Bullyville (16 page)

T
YRO WAS ABSENT
from school for a week. Word got around that his sister had died. Everyone said how tragic it was, and it made me feel even worse that there was no one I trusted enough to tell about Nola's having been my friend. I guess I should have been used to it, after all the practice I'd had, not being able to talk to anyone about my dad.

I realized that losing Nola wasn't the same for me as it must have been for Tyro. She was his sister, and I'd only known her for a few months. But
somehow that didn't make me any less sad.

I wondered if, when Tyro returned to school, we'd be able to talk about Nola. He would know that I'd known her better than anyone else at school, except him, and that I understood, better than anyone, what he'd lost. We would talk about how awesome she'd been. And maybe it would comfort us both, just a little.

I had the picture—the whole scene, and how it was going to play out—fixed so firmly in my mind that when I walked into school the next Monday morning, and Tyro was the first person I saw, I had trouble putting the real person together with the fantasy I'd been having. He was standing all alone in the center of the main hall. None of his friends were around. I had the feeling that he'd been looking for me, waiting for me. And it made sense, because I'd been hoping to see him, too.

I stood directly in front of him. Neither of us spoke or moved. Until at last I said, “I'm really sorry about Nola.”

He looked at me, but he seemed to be seeing
something—or someone—else. Then his face changed and took on an expression I'd never seen on anyone's face before. Part furious, part sad, part distant, part…I didn't know what it was.

And then he hauled off and punched me, with all his might, in the stomach.

In the instant before the pain began, it crossed my mind that the story wasn't supposed to end this way. Our shared sorrow and grief were supposed to make us friends, to bring us closer together, to make us more compassionate, just as Dr. Bratwurst was always saying. That's how it would have ended in a book, all neat and tidy, with everyone learning and changing and growing and becoming better people because of what they'd suffered.

But that wasn't how it was turning out. Because this was real life, and messy. The story had its own direction, its own end, and I felt like an actor in someone else's play, letting the director guide me.

I made a fist and pulled my arm back as far as it would go.

I hit Tyro as hard as I could.

In a moment we were all over each other, swinging and pushing and grabbing for each other's throats. I thought we were going to kill each other. I knew that was what we both wanted. He kept hitting me, harder and harder, but the strangest thing was, it still didn't hurt, because I was so focused on smashing him.

Each time I hit him, it was like there was something behind it, aiming my fist, a force that was making me pound him harder and land my punches where they might do the most damage. I hit him once for Nola, and for how unfair it was that she'd died. One punch for every time he'd made me miserable since I came to Bullywell, one for the ketchup, one each for the names, the kicks, the locker, the text message supposedly from my dad. And then I was hitting him for my dad. One punch for Dad leaving us for Caroline, two more for the towers and the planes flying into them, more punches for my dad getting killed when so many others were saved, another
for my mom's close call.

All the time I was hitting him I didn't think about how, after all this time, I was finally standing up for myself, fighting back against the bully. Against all the bullies, everywhere. Because Bullyville
was
everywhere, it wasn't just this school. Everybody was being bullied by someone or something—by mean kids or terrorists, by the total unfairness of bad luck and sadness and death. Me, Mom and Dad, Nola, poor old Bern, even Tyro—we were all being pushed around by something we couldn't help and couldn't control.

As I slammed my fist into Tyro, I didn't think about whether this was the right or the wrong way to deal with it, or if I was right or wrong. I didn't think how awful it was to hit a guy whose little sister had just died. I didn't think that he'd hit me first, that he'd slugged a kid whose dad had been killed on 9/11. All I thought about was punching him, and it wasn't even really like thinking. It was just something my body was doing, independent of my brain and disconnected from the part of
myself that I thought of as
me
.

Even as I was slugging away at Tyro, memories were coming back to me, all sorts of things I'd forgotten, that I hadn't
let
myself remember. Things I hadn't
wanted
to remember. But now it all rushed in, all the times my dad and I had had fun, the circus and the zoo, the sweltering day he'd rescued me and taken me home, defying the Little League coach who'd ordered our team to run twenty laps as punishment for losing a game. I heard him cheering for me at those games, and I heard him laugh when my stupid cousin painted my fingernails at Gran's Thanksgiving. I kept hearing him laugh, along with Mom, at all their little private jokes. They were always laughing. And when I'd ask what they were laughing at, they would always explain, so I never felt left out.

I hit Tyro again for how my dad died without my getting a chance to talk to him and ask him what he thought he was doing when he moved out. Or whether he really loved me, like he said on the messages he left, and whether he was planning to
come back home and live with us again.

Meanwhile, Tyro and I kept at it, slugging each other. Tyro's face was all bloody, so mine probably was, too.

Finally, after a very long time, I felt someone yanking back on my arms and shoulders. A crowd had formed, and someone was dragging us apart. I saw Dr. Bratwurst, and the teachers, and the other kids. Blood was running into my eyes.

And then it was over.

 

I never went back to Bullywell. That was my last day. There was one final meeting, this time with just Mom and me and Dr. Bratwurst, who calmly explained that Bullywell and I just weren't a perfect fit. Not the match that everyone had hoped for.

I didn't bother mentioning that Tyro had hit me first. I didn't care about justice. I was glad I was leaving. The school had taught me everything that it was ever going to teach me. I thought: Just let me out of Bullywell and everything will work out.

And things
did
work out. Luckily for me, my former babysitter, Ivy, had taken the second semester off from college because she'd broken up with her boyfriend and failed biology and was thinking she didn't want to go to medical school after all. Mom hired her to babysit me—although we called it homeschooling—until the school year was out.

Ivy wasn't in the greatest shape herself, but she was a good driver, and she liked to go places. Sometimes we'd take the train into Manhattan and look at museums, or go to the park and sit there. We went to the Bronx Zoo and rode the Staten Island Ferry. Every so often we'd read a book, or she'd teach me something she remembered from high school science or math, so we could feel honest about the homeschooling part.

The next fall, Ivy returned to college and I went back to public school. And within a few days, all my old friends were my friends again. It was almost as if I'd never left. Sometimes someone would ask me how my time at Bullywell had been,
and I'd say: Worse than you could imagine.

A year later, my mom met a really nice guy named Rob, and the year after that, they got married. Their wedding was covered by several newspapers, because at that point the papers were running feel-good stories about people managing to glue their lives back together after everything got blown apart for them on September 11. Miracle Boy and his mom and the new stepdad—it made really great copy.

A lot of the stories talked about us mending and healing and moving on. But of course nothing broken is ever completely fixed. There's always that hairline crack you can see if you look hard enough.

I tried to tell that part to the reporters. But somehow that never made it into the papers.

 

After enough time had passed, everything that happened that year did start to seem like the crack you can see in a piece of china that's been shat
tered and repaired, or an arm or leg that's been broken and mended but is never quite straight.

Close enough
, everyone says. And it was, it was close enough. Though
close enough
, as everyone knows, doesn't mean:
the way it was before
.

Years later, after I grew up and had a family of my own, we'd come back to visit my mom and Rob. The first time my two kids were old enough to understand, I pointed up the mountain and Baileywell Castle, looming above the town.

I said, “I used to go there for a while.”

“Creepy,” my older son said. And that was it. I was glad that, for some reason, they never asked how it was. I could never bring myself to talk about my year at Bullywell.

I would have, if my kids had been bullied at their schools. I would have told them the same thing happened to me. I would have said, Look at me, I survived. I would have told them, if they needed me to. But I was glad they didn't.

No one bullied my kids, and I know they didn't
see their dad as a former bully-ee.
I
knew I was the same person: an older, bigger Bart. But I no longer felt like that bullied kid, the kid who went to Bullywell, that year I was in the wrong place at definitely the wrong time.

Cover art © 2007 by Jonathan Barkat

Cover design by Hilary Zarycky