I was having what I’d guess you’d call an out-of-body experience, because I wasn’t worrying about my predicament, I wasn’t even fully conscious of what they were doing to me. Instead I was thinking about this jack-in-the-box I used to have when I was a little kid. You turned a handle and a tune played: “All around the mulberry bush the monkey chased the weasel.” My dad used to sing it to me, that’s how I knew what the lyrics were. And when it got to the part about “pop goes the weasel,” this weird clown would jump out of the box. I’d had it for a long time, since I was a baby. At first I’d been scared of the clown, and I’d cried when it jumped out.
Part of me was aware of the kids banging my head against the locker as they tried to stuff me inside, bending my knees and my elbows so I’d fit. And meanwhile I was thinking how I used to imagine that the jack-in-the-box clown was my friend. I even made up a name for him. I called him Acky-Acky. And after he’d jumped out, and I had to stuff him back into the box, I’d say, “Sorry, Acky-Acky. I hope this doesn’t hurt too much, but you’ve got to go to sleep now. Rest in your comfy little box, and soon I’ll play the song again so you can jump out and we’ll have fun.”
They forced me to my knees and turned me into a sort of package that they could lift and prod and stuff so that I could fit into the locker. And I was thinking about how Acky-Acky finally broke. Some spring must have busted. Because when the song got to the “pop goes the weasel” part, Acky-Acky didn’t jump out. I played it over and over, and finally I pried the top loose so I could get Acky-Acky out, so I could set him free….
By now I’d somehow fit into the locker, and I heard myself, as if from a distance, saying, “Please don’t close the door, please don’t close the door, I don’t want to be shut up in here, in the dark….”
But even as I was saying this, I was thinking about how when I pried the lid off, I had to reach in and pull Acky-Acky out of his box, and he just hung there limply, hanging over the side of his little house. It was as if the life had gone out of him. My friend was gone. Acky-Acky was the first thing I knew that had ever died. I cried. Then I stuffed him back in one last time and closed the lid and said a little prayer over him. I put the toy away, and someone—probably Mom—must have thrown it out, because I never saw it again.
I’d never thought about it until now, when I felt that Acky-Acky was coming back to be with me, to help me. Because now I was Acky-Acky. Just like him I’d been stuffed into a space that was way too small. The difference was that no one was telling me to be comfy, rest, go to sleep, no one was promising to play the weasel song and pop me out again. I thought about Acky-Acky and I felt sorry for every time I’d returned him to his dark little cell, and then somebody slammed the locker door, and I was all alone, in the dark. Inside.
It was silent and almost completely black. Two razor-thin stripes of light leaked in through the slots in the metal door. The guys, whoever they were, had gone away. Or so I thought. But I was wrong. Because after a few minutes, I heard someone speaking through the grate.
Tyro said, “If you tell anyone who did this, I promise—no, I swear—we’ll kill you.”
And then they were finally gone. I waited for a few minutes, and then—when I knew I couldn’t stand the dark and the closed-in, suffocating feeling one more second—I began to bang on the locker door. I banged and shouted for a very long time. Maybe everyone was in class. No one heard me, or if they did, they pretended not to. Suddenly I got really scared. Maybe there had been a bomb scare or something—like there had been a few times in public school—and everyone had left the building. I even worried that they’d all gone home for the day and I would be stuck there all night, though I knew that wasn’t possible. Only a few minutes had passed since school started, and it was still early morning. Still, I kept banging and banging and calling out, “Help, help!” though it was highly embarrassing to be calling out like that. It felt like one of those dreams in which you try to run or yell and you can’t move, or maybe you can move your mouth, but no sound comes out, and no one hears you.
Finally I heard voices outside the locker. I prayed that it wasn’t Tyro and his friends coming back to see if I’d suffocated yet, or gone crazy. To see if their attempted murder or whatever had succeeded.
Someone called out, “What’s your combination number?” And amazingly, I remembered. I could tell that someone was fiddling with the lock, and after a while the lock clicked open.
Light and air flooded in. It took several minutes for my eyes to adjust to the dazzle. Then I saw the school security guard, and behind him a group of teachers, and then Dr. Bratwurst’s big face, looking way more frightened even than I probably looked, as he asked, “Are you all right? Are you all right?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m fine. I don’t know what happened.”
That’s what I kept saying. I didn’t know what happened. Someone grabbed me from behind and hit me and stuffed me into the locker before I could see who it was. I didn’t mention the warning that Tyro had whispered through the slots. No one asked if anyone had said anything to me once I was locked inside. Anyway, there had been something in his voice that made me half—well, a quarter—believe him when he said they’d kill me if I told.
First they had the nurse check me over and write up a detailed report, just in case I decided to sue the school or something. But there was nothing much for her to write. No bones were broken, no teeth lost. I did get a few ugly bruises, but they didn’t come out until the next day, and by then I certainly wasn’t about to go back to the nurse and tell her to add that to the report.
After the nurse got through with me, Dr. Bratwurst called me into his office. He asked if anything like that had happened to me before. I said no, and it wasn’t exactly a lie. Some things had happened, but nothing quite like that. It was a strange conversation, because everything was punctuated by long silences, during which I looked over at his computer, at the screen saver of tropical fish gliding back and forth in the turquoise ocean.
By this time, I’d calmed down enough to wonder why Dr. Bratwurst was making such a big deal about this. After all, Bullyville was famous for this sort of thing. Compared to some kid nearly jumping off the tower, my being stuffed in a locker didn’t seem so bad. But then I began to wonder if his concern had something to do with the way it would look if it got out—let’s say, if me or my mom happened to tell a reporter—that Miracle Boy was being tortured by his new friends at Baileywell Prep.
After a lot of throat-clearing and hesitation, Dr. Bratwurst suggested that my mom might want to come in for a conference, so he could personally assure her that this wouldn’t happen again.
I said, “Well, actually, no, she probably doesn’t.”
I asked him if we could please not bother her with this, because she’d been through so much lately. I was basically playing the Dad card, and it worked. When Dr. Bratwurst looked at me, he seemed to be on the edge of tears. He also seemed relieved when he said, “Fine, then, let’s spare your mother the pain of dealing with this little…incident. I’m sure it’s a one-time occurrence and that it won’t be repeated.”
I said, “I certainly hope so.”
Dr. Bratwurst said, “My sense is that all this will probably end right here.”
I said, “I hope that, too.”
But of course it didn’t.
A few days before Thanksgiving, Dr. Bratwurst announced that the traditional holiday assembly was canceled, so we could forget about the Thanksgiving hymns we’d been practicing in music class for weeks. No “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” No “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. Ex—that is, Extra Credit—took it really hard, because he’d written a really long, skin-crawlingly creepy poem called “The Gifts of the Pilgrims” that Mrs. Day had arranged for him to read aloud to the whole school.
Instead of all that fun entertainment, Dr. Bratwurst walked solemnly up to the podium. As the portrait of yet another old geezer—in this case, Governor Bailey, the founder of Bullywell and supposedly th
e discoverer of Bailey Mountain—peered down over his shoulder, Dr. Bratwurst took off his glasses as if he meant to gaze deeply into all our eyes—all our souls—at once. He gave his tie a meaningful tweak and said, “It has recently come to my attention that there have been incidents of what I suppose is called hazing or…bullying…at Baileywell.”
It had recently come to his attention? Was he the only person on the planet that didn’t know the school was called Bullywell? Meanwhile, I couldn’t help noticing that he’d said “incidents.” Plural.
“And it grieves me,” he said. “It grieves me more deeply than I can tell you, gentlemen. Because our mission here is to turn out not just students with a grasp of the academic disciplines, not just leaders who will take the reigns of tomorrow’s society in hand, not just men who can raise families and sustain friendships and do good in the world. Not just men like that but also…compassionate, caring human beings. Men with sympathy for the underdog, big men who can see things from the little guy’s point of view. And to bully a fellow creature, to pick on someone weaker and smaller than you are…”
I didn’t exactly like the “weaker and smaller part,” but there was nothing I could do about it, and besides, Dr. Bratwurst meant well, even though his well-meaning little speech was not going to make the tiniest bit of difference. Anyway, I was only half listening to what Dr. Bratwurst was saying because half of me—maybe more than half of me—was thinking about Tyro, wondering where he was sitting. As much as I would have liked to, I was afraid to turn around and look for him. I was afraid that his eyes might meet mine by accident—and then what would I do? I wondered what he was thinking, if he thought I’d told Dr. Bratwurst that he and his friends were responsible for my having been shut up in the locker.
Was Tyro dreaming up some cruel way to kill me, as he’d threatened, for telling? I reminded myself that this wasn’t my fault. It was Tyro’s fault, he’d started it. And beyond that, it was the fault of the terrorists who’d flown into the building and killed my dad and set off the chain of events that was responsible for my having wound up at this school. But that just made my present situation seem even more like Tyro’s fault. To pick on someone like me, after what had happened to me, made it seem as if he couldn’t possibly have a heart.
Or maybe I just thought that because Dr. Bratwurst kept saying “heart.” “Not just intellect but heart,” he said, “not just courage but heart, not just originality but heart. That’s the kind of young men we want Baileywell to produce. Men with heart. And that’s what I want you think about. Over this break, when you’re with your family and your loved ones, while you’re eating your turkey dinner and, more important, as you’re giving thanks for all that you have and for how much more fortunate we are than so many others. I want you to think about heart, and about how to make your heart the very center of your being, your ultimate authority, your commander in chief.”
At some point during all of this I got sort of stuck on the idea of turkey hearts—and that little package of disgusting innards that, one Thanksgiving, Mom forgot to take out of the bird. It pretty much ruined the dinner, and Dad got really mad. The thought was distracting, and it was keeping me from following where Dr. Bratwurst was taking this.
“On a more practical note,” he was saying, “we’re not—not yet—going to ask the students responsible for this unforgivable behavior to turn themselves in. But let me tell you, let me assure you…no, let me warn you, that the entire staff and faculty and administration of Baileywell and I myself will be, from now on, so to speak, on high alert. Red alert. Any further incident of this kind will be dealt with promptly and punished with the utmost severity. And with zero tolerance.”
I sort of liked the sound of that until I remembered what Seth had said about Tyro’s father more or less owning the school, so that they wouldn’t punish him no matter what he did.
“All right, then Baileywellers,” said Dr. Bratwurst. “Have a happy, healthy holiday.”
The whole student body began to applaud, and the applause got louder and louder until it became a kind of roar. Then one person got up, and another, and then everyone rose and exploded out of the auditorium and into the halls and out of the building and into the arms of their happy, healthy, rich, intact two-parent families.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS GREAT TO BE out of school for a few days, to be able to get up in the morning without being afraid that by the end of the day I would be stuffed in my locker or tortured or terrorized or dead. On the other hand, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to Thanksgiving.
As usual, we were having dinner at Gran’s house, with all the aunts and uncles and cousins. I’d always liked holidays with my mom’s family. It was sort of like spending time with a bunch of very talkative, affectionate octopuses. Arms and hands everywhere, everyone kissing and hugging, everyone eating and laughing and talking with their hands and reaching out to touch you when they wanted to make some kind of point that you could never hear anyway, because everyone was talking at once.
I also liked the fact that even though everyone got older—especially me and my cousins—nothing ever changed. Sooner or later, Aunt Grace, who talked in that strange British accent, always got into some kind of argument with Aunt Barb. Aunt Faye’s husband, Joe, always drank too much wine and said something really stupid, and Aunt Barb’s husband always insisted on watching the football game on TV and fell asleep in front of it. Then someone waded into the fight between whatever aunts were arguing until finally Gran put her hands over her ears and said, Stop, stop, she couldn’t stand it anymore, and everyone stopped.
Plus my cousins were fun: The little ones were cute and the older ones always had some trick up their sleeves. Once, at Christmas, when I was really small, my cousin Steve took me outside and gave me a cigarette to smoke and I came back inside and vomited all over Gran’s table. And once, when I wasn’t much older than that, my cousin Suzanne painted my fingernails purple, and everyone laughed, except for my uncle Ernie, who for some reason bopped my gay cousin Billy—who’d had nothing to with it—on the side of the head.
But this year, when everything else was going so terribly wrong, it made sense that not even Thanksgiving could come without its own ready-made problem looming on the horizon.
About two weeks before the holiday, Mom informed me that she was inviting a guest to Gran’s Thanksgiving. I didn’t like the way she said “guest.”
“Who?” I asked.
“A guy from work.” I liked the way she said “guy from work” even less than I’d liked “guest.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Bernie,” she said.
“You’re inviting a guy named Bernie? Bernie?” It was a dorky name, but obviously the name wasn’t what was bothering me
“Actually, everyone calls him Bern,” said Mom, which made me feel worse. Mom hadn’t been at her new job all that long, and she already knew this dork well enough to be calling him Bern? It was all I could do not to make a really vicious, stupid joke and say something mean and hurtful, like “Burn? That’s what happened to Dad, isn’t it?”
That’s how freaked I was. Because I was suddenly afraid that this Bern was Mom’s new boyfriend or maybe tryout boyfriend or wannabe boyfriend, and it didn’t seem right. Dad had only been dead for two months. But if you counted the six months before that, I mean the six months since he’d left us, and if you factored in Caroline, well, that changed the equation, too. I didn’t care. I didn’t want Mom to have a boyfriend. I couldn’t handle any more changes.
I didn’t know what to say, or if I had a right to say anything at all. But what I couldn’t help saying was, “Is Bern your new boyfriend or something?”
“It’s not like that, sweetie,” said Mom. “It’s not like that at all. Bern’s wife died this summer. Of cancer. He has no kids, his family lives in California, and he has no one to spend Thanksgiving with. It just seemed like a kind thing to do. A simple good deed. And you know, something about what hap
pened to us, and what happened to all those families…it just makes you want to be extra caring and extra kind to people.”
I stared at Mom. It wasn’t like her to say things like “extra caring” and “extra kind”; it seemed like just one more sign of how much she’d changed. Well, of course she’d changed. I’d changed, too. The whole world had changed. And it did make you want to be a nicer, extra kind person. I just couldn’t help wondering why it didn’t have that same effect on Tyro.
“All right,” I said. “Fine. Go ahead. Invite this Bern dude if you absolutely have to.” Meanwhile I was thinking: Definitely the tryout boyfriend. Mom’s trying him out on me and the rest of the family. Go ahead and ruin Thanksgiving, Mom. Who cared? This Thanksgiving was pretty much ruined in advance, what with all we’d gone through, and everything that had happened, and the fact that not just us but everyone in the country seemed to be still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I loved the feeling of walking into Gran’s house on Thanksgiving. It was always warm, too warm, and it always smelled awesome. It smelled like turkey, of course, but mixed with the other dishes: pasta and meatballs, eggplant parmesan, fried calamari—all sorts of delicious food that Gran could never get through her head weren’t part of your typical basic American Thanksgiving.
We were a little late. Mom was bringing her special Brussels sprouts and chestnut casserole and a green salad, and we were halfway to Gran’s when she remembered she’d forgotten the vinaigrette, and we had to go all the way home and get it. So most of the family was already there, and everyone swarmed all over us, hugging and kissing us, telling me how much I’d grown, telling Mom how pretty she looked. In other words, the usual.
But this year I couldn’t help thinking that they were hugging and kissing me twice as much, or maybe the hugs were just lasting twice as long, because I was the poor pitiful orphan whose dad had been killed, and also the Miracle Boy who had saved their beloved daughter and sister and sister-in-law and aunt—that is, Mom—from the same terrible fate.
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