It’s been a while since I was called a “browner”. But in grade 8, I was the king of the Browners. I don’t suppose I even knew what a browner was. Or what it stood for at least. I knew what it was. It was me. A goody-two shoes, a teacher’s pet, someone who always did his homework, someone who got mad when he got a B. Someone who didn’t do drugs or smoke or pass notes in class. Christ, I didn’t even swear. So, yes, I knew what a browner was. I don’t think I knew it was short for brown-noser. I wore the mantel perfectly without knowing that it meant that I was the king of the sycophants, that I was self-serving, that I had my nose firmly up my teacher’s ass. Which, of course, was all true.

It’s not terribly surprising that, except for being their leader, I didn’t know what “browner” meant. We had a class in elementary school that took a tiny school bus and conducted all their classes in the portable and we, the school, called the class the “awkie” class. It was always that way. That’s just what I thought they were called. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that the word stood for “awkward” and that of course it was a slur.

As the King of the Browners, in September of Grade 8, I sat in the rightful throne of the King, that is, in the front row. Meanwhile, near the back of the room was this boy, Kevin. No doubt you had one in your class, too. An irascible boy too funny to be the class bully and too tough to be the class clown. Still he had enough curiosity to get himself into quite a bit of trouble and enough charm to get himself out of that trouble.

Perhaps he had been acting out. Perhaps he had not finished his homework one too many times or perhaps he had been distracting classmates with raucous jokes, but whatever the reason, before September had finished, the teacher had ordered Kevin to sit beside me. Sitting in desks of pairs, the desk beside me, in front of the teacher’s desk, had been empty until that day when Kevin was commanded to sit beside me.

At first Kevin was not happy with his sentence and not happy with me either. During a mandatory reading session, not long after his sentence, I didn’t have any book but the dictionary which I pretended to read. Kevin made fun of me to his circle of delinquent friends. “Memorized the dictionary, yet?” they asked me. For months. They even called me Webster. At 12, there is no bigger stigma than being smart, or rather looking smart.

But while Kevin continued to make fun of me publicly, he became much less cruel to me privately. Within weeks, while we were meant to listen to whatever the teacher was saying, he coaxed me into tic-tac-toe and hangman. He took to passing me notes. And being delinquent, being disobedient, breaking the rules, raised a thrill in me I hadn’t ever known.

It was my first lesson in symbiosis. Often his ipso facto partner in school projects, I helped raise his marks. And I began to understand over the months that he was actually quite smart. It was just important that he didn’t look smart. I helped him with his homework. I taught him how to study.

And he taught me how to be a little less, um, sycophantic. I lost a little brown from my nose. It was a secret at school, but I started staying over at his mom’s house and his grandparents’ house. His grandparents adored me. No doubt, unlike his customary riffraff, they thought I was a good influence. But my primary interest was not in being a good influence on Kevin, but in my own corruption. Kevin taught me how to play Dungeons and Dragons, how to play poker, how to cheat at book reports, how to use, and more accurately, abuse people’s trust, how to swear convincingly, and, when you’re a small town boy with not much to do, how to sniff glue. It was the perfect catechism.

My dad gave him a job on the farm that we did together. Kevin taught me how to do a half-assed job. We didn’t keep the job for very long. Instead, we played on ropes in the old barn. He still made fun of me for being smart. He still called me a browner. But it was different now and he understood that I knew it was different now. We were friends. On one occasion, he dared me to memorize the Universal Product Code on a can of hot chocolate. I had the can for one minute. The next morning he drilled me and I remembered. It’s 22 years later and I still remember the Code: 63591200437. We remained inseparable even after grade 8 ended.

He went on a vacation at the end of that summer, a few weeks before we started high school together. He had been back a week before I ran into him at the convenience store buying comic books. I don’t remember the dialogue but I knew immediately it was over.

When high school started a week or so later, when we saw each other in the hallways, he said nothing to me. I haven’t played Dungeons and Dragons since.

SS