“Is your brother bad news too?” another woman in a yellow raincoat said.
I shook my head.
“He’s really smart, but even really smart, strong people need help,” I told her.
“Amen to that,” the first woman said.
“My mom was an alcoholic,” I said. “She was drinking when she had me in her stomach and that’s how I became the not-normal way I am. A lot of people say I am retarded, but that is not an okay thing to say.”
“Huh,” the bus driver said. He scratched at his neck with his fingernails. It sounded like scrubbing a toilet.
“I can use the word retard if I want to,” I added. “It’s okay. I am taking the power from the word and using it for good, like when black people use the n-word.”
Once I had heard AK47 use the n-word, which was a word she made sure Gert never used, and that was what she told me: that sometimes you can take an ugly word people have for you, like retard, and let the air out of it like a balloon. But she also said that only someone who had been hurt by the n-word could use it that way.
“Every other way it hurts people,” she said, and I did not understand until I thought about the word retard and how it was used to hurt people, and how I could make it not hurt me.
The other thing is that a lot of people get weird when I talk about Mom and how she accidentally poisoned me.
Dr. Laird has a lot of pamphlets, and there are websites too, that explain what happened when Mom had beer and other things while I was a baby inside her.
For example, people like me can have “abnormal” faces, which I do not have, and smaller heads. They are short like I am, and can have trouble sitting still and thinking, which is something Dr. Laird has helped me with. They can also have weak bones and need a lot of calcium, which builds bones, in order to stay strong.
“My fair maiden gets called retarded a lot,” I said. “It bothers him, so whenever I hear someone call him that I make them apologize.”
“Your fair what now?” the woman across from me asked.
“My fair maiden. His name is Marxy.”
“Maidens can only be girls,” the woman said. “That’s what the word means.”
“Well, I don’t care what the word means, because it’s my legend.”
She stared at me for a long time. “Well, anyway,” the woman said. “Sometimes people need help. My son, we all got together and told him how much we cared about him. You know. How he has children to look after. Maybe that’s something you can do with your brother?”
That sounded like a good idea. I thought of the people who could help me. There was AK47, who said she hated Gert, even though she loved him. I could also ask Dr. Laird. Those were the only friends of Gert’s that I knew and liked.
The bus turned a corner really sharply and the bus driver told me that we were going to be on campus soon.
“You going to be okay?” he said.
I said that I was. He stopped the bus and I showed him the special Viking handshake, where you grab the person’s wrist. Then at the end we made a fist dab.
“Good luck,” he said.
“You too,” I said. “Happ.”
Happ means “good luck” in Viking, along with gipta, which I said after, since I didn’t know what the difference between the two types of luck was.
When people started getting on the bus, coming in like a gargantuan wave, the bus driver held out his hand and said in a booming voice: “WAIT YOUR GODDAMN TURN.”
And the people, who were mostly young and students with books and backpacks, stopped trying to get on the bus. I felt like a hero who had just defeated hordes of bad warriors. They moved out of the way and let me walk off the bus.
“Middle building,” the bus driver said before letting all of the people back on. “The tall one with the bells.”
* * *
The campus of the college is gargantuan and reminds me of pictures I have seen of Viking towns, with lots of people walking around. Nobody has swords or axes or hats with animal bones sticking out of them, though. Students don’t look anything like Vikings. They do not have a lot of muscles, or most of them do not. Some of the students I saw were big and could do well on the battlefield. But the battlefield they were on happened in the brain.
When Gert first got into the college, Gert and I and AK47 all went together to walk around. AK47 whistled and said, “Not bad, for a state college,” and Gert shrugged and scratched his elbow. He was wearing his baggy clothes and some people walking toward us made sure to walk really far away from us as we passed on the sidewalk.
That happens a lot with Gert. It’s like he is not only big, he is bigger than he really is when he walks.
AK47 rubbed his shoulder and told him not to worry. “All that matters is your brain,” she said. “Let the rest of these idiots be shit-heels.”
While walking through the college, holding on to Gert’s calculator and the printout of his class schedule, I started to get nervous, since there were so many people around and I was not with anyone I knew. My heart felt like a bird, bouncing against its cage inside of me. In my brain I told the bird to stop going crazy, that it was time to be a Viking bird and not a coward.
I rubbed the sides of my head and closed my eyes and counted to ten.
“Are you all right?”
I opened my eyes and there was a girl standing in front of me. She was holding a large book and wore sunglasses, which were not as shiny as the bus driver’s and sat on the end of her nose.
“I am fine,” I said.
“Lost?”
I nodded. She asked me where I wanted to go. I showed her the schedule from the fridge that had Gert’s classes. People were walking by and someone hit me with their bag accidentally.
The girl pushed the person and said, “Dick, watch where you’re going.”
She read the information on the piece of paper and said where I wanted to go wasn’t far. I told her that the bus driver said it was the building with the tower.
“No. Here. Come on,” she said, and started walking.
I followed her. While we walked she asked me about what I was doing on campus and who I was and I told her I needed to save my brother.
“He needs his special calculator in order to write his test.”
“Midterms are a bitch,” the girl said.
“His name is Gert. Do you know him?” I asked, and when I told her his name she said she didn’t, but that it was a big campus. We went up the hill.
“Lots of people go here. But that’s a pretty weird name.”
At the top of the hill she pointed to a building with a flag sticking out of the top. It was big and metal with a lot of windows.
“That’s where the Econ Department is. Your brother’s class should be there.” She handed the paper back to me. “Second floor.”
I thanked her and told her to stay cool, and we dabbed and she added a move to the dab, where she pulled her hand away after our fists touched and made the sound of an explosion.
* * *
I ran up the stairs of the building to the second floor and walked down the hall and read the numbers by the doors, which were very small. Inside the rooms the students all had their pencils in their hands and were using them to do battle with the sheets of paper in front of them. Many of them had the calculators that Gert used.
This told me that I was in the correct building.
The door to the classroom on the sheet of paper had a small window in it. I could not see Gert, and the window was not big enough for me to see the entire room, which looked like a movie theater, with students sitting in chairs and a Professor standing at the bottom. A computer shot pictures up on a screen at the front.
The screen had numbers and things on it that I did not understand.
I put my ear to the glass of the door so I could listen to the teacher at the front of the room, who was talking very loudly.
“The image projected will correspond to question seventeen,” she was saying.
> The projector changed pictures and showed another one that was even more confusing.
“This is the time,” I told myself. Closing my eyes, I pushed the door and it made a loud metal sound as it opened.
The teacher stopped talking at the front of the class. The students in their chairs all turned to look at me too. All of them got really quiet, like instead of dropping a bomb that exploded I dropped one that sucked up all of the sound.
“Can I help you?” the teacher said.
I took out Gert’s schedule and read the name under MACROECONOMICS. Dr. Gillroy was the name of the professor who was teaching Gert’s class.
“Is your name Dr. Gillroy?” I called to the woman.
The students sitting down started whispering to each other and laughing.
The woman was older, with gray hair that was crimpy and stuck out. When I asked her for her name the second time, the students turned back to her to see what she was going to say. People pointed their phones at me.
“I am, and you’re interrupting my exam.” She folded her arms across her chest.
“I am trying to find my brother,” I said. “He is in this class. I need to give him this.” I opened my bag and took out Gert’s special calculator. “For his exam.”
She opened her arms and said to the class, “Does anyone here know this young woman?”
I made my eyes jog across the classroom, looking for Gert. I said his name aloud. Nobody put up their hand to say they were Gert.
“Does anyone here know a Gert?” she said.
That was when a hand went up. It did not belong to my brother. It belonged to a girl who was sitting in the last row, with blond hair that was pulled back in a ponytail. She had glasses and skinny arms.
She said, “I think I know who she’s talking about.”
“And?” the Professor said.
“May I be excused?” she asked the Professor, who looked at the clock.
“The exam’s already late to start.”
The student asked if she could come up and talk to the Professor. She came down the stairs of the classroom and to the front. The girl and Dr. Gillroy talked quietly, and then the girl walked up the steps to me and said that she knew Gert and that we should probably talk outside of the class, since we were disrupting everyone else.
* * *
We went to the cafeteria. She said that her name was Jenny and that she knew Gert, only she said it in a weird way and then asked me how he was doing.
“Good,” I said. “We should try to find him if he is not in his exam. Maybe he got lost.”
“Somehow I don’t think so.” Jenny smiled. “You two look a lot alike. I can see the resemblance.”
“I need more tattoos.”
And Jenny laughed and said that was true. She picked at her fingernail. “So you’re looking for him, and he told you he was in this class.”
“And that he has an exam.”
“We did know each other,” Jenny said. “I mean, we weren’t best friends or anything. But we hung out outside of class.” She chewed on her nail again.
I asked if that meant they had sex. Her face got red. Most of the girls who knew Gert had had sex with him.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Gert has sex with a lot of people.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I got that impression.”
She told me they had been part of the same study group for their Economics class, the one with the big test. I told her that he had gone to the study group last night.
“Last night,” she said.
“He came home very late and was drunk. Sometimes he likes to go out and have beers after studying, even though he knows I do not like when he gets drunk.”
For some reason she did not want our eyes to meet. Usually people do that when they know something and they do not want to tell you.
So I gave her THE LOOK that AK47 taught me, staring right into her face and her eyes.
Jenny sighed. “Okay, it’s probably none of my business, but I don’t think he’s doing well in class.”
I frowned. “He hasn’t said anything.”
She said that Gert had not been coming to class for a while, and that this was not the first time he had missed a test. “Gert missed his Stats test too. And I haven’t seen him in class for weeks.”
That was impossible, I said. Gert had been studying and going to class. “He is not a person who lies,” I said. “He is not dishonorable like that. And we do not lie to people in our tribe. That is a big rule.”
Jenny saw someone walking with a tray of food and called him over. “Karl, can you come here for a minute?”
Karl was short and shaped like a ball, with a big stomach. He also had red hair, just like Carrot from the Community Center. He sat in the free chair, putting his tray down. He had soup and a tuna fish sandwich on it.
“What’s going on?” he asked, and then he looked at me and back at Jenny.
“This is Gert’s sister, Zelda,” Jenny said.
“Hey,” he said, and we did a funny handshake. “Cool. Where the hell’s he been? I’m almost out of hash.” Karl unwrapped his tuna sandwich, pulling all the plastic off. “It’s been dry as shit on campus.”
Jenny made a noise with her throat.
“What?” Karl said. When Karl talked I could see the food in his mouth. Then he looked at me and put his hands over his mouth and apologized.
“What does Gert have to do with being out of hash?” I asked. “And what is hash?”
Karl looked at Jenny. “Oh. Well, he’s sort of—”
He stopped and bit more of his sandwich.
Jenny said, “Zelda came all the way here to bring Gert his graphing calculator, for Econ.”
The rest of Karl’s sandwich disappeared into his mouth. “I heard he’s going to fail, like, mathematically,” he said. “Maybe academic probation. Right?”
“I didn’t hear that,” Jenny said.
I put my hands on the table and spread out my fingers. “Okay,” I said. “What does that mean?”
“It means that he’s either not going to class or failing his tests. Maybe both.” He nodded his head. “I don’t think he got busted for dealing, so it’s probably not that. Anyway, if you end up talking to him, can you get him to give me a call? It’s Karl. He’s got my number.”
* * *
When I got home I was very angry and decided to take action. I had gone all the way to the college to bring him the calculator. If Karl was correct, Gert was in big trouble.
He is very serious about me not going into his room when he is not home. I have always respected his wishes. But I had to find out who was telling the truth and who was lying. If Gert had lied about going to his test, that was one lie. But if he had stopped going to classes and was failing, he should have told me.
I knew Gert had books and papers on his desk that he said were from school. I put down my bag in my room and went to Gert’s room. I knocked on the door and said it was me, to open up.
If he was not at school, he should have been home.
Everything was quiet.
Gert’s door has a lock on it, but I knew that if you took a pen apart and used the plastic tube inside, you could stick it into the round hole of the lock and press around and the lock would sometimes open.
AK47 showed me how to do it.
So I found the pen and opened the door.
Gert was not hiding in there from his test.
His room was not very clean and smelled like his underarm deodorant and also cologne, and dirty laundry and his armpits. The poster of Al Pacino from Scarface stared at me and said SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND.
Gert likes to keep everything clean and orderly. His messy room was weird. I did not know where to look, so I started at his desk and looked at the papers there. It looked like homework and things from college. They would not help very much.
I checked under his bed and also in his desk, and in the table beside his bed, where he kept his condoms for having sex and also bund
les of socks.
His room has a bigger closet than my room. I went into it and moved all of the shirts that were hanging up out of the way. It was like being in a jungle and being attacked by all the plants. At Uncle Richard’s he kept his important things in our closet, behind a lot of clothes.
I saw the gym bag that Toucan gave him.
I put it on Gert’s bed and pulled open the zipper. There were two envelopes and one of them was empty and the other one had money in it. All of the bills were for twenty dollars and I counted them twice and there were twelve bills. The envelope also had a piece of paper inside, folded up, from a notebook. Gert had written names on the paper and a number beside the name. Some of the names were crossed out.
I put the money and the paper back in the envelope. Then I put the gym bag back into his closet. There was another box hidden behind the gym bag that I had not seen before. It was metal and had a key inside the lock.
I turned the key and the box opened.
There was a gun inside.
chapter eight
“Shit-heel!” I shouted at the gun, even though it was made of metal and couldn’t hear me. I also shouted, “Níðingr!” a word from Kepple that means “scoundrel or person who can’t be trusted.”
The problem with guns is you can make them go off by accident, and the television always shows people getting shot and dying. Sometimes even children and babies get shot. Before AK47 allowed me to call her the name of a gun, she made sure I knew that guns were dangerous and that people who used them to hurt others were cowards. I did not like the idea of Gert being a coward who used guns like a villain and stopped touching the gun.
“Shit-heel,” I said, because if Gert had a gun it could go off by accident and kill a baby. “Shit-heel, níðingr, shit-heel, níðingr!”
Vikings did not use guns. They stopped being powerful and vanished in 1050 AD. The first cannon used in battle was in 1250 AD. So they were late to inventing guns.
During high school, when Gert was still playing football, one of his friends on the football team got shot on the street. Gert was not there, but everyone in the school had to go to a meeting in the gymnasium to talk about how the friend got shot and how guns were very dangerous.
When We Were Vikings Page 8
