Bullyville (4 page)

“And what's
most
important”—Dr. Bratton seemed to be on automatic pilot, so that I wondered if this was a speech he gave all the time—“is the kind of young men we are graduating. Men who feel sympathy for the underdog. The little guy. Who can see things from the little guy's point
of view. Our hope is that the Baileywell experience will produce the sort of compassionate, feeling, deeply human men who will lead us into a brighter and more caring future.”

“Compassion. The future could
use
that,” Mom said, and there was another loaded silence.

“Because we are essentially a boarding institution,” Dr. Bratton said at last, “we have a rich afternoon program. A whole range of after-school activities, though of course it's not
after
for our boarding students. We have a wide variety of athletics to choose from. Theater. Art.” He looked at me as if he was trying to tell if I'd be a rugby player or a theater or art type. “Of course, the day-student bus would bring Brad—”

“Bart,” I said.

“The bus would bring Bart home probably around the same time you'd be returning from work, Mrs. Rangely.”

Work? What work? Obviously Dr. Bratton knew nothing, nothing about us.

“That would be great,” said Mom, as if there
were
a job that she went to every day and would perform more efficiently knowing that I was getting soccer balls kicked in my face by the bullies up the hill.

I sent her an urgent mental telegraph:
Please, no. Forget about it. Let's pull the plug on this right now.
But for some reason my transmission just wasn't getting through.

“It would be great for me to know he was being so well taken care of until I got home from work,” she went on. Had Mom taken a new job that I didn't know about? No, she'd entered a fantasy world in which she
had
a job, a world in which bad things led to at least
one
good thing: a free ride for her only son at the snobbiest school in the state.

By now I was practically waving my arms.
Don't do this, Mom! Don't you know that school's a snake pit of monsters waiting to jump out of the shadows and pounce on me the minute I walk in the door?
But how could I even begin to say that when Mom was talking about going back to work
as if she already had, when my mother and Dr. Bratton were discussing
education
, talking about my future as if a bright, hopeful future existed?

When Dr. Bratton finally left, Mom said, “So what to do you think?”

I said, “I think the guy's about ten minutes away from being busted for downloading kiddie porn.”

Mom stared at me for a moment. “That's
so
bad,” she said. “You're awful!”

Then she starting laughing, she laughed out loud, and that was all that mattered. I decided to let the rest of it go. Mom was—for the moment—happy.

W
HEN
I
WAS LITTLE
, I'd read a novel about a Nazi concentration camp where they made the prisoners, especially kids, pretend to be cheerful and healthy and having fun whenever the Red Cross inspectors came. I was probably too young for the book. I remember it gave me nightmares, which merged into an old nightmare that I'd had for as long as I could remember. In that dream, I was being kidnapped or killed. Mom and Dad were right there, but somehow they couldn't hear me, they couldn't
save me, they couldn't help me in any way.

When I thought about going to Baileywell, all I could think about was that dream. I told myself it was just a dream, but I couldn't stop feeling that it was about to come true.

A few days before I was scheduled to start school, Dr. Bratton invited Mom and me to take a tour. I guess he wanted us to know what a valuable, precious prize we were getting, absolutely free of charge.

Mom dressed up as if she were going to work—or to a job interview. We drove up to the school on a winding road that snaked through a forest of red and orange maples. Even the trees seemed brighter and bigger and healthier than the trees down below. When we actually pulled up inside that insane fortress, the contrast between all the glorious brightness and the bleak, gray stone was so drastic and dramatic that all we could do was shrug and look at each other.

“My God,” Mom said. “It looks like one of those fake medieval hotels by the side of Highway
One where people go to get married and spend their honeymoon drinking champagne in the Jacuzzi in the Dungeon Suite.”

“If only,” I said. “If only
that's
what went on here.” Just at that moment, Dr. Bratton bounced out of the heavy cast-iron door, which clanged shut behind him. He skipped down the steps, trailed by a student.

My future tormentor. Tyro Bergen.

Later, though not much later, his monstrous qualities would emerge. Then he looked like what he was: a fiend in a horror movie. But when we first saw him, he seemed normal. Tall, thin, blond, and maybe just a little too handsome to pass for a regular kid. More like a movie star auditioning for the role of a prep school student.

“Tyro's one of our juniors,” said Dr. Bratton. “Our seniors are so busy right now with their college applications, we generally don't ask them to be our Mentors and Big Brothers.”

“Mentors and Big Brothers,” said Mom. “How nice!”

“It's great,” said Tyro, so tonelessly that the three of us turned and stared at him.

“Next year,” my mom told Tyro, “you'll be applying to college. And then you're on your way.”

Tyro didn't answer.

“You'll like it here,” Tyro told me, in that same robotic voice.

Later, I couldn't believe that this Tyro was the same kid I got to know in ways that I never wanted to know anyone. None of the kids I met that day looked anything like they did later. And it wasn't just that strange thing that always happens—how someone looks totally different when you get to know that person better. I mean, I never again saw anyone remotely like the students I saw on that tour, those contented clones and science fiction pod-babies smiling like store-window dummies as they eagerly raised their hands and shouted out answers in every class we visited, as they ran themselves red in the face on the soccer field and tennis courts.

At every stop, Mom and I nodded and oohed
and aahed as if Dr. Bratton were a realtor and we were planning to buy the place instead of just go to school there. Which I wasn't. I still hadn't accepted the fact that I was doomed to go to Bullywell.

I was hoping for a miracle to save me from what seemed more and more unavoidable and dreadful, even as everything seemed to make my mom more and more hopeful and energetic. Which was strange, because I'd learned to stop hoping for a miracle. If there
were
miracles, my dad would have come walking in the door, maybe a little dusty and rattled, but alive and well and saying he'd ditched Caroline and wanted to come back home and live with us forever.

The point we were supposed to be getting, the point that Mom
was
getting, was that Baileywell was paradise. Teenage-boy paradise! By the time the tour ended, my mom and Dr. Bratton were practically embracing and weeping tears of joy on each other's shoulders. Without anyone consulting me or asking my opinion, it was decided that I
would start school on October 15, just a few days away but long enough for us to locate the papers proving that I'd been vaccinated against rabies or whatever, and to shop for the gross navy blue blazers that made Baileywell students look like the boring businessmen-in-training that they were.

The moment had come to stop playing along and being cooperative and considerate. It was high time to quit pretending to be what Mom called “open to new ideas,” to quit trying to make Mom feel more positive about life. The moment had come to stop imagining that something or someone was going to rescue me. It was time to save my own ass!

Starting on the drive home from Baileywell and continuing without mercy for the next few days, I begged my mom not to send me there. I tried every trick I knew. I argued and pleaded, I told her that Bullywell wouldn't expose me to the
real
world the way that Hillbrook Middle School would. I told her that everyone called it Bullywell, that it was full of bullies and snobs. Mom said
that
was the real world, I might as well get used to it now. I told her some of the stories: the dead kid in the tower, the eyeballs in the soup. I said they bullied kids to
death
there.

“Urban legends,” Mom said. “Did you ever hear the one about the Doberman that bit off the burglar's finger? Or the human finger in the fast-food burger? Or the killer whose fingers got caught in the automatic car window? What's with all these stories about fingers, anyhow?”

Obviously Mom wasn't focusing. By then I was so desperate, I asked her if, considering how recently I'd lost my dad, she honestly thought I was ready to take on a possibly hostile new environment, to make a major change I didn't want to make.

I shouldn't have tried that one with Mom, I should have known it wouldn't work. Mom looked blankly in my general direction, and then her eyes left my face and drifted in the direction that, she must have imagined, led to Baileywell. It was as if she was
seeing
Baileywell, seeing the
future that awaited us there: a new world, a castle where the drawbridge would be lowered, the gates opened, and where she and I would cross the moat and enter a place that would be safe from planes and bombs, defended and protected from anyone who might be planning to hurt us.

 

On the very next day after our tour of Bullywell Prep, Mom got a call informing her that her old company, the one where she'd worked with Dad, had found new headquarters—in New Jersey this time, much closer to our home. She was one of the people they were putting in charge of stitching together the scraps of what was left of their hearts and their minds and their business.

My mother went on a giant shopping spree, as if she had to buy a whole new wardrobe for the whole new person who was taking the whole new job. She tried on all her new outfits for me, and I told her how great she looked. Except for the fact that they still had their labels attached, the skirts and suits and jackets were almost identical to the
ones she'd worn to her office in the North Tower, but I wasn't about to mention that.

Two days before I started at Baileywell, she went back to work. Even though she knew that she was supposed to be forgiving, even though she understood that our tragic experience was supposed to have made her a better person, the first thing she did was to fire Caroline. The second thing she did was to call and tell me.

“Way to go, Mom!” I said.

So all that seemed like another sign that there
was
a future for us, and that my future had bought me a first-class ticket on the express train to Bullywell. I even tried to act happy about it, by which I meant that on the first morning that the Baileywell day-student bus pulled up in front of our house to pick me up, I refrained from digging in my heels and hanging on to Mom's skirt and throwing a full-blown, kindergarten-style tantrum.

The driver was a hugely overweight guy whose folds of flesh hung down over the seat, so that the seat looked like a pedestal growing straight out of
his butt. His thick arms surrounded the wheel, which he held between his surprisingly delicate fingers.

“Hi,” I said, extending my hand. “I'm Bart Rangely.”

The driver scowled at my hand, as if shaking it would constitute a dangerous breach of the rules of road safety, even though the bus was parked. Then he grunted and jerked his head toward the back of the bus, where my fellow day students waited.

My fellow day students! I remembered my dad quoting a comedian who used to say he wouldn't want to join any club that would admit him. Now, it seemed, I had been admitted to a club like that. Not only didn't I want to join it, but it was dangerous for me even to know it
existed
. The bus population looked like a casting call for the latest Hollywood nerd extravaganza or for one of those TV reality shows on which a superhot fashion model is asked to choose a husband from a selection of the ugliest guys on the planet.

It was hard to know if the admissions director had a secret preference for kids who looked like rabbits and chickens, or if they'd once looked normal and had been turned, by their experiences at Bullywell, into human versions of the most timid or stupid creatures in the food chain. That's what it must have been, because really, the day students weren't more wimpy or poor or stupid than the boarders. Their only crime was that they lived in the area, and their parents liked having them come home at night. But the boarders looked down on the day students, and little by little, I guess, the day students had begun to look like the losers everyone thought they were.

As I made my way to the back of the bus, they all looked up and then went back to staring silently and miserably out the window. It reminded me of prison vans I'd seen transporting handcuffed and chained passengers. I also thought of how, every once in a while, I'd made the mistake of looking through the back window of an ambulance and seen the face of some terrified relative they'd
allowed to ride along with the patient.

“Hi, guys!” I said.

No one replied. No one smiled or nodded or turned as I walked past them and found an empty seat near the back of the bus.

I was careful not to make eye contact with anyone. I looked out the window. I was careful not to make eye contact with anyone's
reflection
.

The road that wound up to the castle—that is, the school—looked nothing like the one I'd taken just a few days before with Mom. That day had been sunny, but now the sky was the color of the stuffing of a ripped-apart old mattress that someone had left out in the weather. Between then and now, the wind must have blown all the bright autumn leaves off the trees, leaving bare branches that pointed at me like fingers promising some cruel punishment I must have done something to deserve. And as we traveled in the groaning bus, Bailey Mountain seemed higher and craggier than I remembered, and the climb took much longer than it had when Mom and I were in the
car making nervous conversation.

We passed the main entrance and pulled up to a side door, as if the bus had come to deliver office supplies or cafeteria food instead of to be welcomed by the friendly, inclusive student community Dr. Bratton had described. Well, sure, the bus had come to deliver
us
, packages of something that no one actually seemed to want. And the packages didn't seem to want to be delivered.

As the day students trudged off the bus, they really did look like criminals, filing out of their transport to do some especially nasty roadwork detail. The bus emptied, but still I remained in my seat until the driver—who, I would later learn, everyone called Fat Freddie—yelled, “Last stop, pal. Everybody out. How much farther do you think we're going?”

I laughed as if that was the funniest thing anyone ever said. And then, when my face was still twisted in the clownish fake laugh, and at the exact moment when I felt a bubble of saliva popping at the corner of my mouth, I looked out the
bus window and spotted the kid who'd helped Dr. Bratton show me around the school. My Mentor and Big Brother.

I was so glad to see a familiar face that I said “Hi!” as if we were long-lost best friends. Brothers separated at birth. But he was looking at me—
through
me—as if he'd never seen me before.

“Who are
you
?” he said.

“I'm Bart Rangely.” How could he not remember?

“Oh, that's right,” he said. Now I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with
my
memory, if he could have been a different person from the one I'd met on the tour. Could he possibly have a twin brother at the school?

He said, “I'm Tyro Bergen.” It seemed less likely that there were two identical guys at the school with the same name. I was still trying to figure out why he didn't recognize me when he said, “I'm supposed to be your…Big Brother. Till you get used to this toilet.”

I laughed again, as hard as I had when Fat
Freddie had ordered me off the bus, even though Tyro had said “Big Brother” in a way that hadn't sounded like he meant a helpful, loving older sibling, but rather the evil dictator in the George Orwell novel we'd read in seventh grade.

“Big Brother like Big Brother in
1984
?” I said, regretting it instantly.

“What are you talking about?” Tyro said. He turned his back and motioned for me to follow him into the school.

Walking into the main hallway was like diving into the deep end of the pool and not knowing how to swim, like merging with the stream of traffic on a busy highway and having no idea how to drive. The glum nerds who'd ridden the bus with me had disappeared, swallowed up by boys who wore their scratchy blazers and uncool striped ties as if that was the way that everyone should
want
to dress. Boys whose hair shone so brightly it was as if they were wearing mirrors on top of their heads, boys whose confident, loping walks made me understand what it meant when some cheesy
book said “Blah-blah
strode
into the room.” These guys didn't walk, they strode, like a small private army of teenage gods, and I could tell from the way they treated Tyro that he was their God among gods. Unfortunately, his divinity wasn't exactly wearing off on me, his so-called Little Brother. The other students stared at me the way people look at a stray bug that's turned up someplace where it's especially unexpected or disgusting, a mosquito on an airplane, a cockroach crawling up the wall over your table in a restaurant.