Adam Selzer Read Online Free PDF

those stupid gift books that give idiots a warm, fuzzy feeling. You know the kind. They always have all of the writing done in crayon.
    However, once you get past twelve, people just look at you like you’re about to steal something wherever you go. One time I went into a gas station to buy a can of pop, and the jerk behind the counter got it into his head that I was stealing ice cream. He made me turn out my pockets to show that I didn’t have anything frozen in them, like he was a cop in some movie from the thirties and I was a little thief who stole apples from carts. I decided not to buy the pop, and further decided that next time I was out walking around Cedar Avenue with some friends and needed to pee, I’d do it against the wall of the gas station.
    Another time, I stopped into a Stationery Limited store in one of the five hundred or so strip malls on Cedar Avenue to buy a pen for some ink drawings I was working on, and the woman gave me the third degree about whether I was using the pen for something legal or for graffiti. I pointed out that I was buying a pen, not a can of spray paint, and that I’d be up there for weeks if I tried to tag a wall with it, but she still took down my name and phone number, which I’m still not sure was even legal. Not that I gave her my real name or anything. I’m nobody’s fool.
    At home, my father started worrying even more than before about what sort of TV shows I watched. I took to watching certain shows with the remote pointed at the TV, so I could quickly turn it to some educational program—I always knew exactly which ones were on, just in case—if I heard him coming. I’m not sure he really would have believed that I had been watching a show about penguins instead of soft-core porn in the middle of the night, but it was best not to take any chances.
    My mother was even worse. When eighth grade started, she decided that I would no longer be permitted to ride the bus. This could be because she has decided I am responsible enough to walk the half-mile to school, which allows me to leave half an hour later since the bus takes so long. In reality, it’s because she saw some news story saying that kids as young as twelve are having oral sex on the back of school buses, and she doesn’t want me to be a part of it. The whole story was total crap. The worst thing I ever saw happen on the bus was when Ryan Bannon pulled Keith Messersmith’s pants down in third grade, and he didn’t pull down his underwear or anything. Besides, if there is actually any fooling around going on in the buses, which I doubt, I want to be there for it.
    I’ve always, however, been allowed to attend major social events, like dances and football games, when I want to. I pass on most of them; the dances are too stupid to bother with, and the food they serve is about as tasty as one of my parents’ food disasters. But events that aren’t supervised by faculty are always worth checking out, and even though there might be some teachers present at football games, their powers are useless there.
    Friday night was the first high school football game of the season, and, though I had no desire to attend it, I knew that the first real party of the year would be at Fat Johnny’s Pizza Parlor after the game. Everyone had been making a conscious effort to keep out of trouble the first two weeks of school; it was time for things to start picking up.
    Fat Johnny’s Pizza Parlor was a pretty decent place; no pizza joint with the word “parlor” in its name can be all that bad. The pizza itself was mostly grease, but it was the last pizza place in town that still had a little video arcade attached. Not a big one or anything, just five or six games, plus a pinball machine and a Skee-Ball thing, which was more than most restaurants had. I don’t know where the high schoolers went for their parties, but after every football game, people from my class could be counted on to descend on Fat Johnny’s like so many