Bystander

by James Preller

  Eric glanced at Griffin. “You, too.”

  And that was that. In one quick call, Eric had lied to his mother. He had to, he reasoned, or she would have never let him stay at Griffin’s house. It wasn’t like they were going to do anything bad.

  “Your mother’s old school, huh?” Griffin noted.

  “I guess so, if that means super-strict.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” Griffin advised. “You did good. She’ll never know the difference. No harm, no foul.”

  Eric nodded, shrugged it off as no big deal. “I don’t suppose you even have a Ping-Pong table, do you?”

  Griffin laughed, held his wrists out in front of his body. “I confess, Officer. You caught me. Go ahead, slap on the ’cuffs, haul me off to the Big House.”

  They climbed the stairs to Griffin’s bedroom.

  “Want to play video games?” Griffin offered. “I have a sick collection.”

  He definitely did. It was another thing that Eric’s mom was uptight about. Griffin had games that Eric wouldn’t be allowed to play in a million years.

  “This one is about an assassin from another galaxy,” Griffin said, holding up the box. “It’s pretty wicked. He’s got mad skills. Lots of splurting blood, gushing up like geysers, it’s hysterical.”

  “Do you want to play?” Eric cautiously asked.

  Griffin threw the disk aside. “Nah, not really.” He looked around the room, gestured to a cage on his desk. “We could torture my gerbil?”

  For a minute—a second, really, maybe less than that—Eric thought Griffin might be serious. They locked eyes and there was something there, a passing darkness, then it was gone, like a storm cloud drifting away. Griffin smiled, laughed out loud. He was only joking.

  He reached for a dark wooden box, about the size of a thick dictionary. “Want to see a few of my souvenirs?”

  Griffin asked it with obvious pride. But Eric had to hide his disappointment when he looked through the contents. It was a weird assortment of random stuff, some kind of baseball pin, old coins, a pocketknife, a tooth, a couple of keys, a mishmash of junk.

  “There’s a story behind every one of those pieces,” Griffin said.

  “Oh yeah?” Eric pointed to the tooth. “What’s the story with that?”

  Griffin studied Eric’s face. He took the box, snapped it shut, and returned it to the shelf. “Maybe another time,” he said.

  “Sure, whatever,” Eric answered, not knowing what else to say.

  They talked for a while. A long time had passed since Eric had a normal conversation with someone his own age. Griffin wanted to know all about Eric—he asked tons of questions, very curious—and Eric, to his surprise, answered all of them.

  “So,” Griffin said. “Your dad isn’t around at all?”

  Eric touched on the major parts of the tale, leaving out a few key details. He told Griffin how his father took off one day, a spontaneous decision that was a long time coming. “It was like getting hit by a train,” Eric told Griff. “You can see it coming from miles down the track. You try to get ready for it. But when it hits you, wham, you’re still all messed up.”

  Eric added, “I guess my mom got tired of waiting for him to get his act together. So we moved here.”

  There was something about Griffin, the way he listened. Eric told Griffin things that he hadn’t said to anyone, ever. For his part, Griffin was really nice about everything—he seemed to understand—like he’d already been there. Like he could see inside Eric, and knew how he felt, even when Eric himself wasn’t so sure.

  Griffin blew the hair out of his eyes. “I guess it sucks to be you.”

  “Some days, yeah, it does.”

  When it was time for Eric to go, the boys agreed to get together again, soon. Eric left the house with a sense of relief, like he’d just dropped off a heavy backpack. He kept so many things buried inside, it was good to finally say them out loud. Eric felt lighter.

  Sure, Griffin was a different kind of guy, there was no question about that. He had his rough edges. He wasn’t like Eric’s old friends back in Ohio. But for one day, during those few hours, Griffin was what Eric needed.

  He was, Eric believed, a friend.

  11

  [crazy]

  ERIC PULLED THE ACOUSTIC GUITAR CLOSE TO HIS BELLY, leaned back on his bed, and strummed. He wasn’t practicing anything in particular, just running through some songs. It was his way of checking out. He closed the bedroom door, disappeared into himself, and tried not to think. The guitar was his shield, the hard outer shell he needed, like the exoskeleton of some soft-bellied bug.

  Whenever Eric thought about his father, when he remembered things, it left him confused. He didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to feel this way, but the memories flooded in like a rising river, ruining everything. There they were. He could picture it.

  Rudy just a baby, probably asleep. It was dark out, his parents at the kitchen table, Eric spooning a bowl of vanilla ice cream, and his father’s voice, loud and accusing.

  “Clear the table?” his father screamed. “I’ll clear the table, just watch me. I can be really helpful around the house.” He picked up plates and glasses and tossed them one by one in underhanded arcs toward the sink. There they crashed and shattered—his mother crying, pleading for Eric’s father to stop, please stop, please—but the clatter continued until, finally, the dishes cleared and a life splintered, his father walked out the door.

  Oh, the way his mother sagged to the floor. Eric could see it in his mind, as if a motion picture were projected against the inner walls of his skull. She leaned against the wall and her legs slid forward. She dropped down, slumped over, face splotchy with tears. Eric didn’t dare to move. He sat watching her while a thousand small fish swam through his bloodstream. Then he finally climbed down to the floor and crawled to her and whispered, “It’s okay, Mom, it’s okay, stop crying. I’ll clean everything up.”

  “He’s sick,” she murmured in answer, staring at nothing. “He’s so sick.”

  And rather than clean anything up, Eric bent his head to her warm soft lap and crashed. Just fell asleep right then and there, instantly.

  No, Eric hadn’t told Griffin that story. Some stories you don’t tell. You just keep them to yourself, locked away, and you run the guitar pick up and down across six strings and you strum.

  Eric couldn’t tell Griffin the whole truth about his father. So it was a day of white lies—first to his mother, then to Griffin Connelly. It wasn’t like Eric wanted to lie, exactly. It was just that the truth was so . . . inconvenient. To Eric’s way of thinking, a good fiction was better than a hard fact. Everybody breathed easier; nobody got hurt; and you moved on to the next thing.

  Even if he wanted to, how could Eric tell Griffin about what really happened back in Ohio? The truth was a slippery bar of soap, something ungraspable, a thing Eric himself could never understand, much less tell.

  How do you say that your father has a “mental illness”? How do you say “schizophrenia” and not open a can of fresh wounds and questions? Schizophrenia was like a word from a bad horror movie, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Dad. But it didn’t work like that. His father didn’t act like two people, a good guy and a bad guy. It was trickier than that. His father was once the greatest guy in the world, but then, slowly, over time, he wasn’t anymore. He changed, got angry and confused. His own thoughts haunting him, hunting him down. His father fell into dark moods, made unfounded accusations, said crazy things. And worse: He dropped into long brooding silences, not speaking for days, a ghost walking around in Daddy’s shoes. It was like he slowly vanished in front of Eric’s eyes, from the inside out. A hollow man. A sunken-eyed scarecrow. In that way, his father was like two men, the good guy and the sick one. For Eric to ever live a full life, he knew that he would have to love both men. The well and the ill. He couldn’t pick one or the other. It had to be both, for they were two sides of one man, his father.

  How do you tell that story?

&nbs
p; How do you describe the years of living with that? The best thing—the thing that worked for a while, anyway—was to pretend it wasn’t happening. Repeat: Dad’s just fine. Keep saying it, over and over, as if saying it enough might make it true. Eric was just a boy when things began to turn bad, soon after Rudy was born. On and off, in fits and spurts, the illness took hold, gripped his father like a snake in its coils and squeezed. But nobody talked about it for a long time, each trying to not know, figuring that if they ignored it, maybe it would go away. Maybe Eric’s real father would reappear one morning, bright and chipper, “How ya doing, sport?” Except it never happened. Things only got worse. Until finally, they had to talk about it, Eric and his mom, had to say the words nobody wanted to hear.

  “Your father is sick. He’s been sick for a long time.”

  Sick? “Sick” was a cold, an upset stomach, a fever you recovered from. This wasn’t the body being sick, it was the brain being sick. This was, in his mother’s words, “mental illness.”

  There were doctors, yes, and stays at hospitals, an ever-changing cocktail of little pills. The drugs helped in some ways, offered him some relief, but Eric could see the change in his father. The drugs drained him dry. His neck swelled up, his face twitched, he lost his spark. Eric’s father complained about aches and sore parts. He once rubbed his chest and looked at Eric in wide-eyed alarm—“There’s nothing there, there’s nothing there”—rubbing his chest over and over, there where the heartbeat should be. “I can’t feel anything,” he’d cried.

  But mostly, his father’s essence had changed until it was as if his father on medication had no personality left. That was why, his mother explained, Eric’s father stopped taking the doctor’s pills. “He felt like he was losing himself, slipping away,” she tried to explain. And it was true. Eric could see that it was true. On medicine, his father didn’t act crazy anymore, but in some ways it was worse. A part of him had died. The part Eric loved.

  His mother told Eric other things:

  “He still loves you, he’ll always love you.”

  “He’s suffering right now. He’s confused. He’s overwhelmed. There are voices in his head.”

  She cried. She didn’t want to cry in front of Eric, he could see that, his mother trying to be strong, but she couldn’t be, not all the time. That was the other hard part. He couldn’t lose her, too. And now there was Rudy to worry about.

  It was scary. Because his father was still around, drifting aimlessly from room to room. When things were okay, when Eric didn’t think about it too much, he could sit quietly in the same room with his father and feel . . . good. Pretend everything was okay. He still had a dad. Not just any dad, but his dad, his one and only. That guy over there, the innocent one with the gentle soul, who loved trees and music and laughter and his two sons, that swell guy whose thoughts were eating him alive.

  Then some things happened—other memories now, the water of remembering rising ever higher—when Eric’s father lost control, smashed a mirror and some lamps, ripped down the blinds off a bay window—and was gone the next morning before Eric awoke. And here was the truly shameful thing, the horror in Eric’s heart: He was glad. Good riddance. Who needs to live with that?

  People can lose a leg. People can get their hands stuck in machines and have their fingers torn off. Terrible car accidents robbed people of their sight, their ability to walk, their dreams and hopes of a healthy future. But there was nothing worse—nothing on this earth, of that Eric was sure—than losing your mind, your peace of mind, because that was like losing your self. It was losing everything.

  His father was a walking absence, a faint duplicate, a watered-down version of his former self, without substance enough to cast a shadow.

  There was no way Eric could tell Griffin Connelly that story. So he told bits and pieces and white lies. Eric wondered if Griffin sensed it, the whole truth, if somehow Griffin already knew, saw into Eric’s secret heart and smiled.

  12

  [shiner]

  AS SEPTEMBER GAVE WAY TO OCTOBER, ERIC BEGAN TO feel more at home in his new surroundings. His classes weren’t too bad, and his teachers were fine. Sure, science with Mrs. Wilcox was deadly—she talked and talked—but there was nothing unusual about that. Eric supposed there were boring teachers no matter where you lived. It couldn’t all be PE and recess.

  He sometimes hung with Mary during home base. They weren’t big friends or anything, but Eric felt like it was the beginning of something, though he had no idea what. Maybe he just liked her looks, her unfussy natural beauty. The weird kid, Hallenback, still stared darkly at Eric from time to time. If looks could kill, Eric thought. But for the most part, home base was about getting homework out of the way so that it didn’t interfere with crucial television viewing.

  If Eric had not yet been invited into Griffin Connelly’s inner circle, he definitely had a seat at the lunch table. And for now, that’s all Eric really desired. He was even beginning to like some of the other guys, Pat and Hakeem, in particular. Even Drew P. could be okay sometimes, when he ditched the tough-guy act and tried being himself.

  Griffin was the group leader, the alpha dog. Depending upon his mood, he could be friendly and funny or dark and distant. Eric couldn’t figure Griffin out. But even so, Eric found himself drawn to Griffin, the way a caveman might be attracted to fire. The light, the heat, the danger.

  Along the wall where the line forms for students to buy hot lunch, there was a big GOT MILK? poster, featuring an enormous photo of a pop singer’s smiling face: big sweep of blond hair, flawless skin (thanks, no doubt, to Photoshop), and milky mustache above a pearly white smile. Her head on the poster was gigantic, about three feet tall, or the height of a preschooler. Drew P. pulled a wad of gum from his mouth and stuck it on the singing starlet’s left nostril. With a deft motion, he molded the gum into the shape of a drip. Drew P. stepped back and grinned, an artist satisfied with his creation.

  “S’not bad, Droop,” Cody commented.

  “Truly disgusting,” Eric agreed.

  Just then Griffin brushed past the boys, head down and moving quickly, not turning to say hello, not even bothering to make fun of Cody’s grease-stained jeans.

  “What’s up with Griff?” Eric asked.

  “He’s got a shiner,” Drew P. said in a low voice.

  “A what?”

  “A black eye.”

  “He got into a fight?” Eric asked.

  Drew P. checked to make sure that Griffin was seated at the table across the room. He whispered, “More like he got smacked around.”

  “Who did it?”

  Cody interrupted, “What are you, writing a blog?”

  “Just curious,” Eric replied.

  “Just curious,” Cody repeated in a mocking tone.

  Eric glared at Cody. That kid could be so annoying. But at the same time, he could see that Cody was being protective of Griffin. He was as loyal as a Doberman. “Tell me what happened,” Eric said to Drew.

  “You never met his dad, have you?”

  Eric had not. He’d seen Griffin’s father only once, about a week ago. He was sitting at the Connellys’ kitchen table in a bathrobe, slump-shouldered, staring at a cereal box. Griffin didn’t bother to introduce them, and Mr. Connelly never looked up.

  “Retired city cop, not all that friendly,” Drew P. explained. “Has to be—what?—at least six-four, two hundred seventy-five pounds.”

  “Scary dude,” Cody murmured.

  They moved through the line. Eric threw a square slice of pizza on his tray. Cody stuffed a buttered roll inside his shirt.

  “The main problem is he’s a drinker,” Drew continued.

  “Griff’s father gave him that black eye?” Eric asked.

  “Wow, Sherlock, you are a regular genius.” Cody whistled. He picked up his tray and cut in front of Eric. “Don’t say anything to him, keep it on the down low. Shut up and mind your business.”

  Eric sat down diagonally across from Griffin and
tried not to look. It was impossible. Griffin’s eye looked worse from up close, swollen with ugly shades of blue and purple. Griffin kept his head down, hair dangling over his eyes, and ate in silence. After a few minutes, Griffin glanced up and caught Eric staring at him. He locked eyes with Eric, daring him to look away.

  Then the strangest thing happened. Almost in slow motion, Griffin pushed his hair back and turned his head to give Eric a better look, the way a model might pose for a photographer. Griffin’s long, slender fingers went to his eye, tips lightly touching the tender, bruised skin, a blind boy reading Braille. What did it say? What story did it tell?

  Griffin did not show any expression. There was no emotion there. His face was battered and blank. His eyes, cold.

  Eric shivered, and looked away.

  13

  [pretzel]

  GRIFFIN’S MOOD DARKENED OVER THE COURSE OF LUNCH, and he stalked outside for recess, hands buried in his pockets.

  “Hey, guys. Hi, Griff!”

  The voice—too loud, too high-pitched—could mean only one person, David Hallenback. The kid who could not, or would not, take a hint.

  Hallenback often appeared on the fringes of the group, like a mosquito hovering around a campfire, close but careful not to get burned. He was the butt of jokes, the fool, the kid with the KICK ME sign taped to his back. No one seemed to like him, but by virtue of pure persistence, Hallenback was tolerated. His presence offered a form of entertainment value, comic relief from the routine of endless school days. He was the fly that got swatted, the spider without legs, and in that sense the boys didn’t really mind Hallenback’s uninvited appearances.

  Usually.

  “Not today, Hallenback,” Cody said. “Go away.”

  Unfazed, Hallenback peered at Griffin. “What happened to your eye, Griff? Huh?”

  “Hallenback, Jesus Christ,” Cody hissed. “Go. Away.”

  This type of scene had lately become a frequent occurrence. It was as if David Hallenback suffered from amnesia. No matter what happened, he kept coming back for more, desperate for acceptance. The truth was he had nowhere else to go. So no matter how hard he got shoved away, Hallenback always seemed to dust himself off and bounce back. It was a disastrous strategy for making friends. The tension was increasing, but Hallenback couldn’t—or wouldn’t—grasp it.