Fangboy

by Jeff Strand

Beverly sat down at her desk. “I sure did.”

  “Nathan, do you think that being a tattletale is a path toward a fulfilling life?”

  What was she talking about? Why wasn’t she sending Beverly to the Corner of Ridicule? What was going on here?

  “I asked you a question.”

  Was it a trick question? Was he supposed to say that, yes, being a tattletale was a path toward a fulfilling life, at which point she would say “You’re absolutely right!” and give him a gold star?

  “No, teacher.”

  “That’s right. Nathan Pepper needs to worry about what Nathan Pepper is doing, and not expend valuable energy trying to get his classmates in trouble. Answer me this question, class: does anybody like a tattletale?”

  “No,” said the children in unison.

  “If you behave like a tattletale too often, why, you might grow a real tail! Can you imagine going through life with a tail? Nathan, take over Gordon’s shift in the Corner of Ridicule.”

  Nathan got up and sadly walked across the classroom. A girl whispered “Nathan the Tattletale!” and the children around her giggled.

  He sat on the stool, feeling more ashamed and embarrassed than he had in his entire life.

  And then he threw up.

  TEN

  Nathan decided that he hated school. Hated, hated, hated it. It was the worst thing ever to be invented. Only stupid people should have to go to it.

  He never did have to say what he wanted to be when he grew up or what he had done over the summer, but that didn’t make him feel any better. Nathan the Tattletale! What an awful name! If he’d known that nicknames would be bestowed so quickly, he would have taken action to be known as Nathan the Brave or Nathan the Quick-Witted or Nathan the Rat-Killer. Nathan the Tattletale? Even Fangboy was better!

  Mrs. Calmon dismissed them for morning recess, and the other children happily scampered around the playground, playing on slides and teeter-totters and swings. Nathan stood against the brick wall of the school, sulking.

  “Hello,” said Jamison, leaning against the wall next to him. “I’m glad you threw up.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I throw up all the time. I was worried all morning that it would happen in front of everybody, which it did, but at least I wasn’t the first.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think of school so far?” Jamison asked.

  “I hate it.”

  “Me, too.”

  “They can keep me here, but I’m not going to learn anything,” said Nathan.

  “Me either. Not a thing.”

  “Whatever they teach me, I’ll run straight home and forget it!”

  “Me, too! Me, too!”

  “Why did you spend the summer in the hospital?”

  “Because I’m going to die.”

  “Are you?”

  Jamison nodded. “I wish I weren’t. They don’t know when but it won’t be long.”

  “I’ve never known anybody who was dying.”

  “Now you do. Are those your real teeth?”

  “These?” Nathan tapped his front tooth. “No, these are joke teeth. I never take them out.”

  “Where’d you get them?”

  “There’s a store. I’ll take you there someday.”

  Nathan the Liar…

  “I’m only kidding,” said Nathan. “They’re my real teeth.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I was born with them. One came out, see?”

  “Do you like them?”

  “I hate them. They’re awful.”

  “I bet they make it easier to eat things. When my mother cooks meat it’s so tough that you can barely bite through it, but I bet you could finish the meal in half the time.”

  “I suppose so.”

  They continued leaning against the school wall for a few moments.

  “Do you ever use swear words?” asked Jamison.

  “No. Do you?”

  “No. But I will someday.”

  “Me, too.”

  They leaned against the wall some more.

  “Look! It’s Nathan the Tattletale!” shouted Gordon, jumping off the swings and pointing at them.

  “Shut up!” Jamison shouted back. “Go back to the moon!”

  Gordon ran over to them. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “I don’t care. Nathan’s my friend. If you talk to him, you’re talking to me. Do you want to fight?”

  “No. I’m sorry. My father told me that on my first day I should punch somebody to show everybody that I’m not one to be messed with, but that doesn’t sound like fun at all. Can I lean against the wall with you?”

  “Of course.”

  The three of them leaned against the wall for the remainder of recess. When they went back inside, none of them learned anything, especially the spelling lesson. They ate lunch together, learned nothing afterward, and at afternoon recess decided to swing from the jungle gym. Jamison fell off a few times, but didn’t seem to mind.

  “Get off those bars! It’s my turn!”

  Nathan, who was dangling upside-down, looked over to see Beverly, her arms folded over her chest.

  “If you want to take a turn on the bars, you have to count,” said Jamison. “When you count to forty-five, we’ll get off and it’ll be your turn.”

  “You’ll get off now or I’ll fight all of you!”

  “Hey, everyone!” shouted a boy. “Beverly is going to beat up Nathan the Tattletale!”

  The children all rushed over to the jungle gym. Nathan’s stomachache immediately returned. He pulled himself right-side-up and began to climb down.

  “Don’t get off!” said Jamison. “She has to count.”

  Nathan climbed down until his feet were on the bottom bar. “What are you waiting for?” he asked. “Count.”

  “I’ll count the number of times I hit your face,” said Beverly. “Get off and give me my turn.”

  Nathan lowered his foot and almost touched the ground with his toe, then quickly placed his foot back on the metal bar and smiled. “No. You have to count.”

  “Look at his teeth!” exclaimed the boy who’d shouted that there was going to be a fight.

  Nathan put his hand over his mouth.

  “They’re the teeth of a monster!” shouted a girl. Nathan thought her name was Judy.

  The children crowded around him. Nathan just knew that he was going to throw up again, and the taste still hadn’t quite left his mouth from the first time.

  “What’s going on?” demanded a teacher.

  Judy pointed at Nathan. “I think he’s a prehistoric creature!”

  “I’m not!”

  “Look at them!” shouted a boy named Ronald, who wanted to be a scientist when he grew up and had spent his summer digging for gold. “They’re incredible!”

  “All right, enough of this,” said the teacher. “Leave him alone.”

  “But they’re the best teeth I’ve ever seen! He’s a genius!”

  “Your teeth don’t make you a genius, you dullard of a boy. Hard work and study, that’s what makes you a genius. Now clear out.”

  “Can I see them again?” asked Ronald, ignoring the teacher.

  Feeling a million eyes on him, Nathan opened his mouth.

  The kids “Ooooooh”-ed with admiration.

  “Clear out or I’ll cancel the rest of recess,” the teacher warned. Most of the other kids reluctantly stepped away, though almost all of them continued to watch Nathan.

  “I’ve never been so jealous,” said Ronald. “You could fight crime with teeth like those!”

  “Go away,” said Jamison. “He was my friend first.”

  “And my friend second,” said Gordon.

  “All right, all right. But I’m going to invite him to my Halloween party in a couple of months.”

  Nathan couldn’t believe it. They actually liked his teeth? Had he been hiding away a gift all this time…or were the other children at this school merely insane?

&nb
sp; It didn’t matter. They thought he could fight crime!

  Nathan almost felt as if he were glowing. His teeth, the bane of his very existence, were appreciated by his fellow students. What a glorious thing! Nothing could—

  “I told you to get off the bars,” said Beverly, grabbing his arm and pulling him off the jungle gym. She shoved him to the ground.

  One punch, two punches, three punches, and then Nathan didn’t feel like getting back up.

  “Hey, everybody!” shouted Ronald. “Nathan just got beat up by a girl!”

  “And he’s crying!”

  “What a baby!”

  Beverly gave him one last punch. “The next time I ask you to get off the bars, you’d better do it!” She brushed her hands off on her pants and walked away.

  Nathan lay on the dirt and cried. He didn’t think he was bleeding, and he’d received much more violent beatings from Bernard Steamspell, but he couldn’t stop the tears.

  “I can’t be your friend anymore,” said Gordon, leaping from the jungle gym and heading off in search of alternate acquaintances.

  Jamison climbed down from the bars and extended his hand toward Nathan. “It’s okay,” he said. “She looked tough. I thought I even saw a muscle.”

  Nathan wiped his eyes then let Jamison help him up. “Can I die with you?”

  * * *

  “So how was school?” Mary asked when Nathan got into the car.

  “It was bad, then it was good, then it was bad, then it was good, and then bad again. Do I have to go back?”

  “Yes. What did you learn?”

  “I learned how to blow things up.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what they teach at that school. They gave us all dynamite and showed us how to use it. Then Mrs. Calmon handed me a great big knife and said that it’s okay to stab people if they’re unattractive.”

  “Oh, she didn’t either.”

  “She did! And she said that tomorrow she’s going to teach us how to drown people with only a little bit of water, barely enough to fill a glass. I’ll be able to kill anyone I want when the school year is over.”

  “What did you really learn?”

  Nathan shrugged. “She showed us places on a map, but I didn’t care about any of them.”

  “Well, that’s a silly attitude. What if you wanted to go to those places? You wouldn’t know where they were.”

  “They were all dumb places.”

  “How would you know that if you didn’t care about them?” She stopped at a red light and looked at Nathan more closely. “Why do you have a mark on your face?”

  “I got beat up at recess! And I wasn’t doing anything!”

  “Who beat you up?”

  “Her—his name was…I forget his name.”

  “Why did you say ‘her’?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Did you get beat up by a girl?”

  “None of your business!”

  “Nathan! Don’t speak to me like that. Why did she hit you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Should I speak to your teacher?”

  “No! Can we talk about something else?”

  “Of course we can, Nathan. We have a guest coming for dinner tonight.”

  Nathan was suddenly horrified. “It’s not Beverly, is it?”

  “Is she the one who hit you?”

  “Is it her? Is it really?” If Beverly tried to attack him in his own home, he’d show her. He’d dig a pit in the living room and cover it with a rug and as soon as she stepped inside she’d plummet. He wouldn’t line the bottom with spikes or anything like that, but if he could coax a tiger inside…

  “Her name is Sharon. You’ll like her. She’s very nice.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “She came in to the restaurant this afternoon for a late lunch. She ordered the lamb, which I felt was a mistake, and I successfully steered her toward the pasta with blackened chicken.”

  “Why is she coming over if she’s eaten already?”

  “You’re a very rude little boy today, aren’t you?”

  Nathan realized that he was indeed being rude. It wasn’t Mary’s fault that he’d had a terrible first day at school, except for her contribution toward forcing him to go. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sure tomorrow will be better.”

  “Of course it will. I think you’ll really like Sharon.”

  Nathan pouted in his room for a full three minutes after they got home, but then he decided that he had better ways to spend his time than wallowing in self-pity. He’d made a friend, after all. Jamison didn’t care that he’d been beaten up by a girl.

  Mary was correct. Nathan did like Sharon. She was very pretty; in fact, Nathan didn’t recall ever having seen a woman in real life who looked the way women looked in the movies. She wore a fancy dress and makeup, and both Penny and Mary apologized for the way they looked and for the condition of their home, despite the fact that Nathan thought they both looked nice as well, and they’d cleaned the entire house top to bottom, including the rain gutters, though Nathan doubted that Sharon would inspect them.

  Sharon laughed a lot, and they all played games. Mary also laughed often, giggling loudly at all of Sharon’s jokes, even the ones that Nathan thought could have been funnier. Every once in a while Nathan noticed Penny looking a bit sad, which was strange since everybody was having so much fun.

  Nathan was sent to bed half an hour earlier than usual. He wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t protest. He was tired anyway.

  ELEVEN

  Despite their pledge to one another, Nathan and Jamison found themselves learning things in school. Nathan didn’t like math very much, but he did very well on his spelling, geography, history, and reading tests. Beverly stuck her tongue out at him all the time, but Nathan never told on her. He considered very carefully the idea of squishing something against the back of her head, possibly an egg or a slice of moldy tomato, and ultimately decided that this would be unwise on all levels.

  Penny asked if he might want to invite his new friend over after school, and Nathan agreed that it was a fine idea. Jamison said that his parents didn’t like for him to visit friends on school nights because the excitement increased the chances that he might be dead the next morning, but that the weekend would be perfect.

  Sharon came over for dinner once more that week. The other nights, Mary went over to Sharon’s house and she didn’t come home. Those nights, Penny was more affectionate with Nathan than usual, giving him kisses on the cheek and asking him if he wanted to play just one more game of Exploding Nines even though it was past his bedtime.

  When Jamison came over, they dug for worms, and put Jamison’s toy soldiers through a global apocalypse, and played catch with an orange to see how many times they could throw it before it started to leak.

  Over the next couple of months, Nathan did not stay out of the Corner of Ridicule altogether, but he spent less time there than some of his classmates (though, admittedly, more time than some others). Sometimes he thought he deserved it and sometimes he felt that he’d been falsely accused, but overall it was not such a bad thing.

  Beverly beat up Nathan on three more occasions. She never beat up any of the other boys, even when they were teasing her, and the third time she beat him up she’d specifically sought him out at recess after a boy that Nathan barely even knew called her Godzilla. Though he didn’t tell his teacher, he did tell Penny and Mary and sometimes Sharon all about it. He tried to instill a sense of outrage in them, but all they did was smile.

  Near the end of October, Ronald came up to him after school and pressed an envelope into his hand. “It’s an invitation to my Halloween party,” he explained.

  “Where’s his?” Nathan asked, gesturing to Jamison.

  “He can’t come.”

  “Why not?”

  “My mom says that I’m only allowed to invite ten people because she doesn’t want to have to buy apples for the whole class.”
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  “Then make him one of the ten.”

  “He doesn’t really fit in.”

  “It’s a Halloween party, isn’t it? What fits in better at a Halloween party than a dying boy?”

  Jamison nodded. “I could die right there, during the party.”

  “Maybe he fits,” Ronald admitted. “But I don’t like him very much.”

  “Well, your mother will just have to allow eleven. If he’s not coming, I’m not.”

  Ronald sighed. “All right,” he said, handing an invitation to Jamison. “Cross out Gordon’s name and write in your own. It’s a costume party, so wear something scary.”

  “Thank you,” said Jamison, after Ronald left. “I’ve never been to a Halloween party before.”

  “Neither have I. What should we be?”

  “The last time I was in the hospital they took me on a tour of the burn ward. People aren’t happy there. We could go as two brothers who were burned so badly that their bodies stuck together.”

  “Is Halloween supposed to be that gruesome?”

  “It can be. Last year I dressed as a boy whose guts were all on the outside. I used real guts, too.”

  “Human ones?”

  “No, not human ones. What human would donate their guts for a Halloween costume? But there was cow in there, and some goat. I got a book from the library and I made sure the parts went where they were supposed to be. I’d never gotten so much candy in my life, though afterward I didn’t feel like eating any of it.”

  “That sounds disgusting. Let’s not use real guts.”

  “I could go as a suicidal boy. I’d look sad the whole time and carry around a big bottle of pills.”

  “No.”

  “You could go dressed as a donkey, and I could go dressed as a boy whose face had been crushed in by a donkey kick.”

  “You’re very dark.”

  “Well, what do you want to be?”

  Nathan thought about it. “How about a knight in armor?”

  “Knights aren’t scary!”

  “They have swords.”

  “So? Nobody lies awake at night worried that a knight is going to get them.”

  “I don’t want to be anything scary.”

  “Fine. Be a ballerina dancing on rainbows, then.”