Oddballs by William Sleator

Author:William Sleator
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504019101
Publisher: Open Road Media Teen & Tween

The Pitiful Encounter

As teenagers, Vicky and I talked a lot about hating people. At the dinner table, we would go on and on about all the popular kids we hated at high school. Dad, who has a very logical mind, sometimes cautioned us about this. “Don’t waste your hate on them,” he would say. “Save it up for important people, like the president.” We responded by quoting the famous line from Medea: “Loathing is endless. Hate is a bottomless cup; I pour and pour.”

What Dad did not understand was that hate was not exactly what we were talking about. We had something a little different in mind; that was why Vicky and her two best friends, Avis and Eleanor, had coined their special term, pituh. There was no word in the English language that specified all the particular characteristics that made someone pituh. Though it was pronounced something like the first two syllables of pitiful, the term certainly did not mean that the person was pitiful or pathetic in the sense of being an outcast. On the contrary, most of the people our group considered to be pituh were members of the popular clique: the girls with perfectly groomed beehive hairdos who giggled and flirted and were always fixing their makeup; the arrogant guys they flirted with, athletic types who rarely opened a book and who considered me a nonentity because I was lousy at sports. It was these slaves to peer pressure whom we considered the most pituh of all—somehow they did not seem to understand that we, as oddballs and deliberate nonconformists, were far superior to them in every way.

We were the first hippies at our high school. We wore ancient sandals, carried our books in cloth sacks, and let our hair grow long and untamed. Vicky and Avis were the most daring. They pried discarded gum out of the school drinking fountains and casually popped it into their mouths to chew—making sure, of course, that pituh-people were observing them. The resulting expressions of bafflement and awed disgust were a joy to behold. Vicky and Avis insisted they weren’t just doing this for effect. They claimed that ABC gum (“Already Been Chewed”) had a far more subtle depth of character than the unripened fresh stuff.

The pituh-people at school were not the only ones we took pleasure in bewildering. There was also the general public. Avis had spent a year in England when her father was on sabbatical there and had returned with the ability to speak, when she chose, in a gratingly intense Cockney accent. “‘Ave yuh gawt inny boiros?” she demanded of drugstore clerks, who had no idea she was asking for a ball-point pen. But the best use of her accent was a game we called The Pitiful Encounter, which the three girls played frequently on streetcars.

In order to explain The Pitiful Encounter, it is necessary to point out that Avis was not as attractive as the other two. She was not unpretty, but she was overweight, with a fleshy face and mousy hair.

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