Bullyville

by Francine Prose

  “Are you kidding?” someone called out. “We did that the first day of school.”

  For a moment Mrs. Day looked vaguely alarmed. Then she said, “Let’s write about something we didn’t mention the first time. Anyway, it’ll be nice for Bart. It’s a way of getting acquainted. That’s why we do it the first day of school.”

  It was clear what Mrs. Day was trying to do—to somehow turn back the clock so that it would be almost as if I was starting the year at the same time as everyone else. I was grateful to her for the effort, but it couldn’t have worked. Bullywell had been in session for more than a month before I got there. I felt as if I’d come in on a movie that was already halfway through, so I couldn’t understand what was happening on-screen, and some kindly person in the audience was asking the projectionist to rewind the film, for my benefit, and rerun it from the beginning.

  Everyone turned to glare at me, as if they wanted their eyes to drill deep, painful holes into my head, as if it were my fault that they were being made to put something down on paper instead of just reading aloud from a book they were supposed to have read. Still grumbling, they took out their notebooks. I tried not to look at anyone, but I could hear a lot of sighing and shifting around, and the sounds of writing and scratching things out and of papers being ripped from their bindings.

  I didn’t know what to write. I clutched my pen and moved my arm back and forth, scowling at the page as if words were going to appear on it by magic. But of course none did, and the page stayed empty. During the summer, I’d been a counselor-in-training at the town rec program, the same program I’d gone to as a little kid. I guess I could have written about how I’d saved a little girl from drowning. Or maybe she hadn’t been drowning, the water wasn’t that deep. She’d just gotten freaked and started squealing and I’d had to haul her out.

  I could have written about that, but I didn’t want to. Because when I thought about the summer, what had really happened was that I came to accept the fact that Dad had traded us in for Caroline. I thought I’d gotten my mind around the fact that he wasn’t coming back. Except that I hadn’t known what not coming back meant. Now I did know, and what had happened to Dad stood, as tall and as terrifying as a building on fire, between me and that glorious day, the pinnacle of my counselor-in-training career, when I’d dragged little Heather, or Molly, or whatever her name was, out of the shallow end of the pool.

  After a silence so long I was sure the class would end before anyone got a chance to read his essay, Mrs. Day said, “All right, gentleman, five more minutes.” About another hour passed, and then she said, “All right. Time’s up. Bart, would you like to go first?”

  “I’d rather go last,” I said.

  For some reason everyone thought this was screamingly funny. When the laughter stopped, Mrs. Day said, “All right. I can respect that. Would someone else like to volunteer?”

  One kid—the one whom Tyro had introduced as Ex, which I later learned stood for Extra Credit—read what sounded like a whole novel about how his family had rented a yacht and cruised the Greek islands and every night they snorkeled for octopus and squid (the other kids said “Gross!” and “Yuck!”) and the cook who came with the boat would grill the catch over coals on the beach and they’d eat it for dinner. The next kid read about his African safari, another read about his summer house on the Jersey shore. The kid Mrs. Day called on after that said he didn’t want to read his, he’d gone to his beach house, too, he’d eaten a ton of lobster, but otherwise his summer was pretty much like that of the kid who’d read before. Meanwhile, I kept thinking that everything anyone read made my richest friends at Hillbrook sound like poor people!

  A lot of the pieces were extremely long, which made me realize that, compared to normal teenagers, the students at Bullywell really liked talking about themselves. One kid read for what seemed like twenty minutes about how he saw a bear on his family’s otherwise dull trip to some national park. And a lot of the pieces were horribly bad, full of the kind of grammatical mistakes that made me think there were probably lots of spelling errors, too. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I’d been worried about whether Bullywell might be hard—or “academically challenging,” as Dr. Bratton had said—as well as full of vicious bullies. But now I realized that the academic part wasn’t going to be the problem.

  I’d stopped paying attention, and suddenly I was sweating with dread that Mrs. Day was about to call on me. Then I’d have to confess that I’d just been pretending to write, that there was nothing on the page. I was literally saved by the bell, if you called it being saved to be ejected from my seat in Mrs. Day’s uninspiring but harmless classroom and thrown into the churning sea of sharks and barracudas that passed for the halls of Bullywell Prep.

  The bizarre thing was, it didn’t bother me all that much, because by that point I’d slipped into a kind of fog. All the stuff going on at school seemed amazingly unreal compared to what I was only now starting to see as the hopeless misery of my entire life. If I’d had to find one word for what I was feeling, I guess it would have been: homesick. I felt so homesick, it was as if I’d been sent away to live at Bullywell forever and ever. Dude, I told myself, you’re a day student. You’re going home on the bus tonight. You’re going to have dinner with Mom.

  Still, it was almost as if the reality of everything that had happened to me—Dad leaving us and then dying in that terrible way—was finally creeping in around the edges of things and making me feel unbelievably lonely and abandoned. When I’d first gotten off the bus, I’d been totally self-conscious, as if I was being watched and judged and sneered at by everyone who saw me. But now I just felt like a big rock stuck in the middle of the school while everything flowed around me. I went to a couple of other classes. I knew what the subjects were: social studies, biology. But that was all I knew. I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying.

  I was really disconnected.

  And then at last it was lunchtime, and the dread returned because I could no longer get by just by sitting in class and being silent and passive. I was going to have to find someone to eat with or else face the shame of being that kid in the lunchroom who has to eat all by himself and pretend that he doesn’t mind—or that maybe he even likes it.

  We’d skipped the lunchroom on the school tour we’d taken with Dr. Bratton, and now I understood why. Outside the door was an engraved brass sign that said “Refectory.” Paneled in dark wood and decorated with portraits of famous graduates whose expressions of major indigestion seemed like bad advertisements for the food, the lunchroom looked like a banquet hall where some wicked king might serve a lavish feast and poison all the guests. The noise was like rush hour without cars. But the talking and shouting, the clattering dishes and the rattling silverware, and underneath that a smacking sound that I could have sworn was the noise of everyone chewing—all that was nothing compared to the smell: teenage-boy body odor and bad breath and something like spoiled milk, but most of all grease, old grease that had stayed in the air since those guys on the wall used to eat lunch here.

  I stood at the entrance, paralyzed, fighting off nausea, telling myself, Dude, the last thing you need is to puke in the lunchroom doorway on your first day at Bullywell.

  Just then I heard a soft voice behind me say, “The food line is over there.” I turned to thank my savior, in time to see Seth—the kid from homeroom, the geek who wouldn’t let me look at his copy of The Great Gatsby—scurrying off in the direction he’d indicated. And I thought how much courage it took for Seth to even talk to the new kid, and for him to bypass the line on which everyone else was waiting and to join the lonely nerds at a kind of salad bar marked with a big sign that said “Vegetarian Alternative.”

  I joined the end of the other, presumably non-vegetarian, line, craning my neck so I could see what was being served. I wondered what Bullywell guys would eat—raw meat, maybe. I was relieved to see the trays of steamed gray hamburgers and soggy buns. All right! A diet I could handle!r />
  The lunch ladies seemed like twin sisters or clones or at least blood relations of the ones who’d worked at my public school: same hairnets, same tough-gal-with-a-heart-of-gold manner that was basically an invitation to pull out all the stops and be as charming and sweet as you could on the chance—the slim chance—of getting on their good side.

  “Burger?” said the one nearest me.

  “Thanks,” I said, smiling my warmest smile and pretending that I just couldn’t inhale enough of that delicious greasy aroma.

  She didn’t exactly look at me, lunch ladies hardly ever did. But then, almost by accident, she did look at me. She paused for a beat, and at first I was confused until I figured out that she’d recognized me from my picture in the papers. Somehow, after just one morning at Bullywell, I’d managed to forget that I was the hero Miracle Boy whom everyone loved and pitied.

  “Here,” she said. “Take two. You need to keep your strength up. Come back if you’re still hungry.”

  “Thanks!” I practically shouted, embarrassed because tears of gratitude mixed with self-pity had popped into my eyes. It was the first time that anyone had been nice to me all day, not counting Mrs. Day’s attempt to make me feel comfortable and Seth offering that helpful little pointer, which was probably just a way to keep me from blocking the lunchroom doorway.

  Now that the problem of where to get food was solved, I had to face the bigger problem of where I was supposed to eat it. As I stood there with my tray, it was as if I’d become the Invisible Kid. No one saw me, or if they did, they immediately looked away. You’d have thought I was a lunatic who might do something disgusting like sneeze on their plates or grab their food and lick it. Or maybe I had some contagious disease, like leprosy, that they would catch if I sat near them.

  Suddenly, I saw someone waving. I turned around because I assumed the person was waving at someone standing behind me. Then I realized it was Tyro Bergen, and that he was waving at me, and I remembered his invitation to sit with him at lunch if I couldn’t find anyone else to eat with.

  His table was surrounded by that special halo that always encircles the coolest kids in school. As I approached, that aura parted for me, and I saw the other guys shifting seats so I could sit next to Tyro. So he was my Big Brother after all. I was already thinking of ways to thank him. Maybe I’d save up all my allowance for the next two years and buy him tickets to a Knicks game in the city.

  “Little Bro!” Tyro called. “Come sit your dumb ass over here.”

  Once more, he introduced me to the guys, some of whom he’d introduced me to before, as Fart Strangely. But that was okay, that was fine with me. Everyone here had a nickname. Maybe after I’d been in school awhile they’d come up with something a little less gross.

  The guys—Dog and Pork and Buff—reached over and shook my hand, very grown-up and manly. “Hey, Fart, how ya doin’?” “Whassup?” “How do you like the school?”

  “It’s great,” I said. “It’s really great.” And at that moment I thought so.

  “Whatcha eating, Fart?” said Tyro.

  “Two burgers!” one of the guys said. “Fart’s got two burgers. What did you do to get that, Bart? Screw the lunch lady?”

  “Well,” I said apologetically, “maybe it’s just because I’m new.”

  “Because you’re new,” said Tyro thoughtfully. “Because you’re new…. That’s right, you are new. Very new, aren’t you, Fart. Practically…newborn.”

  “It’s my first day,” I said, idiotically. Obviously. Tyro knew that. There was a long silence during which all the guys stared at the two burgers on my plate, and I wished I’d sneaked off and eaten by myself at a distant corner of the refectory. Couldn’t they get seconds if they wanted? With all the tuition money their parents were paying, you’d think they could have had two measly little burgers. You’d think they could have had twenty!

  Finally, just to break the silence, I said, “Could you pass the ketchup?” I didn’t like ketchup all that much. But it was something to say.

  “Sure,” said Tyro. “Ketchup! Coming up! Could you grab the bottle, gentlemen?” The bottle traveled toward me, hand to hand, down the table. I opened it, and shook it, then shook it again. Everyone was watching. I checked to make sure that they hadn’t passed me an empty bottle on purpose. This was Bullywell, after all. But there was ketchup stuck up in the bottle. It just wasn’t moving.

  “Stuck ketchup,” said Tyro. “It’s a Baileywell tradition.” Everyone laughed and rolled their eyes as if they knew precisely what he was talking about, as if the worst things they had to put up with at school were gummed-up ketchup bottles. “Want some help with that?”

  “Sure,” I said, though I had the definite feeling that I didn’t.

  Tyro took the bottle and, with a single, powerful flick of his wrist, shook it over my burger. Something about the way he did it made him seem like an Olympic athlete performing some brilliant maneuver. A ski jump, a triple axle, a high-speed slalom run.

  A modest little blob of ketchup landed dead center on my burger.

  “Bull’s-eye,” said one of Tyro’s friends.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s great.”

  Tyro seemed not to hear me. “Want some more?”

  “No, that’s enough, that’s great,” I said, but again he acted as if he didn’t hear. He gave the bottle another shake, and another plop of ketchup decorated my burger.

  “How about some more?” he said.

  “No, really,” I said. “That’s fine.”

  “But if a little is fine, more is finer, right? More is more, am I correct?” He shook the bottle again. And as I and his friends watched, Tyro shook the bottle again and again. First the burger was swimming in ketchup, then it was drowning in ketchup, and then at last it disappeared beneath a red tide of ketchup. Soon both hamburger buns vanished beneath the spreading red blob, and still Tyro kept shaking the bottle, which by now was nearly empty.

  “Gee, man,” said the friend Tyro called Buff, and you could see why. “I think something’s seriously wrong with your burger.”

  “Roadkill,” the one called Dog said.

  “I think it’s got a bleeding disorder,” Pork said. “I think your burger hemorrhaged all over your plate, man.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “That’s not funny,” Tyro said. “You shut the hell up, Pork.”

  Everyone shut up. In fact, they lost all interest in me and my burger and my ketchup problem, and went back to talking and eating and laughing as if I weren’t there. I stared at the red soup on my plate, until the bell rang and it was time to leave the refectory and go back to class. I was starving.

  “Shall we ‘do’ lunch tomorrow?” Tyro asked me on his way out.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Absolutely.”

  Somehow I got through the afternoon. My stomach growled through math class, and a couple of kids snickered. But by then I was too exhausted and sick of it all to care. Instead of going to gym, I had a special getting-to-know-you conference with the assistant gym teacher, Mr. Nevins, who listed all the different team sports and told me to think about which one I wanted to try out for.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll think about it. Later.” In the back of my mind, I was hoping that the world would end so I wouldn’t have to come back to Bullywell ever again.

  Then we had after-school art club, led by a woman with long, flyaway blond hair who dressed in robes and beads and who acted like a demented kindergarten teacher. She told us to call her Kristin, and she made us do a “construction,” an “autumn piece” that involved pasting crumbs of crispy dead leaves to a sheet of soggy cardboard.

  The happiest moment of my entire day came when it was time to get on the loser-day-student bus and go home. In fact, I was so grateful I practically threw myself down on the bus floor in front of Fat Freddie. It took all my self-control not to thank him for saving me from dinner at the refectory and whatever hellish things went on here in the evening after the lights went out.r />
  On the bus, there was an empty seat beside Seth. He didn’t smile or do anything friendly, but then again he didn’t say I couldn’t sit there, so I did. You’d think he might have asked, “How did your afternoon go? How was your first day at school?” But he’d apparently missed the lessons Dr. Bratton had referred to, the lessons on how to be a feeling, compassionate leader of the future. Or maybe he already knew how my day had gone. Anyway, I was glad to skip the small talk and get straight to what I really wanted—needed—to know.

  I said, “Remember in homeroom you said I should watch out for Tyro Bergen?”

  Seth said, “That wasn’t me, man. You must be thinking of someone else. I never said any such thing.”

  “You did,” I said. “You know you did.”

  “All right,” he said. “Okay. Big deal. I was just stating the obvious. Like saying you should try not to get hit by a truck. Like saying you shouldn’t climb the fence at the zoo and sneak into the lion’s cage. Like saying—”

  “Like saying what?” I asked. “What did you mean about Tyro?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing like what?”

  “Nothing like…Well, okay. Last year he was supposed to be this new kid’s Big Brother, and he tortured him so bad that the kid had a total nervous breakdown and dropped out of school before the end of the first term.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I wasn’t the guy’s psychiatrist, dude. How would I know?”

  And then, because in just one day I was already becoming the kind of compassionate underdog-lover that Bullywell aimed to produce, I grabbed Seth’s forearm with both hands and twisted his flesh as hard as I could until he said, “Okay! Okay! I think the kid threatened to knock down the bricks at the entrance to the tower and run up and throw himself off the top.”

  “Moron,” I said. “Who cares what he did! What I’m asking is, what did Tyro Bergen do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. No one ever made a big announcement about it, exactly. I guess it because it was so vicious and sadistic.”