by Susan Shreve
“So how’s school today?” Meg would ask me once we were back in the apartment, after her friends had left.
“I hate it,” I’d say.
That was nothing new. After Mary Sue Briggs and my “diagnosis,” as Ms. Percival called the learning disabilities and my speech therapist and my special reading teacher, there was nothing during the day to like except lunch. I missed recess for speech tutoring and twice a week I missed gym for reading and by the end of first grade someone had decided that I had “eye-hand coordination” problems as well.
“Of course he has eye-hand coordination problems. He’s a boy,” my father said one night at dinner. “No six-year-old boy wants to sit at a desk for eight hours a day bored to death. He ought to be playing baseball.”
“Roger.”
The way my mother said “Roger,” which is my father’s name, sounded like trouble to me. As if she’s saying “Don’t ever speak like that in front of Ben.” Or “Set a good example. You’re the father, after all.”
My father can’t help himself. He says exactly what he thinks and that drives my mother crazy. She’s a good and patient person. She tries very hard not to be upset with me, but the fact is, she doesn’t like problems and a problem is what I am.
“So why do you hate school today?” Meg would ask.
It became a daily ritual with us. I’d be lying on the couch, probably eating oatmeal cookies, feeding half a cookie to Jetty and half to me, and Meg’d be lying on her stomach on the rug with her CD player on low.
I’d turn on my side, pull Jetty up on the couch with me, snug under my arm.
“So today the speech therapist came in her rabbit ears and whiskers and said ‘Benny, say thweetheart,’” I’d begin. Meg loves it when I make up stories about my stupid tutors.
“And so what did you say?” Meg would ask.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve stopped talking.”
“That’ll help your lisp.”
“Since I stopped talking, it’s gone away. No lithp.”
“And can you read now?” Meg would ask.
“Try me.”
She’d open her book bag and take out the library book she was reading, maybe eighth-grade level, maybe grownup, open it to the first page, push it across the rug. “So read to me.”
I’d put the book on my stomach and pretend to read, making up a story instead.
“Once upon a time there was a girl called Babycakes who came to school in her sister’s flowered bikini underwear and that is all she wore, even in the winter,” I’d pretend to read. “And Babycakes was fat, so you could hardly see the underwear when she walked into Ms. Percival’s first-grade classroom and sat down at her desk and took out her pencils and her reading book and her chocolate bar, took the paper off the chocolate bar, and ate it completely before the bell rang for first period.”
“Oh, Benjamin Carter. You’re such a genius,” Meg would laugh. “You read perfectly.”
“I know I do. I’m brilliant. A giant brain. One of a kind. Everybody says so.”
“And I’m so proud you’re my one and only brother,” Meg would say.
But the truth was, I had a fluttery feeling in my stomach every day I walked up the front steps of the school.
By the second grade, my report cards used to read like a prison record. They were full of U’s for Unsatisfactory and D’s for Disrespectful, Disturbing, Difficult, Disorganized, Dumb, Dreadful, Disgusting. There were long paragraphs of recommendations for my improvement and the suggestion that I might be happier in a Montessori school.
“Honestly, Ben. You’ve got to pull yourself together or we’ll be visiting you at the juvenile detention home,” my father said. By the time I was in the fourth grade, even he had lost patience with what the teachers referred to as my Deplorable Behavior.
According to the teachers at Stockton, my Deplorable Behavior included stuff like falling over backwards in my chair during reading class or dropping Billy Blister’s sunglasses, which he wears to show off, in the trash or letting the pregnant mother hamster out of her cage during recess so her babies were born on a stack of yellow construction paper in the back of the supply closet. That sort of thing. Nothing bad enough to go to jail, but I couldn’t help myself. School made me crazy.
“It’s not that you’re bad, Benjamin,” my mother would tell me. “In fact, your reading is so much better and your eye-hand coordination is improving and even your lisp.” My mother sounds out the word “lisp” every time she says it as if it’s a word with three syllables: li—ssss—ppp.
It drives me wild.
“Every teacher is mad at me before she even meets me,” I would say.
“You just have a bad reputation, which started with the teddy bear, and now you can’t control yourself,” my mother replied. “The teachers expect you’ll be a problem, so it’s up to you to change their minds.”
It wasn’t entirely because of the teddy bear, although I hold Mary Sue Briggs responsible for every bad thing in my life, including the viral pneumonia I caught from her last year. But my bad reputation has followed me like a tail getting longer every year.
Every September, I go to a new grade and have a new teacher, new school clothes, new books and pencils and erasers, and think to myself that this year everything will be different. The teacher will like me and she’ll tell the other teachers what a terrific kid I am in spite of my old reputation. She’ll even tell Mr. O’Dell. But no. On the first day of school in September, the teacher stands at the front of the room and reads the roll and asks us to raise our hands when our name is called so she can identify us. And when she comes to my name, “Benjamin A. Carter”—A for Anthony, a name I hate—she stops and looks around the room and shakes her head as if a black X is spilled over my name. Somehow like magic, as if I give off a certain bad cheesy smell, things fall apart when I walk into a room at school. Only at school. Everyplace else, like home and my grandparents’ and birthday parties and after-school soccer when I don’t have some stupid special tutor trying to fix my learning disabilities, I’m fine. I mean, almost fine. I’m not exactly a perfect child, but I’m not a criminal either.
But at school I’m a disaster. I walk into a room, like, say, Mr. Eager’s third grade, and a bookcase falls over; Billy Bass tips his chair backwards, hits his head on the floor, and gets a concussion; Patricia Dale trips over my foot in music class and knocks out her front tooth and tells everyone I did it on purpose.
People just expect things to go wrong when I’m around. And they do.
“I think you’re uncomfortable at school,” Meg said to me one afternoon last year.
“How come?”
“Because you’re just a little different, not entirely a middle-of-the-road, regular ten-year-old boy.”
“Because of the lisp?”
“I think it started with the lisp,” Meg said. “Everybody at home thought you were funny and adorable saying things like ‘thweetheart,’ and then you went to school and you weren’t funny any longer. You were wrong. Other kids didn’t talk like you did.”
“Well, Daniel Forest had a lisp.”
“And then he moved to New York.”
“My teachers say I try to call attention to myself by bad behavior. They say my lisp is just an excuse and sometimes I do it on purpose just to call attention to myself.”
Meg shrugged. “The thing is, if people expect you to be trouble, then you’ll be trouble. People expect me to be good, so I’m good. It’s the way people are.”
“Stupid.”
“Right. Stupid,” Meg said.
Which is just one of the reasons Meg is my best friend.
That night when I went to bed, I thought about what Meg had said, because she’s smart in school but she’s especially smart about kids. I thought about the word “uncomfortable” and just thinking about it, I felt a little sick. When I’m at school, it’s as if my skin is squishing me like too-tight jeans. I have this funny feeling in my stomach and I can’t sit still at
my desk, and sometimes I think kids are looking at me like I’m weird.
Every day since the Halloween when Mary Sue Briggs made fun of me, I’ve gone up the front steps of Stockton Elementary with that same feeling in my stomach. Because of my lisp, like Meg says. Because of my special teachers and my learning disabilities. Because everyone— first the teachers and then the kids—is looking at me waiting to see what will happen next.
And then the week after Easter break, fifth grade, section number three, Mr. Baker’s class, Trout arrived. He walked into the classroom wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with his name on the front in black letters and carrying a book bag.
“I’m Trout,” he said to Mr. Baker.
“I know,” Mr. Baker said. “Welcome to the fifth grade. I’ve kept a desk for you right here in the front row.”
But Trout wasn’t paying attention to Mr. Baker. He took one look around the classroom, considering the possibilities for a friend, and decided on me.
And that was that. When the bell rang for the end of homeroom, he jumped up from his chair, rushed over three rows to where I was sitting, and attached himself like Velcro to my side.
Trout is tall, almost as tall as my father, and skinny, with soft yellow hair that hangs below his ears and glasses and a deep dimple in his chin. I wouldn’t have noticed the dimple if he hadn’t drawn a question mark in the middle of it with bright red Magic Marker. Really red, like a tomato. The question mark started just below his lip, filled the space of his chin with its reverse C and short line at the bottom with a dot at the very tip. A perfect question mark. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
“I hate this school,” Trout said to me after first period when I was walking with him to the library to meet Ms. Bissell.
“Yeah,” I said, half agreeing with him, which I did.
“I could tell I’d hate it here the minute I got here. This school has a kind of bad smell,” Trout said.
He was sauntering along beside me. He walked with his body sort of sloped, his long legs stretching out in front of him like a runner in slow motion, a confident walk. He was a confident kid, or so I thought, interested in him from the start in spite of what my father would call “my better judgment.” I mean anyone with a question mark on his chin can’t be very worried about what people think. Right?
“A bad smell?” I sniffed.
It smelled like a perfectly ordinary school to me, the same as it always smelled.
“I’ve been here since first grade and this is how Stockton Elementary smells,” I said.
“Well, I’m going to change that,” Trout said.
“Yeah,” I said.
I had to say something, but as we walked into the library and Ms. Bissell looked up from her papers to give me a little wave, I wondered how you change the smell of a place as big as a school.
My mother sprays this pine-smelling stuff if Jetty pees on the rug. But a whole school? And did Stockton Elementary have a particular smell that I’d been missing all these years?
Ms. Bissell is older than the rest of the teachers at Stockton, and we’re a little afraid of her. You get the sense that noise, even the slightest noise, upsets her. Not that she’d lose her temper or shout or send one of us to Mr. O’Dell’s office. Instead, she might put her head down on the desk and sob. That’s my mother’s word for a lot of crying, which I don’t do, and neither does Meg, but Belinda, on the second floor of our apartment building, sobs all the time.
“Trout?” Ms. Bissell said. “That’s a very interesting name. Mr. Baker said you’d be coming to check out the library.”
“Yeah,” Trout said.
“And Trout is your first name?”
“First and last name,” Trout said.
“Trout Trout,” Ms. Bissell said thoughtfully.
“That’s right. Trout Trout,” he enunciated. “I don’t have a middle name.”
“So, Trout,” Ms. Bissell said softly. “Welcome to the Stockton Elementary library.” She was very proud of the library, as you can tell from the way she calls it by name. “Do you enjoy reading?” she asked.
“We don’t have books at our house. We keep moving every few months or so and my father says we can only move the necessities.” He picked up a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was in the OUT box on Ms. Bissell’s desk.
“Have you read To Kill a Mockingbird?” she asked. “It’s one of my favorites.”
Trout shook his head.
“I don’t read,” he said.
“You don’t like to read?” Ms. Bissell asked. Her voice was kind, not critical, just inquiring, but I could feel Trout stiffen next to me, move away from her desk, fold his arms across his chest.
“I don’t like to read. We didn’t have to read books in my old school.”
“Which was in Georgia?”
“I lived in Georgia until yesterday,” Trout said, “but before Georgia we lived in Kansas, and before that, Mississippi, and before that, Florida. I’m really from the world.”
He has a kind of “don’t mess around with me” voice, with a “one step closer to where I’m standing and you’re history” sound to it. Sort of a tough guy, but I could tell he wasn’t really a tough guy. I don’t know how I can tell those things about a person, but I can.
“That’s very interesting,” Ms. Bissell said. “Perhaps you’ll tell us something about the places you’ve lived. For example, I’ve never been to Mississippi.”
Trout shrugged.
“It must be very hot in the summer.”
But Trout seemed to have finished talking. He jabbed me in the shoulder and nodded his head in the direction of the door.
“Hot as hell,” he said to Ms. Bissell.
Ms. Bissell stood up a little straighter, leaned forward across the desk, her hands flat on the table.
“In my library class, Trout,” she began, and the veins in her neck were standing out like small blue pipes, “you don’t use swear words and you can’t wear a red question mark on your chin.”
Her voice was very quiet. I almost had to strain to hear, but I knew that voice from third grade when I was a problem in library class and she had asked me to leave and not return until the next year.
“Benjamin,” she had said, bringing me up to her desk so the other kids couldn’t hear what she was saying, “get your books and leave and don’t return until next September.”
And that was that.
“The question mark is permanent,” Trout was saying. “It’s a permanent tattoo.”
“It doesn’t matter what it is. You won’t be wearing it in my class,” Ms. Bissell said.
“S’okay,” Trout said, putting To Kill a Mockingbird back in Ms. Bissell’s OUT box and leading me out of the library.
Ms. Bissell had already returned to her papers and didn’t look up as we left, although I waved to her and said goodbye and that I’d see her later, hoping she wouldn’t hold Trout’s comments against me.
I was already headed down the corridor before I realized I had left Trout behind. When I looked back, he was standing in the open door to the library fiddling with something in his hand, so I headed back in his direction, and just then I smelled the most terrible smell I’ve ever known, like a hundred dogs the size of Jetty were using the library as a dumping ground.
“Let’s get out of here before that stupid librarian sees us.”
I was holding my nose.
“Don’t you smell that?” I asked. I should have known better than to ask.
“Smell?”
We were rushing down the corridor and he was laughing so hard he could hardly stand up.
“It’s like, I don’t know, the worst smell…”
Behind us we could hear the other kids making choking sounds as the smell spread down the corridor.
I looked at Trout. “Did you make that happen?”
“I told you I didn’t like the smell of this school,” he said.
I ducked into the boys’ room after him.
“Want to
see?” he asked, reaching in his pocket and putting out his hand. In the palm of his hand was a little brown pill about the size of the vitamin C I have to take to keep from getting colds.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Fart Fun,” Trout said. “Keep it. You may need it sometime.”
He put the pill in my hand.
“You open the capsule and out comes this smell called Fart Fun. That’s the name of the pill. I’ve got hundreds at home I got at a magic store in Georgia. I always carry some in my pocket.”
“So that’s why you asked about the smell of the school, right?”
“Right. I thought the school needed smell improvement and, presto, I had just the stuff.”
When we came out of the bathroom, the bell was ringing for the next period and the smell had almost disappeared.
“It doesn’t last,” Trout said.
“You’re not afraid of getting caught?”
“I’ve never been caught.”
“Cool,” I said, and I meant it. I’d never known anyone at Stockton Elementary who wasn’t scared of trouble, and Trout didn’t seem to be worried at all.
“So?” Trout said as we walked into homeroom. “I suppose you’re wondering where I got the question mark on my chin.”
From a distance, it looked like a bright red sunburn or an infected mosquito bite. Or a big zit. Close up, it looked like what it was. A question mark very neatly made.
“I always wear a question mark on my chin. I had it tattooed when I was six at a place in Florida where they burn the tattoo into your skin too deep to ever come off,” he said.
“Didn’t it hurt?” I asked, amazed that a boy my age would be allowed to have a tattoo. Max has a tattoo, a lizard or an iguana, some kind of cold-blooded creature tattooed on his shoulder. He decided to show it to me over Christmas vacation.
But Max is a senior in high school, grown-up enough to pay for his own tattoo.
“Did it hurt?”