Read Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film about The Grapes of Wrath for Free Online Page A

attempt to acknowledge this fact that we haven’t mentioned since his lunch announcement last week. This is my way of reassuring him that it’s all cool, that we can have conversations like this. Only we can’t. It’s a little too personal, a little too forced, not something he wants to discuss with me. He licks his lips and tugs at his glasses and says, “No.”
    â€œI don’t think so either,” I say, way too quickly. It feels like someone has moved our lockers since yesterday. They aren’t usually this far away.
    â€œYou know, I was thinking,” I say, trying very hard to change the topic. “I might stay late and work on our film. I had some ideas. Would that be okay?”
    â€œSure. Knock yourself out.”
    â€œYou have baseball today, right?”
    â€œYou need a ride home?”
    â€œJust this once.”
    Scenario 3: What if two mild-mannered honors students …
    David meets me in the editing room after baseball practice. I have spent the last three and a half hours putting our film together. There are a few parts David hasn’t seen yet. I am particularly proud of my
Grapes of Wrath
–inspired dust bowl scene. I talked one of the maintenance staff into letting me empty the contents of the vacuum cleaner bag onto the floor. He gave me a look like maybe I was off my meds, but he stayed and watched as I dropped all of the major characters one by one into the pile, which produced wonderful plumes of debris. When I was done he just shook his head sadly while I helped him clean it back up. After I added the screams to the soundtrack, it became one of my favorite sequences.
    â€œYou know,” David says, watching it through the second time, “Wallman is going to love this. It has everything he loves about movies: senseless violence, lots of blood, and you even got sex in there—well, not real sex but a good nude scene. They were naked in the opening, right?”
    I fast-backward to the opening.
    â€œIt was a little hard to get them to look naked.”
    â€œEve’s nipples look like buttons …”
    â€œThat’s because they are buttons.”
    â€œOh. That would explain it. What are we using for a title?” David sits in the chair next to me and plays with the dials on the mixer.
    â€œWe still need to make a title sequence, but how does ‘Steinbeck Sucks’ sound to you?”
    â€œGreat—a tribute to your English essay.”
    â€œWhich I still haven’t written.”
    â€œYou know,” David says thoughtfully, “if we called it ‘Biblical Themes in
The Grapes of Wrath
,’ we could turn it in to Curtis. We have, like, eight Steinbeck references—nine if you notice that the devil sort of looks like the picture of him on the back of the book.”
    â€œHey, why not? What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
    â€œWe fail English. We are forced to endure ridicule and humiliation in front of our peers. Stress-induced hypertension and eventually death.”
    â€œI mean besides that.”

CHAPTER 8
Way Too Much Whining and Some Thoughts on Pissing
    5:32 a.m
.
    It is 5:32. In less than two minutes, my alarm will go off. I hate waking up before the alarm.
    I feel defeated. Absolutely, unquestionably, utterly, and hopelessly defeated. I do not want to go to school. I do not want to get out of bed. I can’t imagine how I will get through the next sixty or so years of my life. I cannot write this paper.
    It’s just a paper. A stupid standard five-paragraph essay. The same stupid five-paragraph essay I have written approximately every two weeks since fifth grade. My self-esteem does not depend on whether this particular paper is good or bad. I have other sources of self-esteem. Not that I can come up with any right this moment, but I’m sure there is something about me that I can …
    Maybe not. Maybe I am really as worthless as I feel right now. Mr. Rogers might