Our final exam in Physics started out mundane enough but ended . . . well, bizarre.
Dave helped me prepare as usual. I didn’t get the straight A’s he got, but still, the tutoring made a big difference in my grades. Since Conway was Dave’s second-favorite teacher, at first I wondered if that wasn’t the reason for Dave’s stellar performance, if Dave wasn’t extra motivated to do well by him. But then I realized that Dave didn’t have the kind of mutual admiration type relationship with Conway the way he did with Goodman, and that Dave simply “got it” when it came to physics like he said he did.
Conway’s tests were tough but fair. He didn’t have trick questions, “show all your work” demands, weird extra credit bonus stuff, or anything like that. He just gave you a reasonable number of questions that you could solve in fifty minutes, and you just gave him the answers. Every question he asked was one we had studied and discussed in class.
Other teachers could have learned how to give a test from Conway, as far as I was concerned.
I worked my way through the test, pleased that only a few questions this time had me stumped and certain I was going to get a decent grade—or, at least, one good enough.
Then, just minutes before time was up, there was an outcry from the front of the room.
“Cheater! You cheat!”
Darryl Schmidt, mild-mannered, front-seat nerd who only spoke up to proudly answer questions in class, stood pointing at the student next to him, fellow nerd and compatriot Gordon Hicks.
“Now, now, Darryl, take it easy.” Conway looked stunned by the accusation almost as much as Gordon did, who stared up at his accuser.
“What are you talking about?” Gordon demanded to know.
“I saw you looking at my answers, Gordon. You copied them. You copied!”
Gordon gave the loudest gasp of indignation I’ve ever heard, immediately making me doubt its sincerity.
“How dare you! I would never cheat!”
“I saw you!”
”Darryl . . .” Conway persisted, now halfway up out of his chair.
Still pointing at Gordon, Darryl turned to face Conway. “We can’t have a cheater like this in class! It’s disgraceful!”
And that’s when the real weirdness began.
Gordon shoved Darryl away.
It was a mild little shove, hardly anything really, but Darryl clearly wasn’t expecting it and stumbled into his chair. He knocked the chair over and fell clumsily on top of it, his test papers spreading across the floor.
“Now look what you did, cheater!” he said as he angrily grabbed each sheet and scrambled back to his feet.
Gordon stood up, his hands balled as if ready to rumble.
With surprising speed, Conway came around his desk and stood between them before things could get too crazy. The class bell sounded in the hallway.
“What’s the matter with the two of you? You’re the last ones I ever expected to cause any trouble! Give me your tests.” He grabbed their tests from them and looked at the rest of us, still sitting and staring in disbelief despite the dismissal bell. “All of you, put your tests on my desk on your way out. Move, people! You two stay right where you are.”
We slowly complied, giving wide berth to the two angry nerds now staring hard at each other, their faces flushed.
None of us wandered far from the classroom door, waiting to see what was going to happen next, if there was going to be another altercation as soon as Conway let Darryl and Gordon go.
Sure enough, the two of them immediately resumed their argument in the hallway.
“Thanks for the week detention, Darryl.”
“You deserve it, you cheater!”
“I didn’t cheat!”
“I know you did!”
“You take that back or after school I’ll . . . see you at The Hill!”
“Fine! See you at The Hill.”
“Fine!”
And they turned and went their separate ways.
“Oh, wow,” Dave said. “They’re meeting at The Hill. I wouldn’t miss this for anything. This could be as big as Homecoming,” he said.
Facetiously, I hoped. But with Dave, you never knew.
The Hill was on the south side of the school, in front of the main parking lot. It wasn’t all that tall, but it was the highest point around, and the place where some people went to settle their differences with their fists after school when nothing else worked. Whoever won the fight was then obviously “King of The Hill,” at least for the time being. It was also where the jocks gathered to have their pictures taken after winning some significant game, a more benign purpose. As a result, The Hill went by several names—Victory Hill, Pride Hill, and Dave’s favorite, Hill of Pain. Of course, if the administration got wind of any planned fight, they waited around to prevent it from taking place, so the trick was to spread the news as surreptitiously as possible to draw a large crowd but leave the administration clueless—which, honestly, wasn’t all that hard to do.
Fights at The Hill—so I was told back when I was a freshman—were a school tradition, even though our Big Brown Box wasn’t really all that old.
Onion giggled when she heard the news. “Too funny! I might watch it, too.”
I couldn’t say I was all that surprised. Usually Onion abhorred violence, but I guess the intrigue of a fight between two skinny, rather feeble-looking guys you would never suspect even knew how to throw a punch was clearly too much to resist. Even I planned to be there, and I didn’t particularly like violence any more than Onion.
As the day wore on, the buzz over the impending fight grew exponentially, like a chain reaction. In the cafeteria, you could tell who had just heard about it when someone whispered in their ear and they burst into laughter, only to turn and whisper to someone else, who then reacted the same way. And instead of producing a sense of foreboding that pending fights usually did, this time there was almost a jovial mood in the air, kind of a party atmosphere. I guess its main attraction was its total incongruity; nobody could quite believe it.
The only problem was that it was becoming such a hot topic, I had to wonder if the administration would soon hear and put a stop to it before it could even begin. I was kind of torn about that—on one hand, that would undoubtedly be good for Darryl and Gordon, but on the other, the letdown after such a tremendous buildup would be immense.
I contemplated what Dave had said when Darryl and Gordon first agreed to fight—in some ways, this was going to be as big as Homecoming.
When the last bell rang for the day, I half expected people to make a beeline for The Hill, tipping off the administration that something was up and spoiling the party. Instead, almost as if rehearsed, people left quietly and without any fuss, as if it were just an ordinary end to an ordinary day. Once safely outside, though, people glanced back to make sure no teachers were watching, then grinned at each other and raced to the south side.
Dave patted my shoulder as we watched the brilliant deception unfold.
“I’m so proud of them,” he said, pretending to wipe away a tear of joy.
By the time the three of us got to The Hill, the whole area was packed. Not ever having gone to a fight before, I wasn’t sure if this was normal or unusual.
“Man, I’ve never seen so many people here,” someone behind me said. “Look at the size of this crowd!”
That answered my question.
The other surprise to me was the number of girls present. I guess I thought the only ones interested in fistfights were those of us awash in testosterone, yet almost half the crowd was female.
I mentioned it to Dave. “You know, you would think this would be more of a guy thing, wouldn’t you?”
He gave me a disdainful look. “Yeah, right. Like girls never fight. Don’t you ever watch YouTube?”
From our vantage point, we couldn’t see what was going on at the top of The Hill. Dave, being the big, commanding guy he is, steamrolled his way closer, and Onion and I followed right behind until we could see Darryl and Gordon standing a couple of feet apart, fists up, ready to go at it. Both had taken off their glasses and looked a little blurry eyed trying to focus on their targets.
“Good,” Dave said. “We didn’t miss a thing.”
The circle of students surrounding the pair were all still grinning, as if the sight of two spindly guys on the verge of thrashing each other—or trying to—was the funniest thing imaginable.
Darryl took the first swing and missed. The crowd cheered the start of the action. Gordon tried next, connecting awkwardly with Darryl’s shoulder, which made Darryl slide a bit sideways. It had rained the night before and the grass had just been cut, making the hill slick.
“That was nothing,” I heard Darryl say. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
Gordon followed up with another swing, missing again. Darryl grabbed Gordon’s arm as it went by his head and yanked it. Gordon lurched forward, his feet went out from under him, and he did a face plant on the hill.
The crowd laughed uproariously.
Gordon got up and charged Darryl, tackling him around the waist. Both went down and rolled over each other.
“Get off me!” Darryl said, and pushed Gordon away.
They staggered to their feet, wet and covered with grass clippings, which caused more laughter.
After sizing each other up a few seconds, fists raised again, Gordon threw a long punch that barely connected with Darryl’s chest. Darryl didn’t even flinch.
“Stand closer,” someone in the crowd yelled.
“Yeah,” someone else agreed. “You’re too far apart.”
I guess if you’ve never fought before, some impromptu coaching from the sidelines was probably in order.
Gordon and Darryl circled each other warily, drawing nearer to each other until they were finally in decent striking range.
“That’s better,” someone said.
Darryl and Gordon threw a punch at exactly the same time. Their fists met in midair with a smack.
They both backed away, grimacing and shaking their affected hands.
The crowd half murmured and half chuckled.
“Didn’t hurt,” Darryl said.
“Nope. Didn’t hurt,” Gordon echoed.
You could sense growing restlessness in the crowd as the two wannabe boxers circled slowly again, feigning jabs.
“Come on! Somebody hit somebody!” someone finally said, more than a hint of impatience in their voice.
“Yeah, what are you waiting for?” someone else chimed in. “We don’t have all day.”
People nodded in agreement. At this rate, the two of them would still be circling at midnight.
Gordon finally threw a punch that looked at first like it might connect, until Darryl quickly held up a palm and caught Gordon’s fist like a baseball pitch. They appeared to arm wrestle a while with both arms, slipping and sliding, their faces contorted as if the effort took all their strength, and then they went down again in a heap. They tried to get up but only made it to their knees, clutching each other and giving really short little jabs to each other’s sides that seemed way too puny to do any harm. After about a minute of that, they fell over and started rolling again—this time, straight down The Hill.
The crowd hurriedly parted to let them through.
Down they went, over and over and over and over, all the way to where the ground leveled out. The parking lot curb finally brought them to a stop.
They separated and lay on their backs, their hands on their foreheads, panting mightily and streaked with grass and mud.
The crowd approached them cautiously.
“Are you kidding me? They’re exhausted!” someone said, as if that weren’t possible after such a short fight.
“That’s it?” someone else asked. “It’s over?”
Several in the crowd groaned. A few people booed.
“Lame!” someone shouted.
“Worst. Fight. Ever,” someone else chimed in, and with faces drawn, the crowd turned away and dispersed. After all the hype, it ended not with a bang but a whimper, as someone once said.
Dave, Onion, and I joined the exodus and headed toward Dave’s car in the far parking lot.
“Well, at least no one got hurt. Much,” Onion said.
Dave shook his head. “Talk about anticlimactic.”
Both Onion and I turned and walked backward to look at Gordon and Darryl. They were alone now, sitting up and talking to each other. Neither seemed particularly animated or upset. They were just talking, probably like they always had.
Nothing much to see there, Onion and I turned to walk forward again.
“I guess they just had to get it out of their systems,” Onion said. “This was probably about a lot more than just cheating on a test.”
Dave shook his head again. “You would think they could have done that without wasting everyone’s time.”
“Hey,” Onion said. “That was their moment in the sun. Maybe it didn’t turn out as planned, but now everybody’s going to remember them. I mean, isn’t that what everybody really wants, just to be remembered?”
Neither of us answered. I didn’t know what Dave thought, but what Onion said was exactly true. I didn’t know many people all that well at The Big Brown Box—or what they accomplished their four years there—but I would always remember Darryl and Gordon’s Big Fake Fight as it came to be known, a permanent part of school lore now that would likely be told for years to come.
I took one last glance over my shoulder and saw the two of them standing now and shaking hands, as if to congratulate each other for achieving fame at last.