by David Klass
His face tightened. “Punching through a wall is an act of criminal vandalism. You destroyed school property. Isn’t that right, Stephen?”
“Yes, but even more worrying is that it’s an aggressive, violent action,” Vice Principal Tobias said, nodding. “Exactly the kind of thing we’re trying to prevent here.”
“Maybe you should put up cameras in the band practice rooms,” I suggested. “Put ’em up in every room and closet in the whole school, and then there wouldn’t be any trouble—”
“NOT ANOTHER WORD.” Vice Principal Tobias cut me off, and slammed his desk with his meaty palm. “We’re going to keep our eyes right on you, Brickman. The next time you step out of line, you can just keep going, because we’ll see it, we’ll catch you up, and run you out of school.”
They didn’t have to tell me that the meeting was over. I controlled myself, stood up, and headed for the door. But just as my hand touched the knob, Tobias fired off one last question. “Brickman. That was your father, wasn’t it, who started that fight in the gym on Friday night?”
“That was his big daddy,” Coyle said.
“So making trouble runs in your family?” Tobias pressed.
“Why don’t you bring my father in and ask him,” I suggested.
“I might just do that,” Vice Principal Tobias said. “Now get out of here.”
As I opened the door, Coyle got off one final shot. “Maybe when we run him out of school, he can go back to working in the car wash with his daddy. He sure was great on hubcaps.”
21
I biked up to Mouse’s house late Wednesday, after soccer practice. Day was darkening into a cold October dusk by the time the McBean house swam into view above the trimmed bushes and manicured hedges of Grandview Lane. The three-story mansion looked dark and cheerless as always—no lights gleamed from any of the windows that faced the street. I left my ten-speed in the driveway and walked to the front door.
Mouse did not answer my ring. He did not answer my repeated knocks. I tried kicking the door a few times, but he didn’t answer my kicks either. I was pretty sure he was in there, but I decided not to try knocking the door down with my shoulder. There had to be an easier way in.
I walked around the house, peeking in all the first-floor windows. There was no Mouse in the living room. The kitchen, den, and hall looked similarly Mouse-less. I climbed a water pipe, and pulled myself up to a window ledge outside his bedroom. At first I thought I had struck out again, because his bedroom was dark. Then I saw the gleam of a computer screen and spotted Mouse at his desk, wearing headphones and taking notes on a pad.
I banged my forehead on the glass pane, but Ed didn’t stir. I held on to the ledge with one hand and rapped on the window with the other. Still no luck. Either the music was cranked up, or whatever Mouse was studying on his computer was absorbing all of his attention.
I saw that the next window over was cracked open an inch. Hanging from the narrow window ledge, with my legs dangling into space, I put years of chin-ups to use and edged sideways, handgrip to handgrip, over to the cracked-open window. I put my lips to the narrow slit between sill and window, and screamed, “Hey, Mouse!”
I don’t know if he heard me, or if he just sensed something, but he turned around quickly. I gripped the ledge tightly with my right hand and waved frantically with my left. Ed saw me and nearly fell off his desk chair.
Then he did a strange thing. You would think Ed would have hurried over to open the window and help his old friend inside. But that wasn’t his first reaction at all. He stood in front of his screen, blocking my view, and turned off his computer. Next he put the pad he had been taking notes on in a drawer, and he scooped up and put away a few other things on his desk and a nearby table. Only after completing this rushed housekeeping did he walk to the window.
“What are you doing out there?” he asked.
“Losing my grip,” I told him. “Aren’t you going to let me in?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I’m kind of busy right now.”
“Mouse, I am seriously about to fall and break my legs.”
“You climbed up, so I imagine you can get down.”
“Ed, for God’s sakes, I can’t climb down! My arms are tired from hanging on! I’m losing my grip. Mouse!”
He must have heard the desperation in my voice, because he finally opened his bedroom window and helped me inside. Right away I got a weird vibe in his room. Not just that it was dark. He was burning a stick of incense. Whoever heard of Ed the Mouse burning incense? Beneath the sweet incense smell, I smelled another, a chemical that I couldn’t identify. I wondered if he was burning the incense to mask the other odor, and if the things Ed had put away before letting me in were chemicals.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I was concerned about you,” I told him. “You don’t answer your phone.”
“That’s ’cause I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
“You don’t answer your e-mails.”
“I don’t want to write to anyone either.”
“What do you want to do?” I asked him.
“Be alone,” he said.
We weren’t getting very far, but at least I was asking him questions, and he was responding. I thought any conversation was a good thing, so I kept quizzing him. “Why don’t you have any lights on in here?”
“It makes it easier for me to concentrate on my games,” he said. “No distractions. No shadows on the screen.”
“You’re gonna hurt your eyes.”
“Probably.”
I reached for a light switch, and Ed didn’t try to stop me as I clicked it on. Light flooded the big bedroom, and we looked at each other. Ed the Mouse had changed a lot in two days, that was for sure. A mouse is a meek rodent that runs and hides to escape danger. Ed looked cornered, dangerous, and quietly ferocious. It was mostly something to do with his eyes. I’m not sure I can quite describe what I saw, except that I was sure he hadn’t slept since Monday. But while lack of sleep usually makes people’s eyes blurry, it had made Ed’s sharp and seethingly intense. If I saw a mouse with eyes like that, I wouldn’t stick my finger in his cage.
“What’s with the incense?” I asked him.
“I like the way it smells.”
“You become a hippie?”
“Will you please leave my room.”
“Sure,” I said. “Why don’t we go play Ping-Pong in the basement and you can throw a paddle at my head and apologize later.”
“I’m not going to throw anything at you, but will you please leave my room, right now,” he asked again, perfectly politely. So I let him lead me out of his room and pull the door closed behind him. He headed for the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. “Want some iced tea?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He poured two glasses and we sat at the table and drank our iced tea as if everything was perfectly normal. “So,” I said, “sounds like you’ve been playing that computer game a lot?”
“I can get to level five every time.”
“You must be the world record holder. How many hours a day do you play it?”
“I don’t know.” His sleepless eyes glowed. “I’m not that conscious of time right now.”
“Are you conscious that you’re missing school, and there are tests and homework assignments you’ll have to make up?”
“I’ll come back to school soon enough,” Ed the Mouse said softly, like he was making some kind of promise to himself. “But on my terms.”
I took a sip of iced tea. “What does that mean?”
“It means what it means.”
“I know it means what it means, but what does it mean?”
“Don’t ask so many questions or it’s going to be hard for me to talk to you, Joe,” he said.
“Okay,” I told him. “No more questions. How about I tell you some news from school? Mr. Murphy lived up to his word.”
“I don’t care about Mr. Murphy.”
>
“Yeah, sure, but I thought you might want to know that he took Jack and Tony and Chris out to the practice field and busted their butts till they could barely walk …”
Ed the Mouse reached into the pitcher of iced tea and pulled out an ice cube and watched it slowly melt in his palm. “I really, really, really don’t care,” he said.
“Look, Ed, I know what happened on Monday was awful, but nobody knows about it …”
“I know about it,” he said in a very dry whisper. “Joe, I think you have to go now. But I’m very glad that you came by. I’ve been thinking about you and what a good friend you’ve been to me, and I want you to have something. It’s in the basement. I’ll go get it.”
I stood by the front door while he ran downstairs and fumbled around, and then ran back up with a framed picture. It was a photograph of our first Rec League soccer team, from when we were eight years old. We had won some kind of trophy, and Ed and I were kneeling side by side in the front row, grinning as only a pair of victorious eight-year-olds can grin. “Here,” he said. “I think you should take this.”
“Why are you giving it to me now?”
“No reason,” he said. “I was just cleaning and looking at old stuff, and I was going to throw it out, and then I thought you might like to have it.”
I studied his face. “Why now, Ed?”
He shrugged. “Do you want me to throw it out?”
“No,” I said. “Thanks.” And I took the photograph.
He opened the door and waited for me to leave. I hesitated and then stepped outside. He immediately tried to push the door closed, but I stuck the toe of my track shoe to block it. “Ed, when are you coming to school?”
“Maybe tomorrow. Definitely Friday. When I come, you’ll know.” I jerked my toe out of the way as he slammed the door closed and locked it, and then double-locked it.
22
I coasted down Grandview Lane, trying not to think about what I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about. I told myself that I was being foolish or dramatic or a nosy busybody. Ed the Mouse would be fine. Kids are picked on in my school all the time, day in, day out, year after year, and they turn out okay. They swallow it down, just the way Mr. Murphy said, and they learn to get along better and pay respect, as my father and Kevin Hutchings believed. The process of learning how not to get beaten up is probably a valuable part of a public school education.
Mouse would be fine. Years from now, he would probably tell his kids about the time he was taped up like a mummy and thrown in a closet, and it might even be a fond and nostalgic memory, the way Mr. Murphy had gotten to like the brand on his butt.
Mouse would be fine.
I stopped pedaling under a streetlight, and just sat there on my bike.
He would be in school tomorrow, or Friday at the latest, and everything would be okay. He would be fine.
I took out the framed photograph that he had given me, and studied it in the glow from the streetlight. There Mouse was at eight, small for his age but with a grin a mile wide. And there I was next to him, with an equally idiotic grin. Even then we were best friends.
Suddenly I knew what I had to do. I didn’t want to do it, but I had absolutely no choice. It was one thing to keep silent when being grilled by Deputy Police Chief Coyle and Vice Principal Tobias, but this was a very different matter. This was my oldest and best friend.
It was more than five miles from Lawndale to Rutherford. Several times along the way I slowed, and almost turned back, because I was heading into unexplored territory. I don’t mean the trip to Rutherford—I had been there before. But I had never done to anyone what I was about to do to Ed the Mouse.
I had gone to a rough elementary school, where kids fought in the sandbox, and then to an even tougher junior high school, where I saw kids get bones broken in fights while their classmates cheered. Now I was a senior at a high school so violent that police patrolled the halls, and all along the way one lesson had been drummed into me: “Don’t be a squealer.” I had played on dozens of sports teams, and had seen all kinds of rough stuff and intimidation and dishonest maneuvers, and I had not told tales. I had kept my lips sealed. Because everyone—from my friends to my coaches to my father—had told me there was nothing lower than a squealer.
I knew Dr. McBean’s building because I had visited him with Mouse three or four times over the years. Twice he had taken us on tours of the labs, and I had been impressed by all the complicated equipment and the friendly but serious people in white lab coats. But I had never arrived alone before, on a bike, at night.
It was a big steel-and-glass building rising from a wide, grassy lawn. A sign on a slab out front proclaimed the building to be GAUCHER-KAHN CHEMICAL CORPORATION.
I locked my bike up to a signpost, and walked to the lobby. There was a fat night guard on duty, hunched over his wooden desk, breathing hard. When I got closer, I saw that he was snoring. “Pardon me, sir,” I said. He stirred, but didn’t wake. His snores sounded a little like groans.
“Excuse me, but it’s kind of urgent,” I said again, and lightly touched his shoulder.
The guard sat up very fast, and even before his eyes popped open he started saying, “I wasn’t sleeping. I swear I wasn’t.” Then he saw me, and took control of the situation. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“I need to talk to Dr. McBean,” I said.
“The building’s closed.”
“He’s still here. I’m sure of it.”
The guard looked at me, taking in my blue jeans and old corduroy shirt with the sleeves rolled up above my elbows. “What’s this about?”
I hesitated. “It’s private. I’m a friend. Just tell him it’s Joe Brickman, and I need to talk to him right now. It’s an emergency.”
“It better be,” he grunted, and picked up the phone on his desk.
He made the call, and less than a minute later one of the gleaming elevators opened and Dr. McBean came hurrying out. He was a short little man—just about Ed’s height—neatly dressed in a jacket and tie, with an I.D. badge swinging on a chain from his neck. Worry showed on his face. “Joe,” he said, “Joe, what is it? Did something happen to Ed?”
“No, sir,” I said, “everyone’s fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. But I need to talk to you.” I glanced at the guard, who was watching and listening. “Alone.”
Dr. McBean studied my face for a moment and nodded. “Of course. We can talk in my office.”
The elevator took us up to the fifth floor, and a long, carpeted corridor to Dr. McBean’s office. It was a nice-sized corner office with a view of an industrial park. His computer was on—he must have been working on something when the guard called. I saw that he made notes on the same type of white pad Mouse used. On the desk, near the computer, was a small, gold-framed photograph of his wife holding her baby son, Mouse, in her arms. She was looking down at her baby with a smile that lit up her face. Her smile seemed almost out of place in the otherwise sterile office.
Dr. McBean beckoned me to an empty seat. He wheeled the leather swivel chair away from his desk to face me. “What is it, Joe?” he asked.
For several seconds I tried to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come. Dr. McBean watched me, and waited patiently. “I’m worried about Ed,” I finally managed to get out.
He knew it before I said it. But he didn’t press too hard. “What’s wrong?”
“You don’t know anything?”
“I guess not, if there’s something to know,” he said. “I’ve been working hard lately. Let’s see, I know he has a cold and has taken a few days off from school.”
“He doesn’t have a cold,” I told him.
This time Dr. McBean wasn’t inclined to wait. He sat forward on his chair, his hands pressed together. “What is it, Joe? Is he in danger?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or I could be completely wrong about this. I mean, I could be one hundred percent wrong. And I almost didn’t come, because I wanted
to be wrong. You know Ed is my closest friend—”
“Why do you think he’s in danger?”
“Stuff’s been happening at school,” I told Dr. McBean.
“What sort of stuff?”
So I took a deep breath, and then I told him. I didn’t go into the details of how and why Ed had been bullied. But I did tell him that something bad had happened to his son on Monday, and that ever since then Ed had withdrawn into himself, playing ultra-violent computer games for hours on end.
“Staying home alone is probably a normal response to being picked on in school,” Dr. McBean said.
“Maybe,” I agreed. “But you’d better listen to me. Because I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think this was serious.”
“I know that,” he said. “I’m listening. I assure you.”
So I told him the rest of it. I told him that I thought Ed might be building something with chemicals—something secret that he was learning about on the Internet. That got Dr. McBean’s attention. I told him what Ed had said about coming back to school Thursday or Friday, on his own terms. And that when he came back to school, I would know about it. Lastly, I showed him the photograph Ed had given me. “He gave it to me like … a goodbye present.”
Dr. McBean looked at the photograph a long time, and his hand holding the picture began to shake. Finally he handed it back to me and stood up. “You don’t really think …”
“I don’t know what to think,” I said honestly.
“I see. Thank you. It was … it was brave of you to come here,” he said, and his voice cracked just the way Mouse’s did when he was highly stressed.
“I hope I did the right thing. I didn’t know what else to do. I hope I’m wrong. I’m sure I’m wrong. Mouse will kill me for talking to you.”
But Dr. McBean was already heading toward the door. “I need to get home right away,” he said. “Do you need a lift?”
“No, I came by bike.”
“Let’s go,” he said. When we were in the corridor, he walked very fast. Then he started sprinting for the elevator, and I was surprised how fast this serious little man could run.