Candidate

Candidate 

- Michael Lapointe

Spencer showed me the margins. The symbol cartwheeled down the page. We’d seen it in a movie. The bad guys wore the symbol on their arms. Spencer was the only other boy who’d seen the movie, so we could laugh about it together.

At my desk, I tried drawing the symbol, but the pencil sometimes went the other way. For a while, I forgot how it was meant to go. Then I thought about the guys in the movie, and it came.

I laughed and looked to Spencer. His head was down, pencil working on the page. I made one symbol after another. Every time it worked, it was exciting.

I wondered what else Spencer was drawing. What else had he seen?

The teacher stood up. Spencer’s head stayed down. Now she came up the aisle. In the movie, we’d seen what happened to the bad guys. I rubbed out my symbols and brushed the dust away.

The teacher asked for Spencer’s paper, but I guess he’d erased his symbols, or maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. She just handed back the page and told us to keep working.

Spencer and i tolerated other shows but only really liked The Simpsons. The Simpsons taught us the culture. For years, we’d see something in a movie or on TV and finally understand the reference from The Simpsons. When we encountered the actual source, we already knew how to make it funny. The only other thing we watched was a tape of Spencer’s sister getting thrown from a horse.

Everything Spencer said was funny. He talked like The Simpsons. You didn’t have to know why.

One time, he said, “Ask me if I’m a tree.”

“Are you a tree?”

“No.”

That was the funniest thing we’d ever heard.