by Peter Hannan
I couldn’t know, but it didn’t matter. She was there.
Molly looked over at Edwin, and he smiled. She had this ability to make people feel good, even when two seconds earlier, they were feeling horrible or pissed off or whatever Edwin was feeling.
“We’ve barely practiced at all,” I said quietly.
Molly thought for a second. “How about the song you sang when I kissed you? I remember that one. I’ll sing harmony again.”
“Yes,” I said.
Hell yes, I thought. She brought up that moment. That had to be a good thing.
I felt prouder than I’d ever felt. I was standing onstage with Molly. We’d be singing a song I wrote, sharing a microphone in front of everyone. We were sharing each others’ shirts, too, and everyone knew that meant something. For the first time, I allowed myself to think that maybe we could be together.
I noticed that other girl in the crowd again. Then I saw Molly noticing her. “Come on, Delaware,” she said, snapping in front of my face. “We haven’t got all day.”
I looked over at Edwin. “It’s just E, A, and B7. Keep the bass line simple.”
On the chorus, I held up my hand to let people in the crowd know that they should sing, too. It’s not like there were a lot of words to learn:
We’re bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored,
Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored,
Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored,
What a bore … a dull, dumb, stupid old bore.
It was funny to hear a crowd of people screaming the word “bored” that many times. Any word loses its meaning when you repeat it a lot. After the first line of “boreds,” it sounded like a bunch of aliens or an idling motorboat or something.
There were two more verses:
Don’t talk, take a test, welcome to the cuckoo’s nest … bored.
Memorize, anesthetize, gotcha right between the eyes … bored,
Same thing, every day, each and every stupid old chore,
What a bore … a dull, dumb, stupid old bore.
Day in, day out, lose your mind without a doubt … bored.
Work hard, get a job, turn into a big blob … bored.
Same thing, every day, each and every stupid old chore,
What a bore … a dull, dumb, stupid old bore.
Same thing, every day, each and every stupid old chore,
What a bore … a dull, dumb, stupid old bore.
The crowd went wild. I mean, they always say that, but this crowd really seemed wild.
Unbelievably, the Dweebs actually sounded okay. Edwin’s bass was better than expected. Molly’s harmony wasn’t perfect, but it felt perfect. My “froggy Eastwood” had sort of morphed into “old blues singer East-wood,” and it sounded like I was there to tell them what was what. Like I was Dirty Howlin’ Wolf Harry, who had rambled up from the delta, down a thousand lonesome highways, and knew a little something about boredom and life in general — and, yes, I felt lucky about it, punk.
The song summed up how bored I’d felt for most of my life, but I was feeling anything but bored now. I was smiling. Molly was smiling.
The Butcher was not smiling.
A few kids from Danderbrook’s class started chanting for the song version of that other poem I’d recited for them, “Full of Bleep.” I’d never even tried singing it.
“Full of Bleep! Full of Bleep!” they cried.
Molly leaned over. “I think you’d better do that ‘Full of Bleep’ thing before a bleeping riot breaks out.”
“Good bleeping idea,” I said, grinning.
I started playing. Coming up with chords for any song is pretty easy when you only know a few chords to begin with. I started in quietly, beating out a rhythm. Edwin joined in, and I nodded. Simple.
After that second verse, a small group of classmates started singing along and laughing. They were really cracking up. A couple were almost choking from laughter.
Huh?
I thought the song was kind of funny, but I didn’t quite get their reaction.
Hey, you, you are so stupid!
Yeah, you, you’re such a creep!
What’s that smell, I think you poop-ed!
Yeah, you, you’re full of bleep!
Speaking of stupid, that was a really stupid rhyme. But it seemed to be very effective at bringing Gerald’s blood to a boil. He had moved from merely full of rage to seriously demented. Even Molly stopped singing and looked back and forth nervously between the Butcher and me.
Shettle was still guarding the plank. I was actually happy to see him there. So even though it looked like the Butcher’s head was about to explode, it was okay by me. There were city workers around to clean that stuff up.
A large part of the audience was now chanting, “Yeah, you, you’re full of bleep!” Then I noticed that the kids who were laughing the hardest were pointing at Gerald in rhythm with the song.
Edwin inched toward me. He leaned in and spoke loudly over the racket. “You know why they’re laughing?”
I shrugged and kept slamming out the chords.
Edwin chuckled. “Get this: Gerald was a bed wetter all through elementary school.”
What?!
Good god. I had no idea.
“And,” Edwin hollered over the noise of the crowd, “nothing drives him more insane than someone making fun of him for it. In sixth grade, Paul Kamurski was joking around about it behind Gerald’s back, not realizing that he was literally behind Gerald’s back. Kamurski left on a stretcher. Some said he died, and others said he just changed schools. But nobody ever saw him again.”
Okay, that was it. I stopped playing.
But Edwin happily joined in the chanting again: “Yeah, you! You’re full of bleep!”
It seemed like Edwin was intentionally trying to make Gerald blow his top. In fact, Edwin looked like he was beyond excited about it.
“Edwin, enough!” I cried, waving, trying to shut the thing down. Molly was frantically making the “cut it” sign with her hand to her throat, too, but stopping the flow of words from Edwin’s mouth was like stopping Niagara Falls. He kept smiling and singing and slamming on the bass.
The crowd was totally into it. Even Danderbrook was bopping to the beat, doing some kind of crazy dance from thirty years ago.
Wait a minute … where was Gerald? I’d lost track of him in the sea of “Full of Bleep” chanters. I scanned back and forth across the crowd, until I finally saw him. He was … reading a book.
So, what? He’d gone shopping at the used-book tables and was suddenly engrossed in his new purchase? This seemed like an extremely odd time for recreational reading. In the middle of a concert? In the middle of revving up to tear me limb from limb? Had he scored a manual on preferred methods of eradicating one’s enemies?
Gerald’s face was beet red. He looked down at the book, then back up at me. Again and again.
Wait.
NO!
He wasn’t reading a regular book. Gerald had one of my notebooks. He and the goons were looking through all of my notebooks. Somebody had stolen them from my guitar case, I guess while I was in the bathroom.
Who besides the Dweebs even knew they were in there? I racked my brain. Wait a minute.
Sparky.
I scanned the audience and there he was, dead center, looking up at me with a smile that seemed impossibly big for his tiny face. Why did I have to call him a munchkin?
Everyone else was still chanting, “Yeah, you … you’re full of bleep!”
Butcher and company riffled through the notebook pages, making wild motions with their hands. Their faces twisted into angry gargoyle expressions. All those horrible portraits and nasty songs! Willard Gourdinski’s bees were swarming. I swear I could hear them buzzing. He started ripping out pages and throwing them into the air like confetti.
I didn’t know what to do. I was kind of trapped there on the barge, frozen, watch
ing it all unfold. Molly and I watched helplessly as Edwin and the crowd chanted louder and louder, making the Butcher angrier and angrier.
Gerald moved closer to the gangplank, trying to get past Mr. Shettle. But even though Shettle hated me, he was protective of Edwin. Shettle folded his arms and glared at the Butcher. The Butcher gestured and pointed, but Shettle wasn’t budging.
“Yeah, you, you’re full of bleep! Yeah, you, you’re full of bleep!”
Gerald stopped trying to get past Shettle. Instead, he crossed his arms, bit his lip, and closed his eyes. He stood verrrrry still.
Then Gerald — the creep whose entire mission in life was to make others cry — started to cry.
At first, I didn’t believe it. But then he looked down and covered his face with his hands. His shoulders heaved. He sobbed.
Pretty soon, everyone noticed. The goons went into catatonic shock. For them, it was like seeing Superman bawl like a baby. One by one, the chanters faded out.
Edwin continued plucking the bass a bit, but eventually even he stopped.
It was dead quiet, except for the sound of the Butcher whimpering. I thought for sure someone would call him crybaby Butcher, or crybaby Gerald, or crybaby something. But you could see from the looks on everyone’s faces that they actually felt sorry for the brute who had tormented most of them for years.
I felt sorry for him, too.
I remembered Mrs. Toople saying that Gerald and I had a lot in common. She had seemed nuts. Actually, she was nuts. But maybe there was some truth to it. It’s like when you realize that King Kong has real emotions and is in love with Fay Wray. He doesn’t seem like as much of a monster. He seems less like a cliché … and more like you.
Anton Squilt (n.: an idiot turd-faced jerk worshipper) held his arms out as if he actually wanted to give the Butcher a hug.
“Hey, buddy,” he said, “don’t feel so bad.” For the first time in Squilt’s life, everyone hung on his every word. “We all know you used to wet your bed once in a while,” he continued timidly. “Well, more than once in a while.”
Oh, man, where was he going with this?
“But that’s all water under the bridge … oh, I mean … you know what I mean. We still like you. So … please stop crying, Gerald.”
Did he say Gerald?
There were a few nervous gasps.
Molly walked up behind me and whispered, “Fasten your seat belts.”
Squilt realized his mistake and scrambled to fix it. “I mean Big G … G-Man … Butcher …”
The Butcher’s shoulders stopped heaving. His head turned slowly, face pinched and angry. His hurt feelings seemed to turn back into regular old psycho bully feelings right before our eyes.
“LISTEN, YOU MORON,” he growled. “I WASN’T CRYING, I WAS KIDDING!”
Anton Squilt’s lip trembled. “Please don’t hit me. Please don’t hit me. Please don’t hit me.” Then he stopped, dropped, and rolled into a fetal position. It sounds a little dramatic, but with the Butcher’s roar still echoing in the air, it seemed like the sensible thing to do.
The Butcher turned back to Shettle and pointed to something in the notebook. Shettle squinted at the page. Then he read out loud, making every line into a question, like he couldn’t believe what he was reading:
“Hey, you, in the gymnasium?
Yeah, you, you’re such a creep!”
He stopped for a second to glare at me before continuing:
“Hey, you, so dumb and lazy-um?
Yeah, you, you’re full of bleep!”
Now his face got red. He and the Butcher looked like two huge angry tomatoes. I would have laughed, if I wasn’t afraid for my life.
The Butcher handed Shettle another notebook and pointed out another passage.
Shettle read some more:
“If your head is made of lumber,
You are smarter … Shettle’s dumb-ber.”
That did it. Shettle stepped aside and made a right-this-way-sir kind of motion with his hand, inviting the Butcher aboard the barge. It was like unleashing a mad dog.
Gerald crossed the gangplank in one leap.
I backed away. “Listen, Butcher, I didn’t mean any of it.” No, wait, he’d never believe that. “Actually, I guess I meant some of it. But definitely not the whole bed-wetting thing. I mean, I had no idea you actually had a problem with that.”
“Shut up!” he snarled, fake-lunging at me.
This was a variation on the hair-smooth move, and it worked perfectly. I jerked backward, tripped over an amplifier, and fell hard, flat on my back. I put my hands up, shielding my face.
Gerald bent down toward me, jutting his chin like he was going to chin me to death. “Brainless dweeb. You think you can show up here, and all of a sudden everybody’s gonna love you and hate me?”
“No, I —” I realized he was right. It had somehow become a competition for him. Maybe for me, too. Not just for Molly, but for the hearts and minds of the entire school.
But Gerald didn’t want to hear it. “SHUT! UP!”
The other goons came up behind him, snickering.
I was so cornered.
“You are so cornered,” said Anton Squilt.
“Leave him alone!” screamed Molly, trying to push her way through the crowd of goons surrounding me.
But I knew there was no way they would leave me alone.
“Okay, boys,” I heard Danderbrook say. “Break it up.”
But before they could even think about breaking it up, someone else shrieked, “WAIT!”
It was Ivan Brink. He was waving a page that had been ripped from a notebook. “Listen to this love poem that Dela-who wrote to Molly!”
“What?” said the Butcher, Molly, and Edwin — and a lot of other people — simultaneously.
Please. Lord. No. How much worse could this get? Which love poem? There were so many.
“Check this!” said Ivan, beside himself with excitement. “It’s called ‘Keep It Secret.’”
“No need to read that,” I said, sitting up. “No one would find it interesting.”
“I’m pretty sure I’d find it interesting,” said Molly, crossing her arms.
Ivan cleared his throat. His weird little vampire voice made everything even worse.
In retrospect, I have no idea why I repeated that line so many times.
Keep it secret … or I’m dead.
Hearing it out loud like that made me want to be dead. Each repetition was another nail in my coffin.
Keep it secret … or I’m dead.
So that was how Molly finally found out that I actually did like her. A lot. That I had all along. But that I’d pretended not to because I was plain old scared. Wimpy turtle in his shell.
I didn’t want to look at her, but I did. Everyone did.
Molly nodded in silence for a moment. She brought the microphone close to her lips. Then she extended her other arm in my general direction, drawing smaller and smaller circles in the air with her index finger, before finally pointing to me.
“Ladies and gentlemen … the one, the only, Davis Delaware. The wussiest wuss in the history of wusses.” She looked at me for a minute. “And he kisses like a fish.”
A fish?
Things quickly went from bad to worse.
“Check this out!” squealed Willard Gourdinski, twitching like an over-caffeinated poodle. He pointed to something else in a notebook. He had found the Glossary of Goons.
“EWWWW!” whined Karl Kidder, looking over Willard’s shoulder and drooling furiously.
“What is it?” Anton Squilt desperately wanted to know.
Other students and teachers passed around different notebooks, recognizing grotesque depictions of themselves.
I heard the lonesome wail of Stephen Jablowski, who had apparently found the entry defining him as a sickly coyote, accompanied by a drawing of him as — you guessed it — a sickly coyote. I remembered having a lot of fun drawing tons of fleas and ticks hopping around on his head.
“WAIT A MINUTE!” A voice cut through the air.
Danderbrook.
Finally, the voice of reason.
“This is supposed to be me?” she cried, pointing in horror to the portrait I had done of her in that first class, days before I’d submitted my poem and become her poetic pet. Good god. I’d spent about twenty minutes carefully rendering slugs slithering in and out of her nostrils.
“WHY?” she wailed. The prince of poetry had let her down. I thought about trying to explain. Maybe say, that, you know, those slugs were just metaphors for something, um, nice?
Meanwhile, until Molly said what she said — you know, the thing about me kissing like a fish — the Butcher probably only suspected that she and I had kissed. Now he knew for sure, and he clearly didn’t care that Molly hated me. His hate for me was all that mattered.
The Butcher towered over me like Godzilla. I tried to crawl away, but he grabbed me by the collar and belt and lifted me like a helpless infant. I crawled in midair for a second.
“Have fun swimming with the sharks, dweeb,” he said. He started turning, holding me at arm’s length. Around and around I flew, like I was on an out-of-control kiddie airplane ride.
The Butcher was enjoying himself way too much. “Three, two, one, zero … we … have … liftoff!”
“STOP!!!!!” someone screamed.
“What? No, liftoff! We have liftoff!” roared the Butcher, letting me go.
Of course, he meant to throw me overboard, but the STOP screwed up his aim and I flew into the drum kit instead, crashing and clanging with the cymbals across the deck.
The scream had to have come from Molly, right? She was coming to my defense after all.