Everybody Sees the Ants (8 page)

“The what?” I ask.

“Chi!” she says, her mouth so full she has to tilt her head back to say it. Mom and I squirm. In the Linderman house, talking with your mouth full equates to peeing on the food.

To avoid having to see Aunt Jodi’s half-chewed dinner again, we don’t say anything else. I try to get another bite into my mouth, but each bite I chew hurts.

I wipe my mouth and thank them for dinner. “I hope you don’t mind, but I need to go to bed,” I say.

Mom offers a sympathetic smile. “Your cheek hurt, Luck?”

I realize my whole face is crunched up in pain, and I look more miserable than usual. “Yeah. It’s killing me, actually.”

Jodi gets up and comes back with two over-the-counter pain pills and takes my plate.

Dave drops his dish at the sink and says, “I’ve got to go back to the office for something. Back later.” Then he rests a hand on my shoulder as he moves toward the door. “Tomorrow I’m getting you on that bench, man. In two weeks, you’ll be beefed up and ready to kick that kid’s ass.”

Jodi answers, “Don’t encourage him.”

The
first thing I hear the next morning is Aunt Jodi diagnosing me in the next room.

“But he’s got all the signs, Lori!”

“You just met him yesterday.”

“Still… he’s depressed.”

“He’s jet-lagged and a teenager. He’s fine.”

“He’s always frowning!”

“That’s his
thing
. You’ll understand when you get to know him better.”

I hear one of them sigh. Then Jodi says, “Did you ever think that your marital problems could be rubbing off on him? On top of being bullied, that could really mess a kid up.”

“There are no marital problems,” Mom insists. “We just needed a break.”

“Seems to me you’re just ignoring all the problems in your life. Dave does that, too, you know. I just don’t think it’s healthy. For you or Vic
or
Lucky. I mean—”

“Please. Just stop. I have a lot on my mind right now,” Mom says.

“He could be at risk!”

I can practically hear my mother’s eyes roll. “He’s not at risk.”

“It’s a proven fact that bullied kids are more depressed than non-bullied kids.”

“He’s not bullied.”

“Didn’t he get beat up? Isn’t that what happened to his face? Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“Look. I mean this in the nicest way, Jodi, but could you please mind your own business?”

I hear Dave clear his throat.

“I am
not
turning a blind eye to a suicidal teenager,” Jodi says. “What if he kills himself here? In our house?”

“Oh my
God
,” Mom says. I hear her footsteps. The door opens. She sits on my bed. “Luck, get out of bed and act happy. Your aunt Jodi thinks you’re going to kill yourself.”

After Dave goes to work at eight, I pull out the book I brought with me,
Catch-22
by Joseph Heller, and sit in the living room. Mom goes swimming while Jodi sits in front of the TV watching talk shows and news flashes between thumbing her gossip magazines with movie-star cellulite articles. She sits forward for the entire Dr. Phil episode. Two college kids are explaining
why they treat their girlfriends like shit, and when Dr. Phil gets stern with them, she cheers as if she’s watching sports or something.

After her swim, Mom gets a bottle of pure aloe from Jodi and spreads it all over my cheek. I admit, it feels nice—cool and soothing—but when I look in the mirror, I see Ohio is coated in ectoplasm or frog spawn. I look like a freak.

The jet lag catches up with me during midafternoon, and I consider swimming to wake myself up, but when I go out, it’s too hot to do anything but go back inside. How is this better than life at home? For either of us?

I decide to nap, even though it makes Jodi look at my mother and raise her eyebrows.

I am trapped in a grass hut with great energy. There is a mirror by the door, and two chairs facing east. This is feng shui prison. There are cameras. Dr. Phil is here. He’s asking me how long Nader McMillan has bullied me.

“Since forever,” I say.

“Can you be more specific?” he asks. The audience nods.

I sigh. “It started when he peed on me in a restaurant bathroom when I was seven.” The audience gasps. “Then it just never stopped. Never.”

Dr. Phil leans forward. “Who did you tell about this, son? Did you tell your parents? The teachers?”

I nod.

“I know it’s hard to talk about, Lucky, but I need you to talk. Who’d you tell about the first thing? The urinating part?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t tell anyone. My parents were with me. What could I say? I mean—I didn’t pee on myself, right? Who would do that?”

“So no one stood up for you?”

I’m silent. I look up. The audience is taking notes on pads made from jungle leaves. The ants are wearing tiny white doctor coats and glasses low on their noses.

“How does that make you feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can I tell you how
I’d
feel if it were me?” Dr. Phil asks.

I nod because I feel hot tears forming behind my eyes.

“I’d feel really tired. And I’d feel that someone should be sticking up for me,” he says. Then he stops for a second and he puts his hand to his chin and looks at the camera. “Do you know what I wanna know?”

I can’t tell if he’s talking to me or the audience. The jungle insects
zeep-zeep-zeep
, and a strange rodent scurries from one corner of the feng shui hut to another.

“I wanna know: Where are this bully’s parents? Why don’t they know he’s been terrorizing Lucky for eight long years?”

The audience hangs on his every word. He looks to a different camera suspended from a boom to the left of the hut. “The sick thing? They
do
know.” The Dr. Phil music cues
faintly in the background. “When we come back, we’ll have some strong words with Mr. and Mrs. McMillan, and we’ll talk to Lucky’s parents, too, so we can all make sure Lucky leaves our studio today feeling like someone cares.”

The music gets louder, and Dr. Phil turns to me off camera. “Son, you need to find a way to get this out of there,” he says, gently poking me in the heart. “You can’t keep it all inside.” All I can hear is what he just said to the audience.
Strong words with Mr. and Mrs. McMillan. We’ll talk to Lucky’s parents, too
.

I send a convoy of red fire ants on an emergency maneuver up the leg of Dr. Phil’s suit pants. I give them orders to bite the minute he starts talking again, so I can get the hell out of here.

Then Granddad Harry swings in on a jungle vine and plucks me from my Dr. Phil feng shui stool and delivers us both back to the limb of our peaceful tree, side by side, swinging our legs, except Granddad is missing his right leg from the knee down.

“I love it here,” I say.

He eyes me up, concerned. “You do?”

I refer to my dream physique with my hands. I am completely buff, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, and my deltoids are firm, small cantaloupes.

“Oh, that,” he says. “You’d give up real life and freedom for
that?
” He looks at me as if he’s annoyed.

“What use is my real life? It sucks.”

“Huh,” he grunts. I realize that maybe that might be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever said. I mean, yeah, my life sucks. But his life sucks way worse. So I change the subject.

“I’ve been reading about you,” I say.

“Am I in a book?”

“I’ve been reading the files Granny Janice kept,” I say. I add sheepishly, “And your letters.”

He nods and says, “You read those letters?” I suddenly feel awful about it. “Some nights I dream of her back when we met in high school. We used to go with our friends to this little diner every Friday night, and we’d show off our cars and eat hamburgers and French fries and try to score a bottle of beer.” He laughs. “Just a bunch of know-nothing kids, before we realized what might happen to us.”

“You mean the war? Getting drafted?”

He nods. “Janice wrote and told me we lost Smitty and Caruso in the first three months. They’d enlisted, you know? Caruso got blown to pieces by a mine, and Smitty got hit with friendly fire. Then me. The only person still standing from our original Friday-night crew was Thompson, who’d escaped the whole nightmare by having a bad back and flat feet.”

“I have flat feet,” I say because he looks so sad talking about his dead friends.

“Boy! We had some fun! Used to go out hunting and camping on weekends, and we’d smoke cigars and steal liquor from our fathers’ cabinets.” He stops and looks at me. “You do that kind of stuff, don’t ya, Lucky?”

“I tried smoking once because Danny wanted to. I hated it.”

“No hunting?”

“Nope.”

“Camping?”

“Nope.”

“Chasing girls?”

“Nope.”

He looks concerned. “You got friends?”

“Kinda. Not really. I used to have Danny.”

“What happened to him?” he asked.

“Nader turned him against me.”

“That Nader kid is really screwing himself out of a good afterlife,” he says. “Have you told any adults about this kid?”

“They’re all afraid of his dad.”

“What is he? Some sort of nut or something?”

“A lawyer.”

“Huh.” He sighs. “What about your dad? Can’t he talk to this lawyer guy?”

I don’t have the heart to answer this.

A
month after Evelyn Schwartz went crying to the guidance department about how “morbid” my survey was, the Lindermans were called into a second meeting. All of my teachers were there, including Mr. Potter, my social studies teacher.

“He’s got no problems in my class,” Mr. Gunther, my algebra II teacher said. “I was going to ask him if he wanted to tutor after school for extra money.” Mom and Dad raised their eyebrows and nodded. Of course, I’d say no to the tutoring because I didn’t want to be in school late, when the Naders of the world roamed the halls in packs (also known as wrestling practice).

“He’s doing fine in my class, too,” said Mrs. Wadner—the best biology teacher in the world. If I managed a B, I’d be happy, because she was hard-core.

Each one weighed in with the same conclusion. I was doing well in school. I nearly smiled, but stayed loyal to Operation Don’t Smile Ever and just nodded.

But then the Shrew got her turn. The Shrew was my gym teacher that semester, and she never smiled, either. She was short, had thighs the size of Pacific totem poles and a face to match. She wore the same outfit every day, only in different colors—a classic coach tracksuit with stripes, and a T-shirt that had something to do with Freddy High girls’ sports.

“Lucky has been absent quite a bit from my classes this month. If he keeps it up, he’ll get an F.”