“So doesn’t it seem a little strange to you that, after that, they make him another new kid’s Big Brother? Another kid like…me?”
Seth said, “I never thought of that.” And now, it seemed, he did think about it. After a while, he said, “It was probably his dad’s idea. His dad has this big thing about making him a better person. Making all of us better people.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I feel like a better person already. So what did they do to Tyro after the new kid freaked out and left school?”
Seth looked at me as I’d asked him why day follows night, or why the earth revolves around the sun. “Duh-uh,” he said. “Nothing.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Because his dad gives a fortune to the school. He owns some kind of bank or something. Or maybe an insurance company. A big corporation, anyway. They’re loaded. Tyro gets everything he wants. Dude, haven’t you seen his car?”
“What car?” I said.
“He’s got that white Escalade they let him park in the faculty lot.”
“An Escalade? A kid drives an Escalade?”
“Come on,” said Seth. “You don’t think anyone on the faculty could afford a ride like that.”
“Dr. Bratton’s got a Yukon,” I said.
“Bratwurst?” said Seth. “Everybody says that Tyro’s dad bought that Yukon for Bratwurst after the trouble Tyro had with the new kid last year. Look, can we stop talking about Tyro? It makes me nervous just to mention the guy.”
We rode the rest of the way in silence. When Seth got off the bus, he didn’t even say good-bye.
Finally, we got to my stop. There it was—my house! All the lights were blazing. And the truth was, my plain little house had never looked more beautiful than it did that day as we pulled up in front of it.
Just as Dr. Bratton had promised, I got back so late that my mom was already home from her new job, and the house was full of wonderful food smells. If I wasn’t mistaken, Mom was making her special pot roast and potatoes. My favorite. Wait until I told Mom that I hadn’t even had lunch!
I found her in the kitchen, flushed and happy from cooking. She turned to look at me. I guess she was trying to tell from my face, before I had a chance to say anything, how my first day at school had gone. I tried to arrange my features in the most miserable and sour expression, but the truth was, there was no way I could look glum enough to show her just how much I’d enjoyed my introduction to Bullywell.
Our eyes met, and in that instant, I saw how the last month must have looked, from my mom’s point of view, the terrible sorrow and confusion of having Dad die so horribly before they could begin to sort things out. I saw what it must have felt like to know that she’d been just a few degrees of fever—my fever—away from dying herself and leaving me to…what? To be raised by Gran or one of the aunts? I saw how terrifying it had been for her.
Mostly I saw how desperately she wanted things to be positive and normal, how much she needed me to like my new school, how badly she wanted me to appreciate the privileged education that had come as a gift, a pitiful consolation prize for all that pain and disaster. She wanted me to have the kind of education she thought I’d get at Baileywell. Or maybe she wanted me to get to know rich, powerful people—or, at least, rich kids who would grow up to be powerful people—as if that could somehow protect me and keep me safe. But didn’t she know that plenty of rich and powerful people had died, along with Dad, along with weak and poor ones? And didn’t she understand that there was nothing safe about Bullywell?
At that moment, I understood that even with the new and better job, the new clothes, even with the satisfaction of firing Caroline, she wasn’t a new person. What had happened to Mom—to us both—would never just go away. Life would never be the same for her, she might never completely recover. And the strangest part was, it was as if Dr. Bratwurst was right, as if Baileywell was teaching me to see things from the little guy’s point of view—maybe not the little guy, but more important, my own mother.
I looked at Mom, and I actually smiled. “It was fine,” I said. “I liked it. The kids are really nice. I learned a lot.”
For a heartbeat, I worried that maybe I’d laid it on a little too thick. Maybe I shouldn’t have added that part about the kids being nice. But Mom didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she didn’t want to. She hugged me, then pulled back to look at me again, and there were tears in her eyes.
“I’m so happy,” she said. “I’m so relieved. Are you hungry? I’m making pot roast.”
“I could eat,” I said.
CHAPTER FIVE
AND SO BEGAN MY SAD career as one of the bully-ees at Bullywell. Because that was how it broke down: the bullies and the bullied. And though it always took place in secret, totally undercover, you knew that it was happening, because it was happening to you.
At first I thought I was the only unfortunate victim, but then, from time to time, I’d catch a certain look in someone’s eyes, and I’d understand that it was happening to that person, too. After a while, I began to see that there was a system: Every bully had his own personal bully-ee as well as groups of fellow bullies to help with the bullying process. It was as if the school population was divided into little cults or cliques or clubs, each of them based on who was doing the pushing around and who was getting pushed.
Tyro Bergen, my so-called Big Brother, had appointed himself and his friends to be my chief tormentors. At first the incidents were so subtle, I wasn’t even sure if they were really happening or if they were just my paranoid fantasies. Did someone purposely dip my tie in the open-faced-turkey-sandwich gravy on the lunch line, or had I done it myself, by mistake? The first time I tripped over someone’s foot in the hall and nearly landed on my face and the kid said, “Hey, man, I’m sorry,” I sort of believed him. But by the fourth time it happened, I’d stopped believing that it was an innocent mistake. I’d had a silver ballpoint pen I liked that had belonged to my dad. When it disappeared, I honestly didn’t know if I’d lost it or if someone had swiped it. I was really sad about that, sadder than I would have imagined. I kept telling myself that I’d lost a pen, not a person. But I had lost a person—the person who’d given me the pen. Whenever I thought about that, I’d feel awful all over again. So I tried not to dwell on it.
I suppose I should have been honored, because Tyro was such a star. I should have been flattered that this school celebrity had chosen to torment little me. But of course I wasn’t flattered. I was nervous and unhappy and a little—well, more than a little—scared. Because I didn’t know how far things would go, how far Tyro would take it, how crazy he was, and what he had in store for me until I gave up and left school or threatened to jump off the tower.
It was almost like we had a relationship. Practically like we were dating, or conducting some insane romance. When I was in the seventh grade I’d had what I guess you could call a crush on a girl named Anna Simonson. I’d find myself thinking about her when I didn’t think I was thinking about anything at all. I’d wonder if she was thinking about me. At school I was always superconscious of where she was, superaware when I passed her in the hall or on the stairs. In a strange way, it was like that with me and Tyro. I thought about him semiconstantly, and I wondered if he was thinking about new ways to torment me. Thinking about Tyro occupied as much of my spare time as thinking about Anna Simonson had taken up.
Little by little, the bullying escalated. I knew I should been taking some action. I should have told Mom or one of the more sympathetic teachers, or even sucked it up and gone to Dr. Bratwurst. What did I care about being a snitch? I had something to snitch about! There were important things at stake. My life, for example.
Even if Tyro’s dad owned the school and they had to decide between him and me, it was fine with me if they decided to keep him and kick me out on my butt. But I knew that would break my mother’s heart even more than it was already broken. She would see it as a huge defeat, and I would feel like a total loser.
Every s
o often, I’d run into one my old Hillbrook friends, and it was always pretty weird. It felt almost as if they didn’t recognize me, or as if they were trying to remember who exactly I was. Maybe they were trying to figure out if I was the same person they used to know, or if I’d turned into one of the Bullywell snobs. One of the Bullywell bullies.
I wanted to say: Hey, look, it’s me! It’s Bart! We’ve known each other since the first grade! But that would have been way too embarrassing, and besides, I was starting to wonder if maybe I wasn’t the same person. I definitely wasn’t the Bart they used to know. First I’d turned into Miracle Boy, and now I was a Bullywell bully-ee. Whenever I ran into Mike or Ted or Tim or Josh, or worse, a couple of them together, our conversation was so stiff and awkward that I stopped thinking that going back to Hillbrook—that bully-free paradise—would solve all my problems. Maybe you could never go back.
Some of the teasing and bullying was harmless, by which I mean physically painless. Still, it was depressing and annoying. Like, for example, the time when someone—Tyro wouldn’t have stooped to this, he probably got one of his lackeys to do it for him—put dog shit on the door handle of my locker. I knew that something smelled disgusting, but I wasn’t looking hard enough or thinking fast enough. Before I knew it, dog shit was all over my hand, which was bad enough, but also all over the cuff of my blazer, which was even worse. I ran to the bathroom and scrubbed and scrubbed, but the odor clung to me and I couldn’t get rid of it.
In homeroom, Seth said, “Oh, man, what’s the deal? You smell like shit.”
I said, “Well, actually, my puppy had a tiny little accident just before I left the house this morning, and I cleaned up after him and—”
“Right,” said Seth in a tone that made me think that not only did he know the truth, but I wasn’t the first bully-ee at Bullywell to fall victim to the not-exactly-original-or-inspired dog shit–locker trick. Luckily, I had a spare blazer at home, so we could we send this one to the cleaners. I told my mom some story about getting animal waste on my jacket in bio lab.
I felt bad about lying to my mother, but at that point anything seemed better than telling her the truth that would have hurt her, and that would have been so shameful for me. I didn’t want her to think she’d raised the kind of kid who’d be singled out to be picked on by the other kids. The fact was, I kept telling myself, I wasn’t that kind of kid. I was just a kid who’d been unlucky enough to be sent to the wrong school at the wrong time.
By my second week at Bullywell, it was clear that my nickname was going to stick. Every time I walked down the hall, someone would aim lip farts in my direction, and some days I’d hear a whole chorus of them. Everyone called me Fart Strangely, and even the kids who, I could tell, were trying to be halfway nice, would say, “Hey, Fart, I mean Bart.” So that became my second nickname: Fart I Mean Bart. That’s what Tyro called me sometimes. Fart. I. Mean. Bart. He’d say it very slowly, threateningly, as if every word was a promise of something I wasn’t going to like, something dangerous and unpleasant.
Every so often my mom would ask, “Have you made any new friends at school?”
And I would say, “Well, there’s this one kid, Seth. But he lives pretty far away.”
Though Seth and I sat together sometimes on the bus, and we had neighboring seats in homeroom and English, our conversation had never gotten friendly or personal enough for us to exchange addresses. All I knew was that the bus dropped Seth off about fifteen minutes before me. Once my mother said, “What about that boy—what was it, Tycho or Tyrone—who came with us on the school tour? He seemed so friendly and nice. So good-looking, too.”
I felt a kind of funny flutter, almost like an extra heartbeat, when I said, “Yeah, well, he is pretty nice. I guess. But we don’t hang out that much with the older kids.”
I could tell my mother was worried about my not having made new friends, so in a way it was almost helpful when the phone calls started coming. The first couple times I let my mom answer because I was sure the call wasn’t for me. She’d turned to me with a puzzled expression, saying it must have been a wrong number. The caller had hung up.
After that I ran for the phone, saying, “It’s probably for me!” Because you could say it was for me, I knew it was for me, though not in the way people generally understand that phrase: for me. I’d answer and hear someone breathing and sometimes a few giggles or snorts in the background as I said “Hello? Hello?” And I’d hear my own voice coming back at me like a shout echoing down a well.
Eventually I figured out how to make it work for me. Whenever the phone rang, I would answer and listen to the silence for a while, and then I’d press my finger down on the button and pretend to talk, loud enough for my mom to hear. I acted as if I was talking to whoever she imagined my new friends were. It was strange, having these conversations about school and homework and life in general with the dial tone, but it was worth it, because when I came back into the living room after talking to my pretend friends, I could see the worry lines smoothing out of my mother’s face.
Every so often, I would catch myself thinking: As bad as this is, it’s the calm before the storm. I’ll look back on this as the good time. I understood that I was enjoying a temporary reprieve, waiting for the bullying to get worse. I could tell that Tyro and his friends were already getting bored with this low-level harassment, and I sensed that they were figuring out how to take it to the next level. What exactly would they do to me to re-create the success they’d had last year with the kid who threatened to throw himself screaming off the tower?
It was a Saturday, in early November. When I was really little, I used to watch cartoons on TV every Saturday morning with Mom, just the two of us waiting for Dad to wake up, because he liked to sleep in. Years had passed since then, but we’d kept up the habit. Now we watched Japanese anime, and Mom didn’t notice the difference, she didn’t seem to care that it was no longer Inspector Gadget. I think she just liked the ritual of spending that time with me.
It was embarrassing to be thirteen and still watching cartoons with your mom, and I wondered if when I grew up and left home and had a house of my own, Mom would still expect me to come home every Saturday morning. At the same time, it felt good, it was comforting. Though I never would have told anyone, the truth was I really liked snuggling up next to Mom on the couch as the bright flashing images chased each other across the screen.
Pokémon had just started when the phone rang.
“It’s probably for you,” Mom said. “I talked to Gran and Aunt Grace earlier this morning.”
I was already out the living room door. I picked up the phone in the kitchen. Silence. Breathing. In the background, a TV was playing, and I listened, vaguely curious as to whether they were watching the same program we were. I was just about to hang up when I heard a voice—it was Tyro’s voice, he didn’t even try to disguise it—say, “How would you like to die, Fart?”
“Not much,” I said. “Actually, not at all.” Then I hung up the phone and just stood there, staring at the receiver. I didn’t really believe that Tyro was going to kill me. But it was a message, a signal that a new offensive had begun, that the brief truce—or whatever it was—had ended.
Suddenly it crossed my mind: Maybe he did mean to kill me. Oddly enough, I wasn’t all that scared, though I knew that if Tyro and his friends decided to murder me, they’d probably choose some slow and painful torture. The worst part was imagining how my mom would feel after it happened, on top of what had happened to my dad and everything else she’d been through. It made me never want to go to school again. And yet I was afraid that if I faked it and stayed home without being sick, it would be bad luck and undo all the good luck (if you could call it good luck) I’d gotten that September morning by staying home when I was really sick.
I went back into the living room. My mom was glued to the TV watching some skinny Japanese kid ride a snorting dragon into a kung fu–style fight with some kind of demon.
“Who
was that?” asked Mom.
“Oh, just a friend from school,” I said.
“Glad to hear it,” said Mom. “It makes me happy to know that you’re doing so well.” And once again I felt as if I were having that old dream in which someone was about to hurt me and my parents couldn’t save me. But now it was only Mom, and she certainly couldn’t help. She didn’t seem to have the slightest suspicion that I was in danger.
CHAPTER SIX
SOMETIMES YOU HEAR people talk about waiting for the other shoe to drop. And that was what I was doing. Waiting for the other shoe to drop—on my head. I could feel the pressure building as we neared the Thanksgiving vacation. It was as if Tyro and his friends wanted to do something major—something to me—that would make them feel they’d earned the right to kick back with their family and friends and gorge themselves on turkey and all the trimmings.
I was careful, I watched my back, I felt like some tourist in a foreign country full of muggers and pickpockets. I was sure that they would strike the moment I let down my guard. But you can’t stay watchful all the time. You can’t hold your breath forever. Every so often, you have to let go, empty your lungs, and inhale.
One morning, I’d just gotten to school. I was putting my coat away and getting some books from my locker when, in a second, out of nowhere, someone grabbed me in a headlock from behind. Whoever it was held my neck so tightly that I couldn’t turn around and see the person’s face. I couldn’t even tell if there was more than one kid, or how many there might be. I figured there were at least two, because while the first one held my neck, the second punched me in the back, as hard as he could. The punch made me crumple, which I guess was what they wanted. As I felt myself getting smaller, shrinking into a neatly collapsed size, they put a paper bag over my head and began stuffing the shrunk-down version of me into my open locker. Even in the midst of it all I thought: At least it’s not a plastic bag. They’re not trying to suffocate me. They just don’t want me to see them.
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