“Linda, what happened?” Linda’s face went red.
“I didn’t see,” she said quietly, with as much conviction as possible, but clearly lying.
“Who didsee ?” she asked, with ominous patience.
Benita, perhaps out of outsider sympathy, put up her hand.
“Yes, Benita?”
“Andy kicked Peter in the leg and Peter fell on him,” she said.
“He tripped on the ball,” Todd said. Everyone looked at him and he blushed, and looked down. By this time Peter had stopped crying, but stayed on the ground as though he wished it would swallow him.
“That true, Andy?” she asked.
Andy refused to look at her, instead twisted his head sideways to shoot Todd Campbell a look to kill. She waited for him to answer and he didn’t. The air on the playground was thick.
Finally, Marshall said, “The new kid just whaled on him. He jumped him and grabbed him in the throat like he was going to kill him.”
With two different stories and a child she had not had time to measure up, there was only one thing left for June Waddell to do.
“Andy, Marshall, Benita, Peter—the office.” She walked over and nudged shoulders in the direction of the school. She blew her whistle, needlessly, since all the children were huddled around the action. “The rest of you resume play. I will be right back and I want to see some hustle when I am!”
She marched the four children to the office, after grabbing Peter by the arm in an insistent manner and reminding him, in her best I’m not-your-mother voice, toget up. Adding that enough was enough.
Petey waited a long time before leaving school, hovering by the lunchroom, wishing he had seventy-five cents to put in the snack machine. He forgot about chips for long stretches of time, while he wondered whether Andy and Marshall were waiting for him outside, as they had threatened to do, or whether they had given up and left already. School let out at three thirty-five. When Petey finally decided to make the long walk down the hall to the back doors of the school, it was ten to four. It felt like he had been waiting for hours.
The hallways were empty by then; the school sounded hollow. Occasionally, sound from the gym could be heard echoing, kids yelling, the ball whacking against the wall, all of it garbled through the peculiar acoustics of the gym. As he passed the staff room he could hear movement inside, but that was all. The empty school had the bad feel of a hospital at night after all the guests have left; it felt serious. They could talk all they wanted about how it was “their” school; it was three-fifty and Petey knew he wasn’t supposed to be there.
The back doors were doubled, with a small foyer where the kids sometimes warmed up at recess until they were kicked out, mostly girls. He went through the first set of double doors and then peered out owlishly. His view of the playground was limited. He could see all the way to the back fence where the goalposts of his most recent disaster were. He could not, however, see far down the sidewalk that led to the school parking lot, where kids congregated after school, waiting for buses and parents to pick them up.
The rest of the day after the fight had been terrible.
They sat them apart in the office. The secretary had been unsure as to who had been involved in what, but she sat Benita and Marshall together on a set of four chairs that faced the desk. She put Petey along the other wall where the teachers came to pick up their notes in the old pigeonholed wall shelf. Teachers glanced over him sternly, setting their mouths to an automatic purse when they saw him sitting there, barely looking at the others because they weren’t in their line of vision. The secretary sat Andy on the chair near her desk. She had frowned when she saw him and said, “Andy Devries, what are you doing here? Not in trouble, I hope?” But he never answered, because Mrs. Waddell was asking to see the principal in a disgusted-exhausted voice. After she disappeared into the inner office, the secretary frowned once more at Andy, and Andy passed it on to Petey.
He mouthed the words,you’re dead. Marshall never said anything. He was preoccupied with keeping his whole body turned away from Benita, who was crying. You could hardly hear her crying and that sort of fascinated Petey, whose mother could do the same thing. Benita’s face poured with tears but, except for her occasional sniffling, you couldn’t tell.
The principal called them in one at a time, starting with Benita. Going first changed the course of her tears and she let out a cry that was loud and terrified. The secretary took pity on her, and said, “It’sokay, honey. He’s not going to bite you.” They always said that.
When they were gone, Marshall sat up straight, saying in a whisper to Andy, “She’s going to pee her pants.” Andy snickered. They stopped when the secretary came back. She frowned at all of them.
Benita came out, no longer crying, but with a look of smugness on her tear-stained face. The secretary told her she should go back out to the field where the rest of the class was still in gym. “Hurry, hurry,” she said. “There’s only ten minutes left in the period.”
Marshall went in next. He came out and was told to wait. The period was about to end.
Andy was still in the principal’s office when the bell rang. Petey looked up at the clock. It was a quarter to twelve. Lunch would be starting. The thought of food reminded him that he was hungry, and the simple pleasure of eating created the most terrible self-pity inside him. His stomach rolled over with the sudden, remembered hunger and, as though to make up for lost time, rolled over a few more times, the last time very loudly. He looked over at the secretary to see if she’d heard but she hadn’t. He put his hand on his belly and gave it a rub, trying to remember what his mom had put in his lunch.
Probably salami. Maybe a pudding. An apple, something like that. He had a dollar for milk, but he would probably buy a pop. Most of the kids did. He stopped thinking about his lunch because that might make him think about his mom, and he wanted her, and that would make him cry. Again.
He’d never been sent to the office before and he was scared. He felt it mostly in his legs, which wanted to shake and did, at intervals. He was holding it in. When his legs got so scared they couldn’t help it, he let them shake for a second and then changed his position on the chair so they would stop. His face felt doughy and soft. He could feel the stiff parts on his skin where the tears had dried, and he swiped at them, rubbing, so they would go away. He had to go to the bathroom.
Andy came out, looking white-faced but not crying. For a second, Petey looked at him thoughtlessly as a compatriot. The principal followed him out. Mr. Hadley, whom Petey had only seen once before, the day he registered, was balding and small, but appeared much larger; whether it was the suit he wore, or his glasses, Petey would have been at odds to say. He had an angry look on his face, but it seemed fake. He led Andy by the shoulder around the long desk that divided the room in two and stopped him in front of Petey. Petey looked up, revealing his horror in his eyes, widened, for just a second. Then he shifted his eyes away from Andy and looked up at the principal.
“You boys shake on it,” he said firmly. For a moment Petey was confused, didn’t know what he meant. Shake on it? Shake?
Andy rolled his neck away from Petey and made no confirming gesture.
“Stand up, Peter,” Mr. Hadley commanded. Petey did. He was the same height as Andy, but much larger, visually. Mr. Hadley sized the boys up and came to his own conclusions. “Andrew,” he said. Andy stuck out his hand, his head turned away.
At last Petey understood. Shake.Oh. He stuck his hand out also and since Andy wasn’t looking, he grabbed the boy’s hand and pumped it once. His hand was warm in Petey’s. He dropped it quickly.
“All right, then,” Mr. Hadley said. He loosened his grip on Andy’s shoulder and side-stepped toward Petey. He patted Petey and Andy on the shoulder. “There you go. Now you boys try to be friends. You’re going to be in Middleton School a long time together,” he said. Neither commented. Petey was thinking that was it, that he could go. His heart began to slow down its relentless pulse. H
is legs felt shakier, as though something had been released. He really had to go to the bathroom.
“All right, Andy, off you go. Lunchroom.” Andy swiveled and bolted out the door. Petey moved to go with him.
“Peter,” Mr. Hadley said. He swept an arm in the direction of his office. “Let’s go,” he said. His voice had lost its pleasantness.
Deciding to chance it, Petey pushed the outer door open as quietly as it would, the mechanical click of metal-on-metal echoing in the space in the foyer. It sounded loud as a gun to Petey. He peeked around the door as he went through it. The schoolyard was deserted, the way it looked in summer. It would be summer soon, and then school would be out, but that was months away.
The parking lot was empty by then too, and he let the door close behind him.
It hadn’t been that bad. He didn’t get the strap or anything. Mr. Hadley had talked to him about the importance of fitting in and making friends, that it was a new school and it was his job to fit in with the other students. There were no visible marks on his face or arms to show what Andy had done to him (unlike Andy, who had pointed to the fast-disappearing mark on his clavicle to shore up his defense that the new kid had attacked him). Andy had kicked him twice in the leg. The second time he’d tripped over the ball and had fallen into Andy, reaching out, and that was when he scratched his neck. Itwas an accident. (At first. After he fell on Andy and Andy started screamingfatso andfat pig Petey had grabbed him somewhere soft—he didn’t know where, couldn’t see—and pinched, digging his nails into him, but Andy wouldn’t even discover that until later; Petey just knew he did it and it added to his shame and guilt.)
Andy and Marshall had told their sides of the story, each with their own particular twist on it. Petey would have no way of knowing what they had said, but the general impression given to Principal Hadley was that of a bully to be: a large, aggressive boy who didn’t like Andy or Marshall personally.
It was fortunate for Petey that Hadley had been a very small child, and an equally small adult. He’d seen an Andy and a Marshall before.
Petey was given a stern talk onfitting in andgetting along and through the whole thing he could tell that the principal was disgusted with him. He could tell by the way his eyes would shift from lookingat Petey to looking very obviously away. Mr. Hadley was a tidy, trim little man, in fact weighed the same as he had in high school. He told the boy to concentrate on his studies and, if he wanted to fit in, perhaps he could talk to the school nurse about a diet. To his credit, he was gentle on the last part, not saying diet butprogram of fitness.
“Get involved in sports,” Mr. Hadley, who had never been on a sports team, told him, and even as he said it, Petey’s face and problem and situation were fading from his memory like the last few minutes of the day. He waved him out, wishing him luck, reminding him without finishing his sentence that his door was always open. What he said was, “My door is always…” and then he just trailed off. But Petey knew what he meant.
Mr. Hadley had said he would call his mom and explain. Petey wanted to ask him,explain what? but just couldn’t bring himself to speak. The whole ten minutes in the principal’s office, he hadn’t uttered a word. He also hadn’t been asked a direct question, or to explain his side of the story.
He crossed the empty parking lot mostly trying not to think. He didn’t want to think about going home, or seeing his mom, or especially about school the next day. In last-period geography, Andy had caught his eye and said, “Every day, fatso,every day .”
Instead of thinking, he imagined he was so tiny that he disappeared.
The principal had called around two, just as Barbara was dragging her ancient portable typewriter out of a nearly forgotten box in the attic and downstairs.
The attic gave her the creeps. Previous owners had made a halfhearted attempt to create a usable space out of it, insulating the roof and putting in a drop ceiling so that it resembled a room, albeit not for the particularly tall, the ceiling only about seven feet high. It had turned it into one large open space, but the low ceiling gave her a claustrophobic feeling. The walls remained unfinished, the drywall not white but gray. Along the far end were three huge oaken beams, likely planned to add character and color to the room but which lay instead impotent and unused, waiting, somehow, on the floor. Boxes of lights to be hung were stacked with their wires spilling out like snakes. It was cold up there, in spite of having been insulated. The cold was there, like a message, as though something was caught unhappily between the plastic and the wall and needed attention.
There was a creeping feeling of something wanting to speak up there, metaphorically. A metaphor, that’s what it was. Cheap walls, cheap intentions; life is cheap?
It somehow managed to look both modern and Gothic, the Gothic winning out atmospherically, in spite of the stack of cut drywall in the far corner, and the cheap, chipboard ceiling. The shadows spoke louder.
She was in and out as quickly as possible, and left the searched boxes open, the useless dreck of her lifetime spilling out onto the attic floor, once she’d found her typewriter.
The phone rang just as she was making her way down the stairs with the typewriter, which hadn’t seen any action since college. She answered it on the third ring, brushing dust out of her hair frantically, thinking it to be cobwebs. (No matter how the attic looked, it seemed to be dark, and old like the loft in a barn or an old farmhouse, with bare wooden walls and beams exposed, creaking with things that hung suspended; thereseemed to be spiders and rats and…nasty things.)
“Mrs. Parkins, this is Richard Hadley from Middleton School. I’m Peter’s principal.”
“Did something happen?” she said, alarmed. “Is Petey all right?”
Mr. Hadley cleared his throat. “Well, there has been an incident,” he said, adding quickly that Petey was fine, but that he and two other boys had been sent to the office for fighting. He gave her the story in brief, calling it “sport related,” and adding that the fault seemed to have been both a misunderstanding and of equitable blame. He stressed that there were no serious injuries, and reassured her that no one had been formally reprimanded, and that before they had left his office he’d made the boys involved shake hands.
“I thought, however, that you and I should talk about the incident, given that Peter is new to the school and the first few weeks are fairly critical in developing a niche,” he said.
Barbara, her back up, let it be heard in her voice: “I’m not sure what you’re saying.”
“Well, Peter has to find a way to fit in. To get along. Fighting in the first couple of weeks in school—and, according to one of the boys involved, this isn’t his first incident—will build a certain kind of persona that we don’t encourage…” He trailed off.
Barbara, confused, tried to muddle through what he had said. “Are you implying that Petey is bullying?”
“No, no. All I’m saying, Mrs. Parkins, is that we, as the school, and you, as the parent, have to take this incident as an opportunity to stress to Peter—is itPeter orPetey that he prefers?”
“Peter,” she said, reminding herself, quickly.
“That Peter makes the right choices regarding action. In short, we don’t want him to develop a reputation for fighting, even if it is fighting back.”
“I see. And did you make this same speech to the other boys’ mothers?” Barbara frowned and held the telephone in a stiff grip.
“Peter is a new face in the school. My concern right now is for his educational experience as a whole. I want him—as I’m sure you do as well—to make his start at Middleton School a step in the right direction.” Then he added, like an afterthought, “Have you ever considered a fitness program for him?”
Barbara paused for a long time, her face red with embarrassment for, and of, Petey. She pictured, briefly, the whole school turned against her boy. She was flustered.
“Mr. Hadley, I would appreciate your calling the parents of the other boys involved. As for the other, that’s none o
f your business. But it seems to me that because Peter is new at your school, then you should give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s just a little boy,” she said, near tears. She took a deep breath and said, more softly, “Petey’s had a difficult year. A little compassion wouldn’t hurt.” Then she hung up, afraid that if she didn’t, she would start crying and make this whole thing something larger than it was. Creating memos and meetings at the school. She forgot to ask the names of the other boys, but wondered if they were the same boys from the other day, or if the whole school was populated with demons.
Barbara sat on the front step and waited for Petey to come home. It was just before four o’clock and the first really nice sunny day she could remember since moving in. Kids were just starting to come down the street, mostly teenagers. She saw few kids Petey’s age.
A fitness program.
Her blue Volvo station wagon was parked across the street and kids disappeared behind it as they walked, emerging from the other side. The midsize car looked smaller than it was compared to the minivans and SUVs that would be parked up and down the street after five o’clock. Right then it reigned supreme. She and Dennis had bought a Blazer several years earlier, but he’d gotten that, having claimed it pretty much as his own the day they’d brought it home. It had made sense at the time, of course, because he had done most of the driving, and also wanted the new vehicle for work. She only drove it to take Petey somewhere or to pick up groceries, or to go shopping. The cargo space in the station wagon was better than the Blazer’s. The station wagon became “hers,” the Blazer “his” (although both were in his name). She wished she had it now, so that at least her car would blend in the neighborhood.
The neighborhood appeared to be (rife; riddled) populated with families. Whether they were intact or blended she had no way of knowing, but she had painfully noted the absence of single moms waving good-bye to their children on the weekend, driving off in Daddy’s car. She had noticed moms and dads working on the yard up and down the street last Saturday, cleaning garbage, raking fall and winter off the lawns, taking a break sitting on the front steps and porches. She’d been waved at a couple of times and once got a “Welcome, neighbor,” from a woman walking across the street past her house, but the woman never stopped and Barbara did not see which house she had gone into, hadn’t actually seen her since. So far no one had come over with a coffee cake or a handful of flyers or coupons or offers of baby-sitting. She was not offended by this, really: she knew people worked and neighborhoods just weren’t set up that way anymore.
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