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dyed-black hair. All together, she looked as though she might be a pitch-black person who’d just had her face dipped in some peach-colored paint.
    The only thing most people in the school know about communism is that they’re against it. The basic idea behind it is that everyone should share everything and no one should be any richer or poorer than anyone else, which seems okay, except that it works about as well as most of my dad’s inventions. As the school’s lone commie, Edie approved of all things “working-class” and disapproved of everything she judged to be for the rich. So far that year, she’d disapproved of lacrosse, the mall, name-brand clothing, and school yearbooks. I’m not really sure what she had against yearbooks.
    “I didn’t think you would approve of football,” I said. “It’s sort of violent, and to be good at it you have to be freakishly large.” She shrugged and went back to kissing Brian’s fingers.
    A waiter came by and I ordered a Coke. As soon as he was gone, Brian pulled a cigarette lighter out of his pocket.
    “I didn’t know you smoked,” I told him.
    “He doesn’t,” said Edie. “Smoking is one of the ways big business keeps the working class under control.”
    Brian grinned, picking up a sugar packet and holding it to the flame.
    “It just comes in handy now and then,” he said. “You never know when you might have to burn something.” He set fire to the packet and put it in the ashtray, and we sat watching it burn. The flame worked its way around the edge of the packet before it started to burn the center, and when it did, all the sugar spilled out at once and started to get caught in the flames. It smelled pretty awful.
    At any decent restaurant on a normal night, this sort of thing would have gotten us into all sorts of trouble, but in a room full of hyper eighth graders I was sure it was the least of the manager’s worries. I looked around and saw that no one was having oral sex on the floor, though. My mother would have been greatly relieved.
    “Are you really doing a sex-ed movie?” asked Edie.
    I nodded. “An artsy one. Something really avant-garde.”
    They both nodded; they probably already knew what avante-garde was. Edie probably didn’t support it, though.
    I hadn’t really done much work on it, other than the mandatory research and discussions about issues that had taken up most of the class time on Wednesday and Thursday. Hearing Mr. Streich say that I would have to invent something had sort of soured me on the whole project. Inventions were my dad’s turf—not mine. I did still find myself kicking around the idea of having a good explosion to end the whole thing, though. I couldn’t think of a single educational film that wouldn’t have been improved by something blowing up. It might not have saved some of the science movies, but it would have helped. Everyone knows that the real point of science class is to blow things up.
    Five minutes later, the waiter came back with my Coke, dropped it off at the table, and immediately ran off, looking as though he wished someone would just blow
him
up and get the night over with.
    “That poor guy,” said Edie, turning away from Brian for the first time that evening to watch the server running toward the back room. “His employer is probably screwing him over.” Like most communists, she assumed that just about every worker was getting ripped off somehow.
    “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe a roomful of us is more than they trained the poor bastard to handle.”
    “The poor oppressed workers at Fat Johnny’s,” said Brian, not sounding too serious. “They should go on strike.”
    “I doubt they’re unionized,” I said. “They can’t go on a strike.”
    “Even if they were,” said Brian, “could they go on strike to have all middle schoolers banned from the premises? That’d never fly.”
    “Yeah, but we should really lay off the poor guy. That’s probably going to be you or me working