrugs. Girls don't notice us at all, so I don't know what they'd call Thant. I guess me and Thant are friends. I've never met his mom and he'll never meet mine, but we hang out at recess trying to stay out of people's eye-line.

Anyways, I knock. We hear scuffling and drawers closing and then a cough or two. Then;

'Come!' he says it in the voice from that crazy old show on Channel 13, the one your Granny swears used to give her the 'heebie-jeebies', whatever they were. Yeah, Ghoulardi, that was him.

We go in. Me first. Gurvitz is fiddling with the pony tail. The failed monk patch is very shiny at the front.

'Come on, come on. We haven't much time,' he says.

His accent sounds like someone pretending to be Polish. Gurvitz is from Columbus. We heard he got fired from OSC. We make up our own stories about what he did; hacked NASA and delivered 20,000 pizzas to Houston Control; re-routed calls destined for the Sister Paula Nielson cable TV show to the White House and God knows what all. The truth is we don't know anything about him. About as much as he knows about us.

And another thing is true: my pal Thant knows more about Falcon and explicit string expansion than Gurvitz does. Gurvitz will pass Thant if he never produces a single paper. He knows it, we know it. He'll pass me too, 'cause I know that Thant has been doing Gurvitz's other job since we first turned up in AP. At recess, or in the after school club known as Falconers, membership: two, you can guess who.
Oh , he's clever enough, Gurvitz, like me. My friend Thant is a genius though; a – what's that word? Prodigy.

Me, I'm just a geek. That's why I hate Gurvitz: when I grow up that's gonna be me.