Bullyville

by Francine Prose

  Mrs. Straus flashed her ID badge at a sensor on the wall, and a door swung open. I could feel the eyes of the waiting-room families drilling into the back of my head. Who were we to be getting this special privilege? No one, I wanted to tell them. Just a kid who trashed another kid’s SUV and was getting punished, I realized now, in a way that was much more painful than anything Tyro’s dad or the school could have dreamed up to make me pay.

  Nola’s bed was in a room with four other beds. In the bed nearest the window lay a kid who kept yelling and groaning, Nola was hooked up to more tubes than she had been before. She had an oxygen mask over her face, and up above her bed were all sorts of monitors with charts and readouts and digital numbers that kept rising and falling. My first thought was that this was all a big mistake, that Nola didn’t belong here, that she was supposed to be back in her room with the goofy stuffed animals and get-well cards.

  Her eyes were closed. She was sleeping, breathing through the oxygen mask. I didn’t want to wake her, I didn’t want to see her here, and I didn’t think she wanted me to see her like this. She looked sicker, frailer, even more yellow—

  Suddenly Mrs. Straus piped up in her supercheery voice, “Nola! Look who’s here to see you!”

  Nola opened her eyes, and she was Nola again. She raised one eyebrow and motioned for me to come closer. She slipped the oxygen mask off her mouth and whispered in my ear, “Get me out of here! Now!”

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  And I was. My brain was going a mile a minute, trying to come up with some new escape plan: Let’s see. We might have to bop that nurse over the head, and steal her uniform, and…But that wouldn’t work.

  “Excuse me, young man, but are you a member of the immediate family?” It was a nurse.

  I’m her brother, I wanted to say. I knew that would have been okay with Nola. But it would have felt weird, lying in front of Mrs. Straus, so I just shook my head no.

  “I’m sorry,” said the nurse, “but only immediate family are allowed in the unit, and only for the first ten minutes after the hour.”

  “We understand,” said Mrs. Straus. “Bart’s a friend. He just wanted a word with Nola. We’re leaving right away.”

  “See you tomorrow,” I told Nola, though I suddenly remembered that the next day was Saturday. Even if I could sneak into the unit, how would I get to the hospital?

  “See you tomorrow,” Nola said. “Don’t forget, okay?” And she winked.

  That night, at dinner, I started telling Mom about what had happened with Nola that day, and I started crying. It was really embarrassing. Because ever since September, I’d been trying not to break down around Mom, no matter what.

  People were doing enough crying in those days, and I felt that seeing me cry would only make things worse for Mom. But I couldn’t help it, I kept seeing Nola in that room, with the kid yelling and moaning and the two other kids I couldn’t even look at. I kept seeing her raise her eyebrow, and I recalled her asking me to get her out of there, even though we both knew that I couldn’t get her out, I couldn’t do anything, there was no way I could help her. Then I would remember her telling me not to forget about coming to see her tomorrow.

  “I want to see her,” I told Mom.

  “We can go tomorrow,” said Mom. “I’ll drive you to the hospital.”

  “You don’t need to come upstairs if you don’t want to,” I said. It seemed like the wrong moment to introduce Mom to Nola. Mom would never know what Nola had really been like. The picture she’d have in her mind was Nola tied up to the tubes and monitors and hardly able to talk. And that wasn’t Nola at all.

  “Fine,” Mom said. “I’m sure there’s a cafeteria. I’ll get a cup of coffee and wait for you. I don’t think they’ll let you stay very long, anyway.”

  “You’re the greatest,” I told her.

  “No,” said Mom. “You are. And I want you to know I’m really proud of you. I’m proud I raised a person like you.”

  I wanted to thank her, to tell her it was because she was the way she was, but now it was all much too embarrassing, and I mumbled something and left the table.

  “Put your dish in the sink,” said Mom, and somehow I knew that she knew what I wanted to say, and couldn’t.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept having crazy dreams. You’d think I would have had hospital nightmares, after the day I’d had. But my dreams were full of bright colors and exotic animals and tropical sunsets. I woke in the middle of the night and thought: I’m dreaming Nola’s dreams. It should have made me feel better, as if we were still in communication. But it only made me feel more frightened and alone.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE NEXT DAY, SATURDAY, Mom drove me to the hospital, just as she’d promised. I was worried that she’d forget she’d offered to wait in the cafeteria, and that she might insist on coming with me. I knew she’d want to be with me in case I had to deal with something difficult or painful. But she headed off to the cafeteria, saying, “Take as long as you want. As long as they let you. But don’t get in anyone’s way. I’ll be here whenever you get back. Don’t worry, I’ve got a book.”

  For a moment I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to find the room where they’d taken Nola, because I’d been so upset yesterday, and Mrs. Straus had led me—well, practically dragged me—to the right place. But in fact I found my way straight there, or at least to the waiting room, where, because it was the weekend, there were even more families than the day before. I hovered around by the locked door until a nurse went in, and I followed her. What did I have to lose? If they caught me, all they could do was kick me out.

  After a few moments of trying to look like I knew where I was going, I found Nola’s room. The kid by the window was still crying out in pain. I recognized the other two kids.

  But now there was someone else in Nola’s bed.

  “Where is she?” I asked the nurse.

  “Who?” the nurse said.

  “Nola,” I said, and at that moment I realized that, after all this time, I didn’t even know her last name. How would I find her? I felt as if I had lost her and I would never see her again.

  “Oh, right,” said the nurse. “I remember you. You’re the kid who was here yesterday when you weren’t supposed to be. The friend.”

  “That’s me,” I said. “The friend.”

  “She’s been moved to the ICU,” said the nurse.

  “What’s that?” I said, though I sort of knew.

  “The intensive care unit.”

  “What do you mean? Has she gotten worse? Is she okay?”

  The nurse just stared at me, sympathetic and impatient at the same time. She had work to do. What part of “intensive care unit” was I not understanding?

  “Is she going to get better?” I asked.

  She said, “We hope so.”

  “Where’s the ICU?” I asked.

  “Up on the fifteenth floor. But they’re not going to let you in. For one thing—”

  “Thanks,” I said, not wanting to waste the time it would take her to tell me why I wasn’t going to be allowed to see Nola.

  The elevator was taking forever to come. I gave up and ran up the stairs, so I was sweaty and panting by the time I got to the fifteenth floor. I found the locked door, and I waited till a guy in a white coat went in, and I sneaked in behind him. I was getting good at this, though it was a skill I hoped never to have to use again.

  Once more I tried to look as if I knew what I was doing and where I was going, as if I was a close family member. I peeked into every cubicle I passed, but I couldn’t see Nola. Most of the patients were ancient, and every one of them seemed to be in bad shape.

  Finally, just as I turned a corner at the end of the hall, I saw something so shocking that I stopped dead because I simply could not understand, could not compute, what I was seeing. Gathered around one of the beds was a group of people I recognized. I knew them from somewhere, but it took me a really long time to figure out who
they were.

  It was Tyro and his family, his mother and father, and a girl, a little younger than Tyro. They stood around a bed, looking down, and though my first impulse was to back away, I was still so confused that I went closer.

  In the bed was Nola. Her eyes were shut, her chin was nearly touching her chest. She was breathing very rapidly and shallowly. And I knew, without anyone having to tell me, that she was dying.

  But there were a lot of other things that I didn’t know. Mysteries and riddles. All sorts of questions ran through my mind, and I wondered if I would ever find out the answers. Had the Bergens known that I was visiting Nola? Did Tyro know? Had Nola been aware that I was the person who’d scratched up her brother’s Escalade? And all this time I’d imagined that I was the only one with secrets….

  Just at that moment, the family spotted me. They looked surprised but not half so surprised as I was. I saw Tyro clench his fists and then unclench them as he looked at me. Then Tyro’s mom reached out and drew me in and pulled me to her side, and everyone began weeping softly.

  “We’re so grateful, Bart,” Tyro’s mom said. “Nola told us all about your friendship.”

  But Nola hadn’t told me about them. She must have known the whole story, not at first, but maybe after she mentioned to her family she had a new friend, a visitor on some punishment detail for having done something bad at his school, and they’d put two and two together. It all added up, because maybe the experience of having a daughter in the hospital had made Tyro’s dad think of the Reach Out program in the first place. But why hadn’t anyone let me in on the truth?

  Maybe Nola wanted it kept secret. Maybe she was afraid that if I knew she was Tyro’s sister, after what he’d done to me—and maybe she knew what he was like, how mean he could be—I wouldn’t want to be her friend or visit her anymore.

  “You helped her so much,” Tyro’s dad said. “You—” He couldn’t go on. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. I didn’t ever want to see someone like Tyro’s dad cry!

  “You did so much to make her last days happier,” Mrs. Bergen added. Her last days! Was this another little detail that everyone but me had known all along? Did everybody know that Nola wasn’t going to live very long, and I’d been the only one stupid enough to think she might get better and that we might go on being friends, and I could watch her get stronger and grow up?

  I felt like they’d been plotting, and that this was a million times worse than Tyro and his gang scheming to torture or even kill me. I couldn’t have said why it was worse, but I felt in my heart that it was, and I wanted to tell them how dishonest and selfish they’d been.

  But of course I couldn’t say anything like that to the grieving family of a little girl who wasn’t going to live much longer. Anyway, they hadn’t planned all of it. Who could have predicted that, of all the kids in the hospital, the one I would get close to was Nola? It could just as easily have been Ramón or Stimmer, the first kids I met. But it couldn’t have been them, it could only have been Nola.

  I felt the tears welling up in my eyes, and even under the circumstances—which, anyone would have admitted, were pretty extraordinary—the last thing in the world I wanted was to cry in front of Tyro. Even though Tyro was crying, along with everyone in his family. Even so, I would rather have died myself before I let the king of the Bullywell bullies see me dissolve in hysterics.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” was all I could say. Then I turned and ran, back past the doctors and families, past the sick old people in their curtained alcoves. No one stopped me, no one said a word. A few nurses watched me streak past. I had the feeling that, if they’d worked there awhile, they’d seen everything. They were probably used to people tearing out of the ICU.

  On the way down, the elevator stopped at every floor even though it was empty and no one got on. It seemed like another part of the plot. Only now it was a plot to keep me from reaching my mom. Finally I found the main floor and the cafeteria, and there she was, reading her book at a table in the sunlight and looking completely beautiful.

  “Bart!” she said. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” But now I was crying too hard to talk, and at the same time I was strangely aware of the people around us at the other tables, watching me cry.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I told Mom.

  “My thinking exactly,” Mom said.

  She literally tucked me under her arm like a mother duck protecting her duckling, and whisked me out of the cafeteria and the hospital and clear across the parking lot. Neither of us said a word until we were in the car. Then I told her what had happened, how I’d gotten to the ICU and known Nola was dying, and how I’d seen her family and realized that she was Tyro’s sister.

  I could tell that Mom was stunned. At least she wasn’t in on the secret. But she didn’t say anything for a long time, she just kept driving calmly.

  Finally she said, “None of that matters, honey. Not Nola’s parents, not Tyro. I mean, of course they matter. But right now, right at this moment, they’re not what should matter to you. They’re not what you should be thinking about. What’s important is the friendship you had with Nola, the fact that you two cared about each other, and that you did make her life better, at the end when she really needed it.”

  At this, I started crying again, and Mom was crying, too, but she kept on talking through her tears.

  “And you’ll never lose that,” she said. “It’s something you’ll have forever. The memory will be like your guardian angel, especially as time passes, and the painful stuff falls away, and you remember all the good things you had with that person.”

  It struck me that what she was saying had something to do with her and Dad, or with me and Dad. Or with both of us and Dad.

  I took a deep breath. Then I said, “Do you miss him?”

  “Yes,” said Mom. “I always did. Even when I was angry. And now I’m not angry anymore. Just sad.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  Mom said, “You think you’ll feel like this forever. But you won’t, honey. I promise. Little by little, day by day, you’ll feel better. The pain will be a little duller, a tiny bit less sharp. On some days, you’ll feel worse again, and you’ll think it’s as bad as it was at the beginning. But the next day, you’ll feel a little more cheerful. And one day you’ll actually feel happy again.”

  “When will that be?”

  “In time,” Mom said. “Time’s got to pass.”

  “I feel a little better already,” I said. And then we both got quiet as I tried to figure out why I’d said that. Because, in a way, it was true. And in another way, it wasn’t. It felt good to finally talk about Dad with Mom. But I still missed my father, the pain hadn’t dulled at all, and I knew that the sharp pain of missing Nola was only just beginning.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  TYRO WAS ABSENT from school for a week. Word got around that his sister had died. Everyone said how tragic it was, and it made me feel even worse that there was no one I trusted enough to tell about Nola’s having been my friend. I guess I should have been used to it, after all the practice I’d had, not being able to talk to anyone about my dad.

  I realized that losing Nola wasn’t the same for me as it must have been for Tyro. She was his sister, and I’d only known her for a few months. But somehow that didn’t make me any less sad.

  I wondered if, when Tyro returned to school, we’d be able to talk about Nola. He would know that I’d known her better than anyone else at school, except him, and that I understood, better than anyone, what he’d lost. We would talk about how awesome she’d been. And maybe it would comfort us both, just a little.

  I had the picture—the whole scene, and how it was going to play out—fixed so firmly in my mind that when I walked into school the next Monday morning, and Tyro was the first person I saw, I had trouble putting the real person together with the fantasy I’d been having. He was standing all alone in the center of the main hall. None of his friends were around. I had the feeling that he
’d been looking for me, waiting for me. And it made sense, because I’d been hoping to see him, too.

  I stood directly in front of him. Neither of us spoke or moved. Until at last I said, “I’m really sorry about Nola.”

  He looked at me, but he seemed to be seeing something—or someone—else. Then his face changed and took on an expression I’d never seen on anyone’s face before. Part furious, part sad, part distant, part…I didn’t know what it was.

  And then he hauled off and punched me, with all his might, in the stomach.

  In the instant before the pain began, it crossed my mind that the story wasn’t supposed to end this way. Our shared sorrow and grief were supposed to make us friends, to bring us closer together, to make us more compassionate, just as Dr. Bratwurst was always saying. That’s how it would have ended in a book, all neat and tidy, with everyone learning and changing and growing and becoming better people because of what they’d suffered.

  But that wasn’t how it was turning out. Because this was real life, and messy. The story had its own direction, its own end, and I felt like an actor in someone else’s play, letting the director guide me.

  I made a fist and pulled my arm back as far as it would go.

  I hit Tyro as hard as I could.

  In a moment we were all over each other, swinging and pushing and grabbing for each other’s throats. I thought we were going to kill each other. I knew that was what we both wanted. He kept hitting me, harder and harder, but the strangest thing was, it still didn’t hurt, because I was so focused on smashing him.