Not really knowing what to do next, I poked the sleeping body again. This time, it jumped awake, raised its arms over its head in a protective posture, and scrunched down into a defensive ball that reminded me of a roly-poly bug. The breathing was loud and shallow and in full-panic mode.
I went down to a knee. Every muscle in this creature’s body contracted in a spasm, as though the touch of the magazine carried enough electric voltage to light up half a city block.
“It’s okay—I’m not going to hurt you.”
The thing froze, as if considering my words, and then rolled forward in a somersault, crawling to try to gain its footing.
I blurted out the only words that came to my head, “Hey! Let me help you.”
I don’t know why I said those words or where they came from. I’m not the kind of person to reach out and help total strangers—especially scary, dirty, vagrant strangers sleeping against a wood pole at the edge of the remote driveway of a secluded manor occupied by witch assassins. But, whatever force placed those words in my mouth, it was spot on because my “Let me help you “made the retreating form stop in its tracks.
A voice, like dead leaves blowing across concrete, said, “You don’t know what I am.” It was a boy.
“No,” I said. “But I can try to help.”
Silence filled the space between us.
“Nobody’s ever wanted to help me. Most people don’t even notice me.”
“Dude, I noticed you.”
Silence again, and the boy stood up.
He shifted his weight from one black boot to the other, like an animal ready to bolt.
“We can help you here. Professor McLemore and Ms. Applewhite can, I mean.”
The weight shifted to the left boot.
“How come you’re here, then?”
The back of the dirty, navy blue, hooded head twitched side to side. Good, I got him thinking, I thought to myself.
Finally a response came. “I don’t know. I left the last place and just started walking until the storm started.” The weight shifted again. “Then I found this sign for cover and fell asleep.”
His fight-or-flight stance relaxed.
“You want to come up to the house for a meal and a shower?” I asked, thinking how good a shower sounded now that I was covered in dried mud and had a scrape on my forehead.
“I’m not like you.”
These words sent another tinge of fear shivering up my spine. The simplicity of the statement, combined with the crumpled, disheveled rumple of a human being standing across from me, raised the hackles on the back of my neck.
“What?”
“I’m different.”
“We’re all a little different around this place, believe me.” I tried to sound confident and hide my rising anxiety.
“People … ” he paused and took a deep breath. “People don’t like me.”
I fought the urge to sprint as fast as I could down the driveway to the safety of the house.
“Seriously, it won’t matter to Professor McLemore or anyone else here. Look, he took my family in and we were about as desperate as desperate can be.”
“Nobody will laugh at me?”
“Only if you say something funny or do something funny.” The truth this time.
“Okay. I’m going to turn around now. I’m going to turn around.”
“Great.”
“Don’t be scared.” His shoulders drooped, and his voice cracked.
My heart sank into my abdomen and my mouth filled with the metallic tingle of apprehension. “Okay, I’ll try.”
The shadowed figure slowly turned. I focused on his heavy black boots with the mismatched navy blue and orange shoelaces, worked up to his dirty and ratty, faded blue jeans, to his oversized army jacket. From the recesses of his sweatshirt hood, two eyes peered out—kind and friendly eyes. They weren’t evil or intimidating, like I expected, just scared.
I forced myself to smile and caught a flash of a grin. From what I could tell, I stood face-to-face with a boy about my own age. He was short and stocky with a brilliant smile. The hair on my neck relaxed into standby mode.
The boy reached up and slid the hood off his head. I gasped and fell a step backward in shock. The smile disappeared from the stranger’s face. His face was marked with pocks and sores and bruises in various stages of development.
He clenched the muscles in his jaw, and we stared at one another for a few moments before he pulled the hood back over his head. He hunched down like a beaten dog as he turned and walked toward the road.
I snapped out of my shock after seeing the sadness in his eyes, an emotion I knew all too well—the loneliness and despair from a life on the move. I’d been there, done that. No friends, no roots, and no place to call home. Guilt and shame dropped into my gut like a brick. At least I had brothers and a mother around. I’d always had a roof over my head—even if those roofs were barely strong enough to survive a pleasant spring breeze, they were still roofs.
I couldn’t just let this boy walk away, no matter how hideous his face was. It wouldn’t be right. Like the time I wanted to call pest control on Ms. Applewhite’s evil squirrels.
“Hey!” I yelled.
The boy kept walking.
“Hey!”
The boy kept walking.
“Seriously, dude. Don’t leave. I don’t even know your name yet.”
The boy stopped.
“Baz,” he said in a low grumble.
I walked toward him.
“Nice to meet you, Baz. My name is Geoff.” I placed my hand on the back of Baz’s right shoulder. His whole body tensed. “I go to school here.” I said, thumb pointing back toward the faded ELWA sign.
“School?”
“Yeah, and I live here, too. It’s kind of like a boarding school. Except right now, I’m the only official ELWA student.”
Baz relaxed.
“Why don’t you come up to the house?”
“Why would you want me to do that?”
I didn’t have a good answer to his question. “I don’t know. Maybe we need another student or something?”
This brought a laugh from under the hoodie. He lifted his arms wide. “Look at me; I don’t have any money.”
“Join the club. We were living in a shanty downtown in the projects a couple months ago.”
“We?”
“Yeah, me and my family. Professor McLemore took us all in when I became a student.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“Do you think—” Baz started to ask.
“Think what? That you could stay here and go to school, too?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, why don’t you come up to the house with me and find out?”
He hesitated.
I gave him a friendly pat on the back. “Come on, what do you have to lose?”
Baz turned around, but this time he kept the hood pulled securely over his head.
“Nothing, I guess.”
“That’s right,” I said, trying to be as bright and optimistic as I could muster. “If you don’t like it, you can turn right around at any time and walk away, no questions asked.”
“Okay. Lead the way.”
We started the trek down the long driveway.
“Is that your magazine?”
“Yeah, my very first issue. You like sports?”
“I love sports. I used to—” He flinched like he’d been hit with a lightning bolt of a memory. “Play, but I don’t anymore.”
“Would you like to see it?” I asked, holding out the magazine.
He grabbed the magazine and ran a hand across the glossy cover photo of LeBron James dunking.
“LeBron’s my favorite.”
“LeBron James is?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m a Kevin Durant man myself.” I smiled.
“He’s cool, too.”
We w
alked stride for stride along the spots of sunlight that painted the drive in leaf shadow patterns.
“And while you’re reading,” I said, “You can tell me about how you got to be under our sign.”
Baz was sleeping on the sofa. He slept soundly. Mom had taken care of him pretty well since this morning. He’d showered and gotten into some clean clothes from things I didn’t wear as much as Mom wanted me to. I could swear there weren’t as many marks on his face as before. I wondered what mom doctored Baz up with. She had this whole collection of remedies she said were handed down mostly through her grandma. She’d often made teas from different roots and herbs. She had all these little homespun concoctions for just about everything. My personal favorite was the staple, the standby, the cure-all: honey and lemon. Best medicine I ever had, and still, it wouldn’t, or couldn’t, account for that kind of healing on Baz.
We—Professor McLemore, me, and Mom—sat in the parlor and silently stared at the pitcher of lemonade on the coffee table. Ms. Applewhite said she needed to consult some of her books at the cottage about Baz’s condition. Of course, Ms. Applewhite, being a sucker for my brothers, allowed them to tag along.
Professor McLemore couldn’t take the silence one more second. “Geoffrey, my boy, tell us again what this boy said.” He sat back in his armchair with one hand on his chin, awaiting my answer.
“He says his dad put a curse on him when he was younger. He told me his dad dumped him on the street a couple years ago. When I pushed him about his story, though, he admitted he ran away because his dad and the nannies he had were always controlling and mean. He said he must be allergic to people. He says every time he gets around groups of other people, he breaks out in those pocks and rashes all over his body.”
“I feel so sorry for the poor, young man.,” said Mom. “I used to break out in hives around peanuts back in the day. Horribly embarrassing. Do you realize how many treats kids brought to school with peanuts or peanut butter in them?”
I rolled my eyes. “I have no idea, Mother.”
“You make a good point, Mary,” said the professor. He refilled his glass from the pitcher. “I bet it would be a bit hard for this young man to be around others.”
“More than a bit. Most kids were outright rude about my allergic reactions and they didn’t want me around.”
A timer in the kitchen chimed. Mom jumped up. “Cookies are done.” She disappeared into the kitchen and returned in a few minutes with a cookie sheet carried in one oven mitt-covered hand. Her chocolate chip cookies were famous. Talk about good medicine!
Mom smiled at Baz lying on the sofa and leaned to set the hot cookie sheet onto the coffee table. The doorbell rang. It startled Mom and she dropped the hot cookie sheet on her uncovered hand. She cried out in pain and shook her hand while she danced around the parlor. Professor McLemore ran to open the door and then ran back to Mom. Ms. Applewhite followed him briskly through the open doorway.
“Heavens, that is a bad burn, sweetie,” Ms. Applewhite said, having a look at the red splotch on Mom’s hand. “It needs aloe.”
Professor McLemore argued, “Cold water is how you treat a burn.”
“Aloe.”
“Cold water.”
“Aloe!”
“No, it needs—”
Mom snapped, “Please, let’s not fight over it. It’ll be fine.”
Baz rolled uncomfortably on the sofa. He turned to face Mom, still asleep. A couple sores appeared on his forehead, followed by a long groan. The burn on Mom’s hand was not quite as red as it was ten seconds ago. I watched Baz becoming increasingly agitated and turned back to my mom, only to see her burn slowly fading away. A few pustules, like nasty mosquito bites, burst from the skin that had been clearing up over the last few hours. I couldn’t believe this was happening. The burn disappeared from the back of Mom’s hand like it had never even been there. Baz rolled around and groaned, but never woke up.
Everyone in the room stared at the boy asleep on the sofa. The only sound now was the playing of my brothers outside and the rhythmic snoring of Baz on the sofa.
Ms. Applewhite looked at Baz, but almost seemed to be talking to herself. “In all my years, I have never seen one. I’ve read some accounts, heard the tales, but never, ever found a real one.”
“What did you find?” I asked.
She sighed. “Poor, poor thing,” she muttered, “He’s an Isaiah Boy.”
The room fell dead silent.
Professor McLemore asked, “An ‘Isaiah Boy’?”
“Yes, an absorber of pain and negative energy. One who soaks in those energies and manifests them as sores on their body.” She swept her hand across his forehead and carefully brushed back the hair that fell over his face. “He’s an outcast, uncomfortable around crowds and groups of people, naturally.” Her voice lowered to just above a whisper. “Can you imagine such a fate? No wonder he’s homeless and wanders.”
“He did say his father cursed him when he was younger and that he ran away from him a couple years ago.”
Ms. Applewhite asked, “What about his mother or any other siblings?”
“He didn’t say anything about them, if he has them. But why’s it called an Isaiah Boy, anyway?”
Ms. Applewhite turned to Professor McLemore, “Do you have a Bible, Johnson?”
He moved to the bookcase and removed a worn volume from the second shelf. “Here you go, Viola, my Bible … New International Version.”
Ms. Applewhite flipped through the thick Bible until she found what she was looking for. “Here it is Isaiah, Chapter 53. Do you want me to read it?”
“Please.”
“He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from who people hide their faces, he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.”
The room fell deathly quiet as she continued the verse.
“But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”
She closed the Bible and handed it back to Professor McLemore. An Isaiah Boy. What a curse to live with. I really felt awful for Baz now and couldn’t imagine living with that. But, it raised another question in my mind. Did Baz even know what he was?
Baz slept almost the whole afternoon yesterday. He woke up in the evening just in time for supper, which he ate like a horse before announcing he had to leave in the morning. He must have checked the curtains a hundred times, though, before dinner. I don’t know if he expected something or someone to come hauling up the drive, but he was definitely anxious as hell. Finally, at dinner, he told Professor and the rest of us that he had to leave, and he had to leave ASAP. Fortunately, we talked him into staying at least the night to rest and get another meal or two in him.
Baz says his last name is Maher. He seems cool. Tough to look at sometimes, but I guess we all are at one point or another. We couldn’t convince him to stay more than a night no matter how hard we tried. Mom said he had a wandering soul and was happiest while moving. Just like her, I guess.
Just the same, I hoped he would stay. It was good to have someone my own age around. Not that I didn’t like the ELWA or anything, but it was kind of isolated. And although I never liked real school and never really had friends to speak of, it was nice just to be around people my age at school, even if they were a bunch of jackasses for the m
ost part.
So, when I woke up the next morning, Baz had already packed up his stuff to go. Mom had washed and fixed up his army jacket. She’d also packed some of my clothes and a crap load of food into one of my old backpacks for him to take. Good old Mom.
Baz squirmed. “Mrs. Terwilicker, you don’t need to do any of this.”
“I know, Baz. But I want to. People are here on this planet to help people and you deserve a little TLC,” she said, pulling the jacket tight around his shoulders. Mom doted like this when she was nervous and anxious for a person. I can’t tell you the number of times she’s fiddled with my hair, my clothes, and the like when she was sending me off to a new school in a new town. The way she fussed over him I could definitely tell she was worried as all get out for our Isaiah Boy to strike out on his own again.
“Dude, this sucks,” I said, more to break the tension than anything else. I knew there wasn’t a dang thing anyone in this room could do to keep Baz here. He was bound and determined to get the hell out of Dodge as soon as possible. Last night after dinner, he couldn’t sit still. He was obviously a quick healer and feeling much better than when I found him. He no longer groaned and grimaced as he stood up. That’s a good sign he was feeling better, I guess.
Mom always says never to judge someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. Well, as he got ready to leave, I tried imagining what it was like to step inside Baz’s black, steel-toed boots. This boy was cursed. But Baz had diddly squat. He had the clothes on his back, and now, thanks to Mom, he had a backpack full of food and clothes to see him off on his journey. Was he going to have to wander for the rest of his life? I tried not to look in his direction because I was afraid I might lose it, tackle his ass, and lock him in the ELWA headquarters cellar until he promised to stay.
I knew there was nothing I could do, though. Nothing would keep him here. Baz was going back into the cold, cruel world of the street. It would suck him in and chew him up, and then spit him out. The street always won. The street always stole the soul from a person. The street would swallow Baz whether he was an Isaiah Boy or not.
In the Beginning (Anthology) Page 7