Bystander

by James Preller

  “Hey, man,” Griffin said, startling Eric as he pulled up behind him, back tire skidding. The others hadn’t followed. It was just Eric and Griffin now, no one else. “I don’t want you getting the wrong idea. You know we’re just fooling around, right? I was never going to take your ball or anything like that.”

  “I know,” Eric said.

  “Because you looked a little worried there for a minute.” Griffin laughed.

  “No, no,” Eric protested. “I knew you were just having fun.”

  Griffin flashed a smile, that hundred-dollar smile he could turn on in an instant. He reached out his fist. “Are we cool, buddy?”

  Eric tapped his fist against Griffin’s.

  “Sure.”

  “Welcome to Bellport,” Griffin said, lifting both hands, arms out wide. “You ever need anything, anybody ever gives you trouble, you just come find me. My name is Griffin Connelly. Everybody knows me. I’ll watch out for you. Okay?”

  Eric nodded.

  “I’m a good guy to be friends with,” Griffin said. He placed a firm hand on Eric’s shoulder. “But I’m a lousy enemy.”

  Eric had already figured as much.

  “Maybe we’ll hang out someday, I’ll show you around town,” Griffin offered. “Of course, it will take all of five minutes, because there’s nothing to do around here. By the way,” he said, leaning in close, “my friend Mary, she said you were cute.”

  Griffin grinned and gave Eric a knowing, heavy-lidded leer. Then he rose up on his pedal and rode away.

  4

  [fresh]

  HIS MOM HAD CALLED IT A NEW BEGINNING. SHE SAID HE should think of it as a fresh start. Those were her exact words, like she had memorized them from some drugstore greeting card. “You’re just going to have to trust me on this,” she said.

  Well, what do you say to that? So Eric nodded, looked at the floor, and said, “Sure, sure, sure.” Yes, he trusted her; yes, he loved her; yes, yes, a thousand times, yes. What did she want from him? Rainbows and unicorns?

  So she sold the house, Eric said good-bye to his friends, and the fractured family headed east. They drove in a car behind a rental truck through Maryland and Pennsylvania, into New Jersey and New York, and finally across the Throgs Neck Bridge and onto Long Island. His brave new world.

  Bellport was his mom’s old hometown. She still had a few friends there, from back in the day. The support she claimed she needed; and, most important, the promise of a good job selling medical supplies for some big company. “Bueno bucks,” she commented. Plus, his mother confessed, “I always missed the ocean when we lived in Ohio.” The salty Atlantic. There was even a bicycle path you could take all the way to the Jones Beach boardwalk. She couldn’t wait to smell that briny breeze again.

  Eric didn’t care. And it was getting harder to pretend he did.

  The way he figured it, there was no such thing as a new beginning. You get one life and it rolls out like a long hallway carpet. It begins on the day you are born and keeps on rolling until you drop. There’s no refresh button, no start-over option. At night when he was alone in bed, that’s when Eric felt it the most. Fooling nobody, not even himself, no matter how hard he tried. Eric missed his dad and he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Not lonely, but worse: alone, abandoned.

  He promised himself that if he ever saw that man again, Eric would turn his back and walk away. See how he liked it. Stick in the knife and give it a twist.

  Eric had seen other families break up. He got that part of it. He just didn’t want it to happen to his family. And definitely not the way it happened, with his dad flaking out. Lots of dads moved out. But usually they bought a house in the next town, or an apartment down the road. They had weekend visits, dinners at lonely Italian restaurants on Wednesday nights, coached Little League, and bankrolled big summer vacations. Not Eric’s dad. He just lost it, stopped going to work, stopped functioning, and eventually just dropped out of sight. Gone, Daddy, gone. He left and never came back, even though he kept saying he would—or was it that he might?

  His mom said that his father went off looking for something, as if he were searching for a lost lottery ticket. “He’ll be back,” she used to promise. “He’s just struggling right now,” she said. “It’s not his fault.” But weeks became months, the months became years, and his father never found it, that missing something. He never showed up again, either. Which led them to Bellport and the necessity of “a fresh new start,” like Eric’s actual life was some kind of “new and improved” fabric softener.

  How does a father do that? Just screw up everything?

  He sent CDs, though. That was the big joke. Every once in a while, a padded envelope arrived in his father’s handwriting addressed to Eric. He made these random CDs, mostly filled with classic rock, stuff like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers, music the dinosaurs used to listen to back in the Jurassic, songs he felt Eric might like. And he was mostly right about that; the tunes were pretty good. His father phoned sometimes, too, but never seemed to say anything. It was like he was in a fog, his thoughts confused. He just wasn’t the same man anymore.

  For sure, he never said the one thing Eric wanted to hear.

  He never said, “I’m better now. I’m coming home.”

  Some dad, huh? Just swell.

  He called yesterday. Eric didn’t even know why. It was a question he kept wanting to ask, if he had the courage: “Why you calling, Dad? What’s the point?”

  The phone got passed around from his mother to his little brother, Rudy, and finally to Eric. The conversation was brief and awkward. As if his father was tired, talked out.

  Eric kept thinking of it this way: It was like his father was a great bird that had flown away, and all Eric could do was watch that bird drift into the distance, smaller, smaller, until it seemed to vanish completely, lost in the clouds. It felt a little like death, a wisp of smoke vanishing in the air, gone but not forgotten.

  So, okay, the phone calls didn’t go real well.

  Or maybe Eric just wasn’t very nice.

  “You probably hate me,” his father observed.

  Eric didn’t answer. He recognized the code. He knew it was really a question, a desperate request, and he heard the ache behind it. The answer his father was looking for was something like “Oh no, Daddy. Don’t worry about us! You’re still the World’s Greatest Dad!” Like on those coffee mugs you see at the mall, the lamest Father’s Day gift ever.

  But Eric wasn’t a little kid anymore. Not like Rudy. He was thirteen years old. Lucky thirteen. Try to roll that with a pair of dice. And the truth was, Eric just didn’t have it to give. A part of him had been ripped out like the stuffing from a pillow. So Eric remained silent on the phone. Kept his father waiting. If Eric listened very hard, he could almost hear his father twisting in the wind, the groan of the rope. A little revenge that didn’t make Eric feel any better.

  “I guess that’s it,” his father said. “You don’t have to say anything, Eric. I’m sorry—I’m so sorry. I just can’t. I can’t.”

  Click, and he was gone, again. Call over.

  Eric looked at the phone in his hand, shot daggers at his mom, snapped it shut. He went into the kitchen, looked for something to eat. A bowl of Rice Krispies, some pretzels, anything.

  His mother barked something about dinner being almost ready, and not to spoil his appetite. Rag, rag, rag. So he grabbed his iPod instead, slid open the back door, and parked himself in a lawn chair. Eric turned the music up, let it pour into him, fill him up. He had downloaded the songs from his dad’s CDs. Eric did not curse, or cry, or seem to feel much of anything. It was all just a swirling mass, a crazy mess inside his numb skull. He closed his eyes and heard Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page pick out the first notes of “Communication Breakdown,” rapid-fire like a machine gun on the open E string, before hitting three big chords, D-A-D. Then singer Robert Plant’s siren wail: “Hey, girl, stop what you’re doin’!�
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  It had rained and some worms crawled from their holes out onto the brick patio. Eric grabbed a stick and idly poked at one, turning it over. That’s how he felt, he decided. Just like that worm. Pushed around, prodded by a stick. After a while he’d crawl back into his hole. And then, in a few days, off to school. A new hole with red bricks and homework.

  It would be a fresh start. A new beginning. Isn’t that what his mom said? New and improved. Guaranteed or your money back.

  5

  [school]

  BELLPORT CENTRAL MIDDLE SCHOOL INCLUDED GRADES six to eight, with students streaming in from four different elementary schools. It was organized into “houses”—like at Hogwarts, Eric noted, but without the exploding jelly beans or cool wizard tricks—and somehow that was supposed to make the experience more manageable. Unfortunately, as they say, timing is everything, and it was plain bad luck that Eric arrived a year too late, after the newness of sixth had hardened into established groups. By seventh grade everybody knew one another. Routines had been set, cliques formed. But Eric was ready for that. He’d be all right. It was just going to take some time, that’s all.

  Eric rode his bike to school that first day, while his younger brother watched TV at home, still in his pajamas. The elementary school didn’t start until an hour later. Eric pulled up to the bike rack a few minutes early, as a long row of buses disgorged a torrent of students. They poured into the main lobby like a babbling river, to resounding shouts and waves and chatter. When he climbed the front steps and entered the building, Eric was immersed in a roiling sea of faces. The noise, the tumult, the clatter! Eric brushed up against soap-scrubbed girls wearing strawberry lip balm, pushed past boys whose armpits were slathered with sickly-smelling antiperspirant. It was the first minute of the first day of school, a time of hope and electricity. Sure, everyone would soon be complaining about dull teachers and too much homework, but for these first few seconds, it was all promise and possibility.

  The kids in Bellport didn’t seem much different from the ones Eric knew back in Ohio. Maybe they appeared better dressed, a little trendier; they had more money, snazzy cell phones, probably their own laptops. The girls wore more makeup, had complicated haircuts, walked with more swish and swagger. Eric wasn’t sure if that was a difference between Long Island and Ohio, or just part of growing up. By the looks of things, some of these girls had grown plenty. A few of them seemed years older than Eric, and pretty intimidating.

  Eric’s big fear on the first day was getting lost. And BCMS was the perfect school for it, a vast, sprawling maze of hallways. Over the summer Eric had received a packet of information designed for incoming students that included his schedule, a letter from the principal (which he ignored), a sixteen-page curriculum guide (tossed aside), and a map (memorized). Each day he took out the map alongside his schedule, and traced a finger along the best routes. He didn’t like the idea of going in without a plan. Eric liked to come prepared. It must have been all those camping trips he used to take with the Boy Scouts. Back when his father still tried to act like a normal dad. The meals, the clothes, everything planned down to the last detail. Now Eric had a real good idea where he was going.

  The first two periods—math and science—were decent enough. Eric thought it was good to get those tough subjects out of the way first thing in the morning, before he was really awake. Then he’d breeze through the easier classes in the middle of the day, like PE and art, not to mention lunch and home base, before ending his day with two of his favorites, social studies and English.

  Home base was where he was headed now, at 9:52 in the morning. The hallways pulsed with life. Behind him he heard a body slam into a locker, a muffled oomph, and the splatter of books falling to the floor.

  “Body check!” a voice announced.

  “Hallenback,” scolded another voice, “watch where you’re going, buddy. You’re gonna be late for class.”

  “Yep, yep, yep!” chirped another voice.

  Eric didn’t turn around, didn’t glance back. He kept right on walking, distancing himself from the sound of laughter and the voices of Griffin Connelly and that other one, the Weasel.

  6

  [hallenback]

  HOME BASE WAS A BIG DEAL AT BCMS. MR. SCOFIELD, Eric’s home base and English teacher, began the period by calling it “the lynchpin of the middle school experience.”

  Um, sure.

  “What’s a lynchpin?” a girl asked.

  Mr. Scofield considered the question. “Have you ever seen any old Westerns on TV? You know those old covered wagons from Little House on the Prairie? Well, they used to put in a pin crosswise through the axle to keep the wheel from coming off. That’s called a lynchpin. It keeps everything rolling along!”

  Eric noted that approximately six people were listening to Mr. Scofield, and half seemed to regret it. Undeterred, the bald-shaven teacher continued, “A lynchpin is an essential element in the success of a team or a plan. That’s home base.”

  In other words, as Eric figured it, home base was a free period, except you weren’t exactly free. But students were allowed to read or study what they wanted, catch up on homework, talk quietly, hang out. They could even go visit with other teachers, or get passes to the library if they showed they were working on special projects. They didn’t hand out “Get Out of Jail Free” cards, but it was the next best thing.

  The girl who Eric recognized from the other day sashayed into the room a few minutes late. Mary, he remembered. She nodded at Mr. Scofield, mumbled something about a jammed locker, and took a seat in the back.

  “Let’s not make this a habit, Miss O’Malley.”

  “No, sir,” she answered.

  Eric turned to watch her. If Mary saw him, or cared in the least, she didn’t give any sign of it. She was already saying hello to a few other girls, quickly engrossed in conversation.

  When he glanced back at Mary, Eric noticed a semi-familiar face, like a boy who looked like somebody he once knew. Eric caught the boy peering at him sideways, a little hunched in his chair, head low, books a jumbled mess, binder open. Every time Eric looked up, he seemed to catch that kid staring at him. It was irritating. But then Eric remembered that day on the basketball court, and the boy running to the pet cemetery. Here he saw that same pale, freckled face. He had curly hair and wore a wounded, wary expression.

  That’s him, Eric realized. Ketchup boy. He remembers me.

  Eric gave him a nod, an almost imperceptible chin lift. A look of hostility flickered across the boy’s face—a flash of anger, bright as a naked lightbulb—then he turned away, stared at the book on his desk. Eric understood immediately. The boy was embarrassed, shamed. And Eric, as witness to that shame, was a party to it. Innocent or not, he was there.

  Eric learned the boy’s name during attendance. David Hallenback. Eric had heard that name before. Yes, he remembered: the crash against the locker, the mocking voice, “Hallenback!”

  It appeared that Griffin Connelly was right. He did make a lousy enemy.

  No matter what happened in the future, or how their lives might come to intersect, Eric would think of Hallenback as forever shambling across that field, haunted and hunted; no matter what else happened, Eric would envision Hallenback as he was revealed that singular summer afternoon—covered in ketchup, covered in shame.

  “I wouldn’t talk to that kid if I was you.” Eric turned and she was there, sitting in the chair beside him.

  Brown-eyed Mary O’Malley.

  “What?”

  Mary smiled at him. Tilted her head toward Hallenback. “Him,” she said. “You should stay away. If you are nice to him even once, you’ll never get rid of him. It’s like feeding a stray dog.”

  Mary wore jeans and a loose shirt, no makeup, but still looked tanned and athletic. “You were with those guys that day,” he noted.

  “I was with Griff,” she said. “We sometimes hang out. The others were just sort of there.”

  Eric glanced back at Hallenbac
k, who was observing them while pretending to read. “That’s the kid you guys were chasing, right?”

  Eric instantly regretted his mistake, wished he could take back the words. On the basketball court, he had told Griff that he didn’t see anyone.

  Mary stretched, languidly raising her arms in the air. Her eyes coolly assessed Eric, studying him. “So you lied, huh? I knew it.”

  “I didn’t want to get involved,” Eric explained.

  “Sure.”

  “Did he do something wrong?”

  Mary leaned forward. “I’m just telling you, because you’re new here, and you seem like you might be all right. Just steer clear.”

  “Considering the way he looks at me, that’s not going to be a problem. I don’t think he likes me,” Eric said. He paused, watched Mary watch him, and changed his tune. “Okay, I got the message. I won’t feed the stray dog. Thanks for the heads-up.”

  Mary stood, without hurry, to rejoin her friends in the back of the room. “What’s your screen name? Do you IM?”

  “IM?”

  “Instant message,” Mary replied.

  “Oh, right! Sure, yeah,” Eric bluffed. The last thing he wanted to admit was that his mother didn’t allow him to use instant message. Not until he was sixteen. It was another one of her rules. Semi-flustered, Eric spluttered, “I mean, I don’t IM a super lot, but—”

  Mary’s brown eyes smiled. “You don’t have a clue, do you?”

  “Not really, no,” Eric admitted.

  “Just give me your e-mail address,” she said. “We’ll go from there.”

  7

  [lunch]

  THE PROBLEM WITH THE CAFETERIA WAS THIS: WHERE DO you sit? Eric hadn’t really thought about it until he stood there, food tray in his hands, inspecting the landscape. The room was huge, filled with rows of long tables. Even at a glance, Eric could guess the personalities of some of the tables: the jocks, the geeks, the popular girls, and so on.