Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key

by Jack Gantos

  “Where?” he asked.

  But I wouldn’t tell him because I could hear the screeching sounds of his radio inside the cab and I thought if I told him he’d call someone and they’d take her away and it would be my fault that we didn’t have each other anymore because I cut off Maria’s nose tip and people blamed her for not controlling me. Or maybe they already took her away and that’s why I was being called a “foster child.”

  “Well, come on,” he said. “We have a schedule to keep.”

  I put my dog book in my backpack and walked down the steps. Not because I wanted to. I just didn’t have a choice. There were only four other kids on the bus but I wished I had been picked up first so I could get used to them one at a time. Even though I had seen kids with some pretty awful problems in Mrs. Howard’s class, this was different. In Mrs. Howard’s class I always felt it was all of them and me, that I was special because I was better. But on the bus it was us and it made me think that I was special because I was as messed up as everyone else. First, there was a kid with no arms. Actually, he had arms but they were tiny and sticking straight out from his shoulders like fleshy pink brussels sprouts with twiggy little fingers stuck on the ends. The arms were so short he didn’t even have elbows, and the sleeves of his T-shirt had been cut off so they wouldn’t get covered up.

  “Hi,” he said while his fingers scratched at the air like the legs on a turned-over crab. He gave me a head nod to sit next to him, so I did.

  “Hi,” I said right back, and thought my medication might have been a dud because even though it was early in the morning when I was usually good I felt a surge of high-voltage willies flash through me. It was all I could do to sit down and squeeze my shoulders together toward the middle of my chest. I didn’t want him to touch me. Still, when the bus lurched forward I fell against his hand and felt his tiny sharp fingernails scratching at my shirt.

  “My name is Charlie,” he said, and I just looked at him from the neck up and it was okay.

  ‘Joey,” I said in return. He leaned way forward as if he had dropped something on the floor and then his little hand touched my hand and I knew he wanted to shake because we had just met so I slipped my hand between his fingers and gave them a gentle tug.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said when he sat up. “What’s your problem?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all except I think they’re trying to take my mom away from me because he called me a foster kid.”

  “They aren’t going to take your mom away,” he said. “I begged them to take mine and they wouldn’t, so it’s doubtful they’ll take yours behind your back.”

  I lost track of what he was saying because a kid was bumping his head against the back of my seat. I spun around to see what he was up to. He was banging it pretty hard so it was good that he was wearing a helmet. It wasn’t a bicycle or football helmet, but more like one of those streamlined motorcycle helmets, and he kept rocking back and forth and lifting his feet off the floor and slamming into the metal rim of my seat back, and when I could get a glimpse of his eyes behind the clear visor it seemed to me that they were wincing in pain, as if a giant rock had flattened him and he was constantly trying to wiggle out from under it.

  In front of me were two girls who seemed like any two girls, dressed nicely in clean clothes with shiny red backpacks on their laps. I touched my nose and smiled at them because girls reminded me of Maria, and they smiled back. “What’s wrong with them?” I whispered to Charlie.

  “They’re sisters. They get help once a week because they read and write everything backward.” He turned to the girls. “Show him what you can do.”

  One girl held up her backpack. YAM was spelled across the top. I thought it was pretty bad that someone was named after a type of potato. The other backpack had ENUJ.

  “Her name is May,” Charlie said. “The other is June. Do you get it?”

  I looked at May. She was grinning. “My sister and I can write notes back and forth to each other in backward writing and people can’t understand it,” she said. “Pretty cool.”

  “Can you talk backward?” I asked.

  “I wish,” May said.

  “Maybe they’ll teach us at special ed,” said June, and giggled. “That is, after we learn how to read forward writing.”

  We stopped at the railroad tracks and the driver opened the door to listen for trains, but it was as if he had opened the door to tease me, as if he were singing, “Come on, Joey foster kid. Bet you can’t jump out the door and escape. Bet you don’t have the guts.” And I was sweating and my feet were vibrating like rockets just before takeoff. I could dive out the bus door and run away and bounce off the walls all the way to Pittsburgh like my dad, or I could pull myself together like my mom and go to special ed and get help. It was as if my life was trapped between two words: run or stay. And just as that kid behind me kept banging his head on the seat, I kept banging my head on those words: run or stay. And because I didn’t know which to do I thought of my mom, who had already pulled herself together, and now it was my turn. Just then the door closed and we jerked forward over the bumpy tracks. I let out my old breath and took a fresh one.

  Then I began to get nervous all over again about my mom being taken away because thinking of her and how she would behave had just saved me from doing something stupid like jumping out a bus door and running away, so now I was even more afraid they were taking her.

  We pulled up to a big old brick house and a kid was standing on the sidewalk.

  “Are you the foster kid?” the bus driver asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, in a real bad mood. “So what?”

  When he stomped onto the bus I looked at him and he didn’t look much different than me, so I closed my eyes because it was too sad.

  When the bus stopped I opened my eyes. We were in front of a new white building with dark tinted windows that looked like a bank or a fancy office. Shiny steel letters on the wall spelled out LANCASTER COUNTY SPECIAL EDUCATION CENTER. We must have arrived late because there were only a few people waiting for us on the sidewalk.

  “See you later,” Charlie said, and used his foot to lift up his book bag so he could reach it with his miniature hand. He ran off toward a set of wide doors that opened automatically to let him in. The girls ran right behind him. I got off and a big man came up to me.

  “Are you Joey Pigza?” he asked. He was wearing khaki pants, a white shirt, and a striped tie.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’m Mr. Ed Vanness,” he said. “I’m your caseworker and you can call me Special Ed. Most everyone does.”

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” I replied.

  “First, let me tell you about the school,” Special Ed said, as the front doors parted to let us in. “It is not a school as you know it, and definitely not a place where you go because no one else wants you or likes you anymore. It’s not a place for punishment.”

  “That’s because everyone here has already been punished,” I said, and pointed to a kid in metal braces struggling to get up a ramp. His arms and legs looked like he was made out of twisted-up pipe cleaners.

  Special Ed waved to him. “Hey, Jason!” he hollered. “Looking good, buddy!”

  Jason grinned as he jerked his head over to one side and said something that sounded like a smudged-up word.

  “He is a great kid,” Special Ed said to me. “For him to climb that ramp is like you and me climbing Mount Everest.”

  “Can I tell you something?” I asked.

  “One minute,” he said, and guided me toward an open elevator door. “I want to show you around so you can see that this is a place you come to when you need extra help to get back on track. I can give you the help you need, and when you do, you can leave. In your case you have to be here at least six weeks because you hurt someone.”

  “It was an accidents I said.

  “Yes, it was,” he agreed. “But we don’t want to repeat it. We want you to learn to make better choi
ces and go back to school. If you become a regular here it just means we didn’t do our job. Quite frankly, we like the kids who don’t want to be here.”

  I didn’t hear much of what he was saying because I still had to tell him something. “The bus driver thought I was a foster kid,” I blurted out.

  “That’s a mistake,” replied Special Ed.

  “I want to see my mom,” I said.

  “We can’t do that right now,” he replied. “We have other things to do. I have to introduce you to some of the people who will be helping you.”

  “Then can we see my mom?” I asked.

  “We’ll call her on the phone,” Special Ed said. “I promise.”

  The elevator made a loud buzzing sound and the door opened. We walked down a wide, bright hall with classrooms on either side. Still, it seemed more like a hospital than a school because it smelled more of medicine than food. A line of blind kids holding on to a rope with one hand and white canes with the other tapped their way down the opposite wall. There were kids in wheelchairs and ordinary-looking kids carrying books. Then there were kids who were not going to make it back to regular school. They were busted up, or deformed and strapped onto wooden boards, or just mentally not all there.

  I must have been staring at them because Special Ed asked me what I imagined other kids thought of me. “They don’t know what to think,” I said. “I look fine.”

  “So they are guessing at what is wrong with you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But they don’t know.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Can I call my mom now?” I asked.

  “Did you take your meds this morning?” he asked instead of answering.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Did you eat breakfast?”

  “No. I’m never hungry until I’m real hungry and then I could eat a cow.”

  “Well, for starters,” Special Ed said, “you are going to have to learn to eat even when you aren’t hungry. Think of it this way—you need to take a bath every day whether you need it or not.”

  “I didn’t take a bath today,” I said. “Am I in trouble?”

  “No, you are not in trouble. This is not about you being in trouble. This” he said, waving his hands around to mean the entire building and people in it, “this is about getting you better.”

  “It was trouble that got me sent here,” I said.

  “And staying out of trouble will get you out,” he shot back as if he had all the answers memorized.

  He unlocked a door and we walked into his office.

  “Before I sit down can I go to the bathroom?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, and pointed to a door on the other side of the room.

  I didn’t really have to go. I just wanted to be alone for a minute so I stood there and flushed the toilet. I had thought the special-ed school was going to be like a prison for bad kids. That had always worried me. But it didn’t seem to be mean. I didn’t feel like someone would beat me up. And Special Ed wasn’t as scary as I thought the teachers would be. In fact nothing was scarier than me knowing something was wrong inside me, something I couldn’t see silently eating away at me like termites, and it was going to ruin me even when I was being good. I was scary to myself.

  I flushed the toilet again and opened the door. “My grandmother said there is nothing that can make me better,” I said. “She said our whole family is sick and nothing will help.”

  “I’m sure your grandmother is a nice person,” he said.

  “She tried to put me in the refrigerator,” I blurted out.

  “Sometimes nice people make bad decisions, Joey,” he said. “I’m telling you, you will be fine. We’re going to give you tests. We will determine if the meds you are taking are right for you. We’ll make sure you are getting the right amount. We will help you feel better about yourself. We will help you get caught up on your homework. And we will both see that Joey Pigza is okay. And when you are, back to regular school you go.”

  “Can I have a dog?” I asked.

  He smiled. “I think a dog is a very good idea,” he said. “Do you know how to take care of one?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Well, when you learn how to take care of a dog, you will have learned how to take care of yourself.”

  “My grandma said I was part dog,” I said.

  “I’d like to meet her,” Special Ed said. “Really.”

  “Well you can’t,” I replied. “She fell down into the sewer and was washed away.”

  “Is that true?” he asked, and smiled real hard at me.

  “She’s in Pittsburgh with my dad. Can I call my mom now?” I asked.

  He turned his phone around and pushed it toward me. I dialed the number. “Beauty and the Beast hair salon,” answered Tiffany, the receptionist.

  “This is Joey,” I said. “Can I speak with my mom?”

  “She’s busy with a customer,” she said. “Can I leave a message?”

  “I’ll call back,” I said, and hung up. Then I instantly called again, because sometimes that’s what I do until Tiffany gets Mom.

  “She’s still not available,” Tiffany said. “We’ve talked about this calling binge, Joey. Now give it a rest before you call again.”

  I hung up and began to dial again but Special Ed pushed the dial-tone button and cut me off. “Joey,” he said, “it’s time we had a very serious talk.”

  “Can I get back to you on that?” I replied, and began to feel itchy in my seat.

  “There is a serious reason why you are here,” he said. “Simply put, you hurt another student and until we are certain you won’t hurt someone else then you can’t go back. That’s the bottom line, Joey. Do you see what I mean?”

  “If Mrs. Howard hadn’t made me wear the rabbit slippers,” I answered, “I wouldn’t have tripped and cut Maria’s nose off.”

  “It’s not the slippers, Joey,” he said.

  “Then what?” I asked. “What?”

  “It’s how you make decisions.”

  “Like what?”

  “You stuck your finger in a pencil sharpener. You swallowed a key. You lost it at the field trip. Joey, you make very bad decisions for yourself.”

  “I got dud meds,” I said. “They work in the morning and don’t after lunch.”

  “We can help with the meds,” Special Ed said. “But that is the easiest part. You still have to learn how to make good decisions.”

  I picked up the phone and started to dial. “I want my mom,” I said.

  He pressed the dial-tone button. “What if I told you your home life is part of the problem? We have to get serious now, Joey. It’s time we look at the big picture.”

  11

  SHIFTING GEARS

  I was bouncing an orange Nerf ball against the front door as I sat on the porch. I did it over and over for about an hour. I wasn’t locked out, I was just waiting for Mom. When I saw her turn the corner on Queen Street about five houses down I just kept throwing the ball harder and harder until she started up the sidewalk. Then I turned and let it all out.

  “He said you were part of the big picture problem,” I shouted. “I said I cut Maria’s nose off, not you. And he said this was not all about Maria’s nose. This was about how I make decisions. I told him I had dud meds and he wanted to know what doctors you had taken me to. I told him I didn’t know and that you rescued me from Grandma and he said special ed was going to help me get better. What does that mean?”

  “Calm down. You don’t have to shout, and stop picking at your head,” she said, and glanced over her shoulder to see if the neighbors were listening. “Let’s go inside and take some medicine and talk about it. And who is he anyway?”

  “Special Ed,” I replied.

  “Oh, yeah. The guy with the two names,” she muttered.

  We went into the house and I kept talking but Mom didn’t listen. “This place is a mess,” she said, and shook her head. “What have you been doing?”

  �
�I was flippin’ out,” I said. “The bus driver called me a foster child and I thought they had taken you away because of what I had done to Maria. I called you at work but you wouldn’t come to the phone. So I kept calling but Tiffany said you were unavailable and I thought they arrested you instead of me. Then later, I thought you got sick of me and ran off again. And I told that to Special Ed and he said that my home life was a big part of my problem.”

  “You told me you were not going to tear the house apart looking for your meds,” she said.

  “I had a bad day,” I said.

  “We all have bad days,” she replied. “You just have to deal with them.”

  Mom reached into her purse and took out the plastic vial of medicine for me. She shook one pill into her hand. “You didn’t leave a number where you could be reached. Otherwise I would have called you back.” She slipped half a pill between my lips.

  After I swallowed I went to the refrigerator to get her the Mountain Dew as she pulled the Amaretto out from under the sink. She mixed herself a drink and I dropped a red cherry in it.

  “So he said I’m to blame?” she asked after a minute.

  “He wanted to know how I felt after you abandoned me.”

  “I left you with your grandmother.”

  “She was mean,” I said. “And I told that to Special Ed too.”

  “What else did you tell him?”

  “About Dad.”

  “And?”

  “About our days. From when I wake up to when I go to bed. Everything.”

  “Did you tell them I love you and I go to work every day at the beauty parlor and listen to everyone talk about their perfect kids and how sick that makes me because for one, I don’t believe their kids are perfect because no one is, and two, they pretend their kids are perfect so they can look down at kids like you and parents like me.”

  She stood up and made another Amaretto sour.

  “If you have two drinks does that mean I can have two meds?”

  “No. It does not. And I wish you wouldn’t go around telling strangers what we do at home.”

  “Special Ed said he’s here to help me and that things would get worse before they’d get better.”