by Neil Smith
Then a voice says, “Are you there, Oliver?” This is where my dream ends. I wake up and realize somebody is knocking on the door to my room.
“It’s me. It’s Thelma.”
“Give me a moment,” I call out in a half mumble. After the punch party, Thelma had said she had an all-night shift in the rebirthing room at the Meg Murry Infirmary. What is she doing back at the Frank and Joe already?
As I slip out of bed, moonlight is streaming through my open drapes. The moon here is full every night. Again, puzzling. I switch on my desk lamp and squint from the sudden brightness. The clock on my desk says a quarter to three.
I shuffle to the door in my oversize pajamas. When I open it, I think for an instant I am still in my Helen Keller dream because standing beside Thelma Rudd in the dimly lit corridor is a member of the Trojans basketball team. He is not in uniform, but I recognize him all the same.
“Zig sent us a late package,” Thelma says, but I do not even glance at her because I am looking at the boy.
“Johnny Henzel?” I say.
The boy nods. He stares at me in the same transfixed way I stare at him. He looks thinner than he did in Hoffman Estates. His buzz cut exposes his ears, one of which is bigger than the other. His eyelashes are so dark he seems to be wearing mascara.
“Did you also have a heart defect?” I ask.
“What?” Johnny Henzel says.
“A hole in your heart,” I say. The chances of two deaths by the same cause at the same school in the same semester are infinitesimally small, I know, but I am half-asleep.
“Let’s step inside,” says Thelma, but nobody moves.
Johnny runs his hands over his hair, scratching his scalp and wincing a bit. Finally, he stops scratching and says, “We didn’t die from a f*cking heart defect, Boo.” His voice is hoarse, shaky. “We got shot by some crazy kid at school.”
A scream. Not in the corridor outside my room, but in my mind. A memory of a scream that rang out in the hallway of Helen Keller.
My voice comes out in a whisper: “You must be mistaken.”
Johnny Henzel drops his knapsack. He moves toward me and opens his arms. He hugs me to him, his sweaty head resting on my bony shoulder. Even though I dislike being touched, even though I was never hugged by anybody but you two, I do not pull away. I pat between his shoulders gently, the way a mama does, as Johnny Henzel sobs and sobs in my arms.
Remember your favorite story about my inability to cry? The encyclopedia story? The incident took place when I was four and we had just moved to 222 Hill Drive in the Sandpits Apartments so you could take over the local barbershop. You had left me in the den with my plastic dinosaurs while you unpacked dishes in the kitchen. A dreadful racket soon had you scurrying back to the den, where you discovered that the bookshelves on which you had placed a set of encyclopedias earlier had proven too flimsy. Three shelves had given way, scattering volumes A to Z. There I sat among the toppled books, staring placidly into the face of my toy ankylosaur, a dinosaur with an armored body and a bony tail club.
“A whole bookshelf of encyclopedias fell on our little egghead,” you said, Mother, in wonder, “and he still didn’t crack.”
“Our son has the head of an ankylosaur!” you added, Father.
Oh, how I liked when you told that story! I miss you, Mother and Father. Given my holey heart, you must have braced yourselves for my early death, but surely you did not expect my life to be snuffed out by a boy with a gun.
Johnny Henzel did not die immediately. After he was shot, he was taken to the Schaumburg Medical Center, where he lay in a coma and never awoke. He tells Thelma and me that despite being unconscious, he could sometimes hear what people said to him.
“The doctors even told my folks to talk to me,” Johnny says. “They never mentioned the shootings, though. They thought if they did, I wouldn’t get better.”
It was his ten-year-old sister who told him about his murder. When their parents were out of the room fetching some lunch, she leaned in close to Johnny’s head, swathed in its turban of bandages, and whispered, “Gunboy got you!”
“Brenda said my folks refused to say the killer’s name out loud. They’d just call him ‘the boy with the gun.’ She told me not to worry ’cause Gunboy couldn’t get me no more. He’d shot himself dead.”
“He is dead too?” I say, astounded.
Johnny makes one hand into a pistol and holds it to his own temple. He nods and pulls the trigger.
He and Thelma are sitting Indian-style on the opposite bed. I sit on my own bed, hugging my pillow. I think I am in shock: I did not die from the over-excitement of learning 106 elements by heart.
“Who was Gunboy?” I ask Johnny, whose eyes are still bloodshot from crying.
“I don’t know for sure,” he replies. “Brenda never mentioned him again. She just kept pleading with me to wake up. ‘Open your eyes, Johnny! Please open your eyes!’ ”
“If Gunboy is a true boy, he must have been a student at our school,” I say. “Oh, goodness, he may be thirteen. He may have been reborn here in Town!”
“I doubt it,” Thelma says. “Zig may be a dope, but I can’t figure he’d ever let in a killer.” She turns to Johnny. “You didn’t get a look at him?”
“No, not the day of the shooting. I just remember walking down the hall minding my own business. I saw Jermaine Tucker and Cynthia Orwell and Larry Schultz and Oscar Stanley,” he says. “I saw you, Boo, standing at your locker. And then nothing.”
“If we die in a real horrible way, Zig erases the very last seconds of our deaths,” Thelma says. “It’s for our own good.”
“Gunboy probably shot me in the back of the head,” Johnny says. “And got you, too, Boo. You didn’t see nothing?”
“I was facing my locker,” I say. “But I may remember the sound of a gunshot and even a scream. I am not sure, though. It is all very fuzzy.”
“Who at your school would want to shoot you boys?” Thelma asks.
Many a former classmate of mine took pleasure in hassling me and hurting me, but would any of them actually shoot me in the back?
Johnny narrows his eyes. “I think Gunboy was a new kid at school.”
“Why do you think that?” I ask.
“I see the b*stard’s face. He comes to me in my nightmares.”
“Your nightmares?”
“All the nightmares I had at the hospital when I was in my coma. Gunboy haunts me, man. He won’t leave me the f*ck alone.”
“Maybe you did catch a glimpse of him,” Thelma says.
“The kid in my dream has an ugly mug, evil eyes, big ears, and messy hair like a punk rocker. I think I might have even seen him around in the months before we got shot.”
I try to picture such a boy. But I died on only the fourth day of the school year, so I might not have noticed any new boys. Perhaps he was not in my classes. “It’s possible Gunboy killed other thirteen-year-olds,” I say. “Other classmates of ours may be here too.”
“We can check the rebirthing books at the different infirmaries,” Thelma says. “We’ll see if Zig sent us any more packages from Hoffman Estates, Illinois.” She gets up from the bed and pats Johnny’s shoulder. “We’ll talk more in the morning, honey. You need to get some sleep.”
“Why does he need sleep?” I say. “He was just in a coma for five weeks.”
Thelma ignores my comment. She comes over and tries hugging me to her big, soft body, but I have had my fill of hugs tonight, so I move away and climb under the covers. She sings a few bars of “In the Still of the Night” as she tucks in my blanket.
After Thelma leaves, I watch Johnny shuck his clothes and don the striped pajamas Thelma stuffed into his knapsack. As he slides into bed, I wonder if he is afraid to go to sleep in case he falls back into a coma or has a nightmare about Gunboy. But I do not ask. I reach over and turn off the light on my desk. We lie in the dark in silence.
Finally, Johnny says, “I’m glad you’re here.”
&n
bsp; When I do not reply, he goes on: “I don’t mean I’m glad you’re dead, or passed or whatever the hell they say. I’m just glad I’m not alone. I’m glad a friend’s here with me.”
A friend. He called me a friend. Odd. We seldom spoke back in America, but then again, Johnny was shot in the head, so perhaps he does not remember things exactly as they were.
“Good night, Johnny.”
“Good night, Boo.”
But it is not a good night because not for one minute do I sleep.
You knew Johnny, Mother and Father. He delivered our Tribune. He seldom stopped by Clippers, though. His hair was shoulder-length, but it was probably shaved off before the surgeons treated his head wound.
I had actually predicted an early death for Johnny back in Hoffman Estates. He was a skitcher. Do you know what skitching is? It is an illegal winter activity whereby a person crouches behind an idling car, grabs its bumper, and then skates down the icy street as the car drives away.
Johnny was a speed demon, as the ribbons he had won as a sprinter on the track team proved. But I saw this perilous activity as a death wish. Furthermore, I saw a paradox because he also served as a school crossing guard. As a skitcher, he flouted the safety rules of the road and risked life and limb; as a crossing guard, he helped younger kids navigate busy roads safely.
I was once witness to his daredevilry, during the winter before our passings. As you know, I always rose early because I could easily survive on six hours of sleep a night. Around six in the morning, I went for my constitutional. Johnny was also up at that hour on account of his paper route, and I would see him around the Sandpits Apartments pulling a rusty wagon filled with copies of the Tribune. In winter, a sled replaced the wagon.
One day in January, I came across his sled left in front of a residence on the east end of the complex. I assumed he was inside making a delivery. It was snowing, and little drifts had collected atop the newspapers. I brushed the snow off so the papers would not get soggy.
Sometimes Johnny’s dog went along with him on his route. Rover was a drooling basset hound with red, rheumy eyes. I glanced around for Rover, but he was not there. I did see a station wagon idling in the street, though. The owner had just scraped the ice from his windshield and was climbing back into the driver’s seat. As he did so, a crouching figure shot out from between two parked cars and grabbed hold of the bumper.
The driver must have glimpsed Johnny in his rearview mirror because he pressed the gas pedal to the floor and his car zoomed down the street. It wove back and forth as though to loosen Johnny from its tail. Johnny finally let go. He tumbled headlong till he collided with a parked car.
I ran up the street to where Johnny lay dazed. His knitted pompom hat was askew. Snowflakes stuck to his eyelashes, snot ran from his nose to his lip, and smudges of newsprint darkened his cheeks.
“It’s so gorgeous, Boo,” he said, staring at the dawning day.
I looked at the sky, which was a soggy graphite gray like the newspapers lying in his sled.
“Are you hurt?” I asked. “Do you need medical assistance?”
“Lie down. See for yourself how beautiful it is.”
“We’re on Meadow Lane, Johnny. A car may run us over.”
“You only live once.” (How wrong he was.)
I glanced around. Nobody was in the vicinity. There were no headlights from approaching cars. The station wagon was long gone.
Who knows why I lay down with Johnny Henzel? I try to avoid nonsense, and yet this act was nonsensical, not to mention risky. Still, I did it, probably because Johnny seemed so adamant.
“Do you see it?” he said to me as the snow wet the seat of my pants.
“What are we seeing, Johnny?”
“Oh, Boo, what we’re seeing is peace.”
“Peace?”
He lifted a hand in the air and made the V sign with his index and middle fingers.
I looked through his V and saw the delicate outline of a waning crescent moon.
Then we heard the beeping of an automobile. We scrambled up, and Johnny took off toward his sled of newspapers, waving a mitten at me.
In the years he and I lived at Sandpits and attended the same elementary school and junior high, we had few conversations longer than that one in the middle of Meadow Lane last January.
In that fleeting moment in the street, I did feel a certain kinship. I do not know whether to call it friendship. We did share something, but what that something was I cannot say.
In the morning after Johnny’s first night in my dorm room, I pick up his clothes off the floor and hang his jeans in the wardrobe. I ball up his socks and drop them in one of the drawers that slide out from under his bed. Yet Johnny sleeps on.
I look around the room. It is tidy and plain. I have not personalized it in any way other than to hang a drawing of a plant cell, which I did in pen and ink. Thelma has implored me to brighten up the place. With Johnny lying in the second bed, my dorm room now seems more personal (despite his dark, furrowed brow).
It is six thirty. I go to shower. I check my back in the mirror for a gunshot scar, but there is none. Afterward, I go to the roof of the Frank and Joe to measure the growth of glass in the shed’s window. When I come back, just after seven, Johnny is still asleep. I write my new roommate a note: “Dear Johnny, I went to the cafeteria to get us breakfast. Back soon. Hope you slept well.” I sign the note “Oliver,” though I realize I will never be anybody but Boo to him.
I stick plastic containers into a paper bag to fetch us oatmeal. Townies prefer to call it gruel because they claim it is grueling to eat. I exit our dorm, and as I cut across a playing field to reach the cafeteria, I see a trio of boys laughing and kicking a soccer ball around. They can laugh and play because nobody shot them to death, I think. But then I realize I am being unfair: I do not know how they died, and perhaps their deaths were as violent as my own.
On the other side of the field, I walk through the front doors of the Sophie Wender School, which houses the local cafeteria. I immediately need to sit on a bench in the lobby because something occurs to me that makes me dizzy and weak. I wonder if Gunboy’s bullet is still inside me, perhaps even embedded in my holey heart. My breathing comes in gasps. I remove the plastic containers from my paper bag and stick my nose and mouth into its opening. The bag inflates and deflates with my breathing.
“You okay, Oliver?”
I look up and see Esther Haglund.
“Are you sick?”
I plan to say I am hunky-dory, but I take the bag away from my face and say instead, “I was murdered.”
“What?”
“I was murdered,” I repeat. “Somebody I do not even know shot me. I assume I died on the spot. The bullet must have hit a vital organ—or maybe it even blew my brains out.”
I think of you, Father and Mother. Did you learn the news by telephone or by a police visit at Clippers? I must avoid such thoughts; otherwise I will never recover my breath.
Esther sits beside me on the bench as townies traipse through the lobby of the Sophie. Gangs of thirteen-year-olds jostle, holler, and hoot. They are as happy-go-lucky as my fellow students must have been at Helen Keller in the moments before Gunboy opened fire.
I put the bag back over my face and breathe in more carbon dioxide as Esther watches. She has widely spaced green eyes, which she blinks at me, but she says not a word. She also is terrible at small talk, despite her position as a do-gooder in training.
I put down the paper bag. “You have nice hair,” I tell her—my attempt at small talk. “I should know because my parents are barbers.”
She examines the ends of a lock as though checking for splits. Then she pushes her hair back and looks me in the eye. “There’s a support group here for murdered kids.”
“Support group?”
“Yeah, they call themselves ‘gommers.’ ‘GOM’ stands for ‘getting over murder.’ A silly name if you ask me. Gommers get together and talk about how they passed. The
ir anger. Their nightmares. That kind of thing.”
I must look surprised because she says, “You aren’t the only kid here who got murdered, you know. Some gommers consider their death a badge of honor. They lord it over the rest of us. They exaggerate and make their murder more gruesome than it actually was. Hope you don’t do that.”
I tell her I doubt I will, especially since I did not even witness my own shooting. “I would far prefer a heart defect as a cause of death,” I add as I place my plastic containers back in my paper bag. I wonder if a heart defect, common among dwarfs, killed Esther.
Then I stand and say good-bye. I need to fetch breakfast for Johnny and myself.
As I walk away, Esther says, “Wait, Oliver!”
When I turn, she hesitates, but then calls out, “Achondroplasia.” It is her form of dwarfism.
“Did Zig make the porridge?” Johnny Henzel asks.
“No, the three bears did,” I say. This is my attempt at lighthearted humor, but Johnny does not laugh. He shovels his gruel into his mouth and closes his eyes as though the taste is exquisite. He must not have eaten any real food during his coma.
We picnic on the throw rug between our beds. Johnny is still in his pajamas. Considering how famished he is, I forgo my own breakfast and give him the second bowl of oatmeal as well as the cashews, dried apricots, two apples, and two muffins I brought from the cafeteria. While he eats, he leans back against his bed and gives an occasional loud belch because his digestive system is not used to food yet.
I eye his scalp through his short hair. Like me, he has no scar from a bullet wound, which must mean that Zig can double as a plastic surgeon.
“I wonder if my damn picture’s up in the school lobby,” he says. He reminds me that when Oscar Stanley was hit by a car last year, his school photograph was blown up and put in the glass showcase with a giant get-well-soon card. “Your picture must be there too,” he says.