Life After Genius (7 page)

One kid in the crowd sees Mead, nudges his buddy, and calls out, “Hey, do you still wet your bed, Ted?” The buddy laughs and Mead takes his cue to exit, ducks his head, and starts walking away. Then the buddy says, “You gotta be really smart to make an A+ fart.” And they both laugh. Mead walks a little faster.

“Hey,” Percy says, steps off the pitcher’s mound, and walks toward the two boys who are taunting Mead. “You two got something you want to say to my cousin?” And every kid on the ballfield turns to see what all the fuss is about. Every last kid there turns and looks at Mead, who tucks his chin to his chest and walks even faster. He wishes his cousin wouldn’t do that, wouldn’t draw attention to Mead’s humiliation. “You got something to say to him,” Percy says, “you’re gonna have to run it by me first.”

“We were just kidding around,” the kid who started it says.

“Apologize,” Percy says.

“Sorry,” the buddy says.

“Not to me, to him,” Percy says and points at Mead.

“Sorry,” the first kid calls out to Mead’s retreating back.

“Yeah, sorry,” his buddy says but with very little feeling behind it.

Mead almost breaks into a run.

“Hey, cousin,” Percy yells. “Come on. Take a swing at bat. Just pretend the ball is one of these guy’s heads and knock it out of the park.”

Mead keeps going.

“You’ll feel a lot better afterwards.”

And keeps going.

“Okay, well, maybe tomorrow then,” Percy calls out, then turns and heads back to the pitcher’s mound. All eyes follow him and Mead sighs with relief.

T
HE LIFE OF A RIVER.
That is the name Mr. Belknap has given this science project. An eight-week study of a six-foot-by-six-foot plot of land that includes some section of the creek that runs along the base of the hill behind the school. Every Wednesday morning the seventh-grade science teacher escorts his class across the asphalt school grounds, past the ballfield, and down the hill to draw diagrams and make notes on how their section of the creek has changed. But Mead did not find the allotted thirty minutes of class time enough to record all the changes he saw today so —with his ruler in one hand and his spiral notebook in the other —he is taking it upon himself to return to the creek and finish up what he started in class.

Mead is halfway down the hill before he sees them and stops. Four boys in his grade, the kind of boys who would rather use their hands to make rude noises than ask questions in class. High Grove Junior High’s latest crop of juvenile delinquents. And they are not here for the same reason that Mead is. They are standing at the bottom of the hill with their backs turned to Mead, holding their dicks and peeing into the creek. And the one on the far end is peeing into Mead’s six-foot-by-six-foot science project. Deciding that maybe now is not the best time to take those measurements after all, Mead turns to leave and steps on a twig, snapping it. The tallest one looks around. Freddy is his name. Freddy Waseleski, the kid who holds the record for most-missed-days-from-school in all of High Grove. He has probably been held back as many times as Mead has been promoted. “Hey, weirdo,” he says. “What’re you looking at?”

“Nothing,” Mead says. “I was just going to take some measurements.” And he holds up his twelve-inch ruler as proof.

“Measurements of what?” Freddy says and his dimwit friends all laugh.

“Hey, I know who you are,” says the one who just peed into Mead’s plot as he puts himself away, as they all put themselves away and zip up. “You’re that freak kid from the elementary school. The genius.”

“How old are you, freak?” another one of the boys says. “Eight?”

“No, I’m ten.”

“Give me your ruler, freak,” Freddy says. “I got something I wanna measure with it.” And more laughter ensues, the kind that usually precedes the flushing of someone’s head down the toilet. So Mead does as he is told, walks the rest of the way down the hill, and hands his ruler to Freddy. The tall boy snatches it out of his hand and says, “Drop them.”

“Drop what?” Mead asks.

“Your pants, freak, so we can see your dick. You saw ours, so now we get to see yours. Drop your pants or I’ll drop them for you.”

Mead glances back over his shoulder. The kids on the ballfield are chanting “Feg-LEE, Feg-LEE.” Percy must be on the mound waiting for the next kid to step up to the plate. Perhaps he is looking around for his cousin right now, checking to make sure he is all right, but Mead is nowhere to be found. Percy probably assumes that he went back inside, that he’s hiding out in the boys’ room, and returns his attention to the business at hand. Winds up and sends another curveball whizzing over the plate.

Freddy pokes Mead with the ruler. “Hey, freak. I said drop them. Now!”

Hands shaking, Mead reaches for his zipper. “I wasn’t watching you.”

“Faster.”

Mead’s pants drop to his ankles. His whole body trembles as he tugs down his Carter’s and the boys start to laugh, making their all-too-expected comments about the diminutive size of his preadolescent genitals. Mead closes his eyes and waits for them to get their fill of fun and leave, only they don’t leave. Freddy pokes him in the stomach with the ruler and says, “Now hand over your report.”

Mead opens his eyes. “What?”

Freddy pokes him again. “I thought you were a genius, freak. You know what I’m talking about, your science report. Hand it over. I always wanted to get an A in science. My old man’ll be so proud.”

“No,” Mead says and hugs the spiral notebook to his chest.

Freddy looks at his friends. “No? Did he just say no?”

“He couldn’t have,” one of them says. “He’s too smart to say that.”

Freddy pokes Mead again. Harder. “Hand it over, freak, or you’ll be sorry.”

“No. I’ve put a lot of hard work into this project. Half my final grade will be based on it. You can’t have it.”

He moves fast, so fast that Mead does not have time to react. In one swift motion, Freddy knocks Mead down, flips him over, and pins him to the ground. With his knee digging into Mead’s back, Freddy says, “You ready to hand it over now?”

“No.”

“All right then, have it your way, freak.” And while the other boys hold Mead’s arms and legs to the ground, Freddy takes the ruler and slides it into the crack of Mead’s butt. A cold dread starts at the base of Mead’s skull and races down his spine. His heart thuds against the ground. Freddy isn’t just a juvenile delinquent; he is downright crazy. “I’ll give you one more chance, freak,” he says. “Hand over your report or I’ll measure just how far I can shove this ruler up your ass.”

Unable to speak, Mead nods his head.

“Is that a yes, freak?”

He nods again and manages to squeak out a sound that resembles a yes.

Freddy grabs the notebook and, knee still buried in the middle of Mead’s back, rips it in half. Then rips it again and again and again, every tear going straight through Mead’s heart, pieces of paper fluttering down through the air like feathers off a maimed bird. When Freddy is done, he tosses the carcass of the notebook into the creek, lifts his knee off Mead’s back, and says, “If you breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll come back and finish what I started, do we understand each other?”

Mead nods again but otherwise does not move, even when the boys climb back up the hill. Not until their voices have receded into the distance does he dare lift his face out of the dirt and sit up. The front of his shirt is soaked with urine. Still shaking, he pulls it off over his head and dunks it in the creek. Splashes water on his chest. Then wrings out his shirt, puts it back on, and steps into his pants. Only then does he retrieve from the ground all the bits and pieces of his notebook. The pieces Freddy threw into the creek are ruined beyond repair.

Mead climbs back up the hill and sees Percy still standing on the mound. His cousin pitches a fastball in over the plate. The batter swings, misses, and the catcher yells out, “Strike!” Then the bell rings, signaling the end of recess, and everyone starts heading back toward the school, laughing and talking. Percy glances around the schoolyard until his eyes land on his cousin. Mead waves as if to say that everything is fine, that he will be along in a minute. The last thing he wants is for his cousin to see Freddy’s handiwork. Mead is humiliated enough as it is, he does not need his cousin to add to his misery with some misplaced act of heroism. And it works. Percy nods back, then trots off in the direction of the school. Not until he has disappeared inside does Mead start to make his own way back.

T
HE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY,
the last week of the project, Mead re-sketches his six-foot-by-six-foot plot of land then, from the bits and pieces of still-legible notes, tries to re-create his report. But the project he hands in is not even worth grading. Mr. Belknap grades it anyway and gives Mead the first C of his life. “Is everything all right at home?” the teacher asks and Mead nods.

But four weeks later, when his mother gets a look at his report card, everything is not all right.

“What happened?” she asks Mead.

“Nothing,” he says.

“Do you see this?” she says and holds the report card not six inches from his face. “C. That means average. You are not average, Teddy, you’re an exceptionally bright boy. Is this your idea of a joke? Or maybe you’re feeling rebellious, is that it? Maybe you’ve decided it doesn’t matter how you do in school. Maybe you think slacking off in your studies is okay. Maybe this is all a big joke to you. But it isn’t okay and it’s not a joke, Teddy, it matters more than you can even imagine.”

“I don’t care,” Mead says. Which is a lie. He does care. He hates that C even more than his mother does. She should know this. She should know him. Why doesn’t she ask him if anything is wrong? Like his teacher. Not that he would tell her if she did ask. He would be too embarrassed. But still, she could at least ask. And so he says what he says to get back at her. To piss her off because he is mad. And it works.

“All right,” she says. “Fine. You want to know what average is going to get you in this life? I’ll show you.” And she stomps to the front hall closet and comes back with his overcoat. “Put this on; we’re going for a ride.”

At first Mead thinks she is going to drive him over to the junior high so Principal Jeavons can give him a lecture, so the man can talk to Mead about grade point averages and SAT scores and all the other things universities care about so much. Which suits Mead just fine. He would love to get his hands on some college guides, to take a peek inside, to get a preview of his much-anticipated future, but he doubts Principal Jeavons has any of those lying around. That’s high school territory, after all. Mead wonders what it would take to get his mother to drag him into
that
principal’s office.

But she drives in neither the direction of the junior high nor the high school. Instead she gets on the state highway and heads for St. Louis. And Mead’s hopes begin to rise again. Maybe she is bypassing both schools and taking him directly to St. Louis University. Maybe she will take him to the library. A university library. A real library. Because the one in High Grove is a joke. Cookbooks, farming manuals, and hunting magazines. That is about the extent of it. Mead would give his right arm to walk among the texts of great scholars. It’d be like dying and going to heaven. He can hardly wait.

Only she doesn’t go there either. An hour and a half later she pulls up in front of Wessman’s Funeral Parlor and says, “We’re here. Get out.”

A funeral parlor? She drove an hour and a half to take Mead to a funeral parlor? Geez, if she wanted him to attend a funeral, they could have just stayed in High Grove. They might have had to wait a day or two for somebody to die, but she could have made her point just as well there and saved on gas too. Whatever that point might be. Dead people don’t scare Mead. There was an open casket at his grandfather’s funeral a few years ago. The old man looked exactly the same lying in that casket as he had two days earlier lying in his bed, only with more makeup. “Pull up your grades or you’ll be burying dead people for the rest of your life like your father.” That’s all she has to say. But no, Mead’s mother has to go and make a big production out of it. Drive home her point. So fine, let’s just do this thing and go back home.

“Sit down and I’ll be right back,” she says then disappears inside Mr. Wessman’s office. Once every month or so, Mead’s father has to come down here to pick up the body of some High Grove resident who spent his or her final days in the St. Louis Hospital, or in one of the city’s many nursing homes, and bring it back home to be buried. So unless Mead’s mother is planning to stick a corpse in the front seat between the two of them for a ride home, Mead doesn’t know what she hopes to prove with this whole charade.

“Okay,” she says as she emerges from the office a moment later, “let’s go.” And she gets onto an oversize elevator not unlike the one at Fegley Brothers, only fancier, with inlaid wood panels and brass fixtures. The doors close and the elevator lurches into motion, heading south. Only then does it dawn on Mead that he is maybe not as prepared for whatever his mother has in mind as he first thought. “Just remember,” she says, “that I’m doing this for your own good.”

The elevator shudders to a stop and the doors open. The first thought Mead has is that someone should turn up the thermostat. The second thought he has is that someone should open a window because it stinks down here. Like a chemistry lab. Like his uncle Martin after the man has spent a couple of hours in the basement of Fegley Brothers, only a whole lot stronger. All such thoughts go flying out of Mead’s head, however, when he sees what lies before him. Dead bodies. At least thirty of them are laying on stainless steel gurneys, naked as jaybirds. Men and women alike. Lifeless as fallen trees. Some with sutures in their necks, others with stitches in an arm or a leg. All of them wearing toe tags. And not a single one of these bodies is under a white sheet.

Mead’s stomach heaves and he throws up on the floor. He turns and runs back into the elevator, frantically pushing on the
CLOSE
button until the doors start to respond. But his mother sticks her hand between the doors and they reopen. Then she steps onto the elevator and hands Mead a Wet-Nap to clean up his face. He gets a whiff of rubbing alcohol and almost heaves again, turns away from her, presses his hot cheek against the cool brass plate, and presses the
CLOSE
button several more times. The door responds and the elevator begins to rise.