The Boy Who Made Everyone Laugh

by Helen Rutter

  There is a free drum kit when we get to the music room and Mr. Osho claps his hands together. “Look at that, you don’t even have to get rid of anyone! Right, Billy, show me what you’ve got.”

  It’s so much harder with real sticks and drums than with pencils. I keep getting easy beats that I can do on my knees totally wrong on the drum kit.

  “It’s harder in real life, isn’t it?” Mr. Osho says.

  “Much!” I say, rubbing my hands.

  “But you are way better than if you were starting from scratch. As I said before, you have the rhythm. You just have to make sure that your brain’s not going too fast for your body. Let me show you the easiest 4/4 beat. You can play this to most things.” He takes the sticks and sits at the drums and slowly breaks down what each hand and foot is doing.

  “Right,” he says when he’s done. “Now give it a go … but you have to go slowly. You can’t be in a rush with drumming—you have to find a beat that you can keep.”

  I start a slow four beat with my right hand and then add in my left on every three and then when that is steady add in the kick drum on the one. It actually sounds like a drumbeat!

  “Keep going!” Mr. Osho says, picking up a bass guitar and plucking a few strings in time to the drums. I feel a bit giddy, like I might start laughing, and try to go a bit faster. That’s when I mess up.

  But Mr. Osho doesn’t focus on the end. He focuses on what came before it. “That’s it!” he tells me. “You did it. Feel good?”

  “Amazing!” I say, starting up the beat again and instantly losing it.

  “Well, now that you know the feel of it, practice this with your pencils and add your foot in. You’ll be able to use the kit in the Music Lounge soon enough.”

  “Thanks, sir.”

  “My absolute pleasure, Billy.”

  As we head back to the Music Lounge, he says, “I know that you haven’t wanted to write anything down in your book, but you know you can talk to me whenever you want, don’t you?”

  “Do you want the b-b-b-book back?”

  “Of course not. You might want to write in it one day, let some of the stuff in that full brain out onto the page!”

  “I write loads at home, sir.”

  “Like what?”

  “Lists and s-s-stuff. Stupid things, like what annoys my sister and jokes, b-b-but sometimes I write about my stammer.”

  “What do you write?”

  “Just how to get rid of it and ways to stay invisible, sir. Stuff like that.”

  “Do you feel like the stammer is the only thing getting in your way?”

  “Y-y-yeah. I’m g-g-going to get rid of it, sir,” I say, thinking about the course.

  “Well, I’m glad you are feeling positive about it, Billy. But, you know, even if you can’t get rid of it, it’s only one thing about you. There is so much more to you than that. Give me that notebook.”

  I hand it over, not knowing where this is going.

  “Okay, so you like lists, Billy?” Mr. Osho asks. I nod. “Well, if someone asked me to write a list about you, this is what I would write.”

  He stops walking, takes a pen from his pocket, rests the notebook on his knee, and starts writing:

  Then he leaves this huge gap and adds in tiny writing at the bottom of the page:

  It makes me smile as he hands over the notebook. We keep walking, and I hold it tightly in my hands.

  He says, “Maybe rather than focusing on getting rid of your stammer, you could try to see yourself the way that other people see you?”

  “Not everyone is as nice as you, sir,” I reply, picturing what Blakemore would do to me if he ever found the notebook.

  When we get back to the Music Lounge, I see what game I can join.

  My new favorites are Rubik’s Race and Forbidden Island. Last week Mr. Osho taught us to play poker! At first I was terrible at bluffing. Bluffing is where you pretend you have good cards when you have gotten bad ones, or the other way round. Alex, Matthew, Josh, and Mr. Osho laughed at me loads when I pumped my fist in the air and did a little dance as I was dealt two aces. We bet with Legos. Mr. Osho says it’s even better to bet with M&M’s, when you can eat them at the end, but we don’t have M&M’s. Reds are worth one, blues two, and whites are worth five. After he taught us the rules, he went to change the record and we kept going. He plays his music on a little record player that folds up into a suitcase with a handle. It’s pretty awesome. He calls the records vinyl.

  There are some eighth-grade girls who go when it’s raining, and a few seventh graders who just sit on the beanbags, but me, Matthew, Josh, and Alex go every day. We are “the regulars.” That’s what Mr. Osho calls us. I go over and join in with whatever game “the regulars” are setting up. They don’t seem to mind me hanging around.

  “Hey, Billy.”

  “What’s it t-t-t-today?”

  “Castle Panic!” says Matthew, laying out the pieces.

  “I’ve got to leave early,” I say casually, setting myself up. “I’ve got the dentist l-l-later.”

  “I hate the dentist.” Josh frowns. “He always puts that horrible stuff on my teeth.”

  “I’m amazed you can sit still enough, Josh, to even go to the dentist!” Matthew laughs, doing an impression of him jiggling around with his mouth wide open.

  “Well, I bet you’re too big for the chair,” says Josh.

  Matthew is six feet tall already. I’m only just five feet, so you can imagine how ridiculous we look next to each other. He can pick me up from under my armpits. He says he wants to use me as a weight to build up his biceps. He has a growth thing; it’s got a funny name, something syndrome. That’s why he’s so tall. He’ll probably have problems with his bones when he is older. He told me about it when we were packing a game up. I think he should be a basketball player; he can nearly do a slam dunk already. He showed me in PE.

  “You missing English?” Alex asks.

  “Yeah, I’ve got to leave after homeroom,” I say. “My appointment’s at TOOTH HURTY. Get it?! Two thirty. TOOTH HURTY,” and with that they all groan and Josh throws a game piece at me … which I catch and pretend to eat.

  Josh is nearly as small as me. He has black hair and really blue eyes. He kind of looks like a wolf. He is the one who never stops moving. When we play games and he is waiting for his turn, he folds bits of paper or fidgets with a little cube he has in his pocket. He’s always jiggling because he has something called ADHD, which means he can’t sit still. He takes pills for it, but he still jiggles. In homeroom, when I’m drumming with pencils and he’s jiggling, Alex says it looks like we are listening to our own imaginary music.

  After Alex’s speech about his hearing aid, I had been worried about whether he’d be able to lip-read me. I’d avoided talking to him, but when we started playing games in the Music Lounge, I thought I’d better check. I got up the courage to ask if he could understand what I was saying, and he said he could lip-read me fine and didn’t understand what the fuss was about.

  He said, “You can’t speak and I can’t hear. We’re the perfect match!” That made me feel really good. I know he wasn’t lying, because he always laughs at my jokes. He laughs all the time actually. He said once as he was laughing, “Billy, you know you’re even funnier when you’re just being you, messing around, even more than when you’re telling jokes!”

  I didn’t even know what I had done that was so funny, but it was a nice thing for him to say. Mr. Osho says that all together we are a “motley crew.” Whatever that means!

  What Alex said reminds me of the comedian me and Granny Bread saw on TV. Maybe after I take the course I shouldn’t just tell jokes—maybe I should find a way to be a bit more me. Some comedians tell stories and some do physical comedy. I just need to think of something that makes me unique.

  * * *

  When I visit Granny Bread at the Oaks after school, I try telling a funny story about Chloe on an imaginary pony. I gallop around the tiny room, but she dozes off hal
fway through, so it doesn’t really work. When she wakes up, I reenact my worst moment from my last soccer match. I stand in the middle of the room and, in slow motion with commentary, act out the ball hitting me on the head and then bouncing up on to the top post, coming back down, and hitting me again before bouncing off into the net and scoring the other team their eighteenth goal of the match. She laughs and calls me “a card.” I’m not sure if storytelling comedy is for me. I think she laughs more at my one-liners.

  I stick Mr. Osho’s list up on my pin board when I get home, but I hide it behind the others. It’s a bit embarrassing to look at it, for some reason. Maybe because I just don’t believe that it’s true, but it feels good pinning it up there. Even though I can’t see it, I know it’s there. I’m still waiting to hear from the stammer school; I can’t quite believe that by Christmas my stammer will be gone. I’ll be able to do anything.

  What do you get when you run behind a car?

  Exhausted.

  At the end of our race in gym class, running across the boggy field towards the looming school, my cheeks are stinging and my chest is screaming at me to stop. I’m third from the back. Behind Elsie and just in front of Skyla. I HATE cross-country. I can just about see Alex ahead, but everyone else is way out in front. So I have no choice. I just keep going.

  After the race we are all paired with a kid from the high school who will tell us our time and then take us to the water fountains to fill our bottles. They’re all doing a “sports leaders” course for PE and have to fill in questionnaires and do warm-ups with us. My “sports leader” is named Ellie and is nearly as tall as Matthew! She has really curly red hair and spots on her face that I try not to look at. I just stare at her lace-up shoes and feel my ears get hot.

  On the way down the hall, I hear a familiar sound.

  Bbrrm tat, Bbrrm bbrrmm tattat.

  Bbrrm tat, Bbrrm bbrrmm tattat.

  Bbrrm tat, Bbrrm bbrrmm tattat.

  It’s a 4/4 drum beat in a kind of marching rhythm.

  So far on our journey, I’ve avoided saying anything to Ellie. Talking to bigger kids is the absolute worst. Especially total strangers. I’m okay now chatting with Skyla, Alex, Josh, Matthew, and Mr. Osho. I have even answered some questions in math in my whispery voice, but with Ellie I feel really nervous. I’m using my classic trick of pretending to be shy. It isn’t hard to fake it. I’m sure I’m bright red.

  Ellie asks me loads of questions:

  “Did you enjoy the race?”

  “It’s a big school, isn’t it?”

  “Do you like science?”

  She talks like grown-ups do, even though she is technically still a kid. I want to look at her but I keep my eyes fixed on her feet. I nod at her questions and try to smile. Listening to the drums is more important.

  I can feel my heart thumping in my chest and hear it loud in my ears. My mouth is dry as I take a big breath in, put my hand on my tummy like Sue makes me, and then just as I’m about to go for it, I stop. I can’t do it. But the drums keep going.

  Brrmm tattat, tattat, rrrrm tat.

  However hard I try I can’t ignore them.

  Brrmm tattat, tattat, rrrrm tat.

  It sounds like they are getting louder. Then it just happens. “Is someone playing the drums?” I say. I said it! I actually said it! I didn’t even stammer.

  I think I must look quite surprised as Ellie kind of smiles at me then, like she knows. “Yeah, I think they are setting up in the Music Lounge.”

  “I g-g-go to the Music Lounge!” I say as though it’s the best thing ever.

  “Shall we go and check it out?” she asks.

  After that it’s much easier to talk to Ellie. I answer her questionnaire as we make our way to the sound of the drumming. She is a Waiter. I even tell her a joke as we head up the stairs.

  “I don’t trust s-s-stairs” I say in my most suspicious voice. “They are always up t-t-t-to s-s-s-something.”

  “You’re funny!” she says. She doesn’t seem to notice my stutter at all.

  One half of the Music Lounge is being set up like a studio—it looks amazing. There are some kids in there who are playing a song that they have written themselves! It’s about breaking things, I think, but it’s hard to understand. The drummer keeps getting stuck on the same part again and again. I’m desperate to go in and play for Ellie; I would love to play on a real kit, and I’m sure I can play the beat that the boy’s getting wrong. But she says we should get back, “before they send out a search party.”

  As we’re leaving, Ellie says, “They’re practicing for the talent show, I think.”

  “T-t-talent sh-show?”

  “It’s huge. Every December in the theater. Last year it was on the local news!”

  When the first bell goes, she waves me off at the locker room and shouts, “Maybe I will get to hear you drumming one day. They have an open rehearsal for the talent show soon. I’ll be there.”

  On the way back to class, I imagine Ellie in the audience while I’m on the stage, but I’m not drumming, I’m telling jokes. I don’t know why that popped into my brain; it makes me feel a bit dizzy thinking about it, so I try to change the channel. It keeps turning back, though, putting new thoughts in. If I’ve taken the course and my stutter’s gone, maybe I could get up on the stage in front of a real audience instead of always having to imagine it.

  * * *

  On my way to the Oaks after school, I remember my pinkie promise to Granny Bread, that I would do a show just for her. Imagine if I did a show just for her and three hundred other people too! She’d be so proud. She needs cheering up more than anything since the stroke. I know that I want to be able to do the talent show for her more than anything in the world.

  When I walk in, I see her on her flowery sofa in front of her favorite game show. Next to her sits a lady who looks even older than she is. She has a full face of makeup and a fancy hat on her head as though she is about to go to a party, not just sit and watch game shows in an old people’s home. She looks so old and there is something weird about her, scary. Like a haunted skeleton in fancy dress. There’s a metal walker next to the sofa and a plate full of cookies on the table.

  “This is Mrs. Gibbens, Billy,” Granny Bread says. “My new neighbor.”

  Mrs. Gibbens looks up and waves a bony hand at me, then tries to get out of the sofa.

  “Help her up, Billy,” Granny Bread instructs. “Once she’s in, she can’t get out, can you, love?” I put out my arm and feel Mrs. Gibbens’s frail, wrinkly hand grab on. I try not to shudder as she touches me. Eventually she manages to get up, hold on to the walker, and slowly makes her way towards the door. Then she stops halfway and says,

  “Scraggles!” in a voice that sounds as wrinkly and haunted as her flesh. Granny Bread picks up what looks like a photograph of a dog from next to the cookies and presses it into Mrs. Gibbens’s hand.

  “Here he is, dear,” Granny Bread says. “Don’t worry. Here he is.”

  “Oh, Scraggles, my sweet boy,” Mrs. Gibbens says, clinging to the picture and continuing her slow walk to the door.

  When she’s gone, Granny Bread whispers, “Terribly sad woman. Completely alone in the world.”

  I look down the corridor and see her sad frail body disappear into the next door down. I feel a shiver run down my spine. Mrs. Gibbens scares me.

  What did the tree say to the bully?

  Leaf me alone.

  No response from the stammer school yet. Mom keeps asking me why I’m checking my emails so much. I lie and tell her I’ve entered a competition. I don’t know why, but I don’t want her to know. Not yet. I want it to be a surprise.

  I started practicing my set in the mirror straightaway (a set is what comedians call the list of jokes they will do). I dream about telling my jokes onstage every night now. Sometimes it doesn’t work out so well and I wake up crying, all sweaty, and have to go and cuddle Mom. But the good dreams when it does work, when I can speak, make me feel so happy.<
br />
  The theater at school is now covered in posters.

  Before math, I go straight to the school office to look at the signup sheet. There are four names already on it. I hope it doesn’t get full before I’ve taken the stammer course. As I’m about to walk away, a little voice whispers in my head, Do it! I laugh to myself. I can’t sign up before I have fixed my stutter, can I? Then I tell myself that the course starts in two weeks; I will go on it, and then everything will be fine. I have all my jokes ready. What could go wrong?

  I feel a surge of excitement as I pick up the pen and quickly put my name on the list before I chicken out. The office lady, who’s sitting at her desk eating a cookie, and has a hairy mole on her face, looks at me and smiles.

  “Brave boy!” she says, spitting out crumbs. I grin back. I feel like a different person, like I can do anything.

  I’m pretty relaxed in my math exam too, apart from all the shushing before it starts. I hate shushing. Some of the kids are being really intense, saying things like “This is SOOO important. It could change the path of your life.” I think that’s a bit much; it’s only a math test.

  I like exams. Not that I would ever say that to anyone. I like the quiet. The sound of everyone’s pens scratching away at the paper. Everyone doing the same thing. It’s really simple.

  I finish the test with loads of time to spare, even after checking all the questions twice. We’re allowed to read our independent reading books when we finish, but I don’t. I watch William Blakemore instead. He looks really sad. He’s not so good at math. I like watching him when he doesn’t know. When he’s being real. Not howling with laughter or wrestling with someone. When he looks like a little kid and not a bully. Last week I saw him in the big supermarket on the edge of town with his mom. They were choosing cereal. I secretly watched him from the cat food aisle. She told him to get some shredded wheat, and when he took them off the shelf, his arm knocked another box onto the floor.

  “Can’t you do ANYTHING right?” she snapped at him as she snatched the cereal out of his hand and headed off down the aisle with the cart. He paused for a moment looking at the box on the floor, wondering whether to pick it up.