Fast Times at Ridgemont High - A True Story

Changing

It had finally happened. Mark Ratner had gotten a C. Up until ninth grade he had a perfect A record. Then a few Bs had crept in. His mother had warned him when he took the job at Marine World, “If you let your grades slip, it’ll be on your record forever. No college wants an average student.”

Then, last week, the mimeographed copy of first-quarter grades came in the mail. Mr. Vargas had dealt The Rat a cruel blow. He’d given him a C in biology. Mr. and Mrs. Ratner were more surprised than anybody. They wanted to know what was wrong with their son. All year long, they said, he’d been changing . . . and The Rat had to agree.

Mark Ratner had always wanted to be an entomologist, a bug scientist. All throughout junior high at Paul Revere, he was the kid who brought insects to school in a jar. For years, little glass display cases full of stuffed-and-tacked specimens hung on the walls of The Rat’s room.

A few nights earlier, The Rat had come home, and it had all looked pretty ridiculous to him. He unhinged the display cases and stashed them in the garage. Now what do I want up there? The Rat replaced them later that night with about a hundred empty Elvis Costello album covers he’d fished out of the trash bins behind Tower Records.

“All year long you’ve been changing.” The words rang in his ears.

“I don’t know,” Ratner reasoned later to his friend Mike Damone at one of their after-school sessions. “The more they start talking about the romanticism of Beowulf and Milton . . . Jesus, I just go to sleep, you know. I can’t wait to get out of there. That stuff is so boring. It just doesn’t enter into anything. I don’t see why they try to get up all this respect for the fourteenth century. Does the guy at the checkout stand at Safeway go, ‘Hey, before I give you this food, you’ll have to tell me about the metaphorical content of fourteenth-century literature in the Romantic Age’?”

“I think teachers get a bang out of it,” said Damone. “It’s just like mandatory P.E. I once asked Ramirez why we had mandatory P.E. He said, ‘What would we do with all the out-of-work coaches?’ ”

“I guess I’m just depressed,” said The Rat.

“Why are you depressed?” asked Damone, holding up his Tia Maria and cream. “I thought you were in looooooooove.”

“I’m totally depressed,” said The Rat. Today, he had almost considered having a tall one himself. “Every time I go by the A.S.B. office she’s talking to guys. Today I went there and she looked right through me.”

“It’s her loss.”

“I don’t know. I start out real confident, and then I see her and I feel chickenshit all over. It just kind of creeps up all over me. Especially when she doesn’t even say hello.” He paused, listening to the Lou Reed album blasting over the Damone family stereo. “I guess I shouldn’t expect her to just go wild whenever she sees me.”

“I would,” said Mike Damone. “So tell me. Do you still like her?”

“Are you kidding? She’s the only girl worth going for this year.”

“Then just start talking to her,” said Damone. “Just go up to her and ask her out. If she can’t smell your qualifications, forget her! Who needs her! But that won’t happen. Just go up there and ask her if she wants to go get a burger. That one has worked for me, personally.”

“What if she’s a vegetarian?”

Damone looked at his friend with scorn. The Rat just wouldn’t learn.

“I know. I know. We’ve been through this before.”

“About a million times,” said Damone.