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bottom, everything balancing out. And of course, she seemed to be aware of how good she looked.
    I squinted through my glasses at her legs from skirt hem to knee, and from knee to ankle, imagining I could make out the goose bumps that were probably running down them andmentally constructing a picture of what everything might look like in the concealed regions. As you do. My guess was it was all in pretty good shape, a well-maintained garden of delights. In other words, she wasn’t the kind of girl for whom our aloofness or the lack thereof would register in the slightest. Plus, though she seemed like a nice enough person from a distance, she was almost certainly normal; that is, at least potentially psychotic and without an ounce of kindness or human decency anywhere in her sadistic, corrupted, robotic, petty, nerd-hating soul. Cute, though.
    Tearing my eyes away from the legs caused a little part of me to die, but I did, and joined Sam Hellerman in examining the street sign up and to our left. Corte Del Mar Camino Road. “Chop Down the Sea Road Road,” if I’m translating it right, and not a bad band name, at that. “Hey, we’re Chop Down the Sea Road Road, and this one’s called ‘Up Yours, Your Majesty (Digitally Remastered Version).’ One, two, eat lead …” It could work, sort of.
    I spend a great deal of my time humoring Sam Hellerman for this or that, and now was no exception. I gave him the look that says “You have my attention.”
    Whatever it was that we were doing was cut short when a green station wagon pulled into the 7-Eleven parking lot and the jeans skirt girl jumped in. Sam Hellerman clicked the tape off, made a couple of notes on the legal pad, and began to gather his stuff.
    “A solid seven point two,” he said.
    It was harsh grading, though I didn’t necessarily disagree, but so what? Sam Hellerman was silent, refusing to answer any questions or even attempt to parry any of my pointed attempts at ridicule. He did ask for “the stuff,” but I wasn’t dumb enoughto give it to him before band practice. The last time I’d done that he’d spent half the practice sprawled on the floor with his head in the bass drum.
    It wasn’t till late that night, long after returning from band practice, that I realized I had forgotten to ask Sam Hellerman about his letter. My curiosity about it was mild, but it still managed to keep me up half the night wondering about it with a vague, inexplicable sense of dread, because I’m King Dork and that’s what I do. I tried to kill time by writing lyrics for a possible song called “Jeans Skirt Girl” but didn’t get too far. The chorus was going to go something like “remain aloof, remain aloof, Jeans Skirt Girl, baby you’re the proof,” but I couldn’t get much beyond that, other than to make a note and underline it three times that somehow, some way, I’d have to manage to arrange things so she’d end up on a roof by the third verse.
    And you know, I never did wind up finishing that song. I was an artist of a sort, but I was no Salvador Dalí. He’d have figured out a way to get her on the roof.

SAM HELLERMAN’S ASSETS
    Band practice, when Sam Hellerman and I finally did arrive, had been less than satisfactory. Celeste Fletcher was there, but so was Shinefield, obviously, as he was the drummer, after all, and moreover, it was his house. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but in case I haven’t, Celeste Fletcher had ditched her sort-of boyfriend, whoever he had been, and as far as anyone could tell was now Shinefield’s sort-of girlfriend, though the most I could ever get her to say on the subject was that she “mainly hung out with” him. At practice she had been friendlytoward me, but distant, and nowhere near as flirtatious as she sometimes has been, historically. She remained aloof, in fact. But unlike the girl in the jeans skirt, she actually knew us, so any aloofness that was afoot in Shinefield’s basement had a whole