Bullyville (10 page)

Less than five minutes after the coffee cups were cleared, Bern thanked everyone and excused himself and left. It seemed to me that everyone heaved a huge sigh of relief.

“What a nice young man,” said Gran.

“What a tragedy,” said Aunt Faye, “to lose your wife like that and not have kids or anyone to spend the holidays with.” And then everyone fell silent, and I knew they were all thinking of what had happened to Mom and me, though of course they
didn't know the true story, and they probably never would.

Meanwhile, I was realizing that all the time Bern had been there, I—and everyone else—had been afraid that he was going to break down and burst into tears and weep into his white-meat turkey. The minute he was gone, we became the Octopus Family again, everyone reaching and gabbing and touching one another. The same arguments broke out, someone turned on the television, and the football game started.

My cousin Brian sidled up to me and asked in a whisper if I wanted to step outside and smoke some weed, but I said, No, thank you, I'm fine. The storm cloud of Bern had gathered and passed. Things were cool. And for the moment, I
was
fine.

S
CHOOL STARTED AGAIN,
and now we were in that narrow window of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas through which you can see a faint ray of light at the end of the tunnel. It made me think of those winter afternoons when it suddenly gets dark and you're walking home alone and you're scared and you first see your house, and maybe your mom at the window. All I had to do was survive for a couple of weeks, and then school would let out for the long vacation.

Bullywell Christmas break was about twice as
long as the public school's, I guess so all the Bullywell families could jet off to their magnificent ski lodges in Switzerland and Aspen. When I was still in public school, kids used to say that the insanely long winter break was the only reason why anyone might ever want to go to Bullywell. But now, knowing what I knew, I wouldn't have gone there if vacation had lasted the rest of the year. Anyway, Mom and I weren't planning to go anywhere for Christmas.

By the time we all got back to school after Thanksgiving, Dr. Bratwurst had hired a couple of hall monitors to keep on eye on the bullying and “harassment” incidents, to keep things under control. But something about the guys he'd found wasn't exactly reassuring. They looked like secret-service men who'd been fired for letting the important official they were protecting get assassinated, and they didn't seem any too overjoyed about their demotion. They still dressed like spies or CIA ops, they wore dark glasses even indoors and those creepy short haircuts. In their dark blue
blazers they looked like guys who might have graduated at the bottom of their class at Bullywell, and wound up back at their old school. They'd probably failed everything and still gotten an A plus in Bullying 101, the subject Bullywell taught best. They'd be more likely to join the bully than to stick up for the kid getting beaten up.

But even that was okay, because I seemed to have lucked into another one of those temporary reprieves. Tyro hardly even gave me a second glance when we passed in the hall. He seemed not to recognize me. Likewise, his friends acted like they'd never met me before. Maybe they'd taken Dr. Bratwurst's warning seriously, and they were worried about being caught and maybe (with the exception of Tyro, of course) expelled. But I was pretty sure I hadn't gotten
that
lucky. It was more likely that they'd retreated once again to regroup and come up with some plan to torture me in a way that was worse than anything they'd done before, to do something really horrible for which they
couldn't
get caught. Nothing happened.
Nothing happened. And then more nothing happened. Everything felt suspended, underwater, waiting.

One morning, between English class and social studies, I was walking down the hall, and I got a text message. I never got calls in school, we weren't allowed to. Just having your phone ring in class—even if you didn't take the call—meant automatic detention.

But that morning, for some reason, I'd left the phone on. I didn't even look at the number to see who was calling. I assumed it was Mom. These days, she was the only person who ever called me on my cell. Sometimes she'd just text-message me to say, “Hi, it's me, I love you.”

And that's what it said, “Hi, it's me.” I smiled, thinking of Mom. And it made me a little less nervous as I walked down a hall crowded with kids who seemed not to see me and into a class with a teacher who didn't seem to like me much, either.

A few seconds later, the phone vibrated again. And the message said, “It's hot.” Maybe it wasn't
Mom. Mom never talked about the weather. She said it was boring to talk about the weather. And now that I thought about it, Mom never text-messaged me about anything except to say that she loved me.

Still, the next time the phone buzzed, I checked the message.

Okay, here's the truth. It's embarrassing, but there's no other way to explain why I kept checking the phone. The fact was, I wouldn't have paid it any attention if I hadn't just read an article in the newspaper about how they'd recently discovered some new way to download porn sites onto your phone. So I was sort of wondering if they'd found out my number, and if this was a test run. What else could “It's hot” mean?

A few seconds passed. The phone vibrated again. The letters spelled out, “It's very hot.” Okay, fine, I'd stay with it long enough to see where all this was going. I had a few minutes before class. Another message came in. All right, let's give this one last chance. Then I had to bounce.

This time the message was longer, and I watched the letters spell out: “It's hot. It's very hot. It's burning hot. I'm burning up. Love, Dad.”

It took me a weirdly long time to understand what I was reading. And the strangest thing was that, for a few minutes, I believed it. I thought it really
was
a message from Dad, because Dad used to text-message me all the time. Even after he moved in with Caroline, he'd still send messages telling me he loved me and asking how I was doing, but mostly I didn't answer, because I was so mad at him for leaving us. That's what I thought about now, how guilty I felt for not having answered all those messages when now I'd never have the chance to message him back and ask how
he
was doing and when he was coming home. And to tell him I loved him, too.

Everything seemed be happening in slow motion. So slow that it seemed to take me about an hour to realize that of course it wasn't Dad. It couldn't have been Dad. My dad was dead. Someone wanted me to feel as bad as I could,
though of course whoever it was couldn't know how bad I felt. No one could imagine. Then it all came pouring in on me at once: missing Dad and being in this terrible place where someone—for no reason, and not because of anything I could have done to him—someone wanted me to be in as much pain as it was possible to feel and still be walking and talking.

And then finally it was too much, way too much. I couldn't take any more. I looked around, took a quick left turn, bypassed the social studies classroom, and headed for the boys' bathroom. And maybe there really
were
miracles, because by some miracle no one was in there to see me or hear me. I went into one of the stalls and burst into heaving, choking sobs. I was crying for myself, and for Dad, and for everything I'd lost, and for how lonely and scared I was, and how I couldn't tell anyone, and how no one could help me. Or even understand.

I washed my face. I pulled it together. But I never went to social studies class. I thought: If
anyone asks, I'll tell them I had some kind of stomach attack. Maybe I should go to the nurse and stay there until school lets out. I could fake it, I knew. By now my face was all streaked and swollen from crying. I could tell the nurse that the stomach cramps were so bad they'd made me cry.

I waited in the bathroom, all alone, feeling sorrier and sorrier for myself. But the thing is, even at the worst times, there's only so long you can pity yourself. And after a while, my sadness began to change. It was almost if someone had lit a fire under all that grief, and it was heating up, simmering, and then boiling over into anger.

Rage, actually. What I felt was rage, pure rage. I wanted to hurt someone, I wanted to kill someone, I wanted revenge for everything that had been done to me. I would have liked to get the guys who flew into the towers, but they were already dead, so I'd take the nearest substitutes: Tyro Bergen and his friends. They'd do fine to take revenge on. What the bullies were doing to me was as pointless and heartless and cruel as flying
an airplane into a building and killing all those innocent people.

I knew I couldn't kill Tyro and the others, even if I'd wanted to. I couldn't even beat them up. I was way outnumbered. I had no allies, no backup. Besides, no matter how mad I was, I knew I could never kill anyone, ever. I had to think of something else.

And then I did.

I hid in the bathroom till lunch period, when everyone was occupied, busy waiting on the lunch line and chewing and swallowing and yelling and pouring ketchup all over some other kid's burger. Then I sneaked outside. I was a little worried that the secret-service hall monitors might catch me, but they must have taken a lunch break, too. They weren't anywhere around. I went down the stairs and out the door to the parking lot. And now I really was lucky. The gods—and maybe there
were
gods of justice, or at least revenge—must have been on my side, because the parking lot was empty.

I recognized Tyro's car right away. The big
white Escalade stood out from the Toyotas and Hondas the teachers drove, as if it belonged to a whole different species. Even Dr. Bratwurst's Yukon looked puny beside it.

For a few minutes I stood there, motionless, in front of Tyro's Escalade. I had to get over the eerie feeling that the headlights and the grille were looking at me, that they somehow knew what I was going to do. I felt like myself and not myself. Like someone else. Like an actor in a movie. I even knew the name of the film:
Miracle Boy's Revenge
. And the way I knew what do next was that I'd seen it in so many films.

I took my house keys out of my pocket and dragged them along the side of the car door, scratching off some paint. The first time, I was hesitant, almost gentle. The groove didn't go very deep, not because I was afraid to dig in, but because some part of me didn't believe that it would actually work.

It worked, all right. There was a thin little scratch where there hadn't been a scratch before.
I stood back. I liked the way it looked. I liked it so much that I did it again. This time I made another scratch, deeper and longer. I came at it from a different angle, and with the third scratch I made an X, like spindly telephone wires crossing the snowy field of the white car.

It was fun, in a way. I liked it. I knew it wasn't a great thing to do. A
compassionate
thing to do. But I enjoyed every scratch I made. I went around to the front of the car, and I felt like a painter who's just gotten a huge new canvas. Okay, let's see what I could accomplish here. I had to stretch and lean way over for this one, but I made a deep, hard, jagged groove all the way across the hood. Then another and another, then a sort of zigzag.

I kept looking over my shoulder. I was still expecting to get caught. My heart kept skipping beats. But then I stopped worrying about that. And after a while I began to feel, inside my chest, a whole different kind of heartbeat. Musical and kind of trippy, as if a dancer deep inside me were doing a fast, superjoyous salsa.

Still, my little art project didn't feel finished. So I began to write. I wrote every curse word, every filthy disgusting word I'd ever said, plus some I'd heard and never used, and some I seemed to be making up on the spot. I wrote Tyro's name again and again, so no one would imagine that this was an accident, or that I'd picked the car at random, or that this had been done by one of those ecoterrorists who burn down housing developments and chain themselves to redwoods and attack monster gas-guzzling-pig SUVs. I knew why I was doing this: because of what Tyro had done to me since I'd started at Bullywell, and mostly because of the text message he'd just sent me, supposedly from Dad. Because he'd taken what had happened to my father and turned it into a sick, cruel joke. I was doing this—trying to make him sad and miserable—because of how sad and miserable he'd made
me
feel.

Thinking about my dad suggested the finishing touch, the final flourish. I started to write “Tyro” one last time, and then I stopped after the
first T and wrote “Terrorist” instead. I wrote “Tyro the Terrorist,” and then I wrote it again.

The more I wrote it, the more brilliant it seemed. Tyro wanted me to feel frightened, just like the guys who'd flown into the towers had wanted us to walk around in terror. The size and scale of the damage and loss didn't seem to matter so much as the reason they did it: to hurt people, to send a message, to spread fear—just because they could.

It was cold outside, but the temperature didn't bother me. The steam my breath was making seemed to be rising from the car, like some ghostly smoke that was part of the magic trick I was doing. It looked so good, I was so proud, it was such a statement. I stepped back to admire my work. It was excellent, but it wasn't genius, it wasn't enough. I still had that boiling feeling inside me.

I bent down and picked up a chunk of cement that had come loose from the pavement. I raised it over my head and threw it through Tyro's windshield. It was a beautiful sight to see, how the
window didn't exactly shatter, and it was beautiful to watch, how slowly it all happened. The glass looked as if it was melting, softening, then sinking in. The cement block disappeared, and in its place appeared a jagged hole surrounded by a huge, fantastic cobweb.

I stepped back again, thrilled with my work. I was about to call it a day and head back into school.

Just then, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and saw the sweating face of Dr. Bratwurst, a few inches from mine. Behind him stood the secret-service hall monitors awaiting his orders to cuff me and throw me into a dungeon in the bowels of Bullywell, from which I would never emerge to see the light of day again.

I didn't care that they'd caught me. Let them do whatever they wanted. I was proud I'd trashed Tyro's car. I'd fought back. I'd done something. I'd gotten revenge for the crimes that Tyro and his fellow terrorists had committed.