Chadwick's Epic Revenge

by Lisa Doan

  “I know what I saw, Musselman,” Terry said. “You just didn’t know anybody was looking. Why would I even make up something like that?”

  “Because you’re gaslighting me! You’re trying to make me think I’ve gone crazy.”

  “Are you sure you need help with that?” Terry asked.

  “I know what you’re doing,” I said, leaning toward him. “I know all about that book you checked out. I’m onto your plan and it’s not going to work. I am saner than you will ever be in your whole life. My brain is rooted and glued and cemented in sanity and I am not going to flee like a flamingo.”

  “What do we think, ladies,” Terry said to the girls. “Thumbs-up for he’s sane and thumbs-down for he’s completely unhinged.”

  I looked around the table. One by one I got thumbs-downs, except for Rory, who helpfully gave me two thumbs-up to try to balance the vote, and Suvi, who refused to vote at all because unhinged was not a proper psychiatric diagnosis.

  So maybe I should have stopped talking before I got to the whole rooted and glued and cemented and flamingo part, but the guy was driving me to say stuff like that.

  I paused. Was it working? Was I in the beginning stages of losing my mind? I might be. After all, I had just questioned if I was losing my mind, so I basically questioned my own idea of reality, which was what gaslighting was all about.

  I didn’t hear much of the rest of the meeting. I was too consumed with trying to analyze where the line between sanity and insanity really was. How would I know if I crossed it? Had I, even now, slipped over the edge? Would I wake up tomorrow and realize that I had moved to Thailand and was living with Principal Merriweather in a remote mountainside temple?

  I only noticed the meeting was over when everybody stood up. Dazed, I followed Rory down the hall. Terry was right behind us, so we walked faster. Then Terry went faster. Then we went faster.

  Terry grabbed my arm and spun me around.

  Rory ran down the hall and cried, “Save yourself!”

  “Listen up, Mussel-man,” Terry said, “I’m going to drive you right over the edge. I’ve been just playing around all these years, but now you’re really gonna pay what you owe. Got it?”

  Since I was alone with an individual who probably made weekend plans to rob elderly women, I decided it was the wrong time to argue.

  Terry glanced at my open backpack and snatched at my persuasive essay, “Video Games—Fun to Do and Good for You.” “I’ll just borrow this,” he said. He let go of me and strode away.

  “Hey,” I called after him. “You can’t make me think I’m crazy. Because I’m totally sane. I have a firm grip on reality, and you’re not going to pry me off of it.”

  Terry waved my paper over his head and disappeared around the corner.

  Stealing my paper was a new low, but as I stood there alone in the hallway, I began to think that the crocodile had finally made a fatal mistake in our never-ending death roll. He had Mrs. Jameston for English just like I did, and when she got two of the same paper, she would ask questions. I could prove that the research and the essay were on my computer. I had spent a lot of time making my case for video games, figuring I would get a good grade and then victoriously hand it to my mom as evidence of why her negative attitude about them was so wrong. If Terry handed that paper in as his, he would get busted. He might even get expelled, and then Jana would forget that he ever existed. And hopefully forget any picture she might have in her mind of me grilling a squirrel in my backyard.

  I smiled. It looked like the Nile crocodile was hunting himself. When he figured it out, I hoped it would drive him insane.

  * * *

  “We’ll go around the room so everybody has an equal chance to participate. Now, let’s see,” Mr. Samson said, as he scanned the list of prompt questions. “Okay, here we go—what is the one thing you wish people understood about you?”

  There had to be a way out of this. I thought about mentioning I had an outbreak of flesh-eating bacteria on my legs and needed to go into isolation. Or falling to the floor into a grand mal seizure.

  “I’ll go first,” Mr. Samson said. “When I was young and naive, I thought I would become a professor teaching at a university. After class, I would lounge at a coffee bar and have intellectual conversations with my colleagues. But here I am at a suburban elementary school. What went wrong? That question haunts my dreams. Rory? Your turn—go.”

  “Well,” Rory said, “I guess I would like people to understand that one of the things I’ve recently become against is making a person say grace at the table with no warning whatsoever. Especially when a person’s religious grandmother is there. It puts that person under too much pressure, and then they mess it up, and then everybody and their grandmother is like, what was that?”

  That was new.

  “Ridiculous, Rory,” Mr. Samson said. “Chadwick?”

  I felt paralyzed. My brain was experiencing a computer crash. It was throwing random messages across my mind—University! Coffee bar! Haunts! Grace! Grandmother! What was that!

  “Uh, I don’t like to say grace either,” I mumbled.

  Suvi snorted. “Deep thoughts from Rory and Chadwick.”

  I got the feeling I was failing group.

  “Moving on,” Mr. Samson said. “Terry?”

  “Mr. Samson,” Terry said, “unlike Chadwick, I take group very seriously. It seems to me that he refuses to talk because he’s hiding a truly unstable mind. If we heard what Chadwick really thinks about all day, we would probably be psychologically scarred for life. I saw him kick a dog once.”

  Kick a dog? What?

  Jana looked at me like she’d just smelled the dead squirrel I’d supposedly grilled.

  “I never kicked a dog in my whole life!” I said.

  “Right,” Terry said to me with a smirk, “like you never barbecued any roadkill either.”

  Mr. Samson rocked back on his chair. “This is going nowhere. Next.”

  That was lie number two Terry had told Jana about me. Now she thought I was some kind of squirrel-grilling, dog-kicking maniac.

  I sat back. The Nile crocodile’s diabolical plot suddenly revealed itself to me. There were more layers and twists and turns to it than I had originally thought. He was making Jana think I was nuts, knowing that would be a surefire way to make me nuts, thereby slowly driving me to the brink of insanity through the disdain of my future girlfriend. I was going to have to use every ounce of strength to avoid a total crack-up.

  While I held on to reality with both hands, Jana turned away from me and explained to the group that she would like people to understand that cheerleading is a sport and just as important as basketball. If the cheerleaders didn’t get new uniforms this year, they were going on strike. The school board would then be forced to view how pathetic a basketball game was without the cheerleaders’ enthusiasm at the sidelines.

  “So let me clarify,” Mr. Samson said. “You want people to understand that cheerleading is a sport? Or that you’re going on strike?”

  “And basketball games are pathetic without cheerleaders,” Jana said.

  Bethany wanted people to understand that she and Jana were best friends and that Carmen was just an extra friend—a third, disposable wheel.

  Suvi said, “Mr. Samson, I plan on becoming a psychiatrist. A leading psychiatrist known for advancing revolutionary theories and treatments. I had hoped that group would provide me with some interesting case studies, but so far that has not happened.” Suvi paused and tapped her index finger against her chin. “Though your disappointed hopes and dreams might prove worthy of study.”

  Mr. Samson dug his hands into his thighs so hard that his fingernails turned white and I suspected his legs were bleeding underneath his slacks. I, on the other hand, began to wonder if Suvi might know something that could help me stay sane. I had known she was a superbrain, but I had not realized that she planned to be a psychiatrist. She was in the very field that could help me. I only had to figure out a way to u
nderstand what she said.

  * * *

  I spent all of Friday morning waiting for Mrs. Jameston to confront me and Terry about the duplicate “Video Games—Fun to Do and Good for You” essays. Nothing happened.

  Over lunch, I told Rory that we needed to follow Terry home from school.

  Rory said, “Terry stole your paper and he’ll get caught—there’s no reason to run all over the place trying to find Mr. Vance and his fingers.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I thought too. But now I realize that we can’t know when Terry will turn in that paper. He’s deeply diabolical and trying to drive me insane. I can’t just assume he’ll make an obvious move. He might decide to turn it in near the end of the year. By then, Mrs. Jameston might have forgotten all about my paper—she might not love video games as much as we do. For all I know, Terry has stolen papers from half the school and has a whole file of them.”

  “He hasn’t stolen any of my papers,” Rory said.

  “No,” I said, “you could leave one of yours taped to the front doors and nobody would take it. Tell me again, what did you call your persuasive essay?”

  “It’s called ‘Why I’m Against the Things I’m Against—A Cautionary Tale.’”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” I said. “Anyway, the crocodile might not turn the paper in at all. Don’t you get it? He’s keeping me off-balance. He’s trying to get me to crack.”

  “Just wait and see what he does,” Rory said. “If he turns in the paper, he gets caught. If he doesn’t turn it in, then he stole it for nothing.”

  “I have to get that photo of his dad’s fingers. That’s the only way I can prove he’s a liar. If I don’t prove he’s a liar, then Jana will always believe I grilled a dead squirrel for dinner and then kicked a dog.”

  “You didn’t grill a squirrel, though, right?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said.

  “That’s good,” Rory said. “You could probably get sick from eating something like that. Depending on how long it was lying in the sun. But then, you would already know that after eating the warmed-up chicken salad sandwich.”

  I could see that Rory was trying to get me sidetracked so I would forget to make him follow Terry with me. I had to unleash the nuclear option. “If you don’t come with me,” I said, “I’ll shut down the kitchen.”

  “You can’t cut off the snacks,” Rory said. “Without the extra calories I get at your house, I’ll get thinner and weaker, struggling to survive on greenery and seaweed crackers, until I’m just a shell of my former self.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “But that doesn’t have to happen. I have enough Cheetos and Doritos to keep you happy and healthy for the rest of your life. You only have to help me prove to Jana that Terry is a liar to keep the snacks flowing.”

  “Okay,” Rory said. “I will agree to your extortion, but with conditions. Number one, we look for Mr. Vance one time only. Number two, you agree to back me up on the next thing I’m against.”

  I was fine with that. Based on last year, I was pretty sure that the next thing Rory would be against was pop quizzes. I was already against them.

  Operation Flamingo Bites Back was on.

  * * *

  “There he is,” I whispered to Rory. “He just got on the bus. Let’s go.”

  Rory and I sat a few rows behind Terry. As usual, he was surrounded by Jana, Carmen, and Bethany.

  “Why don’t we go over to your house, Terry?” Carmen asked.

  Thank you, Carmen! I leaned forward to hear what Terry would say. This could be the beginning of the unraveling of Terry’s stupid stories. We wouldn’t have to follow Terry after all—Jana would go and see for herself that Mr. Vance was walking around with all of his fingers.

  Terry coughed. Then he said, “That wouldn’t be a good idea. By this time of day my dad is not in a very good mood. He has arthritis because of the accident.”

  No! They couldn’t let him dodge it so easily. I grabbed the seat in front of me and stood up. “Terry,” I called. “Don’t you mean it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to your house because they’d see your dad wearing his regular fingers he was born with?”

  Jana turned and glared at me. Terry didn’t turn around, but instead said, “Did you ever get rid of that fungus? You know, the one we all freaked out about when we saw it in the locker room last year?”

  “I don’t have a fungus!” I said. “Stop making up all these stupid lies!”

  “But the gym teacher gave you a cream for it,” Terry said. “Remember? He called it athlete’s foot of the groin.”

  Everyone in the seats around me leaned away. Jana said, “Ugh! Is it contagious?”

  “I’m not sure,” Terry said, “but Mr. Johnson did spray the whole locker room with bleach after he left.”

  “I do not have a fungus growing on me!” I said. “If I did, I would have gone to a real doctor, not the gym teacher.”

  “Well,” Terry said, “let’s hope you did.”

  Rory pulled me down in my seat.

  * * *

  We followed Terry off the bus while I mentioned, loudly, that I had never had a fungus in my life and we were getting off at this stop to go see a friend who went to private school that nobody else knew. That turned out to be totally unnecessary. Terry ignored us as he said goodbye to the girls.

  They hung out the bus windows while Bethany shouted, “I hope your dad gets in a better mood! Tell him we all support him!”

  Terry waved to the girls until the bus turned a corner. Then he swung around to me and Rory. “What are you looking at?”

  This would have been a perfect opportunity to throw out a line like, “What I’m looking at is a big liar named Terry Vance,” but I had already shaken myself up by my daring on the bus. “We’re just looking at house numbers,” I said.

  “Absofreakinlutely, fungus man,” Terry said, and strode down the street.

  “Do you see what’s happening?” I asked Rory. “Do you see what he’s doing? Now Jana thinks I’ve grilled a squirrel, kicked a dog, and have a fungus.”

  “But you don’t have a fungus, right?”

  “Right,” I muttered.

  We followed Terry at a distance. He walked two blocks and then turned down another street.

  “There it is: Mystic Lane,” I said.

  The front yards on the crocodile’s street were filled with toys, aboveground swimming pools, and lawn furniture. Except for the one house that had cars parked all over the lawn. That house had a sign over a large garage. “Vance Auto Repair.”

  “Bingo,” I said. “Let’s do reconnaissance.” I pointed at the pool in the yard across the street. “We’ll hide behind that and scope the place out.”

  We jogged across the street and hid behind the pool. Rory almost collapsed it when he tried to lean against it. The water had been drained out and the sides were flimsy aluminum. I knelt and peered around the edge to Vance Auto Repair. There were a lot of broken-down cars parked everywhere, so I would have thought Mr. Vance and his crew would have been running all over the place trying to get them fixed. But there was nobody. Fifteen minutes went by and nothing happened.

  “Are we going to stay here all day?” Rory asked. “I’m starving. All I’ll get for dinner is some kind of vegetable casserole with yeast on top that’s supposed to taste like cheese. It doesn’t, by the way. I agreed to this on the condition that I get fed. If I don’t eat something at your house, I won’t have the strength to get up for school tomorrow and will start my slow decline. What are you going to do then? Sneak into the hospital where I’m clinging to life and put Cheetos into my IV?”

  “Sooner or later, Mr. Vance will have to come out to fix one of those cars,” I said. “Then we get the photo and are on our way home to the snack drawer.”

  At that very moment I was grabbed from behind by the shirt collar and yanked to my feet. A man turned me around and pushed me against the pool. The side buckled and I fell backward, landing in the inch of wate
r at the bottom.

  “Photo of what?” the man said. He was over six feet tall and wore a pair of overalls with a patch on the chest that said “Vance Auto Repair.”

  Rory was already halfway down the street.

  “Save yourself!” he shouted.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “What are you doing creepin’ around this neighborhood?” Mr. Vance asked in a gravelly voice.

  “Nothing!” I said, watching Rory speed around the corner.

  “Then why are you hiding?” he asked.

  “We were just, well, we were … playing hide-and-seek,” I said. Mr. Vance’s face leaned down close to mine. He smelled like grease and tobacco.

  “Maybe I’ll call the cops and you can tell them all about it,” he said.

  “I’m just an innocent child!” I cried. I didn’t know why I said that. I never referred to myself as a child, and it didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Mr. Vance. I doubted he would be sympathetic even if I were a newborn baby.

  “You’re up to no good,” Mr. Vance said. “I can smell no good a mile away. Whatever it is, you’re gonna take it off my street.”

  I scrambled up and ducked underneath Mr. Vance’s arms. I jogged backward and yanked my phone out of my backpack.

  He reached toward me.

  Click.

  “Got it,” I yelled.

  I raced down the street. At the corner, I looked over my shoulder. Mr. Vance stood in the middle of the street, hands on his hips, staring at me.

  * * *

  It took a half hour to get back to my house. If I had used the sidewalks it probably would have been fifteen minutes, but that didn’t seem safe. I ran from tree to tree, haunted by the idea that Mr. Vance had jumped in a car to hunt me down. Terry’s dad struck me as the kind of person who would bury you in the backyard and then celebrate with a beer.

  Rory sat on my front porch with a bag of Cheetos on his lap. Curtains hung out of one of the living room windows, so I assumed Rory had found the doors locked and decided to pry open a window and climb in. He was like a family of mice—once you got them in your house, it didn’t matter how many holes you plugged up, they just found another way back inside.