It was positively weird how everyone was on their best behavior, trying to avoid the usual arguments. And how everyone was treating Mom and me as if we were as fragile as Gran’s shepherd and shepherdess figurines, delicate china statues that, we were always told, would break if we looked at them too hard. Every so often, tears would pop into Gran’s eyes, or one of the aunts would reach in her purse for a Kleenex, and I’d know that they were thinking about Dad, maybe thinking that this was the first Thanksgiving, the first holiday, without him. I half wanted to tell them that Dad might not have been here even if he were still alive. He might have been celebrating with Caroline. But I couldn’t see how that would help. It would only make everything more confusing, and worse for Mom and me.
Even so, it was all good. In fact, I was sort of happy, because after all those days of feeling despised and excluded at Bullywell, it was great to be around people who knew me, who’d known me since I was born. And who liked me—well, actually, they loved me. I concentrated really hard, as if my brain were a video camera that could somehow record everything that my family was saying and doing. Then I could play the tape back to myself during the next bad time at Bullywell, which, I was pretty sure, would begin the minute school started again. I tried not to think about Bullywell, and just to enjoy the moment. And it would have been one hundred percent perfect if I hadn’t noticed that Mom kept glancing nervously toward the door.
Great, I thought. She’s waiting for Bern to arrive.
Every time Mom looked toward the door, everyone else did, too. I could tell they were wondering who this guy, this Bern, was, wondering whether he was the replacement husband, the replacement dad, and wondering whether it wasn’t a little soon after the real dad had been killed to start thinking about a replacement.
Finally the doorbell rang. I took one look at the guy who walked in, and I thought: Mom must be really desperate or else her taste has gone drastically downhill since Dad. Dad had been confident and good-looking, but Bern looked like the nerds I rode to school with on the day-student bus. He wore glasses, and he was bald but for a little tuft of fluffy hair growing out of the top of his forehead. Not only did he have no chin but he was so chinless that the bottom of his face seemed to be attached directly to his neck.
When Mom greeted him and introduced him to all the relatives, he looked up only briefly, as if he were afraid that any contact with another human being might interrupt whatever serious communication he was having with his own feet. When Mom introduced him to me, he checked me out for a second or two, not long or carefully enough for me to even imagine that he was looking over a kid who might be a part of his future. So, in a way, I could begin to take it easy. This certainly wasn’t my future dad. It occurred to me that Mom was actually doing what she’d said—being kind to a sad guy who would otherwise have spent Thanksgiving all alone. And I could tell that Gran and the aunts and uncles were coming to the same conclusion at the same time, so everyone could just relax around the whole Bern question.
Even so, there was something about Bern’s presence—maybe it was the fact of his being a stranger in a house where everyone else was family—that made me nervous. And I had the definite feeling that Bern had the same effect on everyone, even my youngest cousins. We were all jumping out of our skins. Everyone shook hands awkwardly except for Gran, who threw her arms around Bern and kissed him on both cheeks, and then for some reason everyone laughed and for a few moments the mood lightened.
In a way, I thought, there was something good about Bern’s having been invited. He was sort of a distraction. Without this creepy stranger here for us to focus on, we might have been even more aware of—even sadder about—Dad’s absence. And maybe Mom had known that, too.
Still, something about Bern really bothered me, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. He was given the guest-of-honor seat next to Gran. He mumbled please and thank you when the dishes were passed his way. When Uncle Ernie carved the turkey, Bern said, “Only a little white meat for me, please.”
Everyone looked at everyone else. Only a little white meat, please?
In fact, Bern took only small portions of everything—which was so totally un-Thanksgivinglike, he could have been celebrating a different holiday than the rest of us. As we loaded our plates and tucked into our meal, Bern lowered his head so near his food that he hardly had to use a fork to lift that scrap of white meat to his mouth. He could have just scarfed it up directly off the dish.
Gran and a couple of the aunts tried to strike up conversations with him. “So, Bern, I hear you work with Corinne.” “How long have you worked with Corinne, Bern?” How long could Bern have worked with Corinne? Most everyone who used to work with Corinne before September was dead. Anyway, Old Bern could only spare one syllable at a time—“Yes, two weeks”—lest anything get in the way of the teensy, pleasureless bites he was taking, one after another; lest anything interrupt his chewing very slowly and methodically, as if he were scared of choking. Bern took a morsel of stuffing, a dab of potatoes, a mini-taste of Gran’s meatballs and lasagna. And then, amazingly, Bern opened his mouth and spoke.
“What was that?” asked Uncle Dan.
Mumble mumble mumble.
“Excuse me?” said Aunt Barb.
Bern said, “Do you have any ketchup?”
Ketchup? At Thanksgiving? Hadn’t this guy ever heard of gravy and cranberry sauce? But what the hell, Bern was the guest. Mom started to get up, but Aunt Grace practically shoved her back into her chair, and returned from the kitchen with a bottle of ketchup, all crusted over as if it had been in the refrigerator for about thirty years. Bern shook it and shook it and then a watery stream emerged. It looked as if someone had been bleeding onto his turkey. And all at once I had the shameful desire to do to Bern what Tyro had done to me, that first day at Bullywell, to shake ketchup all over his food until his plate was a sea of red.
All at once, I knew what bothered me so much about Bern. He didn’t just remind me of the geeks I rode to school with. He reminded me of me. He reminded me of me at school, the person I became as soon as I walked in the front door of Bullywell Prep. No one knew him, no one liked him, no one knew anything about him, and at the end of the day, no one would.
I knew that should have made me feel sympathy for Bern, who was suffering, like me. But the truth was, it made me hate him. It made me wish he would just get up and leave Gran’s house immediately. So I guessed I wasn’t becoming the kind of person Dr. Bratwurst wanted us to become—full of compassion and heart. Whatever was happening to me at school seemed to be hardening my heart instead of softening it, shrinking it instead of making it larger. I couldn’t stop thinking about that, couldn’t stop feeling my heart clench and grow smaller inside me. And somehow that made me sadder than anything else. I had changed, I had really changed. And not for the better.
Then I thought of Tyro, and I wondered about his Thanksgiving. I imagined silver and fine china and a gleaming mahogany table surrounded by super-uptight, superrich relatives not talking to each other except to say, Pass the canned peas, Pass the skim milk, Pass the white bread. Maybe he had a rotten family, maybe that was why he was so mean to me. There had to be some explanation. But I didn’t know that for sure. All I knew was that his dad had tons of money. Maybe his family was wealthy and loving and warm, maybe he tortured me for me no reason except that he liked the feeling of making other people miserable, and he could do it and could get away with it and not have to pay the price.
Less than five minutes after the coffee cups were cleared, Bern thanked everyone and excused himself and left. It seemed to me that everyone heaved a huge sigh of relief.
“What a nice young man,” said Gran.
“What a tragedy,” said Aunt Faye, “to lose your wife like that and not have kids or anyone to spend the holidays with.” And then everyone fell silent, and I knew they were all thinking of what had happened to Mom and me, though of course they didn’t know the true story, and they probably never would.
My cousin Brian sidled up to me and asked in a whisper if I wanted to step outside and smoke some weed, but I said, No, thank you, I’m fine. The storm cloud of Bern had gathered and passed. Things were cool. And for the moment, I was fine.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SCHOOL STARTED AGAIN, and now we were in that narrow window of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas through which you can see a faint ray of light at the end of the tunnel. It made me think of those winter afternoons when it suddenly gets dark and you’re walking home alone and you’re scared and you first see your house, and maybe your mom at the window. All I had to do was survive for a couple of weeks, and then school would let out for the long vacation.
Bullywell Christmas break was about twice as long as the public school’s, I guess so all the Bullywell families could jet off to their magnificent ski lodges in Switzerland and Aspen. When I was still in public school, kids used to say that the insanely long winter break was the only reason why anyone might ever want to go to Bullywell. But now, knowing what I knew, I wouldn’t have gone there if vacation had lasted the rest of the year. Anyway, Mom and I weren’t planning to go anywhere for Christmas.
By the time we all got back to school after Thanksgiving, Dr. Bratwurst had hired a couple of hall monitors to keep on eye on the bullying and “harassment” incidents, to keep things under control. But something about the guys he’d found wasn’t exactly reassuring. They looked like secret-service men who’d been fired for letting the important official they were protecting get assassinated, and they didn’t seem any too overjoyed about their demotion. They still dressed like spies or CIA ops, they wore dark glasses even indoors and those creepy short haircuts. In their dark blue blazers they looked like guys who might have graduated at the bottom of their class at Bullywell, and wound up back at their old school. They’d probably failed everything and still gotten an A plus in Bullying 101, the subject Bullywell taught best. They’d be more likely to join the bully than to stick up for the kid getting beaten up.
But even that was okay, because I seemed to have lucked into another one of those temporary reprieves. Tyro hardly even gave me a second glance when we passed in the hall. He seemed not to recognize me. Likewise, his friends acted like they’d never met me before. Maybe they’d taken Dr. Bratwurst’s warning seriously, and they were worried about being caught and maybe (with the exception of Tyro, of course) expelled. But I was pretty sure I hadn’t gotten that lucky. It was more likely that they’d retreated once again to regroup and come up with some plan to torture me in a way that was worse than anything they’d done before, to do something really horrible for which they couldn’t get caught. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. And then more nothing happened. Everything felt suspended, underwater, waiting.
One morning, between English class and social studies, I was walking down the hall, and I got a text message. I never got calls in school, we weren’t allowed to. Just having your phone ring in class—even if you didn’t take the call—meant automatic detention.
But that morning, for some reason, I’d left the phone on. I didn’t even look at the number to see who was calling. I assumed it was Mom. These days, she was the only person who ever called me on my cell. Sometimes she’d just text-message me to say, “Hi, it’s me, I love you.”
And that’s what it said, “Hi, it’s me.” I smiled, thinking of Mom. And it made me a little less nervous as I walked down a hall crowded with kids who seemed not to see me and into a class with a teacher who didn’t seem to like me much, either.
A few seconds later, the phone vibrated again. And the message said, “It’s hot.” Maybe it wasn’t Mom. Mom never talked about the weather. She said it was boring to talk about the weather. And now that I thought about it, Mom never text-messaged me about anything except to say that she loved me.
Still, the next time the phone buzzed, I checked the message.
Okay, here’s the truth. It’s embarrassing, but there’s no other way to explain why I kept checking the phone. The fact was, I wouldn’t have paid it any attention if I hadn’t just read an article in the newspaper about how they’d recently discovered some new way to download porn sites onto your phone. So I was sort of wondering if they’d found out my number, and if this was a test run. What else could “It’s hot” mean?
A few seconds passed. The phone vibrated again. The letters spelled out, “It’s very hot.” Okay, fine, I’d stay with it long enough to see where all this was going. I had a few minutes before class. Another message came in. All right, let’s give this one last chance. Then I had to bounce.
This time the message was longer, and I watched the letters spell out: “It’s hot. It’s very hot. It’s burning hot. I’m burning up. Love, Dad.”
It took me a weirdly long time to understand what I was reading. And the strangest thing was that, for a few minutes, I believed it. I thought it really was a message from Dad, because Dad used to text-message me all the time. Even after he moved in with Caroline, he’d still send messages telling me he loved me and asking how I was doing, but mostly I didn’t answer, because I was so mad at him for leaving us. That’s what I thought about now, how guilty I felt for not having answered all those messages when now I’d never have the chance to message him back and ask how he was doing and when he was coming home. And to tell him I loved him, too.
Everything seemed be happening in slow motion. So slow that it seemed to take me about an hour to realize that of course it wasn’t Dad. It couldn’t have been Dad. My dad was dead. Someone wanted me to feel as bad as I could, though of course whoever it was couldn’t know how bad I felt. No one could imagine. Then it all came pouring in on me at once: missing Dad and being in this terrible place where someone—for no reason, and not because of anything I could have done to him—someone wanted me to be in as much pain as it was possible to feel and still be walking and talking.
And then finally it was too much, way too much. I couldn’t take any more. I looked around, took a quick left turn, bypassed the social studies classroom, and headed for the boys’ bathroom. And maybe there really were miracles, because by some miracle no one was in there to see me or hear me. I went into one of the stalls and burst into heaving, choking sobs. I was crying for myself, and for Dad, and for everything I’d lost, and for how lonely and scared I was, and how I couldn’t tell anyone, and how no one could help me. Or even understand.
I washed my face. I pulled it together. But I never went to social studies class. I thought: If anyone asks, I’ll tell them I had some kind of stomach attack. Maybe I should go to the nurse and stay there until school lets out. I could fake it, I knew. By now my face was all streaked and swollen from crying. I could tell the nurse that the stomach cramps were so bad they’d made me cry.
I waited in the bathroom, all alone, feeling sorrier and sorrier for myself. But the thing is, even at the worst times, there’s only so long you can pity yourself. And after a while, my sadness began to change. It was almost if someone had lit a fire under all that grief, and it was heating up, simmering, and then boiling over into anger.
Rage, actually. What I felt was rage, pure rage. I wanted to hurt someone, I wanted to kill someone, I wanted revenge for everything that had been done to me. I would have liked to get the guys who flew into the towers, but they were already dead, so I’d take the nearest substitutes: Tyro Bergen and his friends. They’d do fine to take revenge on. What the bullies were doing to me was as pointless and heartless and cruel as flying an airplane into a building and killing all those innocent people.
I knew I couldn’t kill Tyro and the others, even if I’d wanted to
. I couldn’t even beat them up. I was way outnumbered. I had no allies, no backup. Besides, no matter how mad I was, I knew I could never kill anyone, ever. I had to think of something else.
And then I did.
I hid in the bathroom till lunch period, when everyone was occupied, busy waiting on the lunch line and chewing and swallowing and yelling and pouring ketchup all over some other kid’s burger. Then I sneaked outside. I was a little worried that the secret-service hall monitors might catch me, but they must have taken a lunch break, too. They weren’t anywhere around. I went down the stairs and out the door to the parking lot. And now I really was lucky. The gods—and maybe there were gods of justice, or at least revenge—must have been on my side, because the parking lot was empty.
I recognized Tyro’s car right away. The big white Escalade stood out from the Toyotas and Hondas the teachers drove, as if it belonged to a whole different species. Even Dr. Bratwurst’s Yukon looked puny beside it.
For a few minutes I stood there, motionless, in front of Tyro’s Escalade. I had to get over the eerie feeling that the headlights and the grille were looking at me, that they somehow knew what I was going to do. I felt like myself and not myself. Like someone else. Like an actor in a movie. I even knew the name of the film: Miracle Boy’s Revenge. And the way I knew what do next was that I’d seen it in so many films.
I took my house keys out of my pocket and dragged them along the side of the car door, scratching off some paint. The first time, I was hesitant, almost gentle. The groove didn’t go very deep, not because I was afraid to dig in, but because some part of me didn’t believe that it would actually work.
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