It worked, all right. There was a thin little scratch where there hadn’t been a scratch before. I stood back. I liked the way it looked. I liked it so much that I did it again. This time I made another scratch, deeper and longer. I came at it from a different angle, and with the third scratch I made an X, like spindly telephone wires crossing the snowy field of the white car.
It was fun, in a way. I liked it. I knew it wasn’t a great thing to do. A compassionate thing to do. But I enjoyed every scratch I made. I went around to the front of the car, and I felt like a painter who’s just gotten a huge new canvas. Okay, let’s see what I could accomplish here. I had to stretch and lean way over for this one, but I made a deep, hard, jagged groove all the way across the hood. Then another and another, then a sort of zigzag.
I kept looking over my shoulder. I was still expecting to get caught. My heart kept skipping beats. But then I stopped worrying about that. And after a while I began to feel, inside my chest, a whole different kind of heartbeat. Musical and kind of trippy, as if a dancer deep inside me were doing a fast, superjoyous salsa.
Still, my little art project didn’t feel finished. So I began to write. I wrote every curse word, every filthy disgusting word I’d ever said, plus some I’d heard and never used, and some I seemed to be making up on the spot. I wrote Tyro’s name again and again, so no one would imagine that this was an accident, or that I’d picked the car at random, or that this had been done by one of those ecoterrorists who burn down housing developments and chain themselves to redwoods and attack monster gas-guzzling-pig SUVs. I knew why I was doing this: because of what Tyro had done to me since I’d started at Bullywell, and mostly because of the text message he’d just sent me, supposedly from Dad. Because he’d taken what had happened to my father and turned it into a sick, cruel joke. I was doing this—trying to make him sad and miserable—because of how sad and miserable he’d made me feel.
Thinking about my dad suggested the finishing touch, the final flourish. I started to write “Tyro” one last time, and then I stopped after the first T and wrote “Terrorist” instead. I wrote “Tyro the Terrorist,” and then I wrote it again.
The more I wrote it, the more brilliant it seemed. Tyro wanted me to feel frightened, just like the guys who’d flown into the towers had wanted us to walk around in terror. The size and scale of the damage and loss didn’t seem to matter so much as the reason they did it: to hurt people, to send a message, to spread fear—just because they could.
It was cold outside, but the temperature didn’t bother me. The steam my breath was making seemed to be rising from the car, like some ghostly smoke that was part of the magic trick I was doing. It looked so good, I was so proud, it was such a statement. I stepped back to admire my work. It was excellent, but it wasn’t genius, it wasn’t enough. I still had that boiling feeling inside me.
I bent down and picked up a chunk of cement that had come loose from the pavement. I raised it over my head and threw it through Tyro’s windshield. It was a beautiful sight to see, how the window didn’t exactly shatter, and it was beautiful to watch, how slowly it all happened. The glass looked as if it was melting, softening, then sinking in. The cement block disappeared, and in its place appeared a jagged hole surrounded by a huge, fantastic cobweb.
I stepped back again, thrilled with my work. I was about to call it a day and head back into school.
Just then, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and saw the sweating face of Dr. Bratwurst, a few inches from mine. Behind him stood the secret-service hall monitors awaiting his orders to cuff me and throw me into a dungeon in the bowels of Bullywell, from which I would never emerge to see the light of day again.
I didn’t care that they’d caught me. Let them do whatever they wanted. I was proud I’d trashed Tyro’s car. I’d fought back. I’d done something. I’d gotten revenge for the crimes that Tyro and his fellow terrorists had committed.
CHAPTER NINE
NEEDLESS TO SAY, I didn’t get thrown into a dungeon. I was sent home early from school. I got my own private bus ride, and—I couldn’t believe my good luck!—I was given the next day off. I would have been totally happy, except that I knew: This time there wasn’t a chance that I would be able to keep Mom out of the loop.
Dr. Bratwurst called that night and arranged a conference for the next morning. The meeting would include me and Mom, Tyro, his parents, and whoever else wanted to get in on the action.
For all I cared, they could sell tickets. Invite the entire school. I was pretty sure I was out of Bullywell. Bullywell and I were so completely over. If I was sorry at all, which I mostly wasn’t, it was only because of what this might mean to Mom.
I thought I should tell her the whole truth before she had to hear it in Bratwurst’s office. So that night, before dinner, we sat down in the living room, and, as calmly as I could, I told her everything. The ketchup, the isolation, the phone calls, every “accidental” little push and shove, and of course the locker incident. And finally the text message, and how it had sent me over the edge.
I’d been wondering how angry Mom would be about Tyro’s Escalade. Because by the time I’d calmed down some, what I’d done seemed—even to me—pretty bad. But when I told her the story, all she kept saying was, “Why didn’t you tell me? Sweetheart, why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t I see this?” And then she cried, which was the worst part. “How could I not have known?” she said. “What was I thinking, sending you to that place?”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “You wanted me to go to a good school. You didn’t know how bad it was because I didn’t tell you. Plus, if you want to get technical, I lied. I kept saying everything was fine.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Mom said.
I didn’t know how to begin to explain. All I could say was, “I don’t know. I didn’t want you to be unhappy. I kept thinking things would get better. I kept hoping the bullying stuff would stop by itself.”
My mom cried a little more, then snuffled and wiped her tears. And I knew that she was okay when she said, “If they give us any trouble about their damn Escalade, we’ll hire a lawyer. We’ll sue them. We’ll tell all the newspapers. Let’s see what happens when people find out about that text message he sent you.”
Then Mom went into the kitchen and cooked the best pot roast she’d ever made. And only later did I think how totally Mom-like it was of her not to say what I already knew perfectly well and didn’t need her to say: that trashing somebody’s sixty-thousand-dollar car was not exactly the smartest, most mature, most sensible way to deal with the adjustment problems I’d been having at school. She knew that. I knew that. She knew that I knew that. That lesson was already learned. The only thing left was to find out what the consequences would be and what it was going to cost us.
Mom took the Friday of the meeting off from work, so at least I didn’t have to ride the loser-day-student bus, which was an instant improvement. Everything was better. Mom was with me. We breezed up the stairs and into school. I’d never been happier to walk into Bullywell. In my joy at having Mom there, at feeling protected and safe, and at finally having the truth come out, I’d practically forgotten that the reason for this meeting was my having messed up a kid’s top-of-the-line, practically brand-new Cadillac.
Dr. Bratwurst came out of his office and shook Mom’s hand and welcomed her to the school and mumbled something about how sorry he was to have to see her again under such unfortunate circumstances. I’d always loved Mom, obviously, but I’d never loved her quite so much as when she tore right into Dr. Bratwurst without giving him the chance to say one more word.
“You knew about this,” she said. “You must have known what was happening to my son. I gather that after the locker incident you knew all about it. And you chose not to call me, not to inform me that my son was in physical danger, that he was being psychologically and physically abused and threatened—”
“Well, at that point it was Bart’s choice,” said Dr. Bratwurst. “He persuaded us no
t to bother you.”
“And you let a thirteen-year-old make a choice like that?” demanded Mom. “And later, when the horror of his father’s death was used to make him suffer, was that my son’s choice, too?”
“What do you mean?” said Dr. Bratwurst.
“Someone sent him a text message and pretended to be his dead father. Someone made a vicious joke about his dad’s death. Someone—”
Dr. Bratwurst actually put his hands over his ears, like a kid. Then he took them down and said, “I didn’t know about that. I mean about the last part. I’d thought this whole…unfortunate situation ended with the locker incident. I thought it was a one-time thing. I had no idea that our students could be so heartless. I’m really and truly sorry.”
I’d wrecked Tyro Bergen’s fancy car, and Mom had Dr. Bratwurst apologizing! I found this so surprising and cool that I had to fight the impulse to slap Mom a giant high five. But that was when I looked past Dr. Bratwurst into his office and remembered that Mom and I weren’t the only ones involved in this so-called unfortunate situation. There was Tyro, between two adults I assumed were his parents, all of them sitting on the edges of their chairs, watching us through the open door and looking none too pleased.
Tyro was glaring straight at me. I guess he imagined that his eyes were creating some kind of force field that could shut me up and keep me from telling the truth. In his dreams, I thought. No matter how long and hard he stared at me, he couldn’t scare me now. Did he really think that I was going to say I’d mutilated his car because I was bored or I didn’t happen to like what was being served for lunch that day? I was going to blow the whistle on him as loud as I could because I knew perfectly well that, after this morning, Bullywell and I were history and there was nothing else he could do to me. I suppose he could have found out where I lived and hunted me down. But I didn’t think that would happen. It was as if Tyro were an evil king whose magic powers evaporated at the borders of Bullywell.
Tyro’s mother was—surprise!—blond and perfect-looking. You’d think she would have been eyeballing me, too, but in fact she floated a watery smile in my direction. Was it because she remembered that I was the Miracle Boy who’d lost his dad and saved his mom’s life and she was trying to communicate that she still felt sorry for me about that? Or did she feel sorry for me because she knew Tyro well enough to know what he could do? I wouldn’t have thought that, except that from the corner of my eye I saw Tyro’s mom reach out to take his hand and Tyro pull it away. His mother looked as if she’d been crying, and I wanted to tell her: Okay, I’m sorry, but come on, it’s only a car. My dad got killed, and I only saw my mother cry a couple of times.
Tyro’s father looked like an older, sleeker Tyro. He was smiling at me, too, a grin that seemed to say, Dude, I’m rich and powerful and confident enough to smile at anyone I choose, regardless of the circumstances, and that person will just have to smile back. In fact, I did find myself smiling back, though I didn’t want to. So there we all were, grinning like monkeys as we got together to discuss a whole semester of vicious bullying and a fully loaded Escalade that was going to need bodywork—a repair job that would cost about the same as a year’s tuition for the other miserable-victim scholarship student who was probably going to replace me.
“Before we go any further,” Dr. Bratwurst said, “we need to clear the air and get everything on the table and find out exactly what we’re dealing with here. So maybe we can cut to the chase and hear from Bart what made him want to do so much damage to Tyro’s vehicle. The whole story, Bart. If you will.”
Dr. Bratwurst knew part of it, the locker part, already. And now he’d heard about the text message. But if he wanted to hear the whole story, I was going to have to start at the beginning and—just as I’d done with Mom—work my way from the ketchup stunt to the fake text message from Dad. When I got to that last part, I heard Tyro’s mom gasp. What was worse was that I could tell that Mom was trying not to cry. I wished that wasn’t happening. I mean, I’d already told her! More than anything, I didn’t want her to cry. Not then, not there. So instead of going on and on about how painful it was to get the phony message, I said, “Well, I guess that’s all.”
“My God,” said Tyro’s mom. “That’s enough.”
“What about you, Tyro?” said Dr. Bratwurst. “What’s your version of the story.”
“I don’t know,” said Tyro. “We were just kidding around. Just having fun or something. I guess it kind of got out of hand. And I’m sorry. I’m really really really sorry.”
One “really” would have been enough. Three was way over the top. You could tell that no one in the room believed him, not even his own mom. His dad folded his hands and was working his knuckles as if his fingers had suddenly gotten stiff. There was a long silence, which Dr. Bratwurst broke by saying:
“Part of what’s so tragic about this is that it was Mr. and Mrs. Bergen, two of the most loyal and supportive members of our board, who first saw the newspaper piece about Bart. That was during the days when we were all asking ourselves, What can we possibly do to help? And it was the Bergens who generously provided the endowment that has enabled Bart to attend Baileywell.”
“Oh, really? I didn’t know that,” said Mom. But she didn’t seem all that interested.
“It’s true,” said Dr. Bratwurst.
“Thank you very much,” Mom said in the general direction of the Bergens. But she didn’t seem all that grateful, either.
“The Bergens had chosen to remain anonymous,” said Dr. Bratwurst. “For obvious reasons.”
Obvious? The reasons were lost on me. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out what this new information—meaning, new to me—might have to do with the way that Tyro had treated me. Was bullying me his way of getting back at his mom and dad? Did he see me as some kind of competition? What did he have to complain about? Too much money? Too much power? He had everything he wanted. Good looks, friends, popularity, both parents, and, until two days ago, an awesome SUV.
Tyro’s dad cleared his throat, and you could tell that he was used to having that sound silence an entire boardroom so that everyone pretty much stopped breathing and listened to what he had to say. It certainly worked on us. We turned toward him and he focused his attention on each of us in turn, moving his head like a lizard.
“It’s been an experiment,” he said, and smiled, though I didn’t get it. Was he saying that my being at Bullywell was his personal science project? “And I’m afraid that things haven’t worked out precisely as planned. So we have two choices. We could simply cut our losses and give up on the experiment—”
That would have been my choice, especially if what he meant by “experiment” was me. I was the lab rat, I’d always known that, and maybe we’d come to one of those moments when the kindly researcher decides that the poor creature has been tortured enough and it’s time to either put it out of its misery or set it free. Wasn’t Dr. Bratwurst always—always!—saying that the point of Baileywell was to teach compassion? The most compassionate thing at this point would be to kick me out, send me back to public school, and encourage Tyro to find someone else to pick on. Which would probably take Tyro about five minutes.
Meanwhile, I kept thinking: What about the Escalade? And then it hit me: The Bergens were so rich they could afford to let it go, to be generous, to pay for the bodywork and move on. Then I remembered that the rich part wasn’t really what was so bad about Tyro.
“Or,” Tyro’s dad was saying, “we can be more creative and see if we can send this little experiment into another, more successful phase.” I definitely didn’t like the sound of that. Maybe he was about to suggest that I should board at Bullywell, and that Tyro should be my new roommate. But before I had a chance to get too worried about that, he said, “It seems to me that both my son and Bart would be excellent candidates for our new Reach Out program.”
Reach out to whom? Reach out to what? Reach out to each other? As far as I was concerned, Tyro had already done mo
re than enough reaching out to me. Of all the things I hadn’t liked so far, I liked this least, and I liked it even less when Dr. Bratwurst said, “Why, that’s brilliant, brilliant! ‘Creative’ doesn’t begin to describe it.”
“What’s the Reach Out program?” I asked.
“It’s a new initiative that Mr. Bergen”—Dr. Bratwurst nodded at Tyro’s dad—“has generously agreed to fund. And it’s part of our effort to make Baileywell a warmer, more compassionate place in which to teach our students to listen to their hearts as well as their minds and their…well, their impulses.” Mom gave me a long look and raised one eyebrow, and I loved her for not bothering to hide what she’d thought of Dr. Bratwurst’s tired old routine.
“The Reach Out program,” he went on, “will be a way of involving our students in the larger community, of giving them a chance to help others less fortunate than themselves. To do fieldwork, social service work, you might say. To help. There are various sites we’re looking at, various areas…. It’s all still in the early planning stages.”
“Tyro and Bart would be our first two volunteers,” said Mr. Bergen. I wondered what that meant. Were they planning to send us to Ground Zero and make us hand out burgers to the firemen and cops who were digging in search of their lost brothers? I didn’t think that, with my history, they’d make me do something like that. They’d find some other hell—maybe the local maximum-security prison—and make us teach basic algebra and grammar to convicted child molesters.
The whole thing seemed strange until it struck me that what Mr. Bergen had in mind was something like sending Tyro and me to some kind of rehab program. The idea, I guessed, was that helping people in worse shape than we were would make us into better people—or at least into people who didn’t go around bullying other kids or trashing expensive cars.
“I’m sorry, but I’m not working with him,” I said. Everyone turned and stared as if they’d completely forgotten me and were shocked to remember that I was there. Meanwhile, I was totally shocked that all they were going to do was put us in some kind of feel-good, do-good program. Clearly, no one had the slightest intention of making Mom pay for the damage to Tyro’s car. More surprising was the fact that no one had said a word about kicking me out of school.
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