Bullyville (6 page)

I stood at the entrance, paralyzed, fighting off nausea, telling myself, Dude, the last thing you need is to puke in the lunchroom doorway on your first day at Bullywell.

Just then I heard a soft voice behind me say,
“The food line is over there.” I turned to thank my savior, in time to see Seth—the kid from homeroom, the geek who wouldn't let me look at his copy of
The Great Gatsby
—scurrying off in the direction he'd indicated. And I thought how much courage it took for Seth to even
talk
to the new kid, and for him to bypass the line on which everyone else was waiting and to join the lonely nerds at a kind of salad bar marked with a big sign that said “Vegetarian Alternative.”

I joined the end of the other, presumably non-vegetarian, line, craning my neck so I could see what was being served. I wondered what Bullywell guys
would
eat—raw meat, maybe. I was relieved to see the trays of steamed gray hamburgers and soggy buns. All right! A diet I could handle!

The lunch ladies seemed like twin sisters or clones or at least blood relations of the ones who'd worked at my public school: same hairnets, same tough-gal-with-a-heart-of-gold manner that was basically an invitation to pull out all the stops and be as charming and sweet as you could on the
chance—the slim chance—of getting on their good side.

“Burger?” said the one nearest me.

“Thanks,” I said, smiling my warmest smile and pretending that I just couldn't inhale enough of that delicious greasy aroma.

She didn't exactly look at me, lunch ladies hardly ever did. But then, almost by accident, she
did
look at me. She paused for a beat, and at first I was confused until I figured out that she'd recognized me from my picture in the papers. Somehow, after just one morning at Bullywell, I'd managed to forget that I was the hero Miracle Boy whom everyone loved and pitied.

“Here,” she said. “Take two. You need to keep your strength up. Come back if you're still hungry.”

“Thanks!” I practically shouted, embarrassed because tears of gratitude mixed with self-pity had popped into my eyes. It was the first time that anyone had been nice to me all day, not counting Mrs. Day's attempt to make me feel comfortable
and Seth offering that helpful little pointer, which was probably just a way to keep me from blocking the lunchroom doorway.

Now that the problem of where to
get
food was solved, I had to face the bigger problem of where I was supposed to eat it. As I stood there with my tray, it was as if I'd become the Invisible Kid. No one saw me, or if they did, they immediately looked away. You'd have thought I was a lunatic who might do something disgusting like sneeze on their plates or grab their food and lick it. Or maybe I had some contagious disease, like leprosy, that they would catch if I sat near them.

Suddenly, I saw someone waving. I turned around because I assumed the person was waving at someone standing behind me. Then I realized it was Tyro Bergen, and that he was waving at
me
, and I remembered his invitation to sit with him at lunch if I couldn't find anyone else to eat with.

His table was surrounded by that special halo that always encircles the coolest kids in school. As I approached, that aura parted for me, and I saw
the other guys shifting seats so I could sit next to Tyro. So he was my Big Brother after all. I was already thinking of ways to thank him. Maybe I'd save up all my allowance for the next two years and buy him tickets to a Knicks game in the city.

“Little Bro!” Tyro called. “Come sit your dumb ass over here.”

Once more, he introduced me to the guys, some of whom he'd introduced me to before, as Fart Strangely. But that was okay, that was fine with me. Everyone here had a nickname. Maybe after I'd been in school awhile they'd come up with something a little less gross.

The guys—Dog and Pork and Buff—reached over and shook my hand, very grown-up and manly. “Hey, Fart, how ya doin'?” “Whassup?” “How do you like the school?”

“It's great,” I said. “It's really great.” And at that moment I thought so.

“Whatcha eating, Fart?” said Tyro.

“Two burgers!” one of the guys said. “Fart's got two burgers. What did you do to get
that
, Bart?
Screw the lunch lady?”

“Well,” I said apologetically, “maybe it's just because I'm new.”

“Because you're new,” said Tyro thoughtfully. “Because you're new…. That's right, you
are
new.
Very
new, aren't you, Fart. Practically…new
born
.”

“It's my first day,” I said, idiotically. Obviously. Tyro knew that. There was a long silence during which all the guys stared at the two burgers on my plate, and I wished I'd sneaked off and eaten by myself at a distant corner of the refectory. Couldn't
they
get seconds if they wanted? With all the tuition money their parents were paying, you'd think they could have had two measly little burgers. You'd think they could have had twenty!

Finally, just to break the silence, I said, “Could you pass the ketchup?” I didn't like ketchup all that much. But it was something to say.

“Sure,” said Tyro. “Ketchup! Coming up! Could you grab the bottle, gentlemen?” The bottle traveled toward me, hand to hand, down the table. I opened it, and shook it, then shook it
again. Everyone was watching. I checked to make sure that they hadn't passed me an empty bottle on purpose. This
was
Bullywell, after all. But there was ketchup stuck up in the bottle. It just wasn't moving.

“Stuck ketchup,” said Tyro. “It's a Baileywell tradition.” Everyone laughed and rolled their eyes as if they knew precisely what he was talking about, as if the worst things they had to put up with at school were gummed-up ketchup bottles. “Want some help with that?”

“Sure,” I said, though I had the definite feeling that I didn't.

Tyro took the bottle and, with a single, powerful flick of his wrist, shook it over my burger. Something about the way he did it made him seem like an Olympic athlete performing some brilliant maneuver. A ski jump, a triple axle, a high-speed slalom run.

A modest little blob of ketchup landed dead center on my burger.

“Bull's-eye,” said one of Tyro's friends.

“Thanks,” I said. “That's great.”

Tyro seemed not to hear me. “Want some more?”

“No, that's enough, that's great,” I said, but again he acted as if he didn't hear. He gave the bottle another shake, and another plop of ketchup decorated my burger.

“How about some more?” he said.

“No, really,” I said. “That's fine.”

“But if a little is fine, more is finer, right? More is more, am I correct?” He shook the bottle again. And as I and his friends watched, Tyro shook the bottle again and again. First the burger was swimming in ketchup, then it was drowning in ketchup, and then at last it disappeared beneath a red tide of ketchup. Soon both hamburger buns vanished beneath the spreading red blob, and still Tyro kept shaking the bottle, which by now was nearly empty.

“Gee, man,” said the friend Tyro called Buff, and you could see why. “I think something's seriously wrong with your burger.”

“Roadkill,” the one called Dog said.

“I think it's got a bleeding disorder,” Pork said. “I think your burger hemorrhaged all over your plate, man.”

Everyone laughed.

“That's not funny,” Tyro said. “You shut the hell up, Pork.”

Everyone shut up. In fact, they lost all interest in me and my burger and my ketchup problem, and went back to talking and eating and laughing as if I weren't there. I stared at the red soup on my plate, until the bell rang and it was time to leave the refectory and go back to class. I was starving.

“Shall we ‘do' lunch tomorrow?” Tyro asked me on his way out.

“Yeah,” I said. “Absolutely.”

 

Somehow I got through the afternoon. My stomach growled through math class, and a couple of kids snickered. But by then I was too exhausted and sick of it all to care. Instead of going to gym, I had a special getting-to-know-you conference with
the assistant gym teacher, Mr. Nevins, who listed all the different team sports and told me to think about which one I wanted to try out for.

“Sure,” I said. “I'll think about it. Later.” In the back of my mind, I was hoping that the world would end so I wouldn't have to come back to Bullywell ever again.

Then we had after-school art club, led by a woman with long, flyaway blond hair who dressed in robes and beads and who acted like a demented kindergarten teacher. She told us to call her Kristin, and she made us do a “construction,” an “autumn piece” that involved pasting crumbs of crispy dead leaves to a sheet of soggy cardboard.

The happiest moment of my entire day came when it was time to get on the loser-day-student bus and go home. In fact, I was so grateful I practically threw myself down on the bus floor in front of Fat Freddie. It took all my self-control not to thank him for saving me from dinner at the refectory and whatever hellish things went on here in the evening after the lights went out.

On the bus, there was an empty seat beside Seth. He didn't smile or do anything friendly, but then again he didn't say I
couldn't
sit there, so I did. You'd think he might have asked, “How did your afternoon go? How was your first day at school?” But he'd apparently missed the lessons Dr. Bratton had referred to, the lessons on how to be a feeling, compassionate leader of the future. Or maybe he already knew how my day had gone. Anyway, I was glad to skip the small talk and get straight to what I really wanted—needed—to know.

I said, “Remember in homeroom you said I should watch out for Tyro Bergen?”

Seth said, “That wasn't me, man. You must be thinking of someone else. I never said any such thing.”

“You did,” I said. “You
know
you did.”

“All right,” he said. “Okay. Big deal. I was just stating the obvious. Like saying you should try not to get hit by a truck. Like saying you shouldn't climb the fence at the zoo and sneak into the lion's cage. Like saying—”

“Like saying
what
?” I asked. “What did you mean about Tyro?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing like what?”

“Nothing like…Well, okay. Last year he was supposed to be this new kid's Big Brother, and he tortured him so bad that the kid had a total nervous breakdown and dropped out of school before the end of the first term.”

“What did he do?”

“I wasn't the guy's psychiatrist, dude. How would I know?”

And then, because in just one day I was already becoming the kind of compassionate underdog-lover that Bullywell aimed to produce, I grabbed Seth's forearm with both hands and twisted his flesh as hard as I could until he said, “Okay! Okay! I think the kid threatened to knock down the bricks at the entrance to the tower and run up and throw himself off the top.”

“Moron,” I said. “Who cares what
he
did! What I'm asking is, what did
Tyro Bergen
do?”

“Oh, I don't know. No one ever made a big announcement about it, exactly. I guess it because it was so vicious and sadistic.”

“So doesn't it seem a little strange to you that, after that, they make him another new kid's Big Brother? Another kid like…me?”

Seth said, “I never thought of that.” And now, it seemed, he did think about it. After a while, he said, “It was probably his dad's idea. His dad has this big thing about making him a better person. Making all of us better people.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I feel like a better person already. So what did they do to Tyro after the new kid freaked out and left school?”

Seth looked at me as I'd asked him why day follows night, or why the earth revolves around the sun. “Duh-uh,” he said. “Nothing.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because his dad gives a fortune to the school. He owns some kind of bank or something. Or maybe an insurance company. A big corporation, anyway. They're loaded. Tyro gets everything he
wants. Dude, haven't you seen his
car
?”

“What car?” I said.

“He's got that white Escalade they let him park in the faculty lot.”

“An Escalade? A kid drives an
Escalade
?”

“Come on,” said Seth. “You don't think anyone on the faculty could afford a ride like that.”

“Dr. Bratton's got a Yukon,” I said.

“Bratwurst?” said Seth. “Everybody says that Tyro's dad bought that Yukon for Bratwurst after the trouble Tyro had with the new kid last year. Look, can we stop talking about Tyro? It makes me nervous just to mention the guy.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence. When Seth got off the bus, he didn't even say good-bye.

Finally, we got to my stop. There it was—my house! All the lights were blazing. And the truth was, my plain little house had never looked more beautiful than it did that day as we pulled up in front of it.

Just as Dr. Bratton had promised, I got back so late that my mom was already home from her new
job, and the house was full of wonderful food smells. If I wasn't mistaken, Mom was making her special pot roast and potatoes. My favorite. Wait until I told Mom that I hadn't even had lunch!

I found her in the kitchen, flushed and happy from cooking. She turned to look at me. I guess she was trying to tell from my face, before I had a chance to say anything, how my first day at school had gone. I tried to arrange my features in the most miserable and sour expression, but the truth was, there was no way I could look glum enough to show her just how much I'd enjoyed my introduction to Bullywell.

Our eyes met, and in that instant, I saw how the last month must have looked, from my mom's point of view, the terrible sorrow and confusion of having Dad die so horribly before they could begin to sort things out. I saw what it must have felt like to know that she'd been just a few degrees of fever—my fever—away from dying herself and leaving me to…what? To be raised by Gran or one of the aunts? I saw how terrifying
it had been for her.