At every stop, Mom and I nodded and oohed and aahed as if Dr. Bratton were a realtor and we were planning to buy the place instead of just go to school there. Which I wasn’t. I still hadn’t accepted the fact that I was doomed to go to Bullywell.
I was hoping for a miracle to save me from what seemed more and more unavoidable and dreadful, even as everything seemed to make my mom more and more hopeful and energetic. Which was strange, because I’d learned to stop hoping for a miracle. If there were miracles, my dad would have come walking in the door, maybe a little dusty and rattled, but alive and well and saying he’d ditched Caroline and wanted to come back home and live with us forever.
The point we were supposed to be getting, the point that Mom was getting, was that Baileywell was paradise. Teenage-boy paradise! By the time the tour ended, my mom and Dr. Bratton were practically embracing and weeping tears of joy on each other’s shoulders. Without anyone consulting me or asking my opinion, it was decided that I would start school on October 15, just a few days away but long enough for us to locate the papers proving that I’d been vaccinated against rabies or whatever, and to shop for the gross navy blue blazers that made Baileywell students look like the boring businessmen-in-training that they were.
The moment had come to stop playing along and being cooperative and considerate. It was high time to quit pretending to be what Mom called “open to new ideas,” to quit trying to make Mom feel more positive about life. The moment had come to stop imagining that something or someone was going to rescue me. It was time to save my own ass!
Starting on the drive home from Baileywell and continuing without mercy for the next few days, I begged my mom not to send me there. I tried every trick I knew. I argued and pleaded, I told her that Bullywell wouldn’t expose me to the real world the way that Hillbrook Middle School would. I told her that everyone called it Bullywell, that it was full of bullies and snobs. Mom said that was the real world, I might as well get used to it now. I told her some of the stories: the dead kid in the tower, the eyeballs in the soup. I said they bullied kids to death there.
“Urban legends,” Mom said. “Did you ever hear the one about the Doberman that bit off the burglar’s finger? Or the human finger in the fast-food burger? Or the killer whose fingers got caught in the automatic car window? What’s with all these stories about fingers, anyhow?”
Obviously Mom wasn’t focusing. By then I was so desperate, I asked her if, considering how recently I’d lost my dad, she honestly thought I was ready to take on a possibly hostile new environment, to make a major change I didn’t want to make.
I shouldn’t have tried that one with Mom, I should have known it wouldn’t work. Mom looked blankly in my general direction, and then her eyes left my face and drifted in the direction that, she must have imagined, led to Baileywell. It was as if she was seeing Baileywell, seeing the future that awaited us there: a new world, a castle where the drawbridge would be lowered, the gates opened, and where she and I would cross the moat and enter a place that would be safe from planes and bombs, defended and protected from anyone who might be planning to hurt us.
On the very next day after our tour of Bullywell Prep, Mom got a call informing her that her old company, the one where she’d worked with Dad, had found new headquarters—in New Jersey this time, much closer to our home. She was one of the people they were putting in charge of stitching together the scraps of what was left of their hearts and their minds and their business.
My mother went on a giant shopping spree, as if she had to buy a whole new wardrobe for the whole new person who was taking the whole new job. She tried on all her new outfits for me, and I told her how great she looked. Except for the fact that they still had their labels attached, the skirts and suits and jackets were almost identical to the ones she’d worn to her office in the North Tower, but I wasn’t about to mention that.
Two days before I started at Baileywell, she went back to work. Even though she knew that she was supposed to be forgiving, even though she understood that our tragic experience was supposed to have made her a better person, the first thing she did was to fire Caroline. The second thing she did was to call and tell me.
“Way to go, Mom!” I said.
So all that seemed like another sign that there was a future for us, and that my future had bought me a first-class ticket on the express train to Bullywell. I even tried to act happy about it, by which I meant that on the first morning that the Baileywell day-student bus pulled up in front of our house to pick me up, I refrained from digging in my heels and hanging on to Mom’s skirt and throwing a full-blown, kindergarten-style tantrum.
The driver was a hugely overweight guy whose folds of flesh hung down over the seat, so that the seat looked like a pedestal growing straight out of his butt. His thick arms surrounded the wheel, which he held between his surprisingly delicate fingers.
“Hi,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Bart Rangely.”
The driver scowled at my hand, as if shaking it would constitute a dangerous breach of the rules of road safety, even though the bus was parked. Then he grunted and jerked his head toward the back of the bus, where my fellow day students waited.
My fellow day students! I remembered my dad quoting a comedian who used to say he wouldn’t want to join any club that would admit him. Now, it seemed, I had been admitted to a club like that. Not only didn’t I want to join it, but it was dangerous for me even to know it existed. The bus population looked like a casting call for the latest Hollywood nerd extravaganza or for one of those TV reality shows on which a superhot fashion model is asked to choose a husband from a selection of the ugliest guys on the planet.
It was hard to know if the admissions director had a secret preference for kids who looked like rabbits and chickens, or if they’d once looked normal and had been turned, by their experiences at Bullywell, into human versions of the most timid or stupid creatures in the food chain. That’s what it must have been, because really, the day students weren’t more wimpy or poor or stupid than the boarders. Their only crime was that they lived in the area, and their parents liked having them come home at night. But the boarders looked down on the day students, and little by little, I guess, the day students had begun to look like the losers everyone thought they were.
As I made my way to the back of the bus, they all looked up and then went back to staring silently and miserably out the window. It reminded me of prison vans I’d seen transporting handcuffed and chained passengers. I also thought of how, every once in a while, I’d made the mistake of looking through the back window of an ambulance and seen the face of some terrified relative they’d allowed to ride along with the patient.
“Hi, guys!” I said.
No one replied. No one smiled or nodded or turned as I walked past them and found an empty seat near the back of the bus.
I was careful not to make eye contact with anyone. I looked out the window. I was careful not to make eye contact with anyone’s reflection.
The road that wound up to the castle—that is, the school—looked nothing like the one I’d taken just a few days before with Mom. That day had been sunny, but now the sky was the color of the stuffing of a ripped-apart old mattress that someone had left out in the weather. Between then and now, the wind must have blown all the bright autumn leaves off the trees, leaving bare branches that pointed at me like fingers promising some cruel punishment I must have done something to deserve. And as we traveled in the groaning bus, Bailey Mountain seemed higher and craggier than I remembered, and the climb took much longer than it had when Mom and I were in the car making nervous conversation.
We passed the main entrance and pulled up to a side door, as if the bus had come to deliver office supplies or cafeteria food instead of to be welcomed by the friendly, inclusive student community Dr. Bratton had described. Well, sure, the bus had come to deliver us, packages of something that no one actually seemed to want. And the packages didn’t seem to want to be delivered.
&
nbsp; As the day students trudged off the bus, they really did look like criminals, filing out of their transport to do some especially nasty roadwork detail. The bus emptied, but still I remained in my seat until the driver—who, I would later learn, everyone called Fat Freddie—yelled, “Last stop, pal. Everybody out. How much farther do you think we’re going?”
I laughed as if that was the funniest thing anyone ever said. And then, when my face was still twisted in the clownish fake laugh, and at the exact moment when I felt a bubble of saliva popping at the corner of my mouth, I looked out the bus window and spotted the kid who’d helped Dr. Bratton show me around the school. My Mentor and Big Brother.
I was so glad to see a familiar face that I said “Hi!” as if we were long-lost best friends. Brothers separated at birth. But he was looking at me—through me—as if he’d never seen me before.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I’m Bart Rangely.” How could he not remember?
“Oh, that’s right,” he said. Now I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with my memory, if he could have been a different person from the one I’d met on the tour. Could he possibly have a twin brother at the school?
He said, “I’m Tyro Bergen.” It seemed less likely that there were two identical guys at the school with the same name. I was still trying to figure out why he didn’t recognize me when he said, “I’m supposed to be your…Big Brother. Till you get used to this toilet.”
I laughed again, as hard as I had when Fat Freddie had ordered me off the bus, even though Tyro had said “Big Brother” in a way that hadn’t sounded like he meant a helpful, loving older sibling, but rather the evil dictator in the George Orwell novel we’d read in seventh grade.
“Big Brother like Big Brother in 1984?” I said, regretting it instantly.
“What are you talking about?” Tyro said. He turned his back and motioned for me to follow him into the school.
Walking into the main hallway was like diving into the deep end of the pool and not knowing how to swim, like merging with the stream of traffic on a busy highway and having no idea how to drive. The glum nerds who’d ridden the bus with me had disappeared, swallowed up by boys who wore their scratchy blazers and uncool striped ties as if that was the way that everyone should want to dress. Boys whose hair shone so brightly it was as if they were wearing mirrors on top of their heads, boys whose confident, loping walks made me understand what it meant when some cheesy book said “Blah-blah strode into the room.” These guys didn’t walk, they strode, like a small private army of teenage gods, and I could tell from the way they treated Tyro that he was their God among gods. Unfortunately, his divinity wasn’t exactly wearing off on me, his so-called Little Brother. The other students stared at me the way people look at a stray bug that’s turned up someplace where it’s especially unexpected or disgusting, a mosquito on an airplane, a cockroach crawling up the wall over your table in a restaurant.
Suddenly I understood what seemed so strange about all this. It wasn’t only that Tyro acted as if he didn’t recognize me even though you’d think the hours we’d spent on that embarrassing school tour might have been what Dr. Bratton would call a “bonding experience.” The weird thing was, I’d gotten used to everyone recognizing me, to being our town’s version of a local celebrity. Hel-lo! I was the Miracle Boy! I was the kid who’d saved his mother from dying on 9/11.
Hadn’t any of these guys heard of that? Didn’t they read the papers? It crossed my mind that maybe they knew perfectly well who I was, and that they were just pretending not to. Why? So that I would feel like even more of an outsider than I already did.
Every so often, someone would ask Tyro, “Who’s the new dude?”
And he would say, “Fart Strangely. I mean Bart Rangely. Fart, this is Buff. This is Pork. This is Dog. This is Ex. Say hi to Fart, guys.”
I’d only been at Bullywell for less than five minutes and already I was learning to laugh hysterically at unfunny jokes—jokes on me!
“Hi, Fart,” the kids all said. And each time I would think: Thanks, Big Brother. All this time, Tyro kept walking a few steps ahead of me, as if he really were an older sibling annoyed that he had to bring his kid brother along on some fun outing with his friends. By now I was practically skipping to keep up, so that when at last Tyro stopped short outside a classroom door, I had to put on the brakes fast—but I didn’t do it fast enough. I plowed right into him.
“Watch it, okay?” he said. “No touching, Fag Face. This is your homeroom, Fart-o. Have fun. Look for me in the lunchroom if you can’t find anyone else who can stand to sit with you. Little Bro.” And he gave me a friendly push in the direction of the doorway, a push that felt ever so slightly like a nasty shove.
I found myself in a room full of kids who looked like younger, shrunk-down versions of the friends to whom Tyro had so charmingly introduced me. None of these eighth graders had pimples or braces or oily hair or any of the physical defects I’d gotten to know and love among my public school friends. It was as if they’d been born with perfect skin and hair and teeth, and with the promise that, from here on in, things were only going to get better. A funny murmur—not a sound so much as a feeling, as if everyone had felt a chill and shivered at once—traveled around the room. I could tell these kids were too young to be very good at pretending not to know who I was. Miracle Boy. The 9/11 semi-orphan. Tragedy Kid. Their new classmate.
I was having such a hard time processing the kids that I didn’t even notice the teacher until she cleared her throat and said, “Why, hello, Bart. I’m Mrs. Day.”
Later, I would learn that everyone called her Mrs. Die, because she looked as if she were just about to. She was positively ancient, though later I began to think that maybe she wasn’t as old as she looked, that teaching at Bullywell was one of those experiences, like seeing a ghost or having a loved one die, that turns your hair white overnight. Mrs. Day was so pale she was nearly translucent, as if the light of another world were already shining through her. For a long moment she zoned out, and a film covered her eyes, as if she were gazing into that other world. Then she awoke out of her trance, or whatever it was. Her eyes filled with globby tears and I knew that she recognized me, she knew exactly who I was.
“Class,” she said. “I want you to meet a new student. A very special new student.”
In a way, it was worse than Tyro introducing me as Fart Strangely. Because the last thing I wanted was to feel more special than I already did.
“Say hello to Bart, class,” said Mrs. Day.
“Hello, Bart,” they said in an obedient chorus that was like one big group sneer.
“Bart, why don’t you take a seat next to Seth?” said Mrs. Day. “Seth, why don’t you hold up your hand so Bart will know who you are?”
A set of fingers rose just barely above the heads of the others, and I walked toward the hand to find myself standing over a kid I recognized from the day-student bus. Great! Was this pure coincidence, or had dotty old Mrs. Day sat me next to a fellow loser on purpose?
Actually, Seth did have braces and pimples. I guess the reason I hadn’t noticed him before was that he slumped so low in his seat that his chin was practically resting on the desk.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I said. End of conversation.
It turned out that Mrs. Day was also the English teacher. So we stayed where we were and had English right after homeroom, which at least spared me the nightmare of going back into the hall and rejoining the stream of perfect human specimens masquerading as high school students. To mark the division between homeroom and English class, Mrs. Day said, “All right, gentleman, everybody get up and stretch your legs. Everybody touch your toes and reach up toward the ceiling.” No one was going to do that! In fact, no one moved, except for a few jocky guys who rolled their shoulders and raised their arms above their heads and cracked their knuckles so loud that the popping sounds seemed to echo off the walls.
“Oh, dear�
�—Mrs. Day put her hands over her ears—“I do so hate it when you gentlemen do that.” Underneath the knuckle popping, Seth—my homeboy, my new fellow-day-student buddy—hissed, “Hey, I saw you walking around with Tyro Bergen. You know him?”
“He’s supposed to be my Big Brother,” I said. “You know, to help me get used to the school.”
“Oh, man,” said Seth. “I pity you, dude. He is the baddest of the bad. I mean, he’s the meanest of the mean. I’d hate to be your life insurance provider.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, stupidly, though I could have figured it out.
Before Seth could answer, if he was going to answer, Mrs. Day said, “All right, gentlemen, turn to page thirty-five of The Great Gatsby. Let’s read aloud, starting from the top of the page.”
Everyone groaned and opened their books, except me. Naturally, I didn’t have a book. No one had told me to get one. I glanced over at Seth’s book, thinking I could look on with him, but he wrapped his elbow around the page, as if he were taking a test and I was trying to copy. I looked up, and Mrs. Day met my eye and grasped my predicament.
“On second thought,” she said, “let’s take a little break from poor sad Mr. Gatsby.”
Everybody applauded. I hoped they were thanking me for saving them from the boring book! But everyone just moaned again when Mrs. Day said, “Let’s all do a little writing exercise. Let’s write about…hmm. Let’s write a little essay about what we did this summer.”
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