Erik vs. Everything

by Christina Uss

  —The Lore

  Erik’s prickly feeling of dread kept him company through the night and during his ride on the school bus to Ridgewell Lower Elementary the next morning. The dread pricks mellowed out into a low feeling of nausea once he was sitting at his desk.

  After some trial and error, Erik had found the best ways to avoid calling attention to himself in Mr. Sullivan’s fourth-grade classroom were to turn in work that was good enough but not so good the teacher might want him to share it with the class, and to hunch ultra-low in his chair whenever things got too hairy. After a dozen or so incidents where Erik scrunched himself up small when asked to participate in class discussions, Mr. Sullivan had let him be. There were plenty of other kids who waved their hands to be called upon, plus other kids who were squirmy and distracted, so Mr. Sullivan had his hands full without having to focus on one slouchy boy.

  Mr. Sullivan had begun a social studies unit about the US presidents earlier in the week. He wrote the name Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the board. “FDR was the first and last American president elected to four terms. One of his most famous quotes was ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’” he said.

  Erik started. “That’s not true,” he said, the words jumping out of his mouth.

  Mr. Sullivan’s eyebrows rose. “Sorry, was that you, Erik? Did you have . . . something to say?”

  Erik felt more words bubbling up. His mouth seemed to have a mind of its own. “There’s lots of other things to fear. Getting hurt? Feeling stupid?” The words came faster now, and louder. “School buses. Running squirrels. Crouching squirrels. Squirrels in trees. Squirrels under beds. Baseball. Football. Basketball. Dodgeball. Kickball. Volleyball. Every kind of ball. Having things thrown at you. Having things yelled at you. Having people stare at you.”

  The other kids were staring at him.

  His innards turned hard and sharp, and his tongue suddenly felt two sizes too large. At least with this big, unwieldy slab of tongue to deal with, his traitorous mouth gave up and stopped talking. He clamped his lips shut and slid way, way down; this time he went completely off of his chair and ended up tucked underneath his desk.

  As soon as he slid out of view, the other kids lost interest and went back to hand raising and squirming. They were accustomed to Erik disappearing under stuff. Most of his classmates had known him since kindergarten, when they’d drawn him in-class birthday cards featuring pictures of his desk with his legs sticking out from underneath it. (He had a couple of friends who liked to hang out and read comic books and graphic novels like he did, and he appreciated that they never made a big deal about his tendency to hide under furniture.) Mr. Sullivan, who had been staring at Erik too, gave his head a shake and went on to explain President Roosevelt’s handling of World War II.

  Time passed ever so slowly under Erik’s desk until the bell rang for the end of the day.

  Spjut was waiting when the school bus pulled up into the Sheepflatteners’ neighborhood. He sniffed each child as they disembarked and gave most of them a tail wag. Erik was the last one off. The boy trudged toward his front yard. The little dog followed at his heels until the neighbors’ enormous German shepherd strutted by. Spjut barked out a challenge and chased the much bigger dog down the street. Spjut Sheepflattener didn’t appear to know the meaning of the words fear or much bigger dog. Despite weighing no more than a scrawny rabbit, he acted like he was the most intimidating animal in town.

  Spjut dashed back in time to follow Erik through their front door. Erik snuck past his mother sitting at the kitchen table and headed up the stairs. The terrier followed, his tiny toenails clicking on the wooden stair risers, and reached the top to watch Erik do his bed-jumping, squirrel-repelling routine. Spjut settled down with a fragrant doggy sigh on Erik’s rug, ready for a nice nap while Erik did whatever it was he liked to do under that bed every afternoon.

  Erik blew a fluff of dust out of his way and rolled over on his back to think about school. How could he AVOID another scene like that? He’d been toying with the idea of making his own personalized list of Lore-like survival tips, starting with He who can avoid stuff will not be destroyed by stuff. Maybe he could come up with a saying to remind himself to keep quiet.

  “Keep one’s lips stuck together except when eating,” he said out loud. Granddad’s deer-hide slippers appeared below the quilt. His wrinkled face appeared next, upside down.

  “Hi, Granddad,” Erik said. He wondered whether his grandfather had heard what he’d said.

  Granddad Golveg gave him a wave, and Erik caught a glimpse of his faded tattoo (the symbol for TURNIP).

  “Better to speak too little than too much,” the old man said, quoting a translation of Erik’s father’s favorite bit of the Lore. Wisdom delivered, he straightened up and shuffled away, humming.

  Erik stretched his legs toward the wall and picked up a graphic novel about aliens. He wasn’t moving from this spot until he absolutely had to. When he’d crept past his mom, he had seen the Ridgewell Recreation catalog open on the kitchen table in front of her, the frightening words Youth Lacrosse and Introduction to Drama and African Drumming Circle in bold on the page. Although he had pleaded with her before every activity as though he were being sent to fight in a hopeless battle, never to return, their conversation was always the same:

  “Mom, no,” he had said, watching Cub Scouts setting up painted wooden cars on the Pinewood Derby track.

  “Mom, no,” he had said, grabbing the doorjamb to resist being pushed inside the local tae kwon do dojo.

  “Mom, noooooooo!” he had howled, his mother hauling him to junior swim team tryouts and plopping him into the shallow end.

  “Erik, yes,” she said back. Occasionally, she’d add some nugget of child-raising wisdom, like “One must howl with the wolves one is among,” or “Children must stay busy,” and would hear no more on the subject.

  Erik listened in despair to the scratching of his mom’s pen as she filled out his contact information for yet another thing he didn’t want to do. The scratching was interrupted when the phone rang. Erik yelled, “Gaaah!” like he always did when the phone rang. His yelp petered out into a groan. He’d already failed at keeping his lips stuck together.

  Mrs. Sheepflattener didn’t react to the yelp. No one in the family ever did. Erik yelling “gaaah!” after the phone rang was as unsurprising as a light coming on after you flipped the switch.

  “Bjorn, how are you?” she said to the caller. Uncle Bjorn was Erik’s father’s brother. “How are Hilda and the babies? And how are Ragnar and Hrolf enjoying being big brothers to so many?” Aunt Hilda had given birth to triplets, two boys and a girl, shortly after Christmas. “Oh? Mmm-hmmm. I understand. Yes . . . yes . . . well, of course, we’d be happy to help.” She shifted some papers around. “Uh-huh, school is done by then. Certainly, Erik would be thrilled to see his cousins. What boy wouldn’t be?”

  Erik’s heart thumped. He was pretty sure he and his mother didn’t agree on the meaning of the word thrilled.

  “He’ll be there. Give all the children and Hilda a hug from all of us. Goodbye!” Mrs. Sheepflattener hung up the phone and clapped her hands together. “Erik, downstairs please, I have news! Girls, you too!”

  Erik and his sisters obeyed.

  “Uncle Bjorn called to say the triplets are growing beautifully, hitting milestones faster than they expected. He and Aunt Hilda can already tell they’re going to have their hands full by the time the little ones start to crawl this summer. Your uncle asked if any of the cousins could come up and lend a hand around the house. I told them Erik could.”

  Erik’s jaw dropped. “Me?” he squeaked. The Minnesota Sheepflatteners had leaned on the Lore with a vengeance by raising and hunting their own food after his aunt and uncle both lost their jobs. Erik couldn’t imagine how he could be of any help.

  “Of course you. Allyson has cheer camp, and Brunhilde is planning on lifeguard training this summer,” his mother said. “Babies are straig
htforward, dear, it won’t be hard to figure out. Rock them, feed them, don’t let badgers eat them, it’s plain and simple. And family always looks after family! Speaking of looking after things, I need the three of you to clean up the dining room before dinnertime.” She walked over to the back of the pantry door where the cleaning supplies hung and grabbed the straw broom. “I don’t want any axe-grinding stones in the way when your father gets home.”

  Mrs. Sheepflattener shoved the broom into Erik’s hands, and he dragged himself after his sisters. Just when you think the worst thing you have to fear is the Recreation catalog, along come triplets learning to crawl. Erik felt like he’d been triple-punched in the stomach. Cousins—pow! Babies—pow! A summer hundreds of miles away from his own bed—ka-pow!

  Allyson bounced from the kitchen into the dining room and started collecting the loose bits of chain she’d been hammering into a stylish yarn-and-chain-mail scarf. Brunhilde stomped over to gather her axe-cleaning tools.

  It was easy to tell which girl had been working on which side of the room. Erik believed his twin sisters must have agreed at birth that being born on the same day didn’t mean they were the same. One sister got her fashion hints from teen magazines; the other from centuries-old war poems. Brunhilde took great pride in sharing her name with a mythic Valkyrie maiden; Allyson had insisted since preschool that everyone call her something “more Connecticutty,” since her given name, Blóðughadda, proved impossible for any classmates to pronounce. Neither twin was old enough to have a rune tattoo yet, but like most Sheepflattener teenagers, they often copied different symbols on their arms to try them out. Today, Allyson’s rune, sketched in strawberry-scented highlighter, said FUN. Brunhilde’s own charcoal-traced tattoo was the same one she’d been choosing for months: CONQUER.

  Erik started to sweep in twitchy bursts, poofing up a cloud of pink yarn clippings mixed with gray stone dust. As the pink and gray flotsam settled back down, he sneezed and leaned weakly on the broom, thinking that he’d probably end up having to share a bedroom in Minnesota with his boy cousins. What would his borrowed bed look like? Would it be close enough to the doorway that he could do anti-squirrel inspections with one leap? Would it have any space under it at all, or would it be crammed full of moose hides and war bows with no room for a boy to hide?

  * * *

  The room got cleaned, the table was set, and dinner was served when Thorfast walked in the door. He greeted them all with a fond grunt, and the whole family settled in to eat. Allyson talked about a school project to collect clothes for the homeless, and Mrs. Sheepflattener reminisced about when each of the kids was an infant and how much work new babies can be.

  Brunhilde was quiet throughout the meal. Eventually, she put down her fork. “Mother,” she said in her monotone voice.

  “Yes, my iron flower?” Mrs. Sheepflattener said.

  “Does Cousin Ragnar still practice boxing?” Brunhilde asked.

  “Mmmm, I am pretty sure he does. He won that state championship for his weight class last year. My, how he likes hitting things. Every time he gets in the ring, someone learns the fists of Vikings are not to be trifled with!” Mrs. Sheepflattener said. Erik shivered. Ragnar was his oldest Minnesota cousin and always wanted to play games that involved smashing something.

  Brunhilde swallowed and frowned. “You know the school still won’t let me in the boxing ring at all. Not since I punched right through the punching bag and my glove came out the other side.” She picked up a hunk of halibut from her plate and squeezed it until it dripped grayish juice. “Does Ragnar still have that throwing axe? And is Hrolf learning wrestling? Mother, may I accompany Erik in visiting the cousins? Perhaps they will train with me. It is difficult to find anyone strong and quick enough out here to fight with,” she said. “I am a warrior in here”—she thumped her chest with a fist wet with halibut juice—“but I need more skills to be a warrior out in the world. Visiting the cousins might help.”

  “I hear you, dear,” their mother said, refilling her own plate. “Granny Vigdis always said you naturally take after our most combat-hungry ancestors. Letting you visit the cousins sounds fine to me. I’ll call your uncle back after dinner and see what he has to say, but I imagine he’ll be delighted to have you. You can help Erik with the babies!” she said.

  Brunhilde grunted in satisfaction, and their father grunted in agreement. Erik looked at his sister, with her thick blond braids and sharp, serious face. Was having her along on the trip going to make it more or less terrifying? The last time the cousins got together, Brunhilde and Ragnar organized an offensive against a flock of geese that kept pooping on the school playground. Erik had never seen so many feathers.

  He got lost in his imagination for a while, picturing Brunhilde and Cousin Ragnar inventing a combination of axe-fighting and boxing, or wrestling with wild animals, or designing plans to wage war on the local townsfolk. It seemed unlikely that his sister joining him was going to make the whole experience any calmer.

  It was going to be a long summer.

  Three

  The Minnesota Vikings

  You needn’t swim faster than the shark, only faster than the swimmer next to you.

  —The Lore

  Brunhilde clomped into Erik’s room and dropped a pair of boxing gloves into his suitcase. “No more room in mine. You take these.” She clomped back out.

  The suitcase his mother had set out for him at the end of his bed was nearly full. He tried not to look at the bundle of his soft, defenseless shirts, pants, and underwear now wrinkled under Brunhilde’s boxing gloves. In an hour, he’d have to zip that thing closed and drag it to the airport for his flight to Minnesota. The weeks since the phone call from Uncle Bjorn sealing his doom had slipped horribly past like rattlesnakes racing down a greased hill. He tried to be glad that he didn’t have to show up for piano lessons for the five weeks they’d be gone, but it was a small comfort.

  Erik folded his hands and tried petitioning Thor to whip up an airport-closing hurricane, aware that it would only delay things. He knew not even the old gods could make a hurricane last the entire summer.

  It appeared Thor knew it too, because the dreamy blue June sky hosted the friendliest and puffiest hurricane-free clouds.

  “A perfect day for flying!” his mother said several times on the way to the airport. Erik wondered if maybe she’d asked the gods for good weather before he’d asked for bad. It took hardly any time at all before he was clasping his boarding pass to Minneapolis/Saint Paul at the back of the security check line. Mom hugged him, and Brunhilde and his dad exchanged a couple of solemn grunts.

  Allyson ruffled Erik’s hair. “Have fun, Erik,” she said. Then she gave Brunhilde an enthusiastic squeeze. “I’ll, like, miss you, sister. But any clothes you left behind are fair game for me to borrow, right?”

  “No,” said Brunhilde.

  “Your mouth says no, but your unprotected closet says yes!” Allyson sang out.

  Brunhilde responded, “My mouth and my closet both say no. Is that not clear? Do I need to make it clearer in a way you will not forget all summer?”

  “No time for that now, girls!” Mrs. Sheepflattener admonished. “They’re calling Brunhilde and Erik’s boarding group. Now, Erik, do your best. I want to hear nothing from Hilda but how much you helped her with those babies, do you understand?”

  He nodded stiffly, wondering if his fear of flying was about to dislodge his dread of visiting the cousins. Nope, he realized while hauling his suitcase up the jetway behind Brunhilde. His insides made room for them both.

  * * *

  After enduring a three-hour flight and one-hour bus ride, Erik and Brunhilde arrived at their uncle and aunt’s house and were immediately enveloped by a passel of back thumps and roared greetings. Erik was planning on scoping out the bed situation, but his Aunt Hilda insisted she’d take care of the unpacking while the rest of the family brought him and Brunhilde out for some fresh air.

  Aunt Hilda handed Uncle Bjorn
a picnic basket that smelled of fish, instructing her husband, “You take your niece and nephew out to the lake, give them a chance to shake the dust of travel off themselves.” She added, “And take the triplets too, they could use an airing out.” His cousins bustled out the door, and Erik had no choice but to follow.

  After the meal of fish cakes had been eaten, Erik hung back near the picnic blanket while eight-year-old Hrolf and fourteen-year-old Ragnar waded in the water and Brunhilde set up a ring of stones to make a fire pit. The triplet babies, Sven, Siegmund, and tiny Sally, were bundled up under animal pelts in their stroller, gazing around themselves as if they owned the woods and the lake and found them good.

  Other than their small size, Erik found it hard to believe the triplets were only six months old. At this age, average babies might be trying to master sitting up. Hrolf had told him on the walk over to the lake that triplet babies are born tougher than average. After nine months of whacking into each other in their mother’s womb before being born, even non-Viking triplets have better muscle control than other newborns. Assuming all babies were sort of hopelessly blobby and soft, Erik had been unprepared for the triplets’ alert eyes and grasping hands. They seemed less like infants to him and more like miniature animals born ready to hunt.

  “C’mon, Erik lad, get out there.” Uncle Bjorn pointed at the lake.

  “No, thanks,” Erik said in a small voice. He didn’t expect it to work any better on Uncle Bjorn than it did on his mother. He was right.

  “You must not have heard me, lad. Get on out there! The fish won’t catch themselves, you know,” Uncle Bjorn said.

  Erik looked out at the choppy, dark surface of the lake. It offered no hint of what might be prowling its depths. Young Hrolf ducked his head under the water to search for likely catfish hidey-holes.

  Erik made no move to do anything. Uncle Bjorn looked flummoxed. “What are you waiting for?”