Robby the R-Word

by Leif Wright

  She had just asked what ten plus ten was—a simple answer that she had already explained twice—when Robby uttered one of his signature “haaaaa” noises.

  Mrs. Edwards saw red as she witnessed all the children looking over at him, some in horror, some in amusement, others just to be doing something other than paying attention. She gritted her teeth.

  “Will someone shut that … that … fucking retard up?”

  Funeral silence permeated the classroom.

  I’m NOT a retard! Robby thought angrily. You’re just too stupid to listen!

  “Haaaaaa,” he said instead. Then, for emphasis, “haaaaaa.”

  Mrs. Edwards’ face turned bright red as she threw her piece of chalk down onto her desk and, with speed unexpected for a schoolmarm in a long skirt, raced back to Robby’s wheelchair and slapped him—hard—across the face—twice. Robby’s head rocked to the side, slamming into the wall beside him. Bright stars filled his vision as tears immediately and involuntarily began streaming down his face.

  But still that smile—the smile he already hated—wouldn’t leave his face. Sobbing inside, Robby smiled at Mrs. Edwards through the stars and tears and said the only thing his mouth could say: “Haaaaa.”

  “Stupid retard,” Mrs. Edwards growled through clenched teeth, drawing her face close to his, her coffee breath watering his already tear-filled eyes. “If these students weren’t here, I’d knock that stupid smile off your face. You are ruining my life, you little retard!”

  Then, in a move worthy of a stage magician, she composed herself and addressed the class.

  “Girls and boys, it’s important that no one knows what just happened,” she said pleasantly. “If you tattle, your parents will be very angry with you, because no one loves a tattle-tale. You want your parents to love you, don’t you?”

  All the children, wide-eyed at the prospect of losing their parents’ love, nodded.

  “Then we will keep this between us,” she said. “Don’t even discuss it among yourselves, or I will know. Do you understand?”

  The class nodded. Suddenly, Mrs. Edwards was more than a teacher in their eyes. She was an angry god who had to be obeyed. No one told their parents and, as the children grew, they all forgot Mrs. Edwards slapping Robby the retard as their brains were filled with new memories, new lessons, new fears, new angry gods.

  All of them except Robby. Robby remembered in vivid detail.

  Robby remembered the wrinkles on her face, the piercing blue of her eyes, the angry eyebrows, the putrid breath, the yellow teeth. He remembered the magic way she had turned on the charm for the class, the psychologically evil threats she had made to them. He remembered the pain in his cheek and his head where it had struck the wall. He remembered how his neck had hurt for two weeks afterward.

  But mostly, he remembered how Mrs. Edwards was the first person other than his father to openly call him a “retard”. She was the first to dehumanize him, to give him a label instead of a name—a label that made it okay for people to see him as less than a person, to see him as a bag of organs without feelings, emotions, needs. He remembered Mrs. Edwards’ slaps driving home the point of just how alone he was. No love at home, no love at school. No protector, even a teacher. Everywhere he went, Robby was a burden, an annoyance to be disdained, an inopportune outburst to be quelled. He was an inconvenience foisted upon those who had better things to do than waste their time on a hopeless case, a vegetable being kept alive by artificial means.

  Robby, he discovered that day, may not have been a retard as everyone seemed to become so fond of saying, but he was something far worse. He was an object. A non-entity. He was a punching bag, a scapegoat, a thorn in everyone’s sides.

  Mrs. Edwards had made her point, and it stuck with Robby. Most of the other students in time completely forgot the entire class, some of them even forgetting that their first-grade teacher’s name had been Mrs. Edwards. As new information poured into their spongy brains, it seemed Mrs. Edwards and her first-grade ramblings were squeezed out, dripping into the floor somewhere as their brains made room for long division, sentence diagramming, and Manifest Destiny.

  But Robby remembered. Unencumbered by the need to learn social skills, Robby’s mind formed itself into a trap of information. Everything got in; nothing got out. Where his brain failed in motor control it excelled in everything else, with Robby silently learning quantum physics in the seventh grade, calculus the same year and Latin a year later.

  But in first grade, he learned the most important lesson of his life: no one wanted to be bothered with him. To them, Robby was one thing: a retard. Not a boy. Not a person. A retard. Mrs. Edwards taught him that. Her other lessons may have been forgotten by everyone else, her life wasted teaching nothing to kids who learned nothing from her, but her star pupil was the one she hated most, the one who frustrated her enough to cause her to strike him.

  41

  1986

  ROBBY COULDN’T DECIDE IF IT WAS APPROPRIATE TO CALL IT A DREAM, since most of it was based on a memory. He knew it was a dream, because some details changed, but it was a dream about a memory—at the same time his favorite and most shameful.

  Jodie Phillips was funny, popular, and beautiful in a way only carefree teenagers, who had no real idea of how cruel and painful the world really was, could ever be. Everything about her was attractive. Her eyes, her smile, her musical laugh, the way her perky boobs fought against her shirts and sweaters. Robby could think of nothing else when he shared a class with her, which explained why geography was the one subject he had never mastered.

  Of course, he got an A in the class, just like all the others, but no one knew he was even paying attention. The grades were a grotesque combination of charity and revulsion on the part of his teachers—an attempt to make sure he never returned to their classes while making themselves feel good about giving an A to a retard.

  Geography was great, because Coach Bloom couldn’t have cared less about teaching, and most days he would either show a movie or just leave the class—with an admonition to “keep it the eff down while I’m gone”—and go to the coach’s room to work on game strategy. This day, the day that forever burned itself into Robby’s memory, was one of those.

  Coach was gone, and Jodie, wearing a tight OP shirt and barely-there shorts, was already goofing around, bending over Paul Ernstein’s desk—Paul Ernstein, who would become Mr. Jodie three weeks after graduation and Mr. Ex-Jodie not long after—to flirt with him, giving Robby an unobstructed view of the bit of ass cheek that wasn’t covered by her shorts as she bent over.

  As she jostled and giggled, the shorts pulled up and down her legs, revealing more of her legs—and tantalizing glimpses of what was between them. Robby, accustomed to being invisible, openly ogled, getting hard as he did.

  “Robby the Retard is checking out your ass, Jodie,” Paul said calmly, pointing at Robby with the end of the piece of jerky he had been chewing. “Bet he’s got a retard boner.”

  Jodie looked back over her shoulder, poking her ass up a bit higher, showing just a bit more, the shorts pulling salaciously between her legs, revealing folded skin there—just a glimpse—but clearly skin that was something other than the inner thigh that led up to it. Robby wouldn’t have looked away if he could have.

  “Is he?” she sang mischievously, bouncing her ass. “Like what you see, Robby?”

  He would have said “Oh, hell yes” if he could have. Instead, a bit of drool escaped the corner of his mouth and made its way down to his pants, which were doing nothing to hide his erection.

  “Is that a boner, Robby?” she sang as she turned her body around to face him. The rest of the class had completely disappeared. Even Paul was gone. Only Jodie and Robby existed in the world as, for the first time he could remember, he was actually communicating with someone, even if it was just his penis letting a pretty girl know he thought she was sexy. And she was communicating back, even if just to tease him and even maybe make fun of his boner.


  She walked the five steps over to him and cooed at him, lowering her voice to a husky whisper.

  “Do I turn you on, Robby?” she whispered, her face inches from his, her voice bouncy and carefree. Robby might have imagined it, but her breath smelled like strawberries. To this day, the smell of strawberries made him hard. She brushed her soft, warm finger across his face, smiling as she did. “Do you want to fuck me, Robby?”

  He did. He knew he couldn’t, but he wanted to, more than he had ever wanted anything—more than he wanted to be able to walk or talk. Somehow, when she said The Eff Word, it didn’t sound dirty or hateful, like it did when his dad said it. It sounded like poetry, like Shakespeare for a first-time listener.

  “You want me to take my pants off, unzip yours, get that hard dick out and put it inside me, Robby?” she whispered, the strawberry scent filling his lungs as she leaned closer. “I could do it right now, you know. No one would say anything. I could fuck you right here. You want that?”

  He did. More drool fell from his mouth and some other liquid—not semen; he was used to that some mornings as he woke up—began darkening his pants at the tip of his penis, which was trying to get to her through his pants.

  “Pre-cum,” she said, leaning closer to it. “You really are horny, aren’t you?”

  She brushed it with her breast, whether accidentally or on purpose, he never knew, but he could tell she wasn’t wearing a bra. He—his penis, no less—had touched a real breast. His body started trembling. She smiled.

  “You like that?” she said, laying her hand on his chest to feel the trembles. “You’re practically vibrating!” Then, she seemed to have an idea, her eyebrows rising. With no warning, she kicked a leg up and over him—he fantasized that he saw everything in that brief moment—and she straddled him, his hard penis firmly pressed between her legs. His tremors got stronger, and Jodie’s eyes got bigger.

  “Yeah,” she said, biting her bottom lip. “That’s what I’m talking about! Maybe us girls are missing out! Don’t stop vibrating, you big pervert.”

  She grinded herself against him twice.

  “You like that?” she wiggled her shoulders, making her boobs jiggle. “You want my pussy, Robby?”

  Robby couldn’t have answered even if he had possessed the ability to talk. Instead, he felt his balls briefly tighten and convulse just before he shuddered and ejaculated, filling his pants with semen.

  Jodie’s face twisted, contorted, and distorted as she looked in horror at the spreading stain that was now touching her between her legs, darkening a small spot on her whisper-thin shorts—shorts that were the only thing between his semen and her vagina.

  “Oh my God,” she screamed, eyes widening. “He came! The RETARD came on me—in me!”

  As if propelled by the rockets that would later that year destroy a space shuttle, she launched from his lap, the look of horror strangling her face into a weirdly beautiful mask of its former self.

  “RETARD cum! I have retard cum on me!” She backpedaled comically, stumbling over an empty desk. “What if I’m pregnant with a retard?”

  The classroom became uncharacteristically silent as she panted.

  “It was just a fucking joke, you fucking ’tard,” she screamed to twitters of burgeoning giggles. “I didn’t really want to fuck you! Jesus Christ! I’m gonna fucking hurl! Retard cum!”

  By the end of that sentence, the entire class—except for Jodie and Robby—were in hysterics, some holding their stomachs, laughing, some just laughing. Jodie seemed to be stuck in a loop, like a CD with a scratch.

  “Retard cum!” she screamed again. “RETARD CUM!”

  She had begun rubbing herself, looking as if she was trying to extract a baby from her vagina. Tears were streaming down her face, the edges of her mouth were trembling as it hung agape. She was too caught up in her horror to see Paul laughing—something she wouldn’t learn had happened until two years later, during the heat of a knock-down-drag-out over how he was looking at every waitress at the Waffle House one Sunday morning.

  That, more than everything else—his refusal to get a job, to go to school, to do anything to become a man—had been the final straw in their blip of a marriage. It was the fact that he had laughed while she was covered in semen from Robby the Retard.

  That day, however, Robby wasn’t laughing. His pants were soaked in semen, his erection chased away by Jodie’s horror. What did he do wrong? She was the one dry humping him. All he did was sit there and be hard. She was the one rubbing her tits on him. She was the one offering him tantalizing views of her body as she did it, asking if he wanted to fuck her. Why was she mad when she got the reaction she was grinding for?

  His rumination was rudely interrupted by the pain in his face from a vicious slap delivered by Jodie, who was now wailing.

  “How dare you, you fucking retard?” she screamed between gasps. “You came on me. Probably in me! You raped me!”

  Rape? I couldn’t even rape myself, he thought. But, as often was the case at the most inopportune times, he answered her: “Haaaa.”

  That sent her over the edge, and she jumped onto him, hammering him with her fists, screaming, “Retard cum, RETARD cum!”

  She was a tiny girl, but she packed a punch. Robby’s eye was blackened, his nose broken, his lip swollen. He bore bruises on his ribs and shoulders, though no one ever saw them.

  From that day until graduation, everyone in the school started calling Robby “retard cum”—at least when no adults were around. When they wheeled him across the stage at graduation, some smartass in the crowd stood up and yelled the epithet, which brought raucous laughter throughout the crowd of students gathered.

  But for Robby, the event became both the best and worst day in his life. Late at night, all he remembered was Jodie, sexy, hot, horny, rubbing her tits on him, humping him, flashing her pussy at him. When the day broke, however, she was a vicious bitch, punching him, embarrassing him, making fun of him, and inciting the entire school to call him “retard cum”.

  Her reign as the female Lothario of William B. Franks High School had ill-prepared her for life, early marriage and early divorce, he later learned. Five years after she was voted “most likely to succeed”, Jodie Phillips’ body was found, naked, cut from bow to stern, rudely jumbled into a heap half a mile east of Old Barry’s seedy truck stop. She was full of trucker sperm this time, track marks littering every joint on her body.

  Robby, however, endured, bedsores and all, giving Jodie more cum every time he dreamed about that day. Today, however, it came with a tinge of sadness. Jodie was gone. Jodie, who more than anyone, he had fantasized about meeting again once he could communicate. Who he had longed to explain to that he hadn’t intended to gross her out, that he had no control over his body, that he hadn’t intended any disrespect. Cerebrally, he knew she was wrong to accuse him of anything, but emotionally, she was the only girl who had ever given him the time of day—however cruelly—and he had wanted her to know he was sorry for going too far, even though he couldn’t control it.

  Would she understand? Would she apologize for freaking out on him, beating him up? Would she call him a retard again? He didn’t know, and the fantasy never got that far. The candle he held for Jodie—unquenched by her cruel reaction to his excitement—would never be extinguished, and he had always hoped to at least make peace with her over it.

  But some crazed trucker had stolen his chance in a dusty parking lot where desperate women gave themselves up to make a few bucks for drugs.

  42

  1992

  THIS WASN’T HOW IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FOR HER, SHE THOUGHT AS she ignored the pain from her shoulder and looked distractedly up at the plush, upholstered ceiling. The thought was fleeting, as another spike of pain—this one from between her legs—begged for her attention. The sweaty man with clammy hands either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care that today was Sunday, but the dingy panties he had clumsily shoved to one side said “WEDNESDAY” in purple-on-pink in a jaunt
y and playful typeface.

  He also didn’t seem to care whether the red bumps were razor burn or herpes (They’re razor burns, she thought, indignantly, as if herpes was so much farther beneath her than selling herself for $20 to buy half the meth she needed for today). She barely even noticed him making man-sex noises above her. Men and their noises were so disgusting. It had taken her a while to learn how not to laugh at their noises and their faces. Not to mention the ridiculous stuff they said, all of which sounded like dialogue rejected as too stupid and cheesy from a porno. To keep from laughing out loud when they started whispering stupid shit to her, she had learned to turn off her brain, her body automatically saying “Oh yeah, oh yeah” when it heard pauses in the dirty talk.

  She could have graduated college by now if she hadn’t discovered booger sugar with Paul after they had been married a month—and three weeks after they both realized what a colossal mistake that had been. Meth was her salvation. Paul had smoked it once, decided it was no better a high than weed, and never touched the stuff again. But for Jodie, crank was the multiple orgasm of drugs.

  “It’s like an itch on your back,” she had tried to explain to him. “You try with both arms, but you can’t quite reach it to scratch. You can get so close, but not quite. You even start hurting your arms to try to get to it. You put your back on a corner wall somewhere, and you can scratch it, but it’s more like rubbing it and making it worse. You get a hanger and get it, but that’s like rubbing it too. Finally, someone with long fingernails gets to it and scratches it, and you never want them to stop—just keep scratching. Scrape all the skin off if you have to, just don’t stop. Meth is like that.”

  But now, thinking over it while this fat man with the pencil dick used her to do what amounted to masturbation with a sex doll—for all the participation she was contributing—she knew that description fell short. The first time she had smoked it, she had known this drug had been created just for her.