Revenge of the Green Banana

by Jim Murphy

  I might have mumbled “Thanks” to her, but I can’t remember. A numb feeling was creeping up the back of my neck and invading my brain, completely blocking out everything else. I wasn’t thinking anything in particular. It was like a giant electrical storm flashing and exploding in my brain.

  Sister Angelica instructed us to take out our math books and open to page 14. I did as directed, but I wasn’t thinking about math or page 14 or anything else except that I hated Sister Angelica Rose. With a passion.

  I shoved my pencil box into the space under the desk. So much for new beginnings, I thought. From my right, Philip whispered, “Hostis humani generis.”

  2

  The Plot Sickens

  “I HATE HER for that.” That wasn’t me talking about what had happened to me, though I completely agreed. It was Vero who said it. He was a good pal, always ready to defend anyone who had a nun encounter like mine.

  “Me, too,” said Iggy. We were on the lunch line, sliding our green plastic trays along the aluminum railing and trying not to gag. The first item offered was always the brown soup, which smelled like it came directly from the boys’ bathroom. Mom volunteered as a lunch aide when she wasn’t working at my dad’s office, and when I asked her what was in the brown soup, she said, “You don’t want to know, Jimmy.”

  After the brown soup came hockey puck hamburgers with gooey yellow glop on top, hot dogs boiled to a strange gray-pink color, and a vat of chicken chow mein. When I asked Mom what was in the chow mein, she suggested that I have the brown soup instead.

  I was about to grab a simple and safe American cheese sandwich on white bread when long metal barbecue tongs suddenly appeared in front of my face.

  “Jimmy,” a familiar voice said, “you should try one of these chicken cutlets. They’re new on the menu.”

  My cousin Sophia was wagging the chicken cutlet up and down in a way that made it impossible for me to move forward without smacking into it. Actually, she wasn’t my cousin. She was my mom’s nephew’s second cousin once removed, or something like that. I could never keep track of all the branches of the Italian side of the family tree, so everyone was an aunt, uncle, or cousin to me. “It looks good, don’t you think?” she asked.

  I liked Sophia. She laughed and smiled a lot when the family got together at holidays and funerals, and she told the best jokes, too. And when my family visited hers, she always gave me a little glass of red wine with dinner, whispering, “Don’t tell I gave you this.”

  I stared at the cutlet, wondering what part of a chicken was so perfectly round. I was about to say no thanks, but Sophia was still beaming a one-hundred-watt smile and I didn’t want to disappoint her. I said okay, and she put the cutlet on a plate, then ladled gravy over it.

  “Thanks, Sophia,” I said quietly, putting the plate on my tray. I grabbed a carton of milk and followed Jimmy Mayor as he headed for the table where we usually sat.

  I wasn’t watching where Mayor was going. I was staring at the gravy on my plate. It was a shiny, greasy light brown, slick with little ribbons of dark color in it that swirled and circled the cutlet. The dark part looked like worms trying to attack the chicken.

  The idea of worms in my food made my stomach do a flip-flop, and I tasted a little bit of puke in my mouth. I thought I might hurl for real, so I looked away, and the first person I made eye contact with was Kathy Gathers, who was sitting at a table with six of her girlfriends. As soon as she spotted me, she started laughing, and so did her friends. One of them whispered something in her ear, and Kathy laughed even harder. Suddenly that plastic tray felt as heavy as my desk.

  I turned away quickly so Kathy wouldn’t see me blushing, but my eyes fastened on those ribbon worms. They were wriggling around like crazy now and seemed to be coming for me. That made my stomach do a double flip-flop. I closed my eyes and started to walk faster, but Mayor had stopped, so I rammed him in the back with my tray. And that got the ribbon worms really shaking around.

  “Hey,” Mayor said quietly to a little kid at our table. Mayor’s hair was always a crewcut shaved down to the wood, which gave him a serious, down-to-business military look. “We have to have a meeting, so we need this table.”

  The kid looked startled, but didn’t say no, so Mayor pressed on. “Murph here”—​he nodded his fuzzy head in my direction—​“had a bad morning, and we have to plan what to do, you know what I mean?” Mayor was one smooth operator. His dad owned five or six insurance offices in New Jersey, and Mayor was always visiting one or another of them and sitting in on meetings. He knew how to get things done without a lot of fuss.

  “Ah, I guess,” the kid said. But he didn’t move. He had very big, very brown eyes that seemed slightly startled because a sixth grader was actually talking to him.

  Mayor gave him a smile and asked, “What grade are you in, um . . .” The “um” kind of hung in the air a long time.

  “Alan,” the kid finally replied. “Alan Craig. I’m in second grade.”

  “Hey, do you have a sister in fifth grade? Elaine, right? Blond hair? Pretty?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” said Alan the Second Grader, shrugging his shoulders a little.

  “Good to meet you, Al. Hey, could you move down a few seats so Murph can sit on the aisle?” Then he said in a confidential whisper, “We have to settle some business, Al. Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.” Al the Second Grader picked up his tray and moved down to the far end of the table. We filled in the rest of the seats, with me on the aisle, Mayor next to me, then Squints, and Al the Second Grader next to him. Vero, Iggy, Philip, and Tom-Tom were across from us.

  “Okay. After what Angelica did to Murph and Philip, we need a plan to take care of her,” Mayor began, “before it’s too late.”

  “Philip?” I asked. Mayor didn’t hesitate. Seems that while I was in my new beginning–Kathy Gathers daydream, Angelica had called on Philip to say his name and tell about his summer. He stood up like everyone else and said, “Mi nombre es . . .” She wouldn’t let him finish. Instead, she said, “This year everything will be said in English, Philip, starting now.”

  Philip was as thin as a piece of dental floss and just as pale, and being forced to speak English must have been excruciating for him. His ears and cheeks were still burning a furious red.

  “Who’s Angelica?” Al the Second Grader asked. “And before what’s too late?”

  “Hey, shut up, kid.” That was Squints, who never took a subtle approach when a direct attack was available. “I mean,” he continued, peering around at all of us through the thick lenses of his glasses, “why are we talking to a second grader?”

  Tom-Tom grunted in agreement. He was thin and tall—​half a head taller than Iggy’s hair—​with a long, serious face. Tom-Tom’s real name was Toma Capreanu Baiat (which means Thomas the Goat Boy in Romanian), and even though his family had been in Kearny for years, he still had a slight accent that made everything he said seem wise and important. Sort of like a very intelligent Count Dracula. “You should listen more,” he told Al the Second Grader. “You will learn something that way.”

  “Angelica,” Mayor told Al in a perfectly pleasant voice. Most kids in the older grades dropped the “Sister” part of a nun’s name (unless, of course, the nun was nearby). Al was only in second grade, but by fourth grade he’d be doing it too. “She’s new, and she gave both Murph and Philip a hard time this morning. And for no good reason, either.” There was a low grumble of approval from my friends that made me feel less alone. “And we want to be sure it doesn’t happen again.” Another set of approving animal growls.

  “Now,” Mayor said, eyeing everyone at the table, “we need to know our goal, and we need a plan to achieve that goal.” Spoken like a true insurance man.

  “Goals shmoals,” Squints muttered. “Let’s just do something!”

  Tom-Tom seconded Squints’s demand with a solemn nod of his head, adding, “Yes, it is no time to waste time.”

  “We can’t just do so
mething unless we know what we’re planning to do.”

  Mayor was working hard to keep everyone focused and under control. But I wasn’t paying close attention. Glancing between Vero and Iggy, I could see the back of Kathy’s head. She leaned a little to her right and said something to one of her friends. That friend leaned toward the girl next to her and said something that was passed around their table to much laughter.

  “Maybe we can torture her,” Iggy suggested. “Put bugs in her desk. Hide all the chalk . . .”

  “Yeah.” Squints sounded as if he’d been given a present. “We could . . . we could . . .” Suddenly Squints was so enthusiastic, his words got stuck together the way Philip’s did when he spoke in English. “We could lock the supply closet the next time she leaves the key and . . . and . . . and then throw the key away. We could . . . we could glue her desk drawers shut. We could . . . we could . . .”

  Squints and everyone else at the table suddenly went dead quiet as Sister Regina stopped next to me. She was one of three nuns on aisle patrol today, strolling around to make sure everyone was behaving properly.

  Sister R was okay in my book. She always spoke in a quiet whisper and had never hit anyone, as far as I knew. Which was not only unusual but an important personal characteristic to someone who seemed to be a natural nun target. Most of the nuns had a simple crucifix, two inches tall and black with a silver Christ hanging on it. But Sister R had the coolest, most gruesome crucifix dangling from her waist. It was four or five inches long and had painted blood dripping down Christ’s hands and feet.

  “Boys,” she said in a soft, angelic voice, “we need to keep our voices down in the cafeteria, okay? And James, you should finish up your lunch. There are children starving in Armenia, you know.”

  I said I would, and she drifted down the aisle, scanning tables and chatting with kids.

  Squints adjusted his oversize black-rimmed glasses and tried to get back into telling us what we could do to Angelica. But he’d lost momentum and could only sputter, “Um . . . um . . . we could . . . you know . . .”

  “I’ll tell you what we can do,” Vero said in a hoarse whisper. He put his elbows on the table and leaned over his tray, then gave everyone a dark, no-nonsense glare. “We could annihilate her,” he began. “We could decimate her, lacerate and mutilate her. We could eradicate and emasculate her—”

  “Emasculate?” Iggy asked. “That’s technically not possible.” Iggy’s real name was Richard French, but he got his nickname because he was always talking about the International Geophysical Year. Hundreds of scientists around the world were doing research on gravity, cosmic rays, and weather patterns, though he always lost me when he got to hard solar corpuscular radiation. In other words, he liked things to be scientifically accurate.

  But Vero wasn’t about to be stopped by scientific reality. He was on a roll. “W-we need to invalidate, detonate, terminate, and murderlate her to pieces.”

  “Murderlate?” was murmured by everyone at the table, including Al the Second Grader, with some confused looks tossed around besides.

  After a second of silence, Squints demanded, “What does that mean?”

  Vero looked shocked. Maybe because he just realized he’d made up a word and wasn’t exactly sure how to explain it. Philip came to the rescue with “Obit anus, abit onus.” He nodded his head in a dead serious way, as if that settled everything.

  Squints would have none of it. “Jeez, Philip, can you translate for once?”

  Philip seemed startled by the request, especially after what had happened to him in class that morning. But Squints was a friend and wasn’t being mean like Sister Angelica. “It . . . it . . . it m-m-means . . . Th . . . th . . .”

  “Spit it out already,” Squints ordered. Which you don’t ever want to say to Philip, because he will.

  “Th . . . th . . . the old woman di-di-dies, th . . . the bu-bu-bu-burden is lifted.”

  Squints’s face lit up. “Ah,” he said in a hushed voice. “Killing Sister Angelica Rose. Has a nice sound to it.”

  Of course, we all knew he wasn’t suggesting that we actually murder Angelica. Though I admit I had homicidal feelings about her. But getting even somehow, embarrassing her the way she embarrassed me and Philip, sounded good. A loud discussion immediately began on ways to murderlate-embarrass Sister Angelica. I didn’t say a word, because I was trying to work out another, more immediate problem. Sister R had made it to the end of the cafeteria and was now slowly circling back our way. I had to get rid of my worm-squirming chicken cutlet or she would make me eat it, probably while she watched.

  If I’d had some mashed potatoes or a bunch of string beans, I would have buried the cutlet under them and hoped that Sister R didn’t notice. This strategy worked at home maybe sixty-two percent of the time, which is decent enough odds. A napkin would have worked too, but as usual I hadn’t taken one and neither had any of the other guys. This is why we all went home every day with a greasy smudge near our right pants pocket (except for Mayor, who’s left-handed, so his smudge is near his left pocket).

  Sister R was closing in on our table, so I had to act fast. I gagged a little bit, but I managed to pick up the cutlet between my thumb and forefinger and hold it under the table. Now what was I supposed to do? Just then, Sister R’s shadow fell across my tray, and the entire table went dead quiet again. “Are we all finished here, boys?” she asked in a sunny, soft voice. “Why don’t you take your trays to the counter, then go outside to play.”

  After a unanimous “Yes, Sister,” the guys all pushed their chairs back to stand up. Except me. I was trying to figure out how to get up, take hold of my tray, and not let her see . . .

  This was the moment when the greasy cutlet, alive with predatory worms, slipped between my fingers and sailed to freedom. The next second, Sister R was looking down and wearing a completely baffled expression.

  I leaned over the end of the table and looked down too. There, perched delicately on the very tip of one of Sister R’s sensible black shoes, was my perfectly round chicken cutlet.

  “Master Murphy,” Sister R said with a tired sigh, “sometimes you would try the patience of a saint.”

  I was still studying the cutlet and wondering how it could possibly stick to such a gleaming piece of shiny leather. And here is where my brain decided to abandon and betray me. Which it did frequently. Instead of having me apologize and scramble to get the cutlet off her shoe, it made me remember the shoes Ellen McDonald wore last Easter.

  Ellen’s shoes were black patent leather and so shiny you could see your reflection in them. I know that because I was trying to position myself to find out if it was really true that you could see a girl’s underwear by looking at her patent leather shoes. But what caught my eye instead were the tiny red bows right at the tips of Ellen’s shoes. I suddenly pictured Sister R and all the other nuns wearing shoes with tiny red bows on them. And this started me chuckling.

  Maybe I was nervous from the morning’s encounter. Maybe I was nervous that Sister R might be ticked off enough to smack me in the head with her blood-dripped crucifix. When I looked up and saw Vero’s face, his eyes had become dinner plates in panic, so naturally I burst out laughing. And not quietly, either.

  “Urphy-may,” Vero hissed under his breath in his best pig Latin, “ix-nay on the aff-lay.” He was vigorously nodding his head toward Sister R.

  Vero was looking so serious that his warning set me off laughing even harder, and this got Tom-Tom, Squints, and Philip laughing too. By this time, kids from surrounding tables were watching us, some standing up to get a better view. Even Kathy Gathers had turned around. It’s amazing how a little chicken cutlet can attract a crowd.

  “I think,” Sister R said as softly as ever, but with a tiny edge to each word, “you should go to the principal’s office and explain to Sister Rose Mary what happened here. The rest of you boys should settle down now, or you’ll be joining him.”

  I picked up my tray, walked quickly around Sist
er R, and headed down the aisle. I didn’t even check to see if Kathy Gathers was watching my latest humiliation. All I heard was Sister R asking for something to take the chicken cutlet off her shoe and then saying, “None of you boys has a napkin? How is that possible . . . ?”

  3

  A Rose by Any Other Name

  I GAVE MY TRAY to one of the lunch ladies (who was really Mary Claire Danes’s mom). Sophia waved her barbecue tongs at me and asked if I liked the chicken. I said it had been an interesting experience. Then I headed for the exit.

  Sister Rose Vincent was standing guard at the door to head off any escapees. When I was little, I thought all nuns were seven feet tall. I was taller now and knew they really weren’t, but Sister Rose Vincent was way over six feet tall and very big in every direction. She looked like a giant black billowing mountain with a tiny carved pinhead stuck on top.

  In all my years at St. Stephen’s, Sister Rose Vincent had never, ever smiled or said very much to me. A “don’t do that” here or a “can you please be quiet” there, but mostly she just frowned when she saw me. I was sure she had some really good stuff to add to the red MURPHY folder. As I got nearer the door, her eyes were drilling into me, so I told her, “I’m supposed to go to Sister Rose Mary’s.”

  “Hrrrumph.” I thought that was nun-speak for I would expect nothing less from a troublemaker like you. I pushed the door open, and she added, “And don’t dawdle in the halls.”

  The last thing anyone wanted to do was dawdle in the halls of St. Stephen’s. Every time the last person left a classroom, the lights were turned off to save money. When the last class left a hallway or wing of the building, those lights were turned off too. It wasn’t just the spooky darkness that kept us from goofing around in the hallways. The nuns and their black robes blended into the darkness, as if they could will themselves to be a part of the shadows, ever ready to strike. Like a green snake in the grass, only deadlier.