Cornered

by Rhoda Belleza

  It always went the same way: him standing, kicking up gravel on the side of the wide field, waiting to be picked and not being picked. He’d be the only one left—walking backward, away, into the corner of the playground where he could return to his book and read in the heavy shadows of tall, lurking trees. There was a group of boys who would jeer as he retreated, who’d puff out their cheeks and wobble side-to-side like fat little penguin-boys, because this is what Jean-Carlos was to them. A fat little penguin-boy. They wanted to be sure he knew he was another species, a less-than-human one. And so he would sit there, alone in the grass, badly wishing that the words inside of his book might grow huge and swallow him up.

  She worried in private, his mother. She worried about the seeds of anger that root when children are young, before they understand what is growing up inside of them, filling the open space of their bodies like weeds. Thick and impossible to cut down. It’d happened to Jean-Carlos’s father when he was young—the short dark man who’d pushed himself inside of her in an alley outside of Mexico City, who’d dutifully married her two months later. He always came home late, sweaty and slurring, and died, selfishly, when Jean-Carlos was three-and-a-half. His mother had part-time work at a grocery store but nothing more.

  But the young Jean-Carlos was not angry yet. He barely remembered the man, even if he looked like him, even if he’d inherited his softness around the middle and his long, feminine eyelashes. He loved his mother. He loved gummy candy. He loved episodes of Jeopardy! He loved doing next week’s math homework as he licked candy-sugar from his stubby fingers.

  • • •

  Jean-Carlos’s white shoes turn from red to brown as the blood starts to dry, caking up in the little air holes of his sneakers. Norman’s good eye is shut, and his glass eye stares blankly up, like a paperweight stuffed into his face.

  “Faggot,” Jean-Carlos spits, “faggot-faggot-faggot.” He says this without knowing if chubby, one-eyed Norman has actual sexual inclinations toward other boys, but it doesn’t matter because either way he’s a capital-F Faggot. And so he keeps saying it as he kicks, and Norman thrashes, slurring and bleeding.

  Norman’s fingers dig into the dirt beside him. His face does not look like a face.

  Jean-Carlos bends down over him and digs change out of the pockets of his Faggot coat. Three quarters, one dime, one crusty nickel. Not even enough for a pack of gummy worms.

  • • •

  After recess, after kickball, after bathroom-stall-skulking, there’d been a math quiz. While his classmates grumbled and sweated, the young Jean-Carlos finished early. He sat fingering the holes near the hem of his favorite ill-fitting turtleneck, remembering the bag of gummy candy he had secreted away in the back of the pantry.

  He ate tons of the shit. Hoovered it down his throat. He would run to it when the final bell rang, belly jiggling, heart thump-thumping, saliva gathering in a thick pool beneath his tongue. His mother would not be home from work for two hours, and he would gorge himself, smacking his lips and licking each finger, alone. Alone. Alone.

  He had liberated his fingers from the holes of his turtleneck, thinking of how it might be to dip gummy candy in a cold glass of Cola. Would the sugar soften and fall to the bottom of the glass, or would it simply absorb the additional sweetness of the Cola, making the gummy candy even more appealing? Then: the Thing escaped him, out of his ass and into the world.

  It began as something like a raucous howl and ended like the high-pitched scream of a small child. The fart had been surprising—a startling, bewildering thing, ripping through the near-silence of the classroom. Before that there had only been the calm of pencils scratching paper, the occasional shuffle, sniffle, sigh.

  Had he been paying attention to the state of his stomach that afternoon, he may have noticed a low bubbling curving its way around his intestines, preparing to tear through the cool sweetness of classroom air and destroy it. But he had not.

  And when It untrapped itself into the classroom air, the fallout was a silence so icy and still it could only be qualified as utter, dumbfounded horror. He was already the chubby outcast of his third-grade class, and they required no further reason to torment him. But this, this would go beyond torment.

  The other children sat frozen for several moments in the aftermath until the lot of them became like a single cell, suddenly spliced, bumping like mad against the walls of the classroom.

  • • •

  Norman stops squirming, his flap-lips like two lazy donkey tongues, melded to the cold ground. Jean-Carlos is bored and leaves as the school bell rings; children pour out across the grounds. Norman’s little sister sits waiting on the steps for a very long time, head rested against her prayer-folded palms. As Jean-Carlos walks back up the path he looks away when he sees her hug her princess book bag tight into her chest, her mouth starting to wobble.

  • • •

  Miguel, Jean-Carlos’s father, is watching his son from high-up and far-away. From the Realm of the Dead. Miguel is not some heavenly creature in white; he does not know what he is, but he watches. He watched as his son’s hands dug in the pockets of the boy with the bloody face, and he watches now as Jean-Carlos walks away, the boyish parts of his son’s face changing to something blank of humanity.

  And through the mess of blood and faces he remembers Juan, his Juan, and how they’d been together in a mucky pit behind Juan’s father’s farm so many years ago. The heat rushed up around their muddy clumsiness and burst through his fingers and toes as they kissed. Pigs gathered nearby, snorting their disapproval, but he could not stop. Miguel remembers this as the single best thing that ever happened to him, because in these moments he did not ever have to question that this was true. It just was.

  He remembers his anticipation the next morning as he walked the rocky path to the classroom, wondering if they would eat lunch together, somewhere apart from the other boys. Miguel pictured Juan’s fingers moving slowly to the dirt just beside his knee—so close he could feel the vibration of Juan’s skin beside his own—drumming the pulse of the secret they shared. But when he arrived that morning, Juan refused to look at him.

  And when it was time for lunch, they did not go somewhere private.

  No. Juan chased him—with every other dirty-kneed, adrenaline-wasted boy in their classroom—across the dusty field glutted with scrap metal and other discarded things. Chased him straight into the outhouse on the other end of that field where in the dark, rank box, Juan dunked Miguel’s whole face into the steaming reek of other people’s bowels. “You come back here, you die, Cabroncito,” he warned him.

  He never returned to school or ever saw Juan again. Instead he kissed women and did not feel the burst of heat-light through every inch of his skin, the wildness through his chest as he touched them. Felt nothing except a slow closing up of his insides, a spreading deafness, contaminating every other sense.

  Miguel watches as Jean-Carlos retreats. A little fountain of blood erupts from between the boy’s lips that his son has left lying on the ground, but Jean-Carlos is too far away to notice it now.

  • • •

  That day, that horrible day, Jean-Carlos remained glued to his too-small plastic chair. His belly was pressed hard up against the edge of the attached desk. He had been too terrified to move and the teacher did nothing to stop the children as they crumpled up their tests and slung them (with an accompanying symphony of mouth and armpit fart-noises) at Jean-Carlos—who shielded his face with his hands. His math test was still intact, and he stared at it with a devoted intensity as though it was a solar eclipse—the last very bright, perfect, dangerous thing he would ever see again before his corneas burned away to nothing.

  • • •

  In the griddle-heat of his memories, Jean-Carlos’s father is transported. No longer a long-dead man but a boy, plugged firmly into Mexican earth and mud and other people’s shit. He remembers his childhood dog—Cabroncito—a white and brown mutt with long, furry ears. The dog his own father ha
d dragged from an alleyway one rainy Easter, brought home, and let him name. Miguel chose Cabroncito because it was the last word Juan had ever spoken to him. Cabroncito. That one stupid word and how it stuck to him. How one word can superglue itself to your skull and not even the strongest, ungodliest hands can rip it from the Velcro of your brain—Cabroncito—

  • • •

  The teacher must have noticed, but barely tried to intervene when the classroom devolved into a simian landscape of howling and mimed fecal-flinging. Their cruel taunts directed at the stoic but crumbling figure of chubby Jean-Carlos—slow-limbed, farty creature—still seated, head-bowed, shielding his eyes to prevent the other children from seeing tears begin to mow their hot way down his face. She rapped at the blackboard several times with the sturdy silver ring on her pointer finger and cleared her throat twice before she yelled, “Children! Calm DOWN!” Miss was distressed, always distressed. She looked down and rubbed the drippy folds of her face with both hands and sighed heavily.

  Jean-Carlos retreated back into the isolation of his own skull and listed the things he loved. As long as he repeated this list he did not have time to worry about the relentless surge of crumpled-up paper. He moved his hands to cup his ears and let the paper continue to ping his skull. Ping ping ping ping.

  He loved his mother. He loved gummy candy. He loved licking sugar from his fingers, watching Jeopardy!, and wearing soft turtlenecks with holes in the hem. He loved. He loved.

  He stared at his math test until the blackness of numbers became like ants, until the whiteness seemed to besiege the little insects and they simply marched off the page. Some flew, without wings, rising into space because they willed it so. And when they had all ascended or crept or spiraled from the page, he had been left with a terrible whiteness that made his eyes feel marble-hard. His brain forgot, just plain forgot, to see anything at all. Likewise, his ears had shut off, and his body sort of flattened into itself, like how tap water must feel when introduced to the ocean, swallowed into something that is itself and is not.

  The other children were bleating, their eyes gibbous and red with glee. He barely realized he had been biting his tongue, hard, until with every swallow, the metallic taste of blood replaced the nothing taste of saliva. It was this taste that brought him back into his body, into the reality of his small plastic chair.

  It was a reality he could no longer bear. Something was wincing in him, threatening to snap.

  His father watched this day, too, watched as his son escaped his too-small plastic chair, belly jiggling prodigiously, and ran to freedom. As he beelined it for the door the other children ran to block his way, creating a sturdy wall of No-Go. The teacher rose from her desk like very slow smoke, rapped again at the blackboard with her sturdy silver ring, hoping that perhaps this time it would have some effect.

  Which, of course, it did not.

  The only way out now was in the other direction—the window—and Jean-Carlos pushed his way through a crowd which tried to hold him back again. But he would not, could not be contained for he was a torpedo, a whirling jet with sweat-slick hair. When he reached it, he lifted it easily with both hands and hurled himself to the snow. The other children and the teacher came to the window, watching him squirm; his arm was hurt and he struggled to his feet in the slippery ice and mushy snow.

  “Are you hurt?” the teacher called down, and with no response she continued, “Well, say something, Jean-Carlos! Do you need the nurse? Jean-Carlos. Answer me! Jean-Carlos! JEAN-CARLOS!” She kept repeating his name in a frenzied kind of yelp.

  But all her voice did was propel him forward, across the wide lawn of the school, the arm he’d landed on throbbing as he tried to run. Her voice echoed his name across the snow until he could hear it no longer, until he collapsed, breathless, between a row of bushes on the far edge of the school grounds. He lay there and did not move, did not wish to ever move again.

  Everyone walked past him at the end of the day as he hid, still lying between the prickly, snowy bushes. He lay there so long he missed Jeopardy! that night, which he’d never done before. When he finally snuck home, he threw all of his turtlenecks into the trash and cut his own hair in the bathroom. Parts of it he cut too short. They looked like bald spots, which made him look sort of mean and deranged.

  Which is what he wanted.

  His mother did not try and stop him, but she dug his turtlenecks out of the trash later that night and tucked them into a dark corner of his closet because they could not afford to throw away perfectly good clothes like that.

  • • •

  Norman’s eyes are open wide and they stare up at Jean-Carlos, who has come back for reasons he doesn’t understand. He steps backward and stares into Norman’s peeled-open eyes and does not know what he’s done. He does not understand it, though some part of him can’t help but liken it to that day, to the hours he’d spent shivering alone in the snow. Something inside him crumpled, like the paper balls his classmates once threw at his soft-haired head.

  He has carried that day with him in, deep in his gut, even as he flirted with Lisa-Mo Leesa who thinks he’s sixteen though he’s only thirteen and in possession of the finest of mustaches. Even as he’s stuffed jeans he could not afford into his bag, sprinting out of the store on a dare that wasn’t even a Double-Dare.

  He remembers the dizzy feeling in his skull as he ran, wildly, through the cold streets toward the grocery store where his mother had worked stacking waxy produce in pyramids all day long. He remembers when his mother had work and the dinners they’d eat, side by side at the small wooden table, and how she’d hold him near her as they watched Jeopardy! together. She would murmur in awe as he got every answer right.

  And he’s got that same dizzy feeling right now as he stares at the snow which should be white but is brown and red, clumped up in weird little fists sticking out of the dirt. Norman’s hands. One is clenched and one is open wide, pressed out as though to put a stop to what has already happened. No one is around. No one has stopped this.

  He thinks of his mother’s gloved hands lifting the cool fruit, separating perfect from bruised, smoothing the labels flush. He thinks of the baskets of ruined fruit that used to fill their dining room table and how they would sit there, uneaten, until they melted into each other. Rotten.

  He looks at Norman’s mouth, flung open. At the snow, now a curtain of blood beneath his back. Jean-Carlos stoops in the snow and lets the wetness soak through to his knees as he pulls Norman’s head onto his lap, not knowing what he has done because it makes no sense.

  Norman’s head lolls in his lap. His sister is gone, and Jean-Carlos realizes she doesn’t know where Norman is. She doesn’t know his face no longer looks like a face. She doesn’t know that he’s still breathing but barely, and she doesn’t know that Jean-Carlos dials 911 on his cell phone, says what he needs to say and runs, runs like some fanatically trained action hero through the snow and back down Forsythe Ave, past the sheet-metal shacks and the high school he now attends, where he knows Norman has his lunch stolen and the shit beat out of him every single day.

  When Jean-Carlos hears the yowl of the ambulance his legs stop working, and he falls again, back into the snow. A thin dog creeps from the shadowy triangles of an alleyway and sits beside him, nuzzling into his shoulder and whining softly. It’s then Jean-Carlos realizes he’s crying into its coat and the dog is letting him cry. He thinks that Lisa-Mo Leesa would know he was only thirteen right now if she saw him, but he doesn’t even care.

  In the rush of the wind through the fracture-branched trees, there’s still the sound of the ambulance. It’s not far. He could go back. He could explain about the notes Norman gets in his lunches and his own mother, always in bed. He could tell them about all that fruit, rotted in bowls on their kitchen table and his father, dead so long.

  But instead, he stays, and he waits. And then, when the whine of the ambulance grows too distant to hear any longer, he runs.

  How Auto-Tune Saved My
Life

  BY BRENDAN HALPIN

  YOU WOULDN’T THINK fifty minutes would be so tough. I mean, you can pretty much endure anything for less than an hour—except that I spend the whole time just waiting for Kruzeman to go off on me, which he does, every day without fail. So when I have him after lunch, I have The Sour Stomach of Dread, which prevents me from eating even the cafeteria’s chocolate chip cookies, their only edible product.

  My mom works two jobs so we can keep the house, and she’s never around when I get ready for school. So I just throw on whatever and leave, which is apparently not cool at Boston Classical High School, where the West Roxbury kids—even the boys—spend like an hour getting ready and making sure their sneakers match their flat brims. They all get new clothes from Hollister or Abercrombie while I rock last year’s clothes from Target. And I’m not especially good about making sure things are tucked in and straight and all that stuff, because I guess I don’t really value order all that much. But I know someone who does.

  So I walk into class. I take a squirt from the hand sanitizer mounted on the wall and try to scoot around the crowd at Kruzeman’s desk so I can slip quietly into my seat. No such luck, though. “Mr. Michaels!” he calls. “No word from the What Not to Wear crew yet, I see. Well, fear not. We’ve sent them photos. They’re bound to call.”

  A few people laugh just to kiss his butt, but really, this couldn’t possibly be funny anymore. He says it like every single day.

  The bell rings and today—like every other day in Kruzeman’s class—we’re all in seats, a black ink pen in hand and a blank piece of paper in front of us. Kruzeman looks up from his desk. “Heading,” he says.

  We all begin to write our headings in the top right corner of the paper. His name, our name, and the date. They must be one inch from the top and a half-inch from the right side. As his ritual, he walks through class with a ruler and every once in a while, he’ll slap it down on someone’s desk to measure whether their heading is in the right place. “One inch from the top. Very good, Mr. Flaherty.”