Malcolm in the Middle: one-shots

Malcolm's Hollywood Adventure

My day in the Krelboyne class started out like any other boring day there: discussions of homework that went far too long as I was surrounded by people who actually liked doing homework, demonstrations of college-level algebra problems on the board, and long debates about which translation of Oedipus Rex was best, but then our teacher gave us some news: our class was chosen to participate on Lightbulb Heads, a nationally-televised game show.

Lightbulb Heads was on a channel that only played educational shows, the only channel that Mom would let us watch if she had her way because she thinks that the best shows, like Dragon Ball Z and prank shows on MTV, are corrupting our minds. They didn't play the good kind of educational shows where wild animals maul each other, but the kind where professors sit in front of a chalkboard and talk about physics as if they're intentionally trying to put people to sleep.

The show featured two teams of four gifted students from middle and high schools across the country who competed against each other to answer questions about things such as random presidential speeches from over a hundred years ago, the phylums of microscopic organisms, and the original Middle English version of The Canterbury Tales. From what I saw, all of the contestants seemed like they had never played a video game or done anything else that was actually fun in their life, and they were even dorkier than my classmates, as if that was ever possible.

Most game shows have cool prizes like money, new cars, and vacations to places that aren't a casino near a missile-testing site in the desert or the Motel 6 on the first stretch of the highway you see when driving from my house, but the prizes on Lightbulb Heads weren't even as cool as the Rice-A-Roni on The Price is Right, as they were simply subscriptions to academic journals. I mean, I found some of this stuff very interesting ever since I got my first toy microscope as a little kid, but not to the point where I read peer-reviewed journals in my spare time when there were more interesting things to read, like comics.

When the teacher asked us who wanted to have their names in the running to compete on the show, everyone's hand shot up as quickly as possible. I debated as to whether or not to raise my own hand since on one side, this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience because I'd get a free trip to Los Angeles out of it, yet on the other side, I had no interest in being on national TV, even if it was on a show that no one really watched.

I still raised my hand anyway because I was sure I could help the class win, considering the time where I did advanced mental calculations, including natural logs and square roots, using credit card numbers at the Krelboyne class picnic last year.

Once the teacher counted how many of us wanted to try out, which was all of us, she wrote all of our names on paper slips and put them inside a small box, shook it around, and then drew four names.

"Amy...Dabney...Stevie...and...Malcolm!"

I was glad that Stevie was going to be there, since he was the one true friend I had in the class, and in general. I didn't want to see what Dabney would be like on the plane, because not only was he joined at the hip with Lloyd (whose name wasn't picked), but he was a huge crybaby with an overly attached mother who made mine seem distant, and I felt the same about Amy because she was someone who had violent arm spasms because of how often she raised her hand, and when she did, her voice could have shattered the windows and someone in my class did an equation to prove it.

As I walked home with Reese and Dewey after school, I never told them my big news, instead listening to Dewey talk about the slug he found on the four-square ball court during recess the whole time as Reese laughed his head off and said that Dewey was essentially asking to be on the receiving end of one of his infamous punches.

At home, the three of us grabbed a few bowls of 3D Ruffles and started channel-surfing, and as we passed talk shows, soap operas, and infomercials, we found an episode of Lightbulb Heads, and even though I took the remote so I could find something more interesting, Reese asked to leave it on so he could laugh at the contestants' weirdness and knowledge of random facts.