by Morgan Rice
Oliver’s stomach groaned then, reminding him that Chris’s bullying and torment were about to begin anew, and that he’d better get some food in him before they did.
He passed the still broken dining table and went to the kitchen. Most of the cupboards were empty. The family hadn’t yet had the chance to go grocery shopping for the new house. But Oliver found a box of cereal that had come over in the move, and there was fresh milk in the fridge, so he quickly made up a bowl and scarfed it down. Just in time, too. A few moments later, his parents emerged into the kitchen.
“Coffee?” Mom asked Dad, bleary-eyed, her hair a mess.
Dad just grunted his yes. He looked at the broken table and with a heavy sigh, fetched some packing tape. He got to work mending the table leg, wincing as he did so.
“It’s that bed,” he muttered as he worked. “It’s wonky. And the mattress is too lumpy.” He rubbed his back to emphasize the point.
Oliver felt a swell of anger. At least his dad had slept on a bed! He’d had to sleep on blankets in an alcove! The injustice stung him.
“I have no idea how I’m going to get through an entire day at the call center,” Oliver’s mother added, coming over with the coffee. She placed it on the now tentatively fixed table.
“You have a new job, Mom?” Oliver asked.
Moving house all the time made it impossible for his parents to keep full-time work. Things at home were always harder when they were unemployed. But if Mom was working that meant nicer food, better clothes, and pocket money to buy more gizmos for his inventions.
“Yes,” she said, letting out a strained smile. “Dad and I both. The hours are long, though. Today’s a training day, but after that we’ll be doing the late shift. So we won’t be around after school. But Chris will keep an eye on you, so there’s nothing to worry about.”
Oliver felt his stomach sink. He’d prefer Chris to not be in the equation at all. He was perfectly able to look after himself.
As if summoned by the mention of his name, Chris suddenly bounded into the kitchen. He was the only Blue who looked refreshed this morning. He stretched and let out a theatrical yawn, his shirt riding up over his round, pink belly as he did.
“Good morning, my wonderful family,” he said with his sarcastic grin. He flung an arm around Oliver, pulling him into a headlock cleverly masked as brotherly affection. “How are you, squirt? Looking forward to school?”
Oliver could hardly breathe, Chris was holding on so tight. As always, his parents seemed oblivious to the bullying.
“Can’t… wait…” he managed to say.
Chris let Oliver go and took a seat at the table opposite Dad.
Mom came over from the counter with a plate of buttered toast. She placed it in the center of the table. Dad took a slice. Then Chris leaned forward and snatched up the rest, leaving nothing for Oliver.
“HEY!” Oliver cried. “Did you see that?”
Mom looked at the empty plate and let out one of her exasperated sighs. She looked at Dad as if expecting him to step in and say something. But Dad just shrugged.
Oliver clenched his fists. It was so unfair. If he’d not preempted such an event he’d have missed another meal thanks to Chris. It infuriated him that neither of his parents ever stood up for him, or ever seemed to notice how often he had to go without because of Chris.
“Will you two be walking to school together?” Mom asked, clearly trying to sidestep the whole issue.
“Can’t,” Chris said through his mouthful. Butter dribbled down his chin. “If I’m seen with a nerd I’ll never make friends.”
Dad raised his head. For a second, it seemed as if he was about to say something to Chris, to chastise him for calling Oliver names. But then he clearly decided against it, because he just sighed wearily and let his gaze drop back down to the tabletop.
Oliver ground his teeth, trying to keep his growing fury at bay.
“Doesn’t bother me,” he hissed, glaring at Chris. “I’d prefer not to be within a hundred feet of you anyway.”
Chris let out a spiteful bark-laugh.
“Boys…” Mom warned in the meekest voice ever.
Chris shook his fist at Oliver, indicating quite clearly that he’d get him back for it later.
With breakfast over, the family quickly got ready, and left the house to start their respective days.
Oliver watched as his parents got into their battered car and drove off. Then Chris stalked away without another word, hands in his pockets, a scowl on his face. Oliver knew how important it was for Chris to establish immediately that he was not to be messed with. It was his armor, the way he coped with turning up at a new school six weeks into the school year. Unfortunately for Oliver, he was too skinny and too short to even attempt to cultivate such an image. His appearance only ever added to how conspicuous he was.
Chris stormed ahead until he had disappeared from Oliver’s sight, leaving him to walk the unfamiliar streets alone. It was not the most pleasant walk of Oliver’s life. The neighborhood was tough, with lots of angry dogs barking behind chain-link fences, and loud, beat-up cars swerving along the potholed roads with no regard for the children crossing.
When Campbell Junior High loomed up ahead of him, Oliver felt a shiver run through him. It was a horrible-looking place made of gray brick, completely square, and with a weather-beaten facade. There wasn’t even any grass to sit on, just a large asphalt playground with broken basketball hoops on either side. Kids jostled each other, wrestling for the ball. And the noise! It was deafening, from arguments and singing, to shouting and chatter.
Oliver wanted to turn around and run back the way he’d come. But he swallowed his fear and walked, head down, hands in pockets, across the playground and in through the large glass doors.
The corridors of Campbell Junior High were dark. They smelled of bleach, despite looking like they hadn’t been cleaned in a decade. Oliver saw a sign for the reception area and followed it, knowing he’d have to announce himself to someone. When he found it, there was a very bored, angry-looking woman inside, her long red fingernails typing away into a computer.
“Excuse me,” Oliver said.
She didn’t respond. He cleared his throat and tried again, a little louder.
“Excuse me. I’m a new student, enrolling today.”
Finally, she turned her eyes from the computer to Oliver. She squinted. “New student?” she asked, a look of suspicion on her face. “It’s October.”
“I know,” Oliver replied. He didn’t need reminding. “My family just moved here. I’m Oliver Blue.”
She regarded him silently for a long moment. Then, without uttering another word, she turned her attention back to the computer and started typing. Her long fingernails clacked against the keys.
“Blue?” she said. “Blue. Blue. Blue. Ah, here. Christopher John Blue. Eighth grade.”
“Oh no, that’s my brother,” Oliver replied. “I’m Oliver. Oliver Blue.”
“Can’t see an Oliver,” she replied, blandly.
“Well… here I am,” Oliver said, smiling weakly. “I should be on the list. Somewhere.”
The receptionist looked extremely unimpressed. The whole debacle was not helping with his nerves one bit. She typed again, then let out a long sigh.
“Okay. There. Oliver Blue. Sixth grade.” She turned in her swivel chair and dumped a folder of paperwork on the table. “You’ve got your schedule, map, useful contacts, et cetera, all in here.” She tapped it lazily with one of her shiny red nails. “Your first class is English.”
“That’s good,” Oliver said, taking the folder and tucking it under his arm. “I’m fluent.”
He grinned to indicate that he’d made a joke. The side of the receptionist’s lip twitched up, just barely, into an expression that might have resembled amusement. Realizing there was nothing more to be said between them, and sensing that the receptionist would very much like him to leave, Oliver backed out of the room, clutching his folder.
/> Once in the corridor, he opened it up and began to study the map, searching for the English room and his first class. It was on the third floor, so Oliver headed in the direction of the staircase.
Here, the jostling kids seemed to be even more jostly. Oliver found himself swept up into a sea of bodies, being pushed up the staircase with the crowd rather than of his own volition. He had to fight his way through the swarm to get out at the third floor.
He popped out onto the third-floor corridor, panting. That was not an experience he was looking forward to repeating several times a day!
Using his map to guide him, Oliver soon found the English classroom. He peered through the little square window in the door. It was already half full of students. He felt his stomach swirl with anguish at the thought of meeting new people, of being seen and judged and evaluated. He pushed down the door handle and walked inside.
He was right to be scared, of course. He’d done this enough times to know that everyone would look over, curious about the new kid. Oliver had felt this sensation now more times than he cared to remember. He tried not to meet anyone’s eyes.
“Who are you?” a gruff voice said.
Oliver swirled to see the teacher, an old man with shockingly white hair, looking up at him from his desk.
“I’m Oliver. Oliver Blue. I’m new here.”
The teacher frowned. His beady eyes were black and suspicious. He regarded Oliver for an uncomfortably long time. Of course, this just added to Oliver’s stress, because now even more of his classmates were paying attention to him, and still more were streaming in through the door. A greater and greater audience watched him with curiosity, like he was some kind of spectacle at the circus.
“Didn’t know I was getting another one,” the teacher said, finally, with an air of disdain. “Would’ve been nice to have been informed.” He sighed wearily, reminding Oliver of his father. “Take a seat then. I suppose.”
Oliver hurried to a spare seat, feeling everyone’s eyes following him. He tried to make himself as small as possible, as unobservable as possible. But of course he stood out like a sore thumb no matter how much he tried to hide. He was the new kid, after all.
With all the seats now filled, the teacher began his class.
“We’re carrying on with where we left off last class,” he said. “About grammar rules. Can someone please explain to Oscar what we were talking about?”
Everyone started to laugh at his mistake.
Oliver felt his throat get tighter. “Um, sorry to interrupt, but my name is Oliver, not Oscar”
The teacher’s expression turned instantly cross. Oliver knew immediately that he wasn’t the kind of man who appreciated being corrected.
“When you’ve lived sixty-six years with a name like Mr. Portendorfer,” the teacher said, glowering, “you get over people pronouncing your name wrong. Profendoffer. Portenworten. I’ve heard it all. So I suggest you, Oscar, ought to be less concerned about the correct pronunciation of your name!”
Oliver raised his eyebrows, stunned into silence. Even the rest of his classmates seemed shocked by the outburst, because they weren’t even tittering with laughter. Mr. Portendorfer’s reaction was over the top by anyone’s standards, and for it to be directed at a new kid made it even worse. From the grumpy receptionist to the volatile English teacher, Oliver wondered if there was even a single nice person in this whole school!
Mr. Portendorfer began droning on about pronouns. Oliver hunkered down even further in his seat, feeling tense and unhappy. Luckily Mr. Portendorfer didn’t pick on him anymore, but when the bell rang an hour later, his chastisement was still ringing in Oliver’s ears.
Oliver trudged through the halls in search of his math classroom. When he found it, he made sure to beeline straight for the back row. If Mr. Portendorfer didn’t know he had a new student, maybe the math teacher wouldn’t either. Perhaps he could be invisible for the next hour.
To Oliver’s relief it worked. He sat, silent and anonymous, throughout the whole class, like an algebra-obsessed ghost. But even that didn’t feel like the best solution to his problems, Oliver thought. Being unnoticed was just as bad as being publicly humiliated. It made him feel insignificant.
The bell rang again. It was lunch, so Oliver followed his map down to the hall. If the playground had been intimidating it was nothing compared to the lunchroom. Here, the kids were like wild animals. Their raucous voices echoed off the walls, making the noise even more unbearable. Oliver bowed his head and hurried toward the queue.
Smack. Suddenly, he slammed into a large, foreboding body. Slowly, Oliver raised his gaze.
To his surprise, it was Chris’s face he was staring into. On either side of him, in a sort of arrow formation, were three boys and one girl all scowling the same scowl. Cronies was the word that sprang to Oliver’s mind.
“You’ve made friends already?” Oliver said, trying not to sound surprised.
Chris narrowed his eyes. “Not all of us are antisocial loser freaks,” he said.
Oliver realized then that this wasn’t going to be a pleasant interaction with his brother. But then, it never was.
Chris looked over at his new cronies. “This is my pipsqueak brother, Oliver,” he announced. Then he let out a belly laugh. “He sleeps in the alcove.”
His new bully friends started to laugh too.
“He’s available for swirlies, wedgies, headlocks, and my personal favorite,” Chris continued. He grabbed Oliver, and pressed his knuckles into his head. “Noogies.”
Oliver wriggled and thrashed in Chris’s grasp. Locked in the horrible, painful headlock, Oliver remembered his powers from yesterday, the moment he’d broken the table leg and sent potatoes into Chris’s lap. If he only knew how he’d summoned those powers he could do it now and break free. But he had no idea how he’d done it. All he’d done was visualize in his mind’s eye the table breaking, the plastic soldier flying through the air. Was that all it took? His imagination?
He attempted it now, picturing himself wrestling free from Chris. But it was no good. With Chris’s new friends all watching on, laughing with glee, he was just too tuned into the reality of his humiliation to shift his mind to his imagination.
Finally, Chris let him go. Oliver staggered back, rubbing his sore head. He patted down his hair, which had become frizzy with static. But more than the humiliation of Chris’s bullying, Oliver felt the sting of disappointment from failing to summon his powers. Maybe the whole kitchen table thing was just a coincidence. Maybe he didn’t have any special powers at all.
The girl who was hovering next to Chris’s shoulder spoke up. “Can’t wait to get to know you better, Oliver.” She said it in a menacing voice that Oliver could tell meant quite the opposite.
He’d been worried about bullies. Of course he should have anticipated the worst bully of all would be his brother.
Oliver shoved his way past Chris and his new friends and headed for the lunch queue. With a sad sigh, he grabbed a cheese sandwich from the fridge and headed, heavy-hearted, to the restroom. The toilet cubicle was the only place he felt safe.
*
Oliver’s next lesson after lunch was science. He wandered the corridors looking for the correct room, his stomach churning with the certainty that it would be just as bad as his first two classes.
When he found the classroom he knocked against the window. The teacher was younger than he’d been anticipating. Science teachers, in his experience, tended to be old and somewhat strange, but Ms. Belfry looked completely sane. She had long, straight, mousy brown hair, which was almost the same color as her cotton dress and cardigan. She turned at the sound of his knock and smiled, showing dimples on both cheeks, and beckoned him in. He opened the door timidly.
“Hello,” Ms. Belfry said, smiling. “Are you Oliver?”
Oliver nodded. Even though he was the first one there, he felt suddenly very shy. At least this teacher seemed to be expecting him. That was a relief.
“I
’m so pleased to meet you,” Ms. Belfry said, holding out a hand for him to shake.
It was all very formal and not at all what Oliver was expecting considering what he’d experienced of Campbell Junior High so far. But he took her hand and shook. She had very warm skin and her friendly, respectful demeanor helped put him at ease.
“Did you get a chance to do any of the reading?” Ms. Belfry asked.
Oliver’s eyes widened and he felt a little hitch of panic in his chest. “I didn’t realize there was any reading.”
“It’s fine,” Ms. Belfry said reassuringly, smiling her kind smile. “Not to worry. We’re learning about scientists this term, and some important historical figures.” She pointed at a black-and-white portrait on the wall. “This is Charles Babbage, he invented the…”
“...calculator,” Oliver finished.
Ms. Belfry beamed and clapped her hands. “You already know?”
Oliver nodded. “Yes. And he’s also often credited as the father of the computer, since it was his designs that led to their invention.” He looked at the next picture on the wall. “And that’s James Watt,” he said. “The inventor of the steam engine.”
Ms. Belfry nodded. She looked thrilled. “Oliver, I can already tell we’re going to get along famously.”
Just then, the door opened, and in poured Oliver’s classmates. He swallowed, his anxiety returning in a huge rush.
“Why don’t you take a seat?” Ms. Belfry suggested.
He nodded and hurried to the one closest to the window. If it all got too much, at the very least he could look out and imagine himself somewhere else. From here, he had a great view out over the neighborhood, at all the bits of trash and crispy fall leaves blowing in the wind. The clouds above looked even darker than they had that morning. It didn’t really help with Oliver’s sense of foreboding.
The rest of the kids in the class were very loud and very rowdy. It took a long time for Ms. Belfry to settle them down so she could start her lesson.
“Today, we’re carrying on from where we left off last week,” she said, needing to raise her voice, Oliver noticed, in order to be heard over the din. “With some amazing inventors from World War Two. I wonder if anyone knows who this is?”