Info from the flap jacket:
I’m a freshman. I use hair spray, hair gel, and hair mousse. And Old Spice deodorant. I can quote from all the Batman movies. I am very organized and very clean. I use soap instead of hand sanitizer because I heard that hand sanitizer gets you high and kills brain cells. Because I need to hang on to all the brain cells I have left, I use soap. Lots of it.
Rene, an obsessive-compulsive high school student hell-bent on becoming a superhero, smells his hands and wears a Batman cape when he’s nervous, which is six to eight hours per day, depending on whether it’s a weekend or weekday. On a weekday, he witnesses his English teacher smash his head into the blackboard. Rene is convinced that he is responsible for this and all other tragedies. If he picks up a face-down coin, moves a muscle during a time of thirteen (7:42 is bad luck because 7+4+2=13), or washes himself in the wrong order, Rene or someone close to him will get left back in school, break a bone, fall into a coma, contract a deadly virus, and/or die a slow and painful death like someone in a scary scene in scary movie. Or worse.
Rene’s new and only friend tutors him in the art of playing it cool, but it’s not as easy as he makes it sound. Can Rene ever be safe—he doesn’t like to talk when not surrounded by security details like locks or walls or people he trusts—when the most horrifying place is in his head?
Why I wrote the book
Teachers often say that loud, disruptive students are thorns in their sides but most would admit that the truly dangerous ones—dangerous, at least, to themselves—are the quiet, aloof ones who fly under the radar because they nod politely at their teachers. They play the game well, well enough to get promoted, but they are anything but well. At best, these kids are wild cards who occasionally fail a test but turn out aces; at worst, they sleep on the street.
A SCARY SCENE IN A SCARY MOVIE is the result of seeing a growing number of students isolate themselves. Rene, the protagonist, is a composite of wild card students I have either taught or observed. Rene’s rituals and magical thinking exemplify what it means to be mentally ill, or at least socially inept, in a high school setting that demands academic prowess and social fluency. I wrote this book to offer hope to wild card teenagers (what teen isn’t a wild card these days?) or those who begrudge their parents (sometimes deservedly so), question conformity, and feel so desperate and alone that the only safe place is inside their heads. But what if even that place isn’t safe?
