by Marty Chan
“Do you know what I can do to you?” he asked. I was pretty sure that no matter what I answered, he was going to show me.
He leaned so close I could smell what he had for breakfast — toast with peanut butter and milk. I scrunched my face from the stench. “Apologize.”
I said nothing.
“No apology, no mercy,” Nathan said as he stepped back and took a karate stance. His hands looked like bull’s horns. The cheering kids made me think of a bloodthirsty crowd in the stands of a bullfight. The only thing missing was the red cape. Suddenly, I realized I wasn’t the matador. I was the cape that the bull was about to gore. Nathan wiped his thumb across his nose and tugged one leg of his cotton pants to expose his deadly sneaker. He ground his foot on the cement pad as if he were crushing a bug. Then he inched closer.
“Gentlemen, do we have a problem here?” a man’s voice called out. It was Principal Henday, the man we all called The Rake, but only behind his back.
Nathan straightened up and stepped back. “No. We were just acting out a scene from a Bruce Lee movie. Isn’t that right, Chan?”
As much as I didn’t like Nathan, I was more afraid of The Rake. Our reedy principal made up for his slight stature with a heavy attitude about fighting. He was always ready to make an example out of any kid who tried to throw a punch.
“Yeah, we were just playing around,” I said.
Principal Henday fixed me with an even look as he dragged his skeletal hand through his hair. I remembered he had brown hair last year, but the stress of the job must have turned his hair grey. The grey made him look more menacing, like a vampire. A starving vampire who needed to feed, and I was the main course. “Tell the truth, gentlemen.”
Nathan closed his eyes and meditated. I could almost hear him counting: “one, two, three, kittens in a sunbeam.” The Rake folded his arms over his grey suit jacket and began to tap one finger against his elbow as he drilled his stare into my brain. This was his finger of doom, a very effective way to get kids to talk. All he had to do was tap his finger and wait for a confession. The longer the tapping, the harder it was to keep quiet. One time, Eric Johnson caved to the interrogation and confessed to wetting his bed. Such was the power of the finger of doom. I tried not to look at the finger and kept my mouth shut.
Finally, The Rake stopped tapping and said, “No fighting of any kind in this school, real or pretend. I catch you doing this again, and it will be a strike against you both.”
The Rake loved baseball, because he was forever handing out strikes to “bad” kids. Three strikes and the kid was out. In this case, we were given a walk. Nathan glared at me and headed off. The Rake went into the school. Remi came up behind me and patted me on the back.
“Oh man, I would have caved. The Rake freaks me out. How’d you stay so cool?”
“Mind over matter,” I said, using my sleeve to sponge off the sweaty lake from my forehead.
Nathan joined his two helpers. Kennedy tossed his end of the board to one side. It landed on Eric’s foot.
“Ow. Watch it, knob head,” Eric barked.
Kennedy whined, “It was too heavy.”
Nathan grabbed the board. “You’ll have to build up your stamina if you want to work out in my dad’s dojo.”
“I’ll try harder,” Kennedy said. His chubby cheeks were red from the exertion of holding up the board. “Maybe I can do some odd jobs around the dojo and just watch you work out. Or what if I help you count? One . . . two . . . three . . . I’m peanut butter on a jelly sandwich . . . ”
As the trio walked away, a part of me wished that I had fought Nathan. I replayed the scene in my mind: Nathan the snake master against the Marty the eagle lord. He twitched his body, giving away his first move, a punch, which I easily dodged. He was off balance. I ducked low and knocked him off his feet with a leg sweep. He fell on his butt and I launched myself into the air like an eagle and tumbled three times, before landing with my feet on either side of his fallen body, my fist screaming to his face like angry talons. I stopped an inch away from his face. He screeched like a little girl and begged for mercy, while everyone cheered. I let him up and warned him to never challenge me again. He slithered off into the tall grass.
Remi interrupted my kung-fu daydream. “Mission accomplished.” He pointed across the schoolyard, where Samantha and Trina were chattering as they walked toward the school entrance.
“Good,” I said.
“Watch your back,” Remi warned. “I don’t think it’s over.”
“He wouldn’t do anything else,” I said. “Not with The Rake around.”
My friend shook his head. “The Rake can’t be everywhere.”
I nodded and glanced at Nathan, making a note to keep an eye on the “karate master” in case he tried to teach me another lesson. Remi and I headed into the school. I hoped Trina was making progress with our suspect.
In class, I tried to eavesdrop on Samantha and Trina as they talked in hushed tones at the back of the room. I craned my head back so that I could hear. Mikayla Jackson, the grade six grump, must have thought I was spying on her.
“Back off, lurker,” she barked.
She slammed her grey journal shut and glared; her short brown hair bristled as a warning. She scowled, flashing a mouth full of metal that looked like they could tear through pop cans. The other kids called her Jaws, but no one dared say that to her face because she had a fiery temper.
“I wasn’t looking at . . . I mean . . . it’s just that,” I tried to explain.
“I don’t care about your reasons. Click on another website. This one is 403 — forbidden access.”
Suddenly, the entire classroom went dead silent. I glanced past Mikayla at our grade six teacher, Ms. Nolan, staring at us. With her long red hair and bright smile, I thought she should have been a model or a movie star instead of a teacher. I think she thought the same thing, because she was always cranky. She lived up to her name, Nolan, because her classroom was a place we called “No Land”, which was inhabited only by her “NOs”.
“No, don’t stop on account of me. By all means, keep talking and cutting into my lesson time.” She had a sarcastic sense of humour. She claimed her jokes were going to prepare us for junior high school.
Mikayla slowly turned around in her desk. “Sorry, Ms. Nolan.”
“With your permission, I’d like to continue teaching. That okay with you?”
Mikayla hunched over and stretched out the back of her red T-shirt, which read: Byte Me. I was pretty sure she wanted me to get a good look at the slogan.
“Marty?” Ms. Nolan asked.
I knew better than to answer her rhetorical question. If you answered a rhetorical question, you’d turn red in the face like I did once when I answered Ms. Nolan’s rhetorical question, “Do you take me for an idiot?” The answer to the question was definitely not “yes”.
Eric hadn’t figured out our teacher’s sense of humour yet: “Keep talking, Ms. Nolan. That way we don’t have to learn about computers.”
The kids laughed. Our teacher aimed her sharp sense of humour at Eric like a pirate turning her sword on an enemy. “Did you say something, Eric? Oh? You’re volunteering to be my dance partner when we do the dance unit,” she said, making Eric walk the proverbial plank.
“I didn’t say that,” he protested, shaking his head so hard his blonde hair whipped back and forth like ragged sails against gale force winds.
Ms. Nolan stabbed hard and swift. “That’s so sweet of you. Your mother says you have twinkle toes, Eric.”
The roar of laughter that filled the classroom sounded like a crew of mutineers on a ship. Ms. Nolan tried to coax the burly Eric out of his desk to dance with her.
Eric waved her off. “I’m sorry, Ms. Nolan. I take it back. I didn’t mean anything. Please don’t make me dance with you.”
“I think we can start class now . . . unless I have more dance volunteers.” She looked right at me. I ducked down in my desk. I figured I had made enough e
nemies for one morning.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lunchtime couldn’t come fast enough. I hoped to catch Trina at recess for an update, but she and Samantha disappeared in the girls’ bathroom for most of the break. Remi was busy showing a few of the French kids how to get good snap on a wrist shot, so I had no one to talk to except Kennedy, who decided to latch on to me.
“Who do you think would win in a fight? Jet Li or Jackie Chan?” he asked, wheezing as he tried to keep up with me. His breath smelled of chocolate.
“I don’t know, Kennedy. Why don’t you ask Nathan?”
“I did. He said Jet Li, but I didn’t believe him, because I heard Jet Li became a Buddhist, and those guys don’t fight. What do you think?”
“Why do you think I’d know?”
“Because you’re Jackie Chan’s nephew,” Kennedy said.
“We’re not related.”
He glanced around the hallway and whispered. “It’s okay. I know you have to keep it secret, but I won’t tell anyone. You can tell me the truth. I mean he must have taught you some sweet moves, right? Right?”
“We just have the same last name,” I said.
“Sure, sure, I get it.” He winked at me. “You’re not related at all. If I keep your secret, will you show me some of his moves? I just want to be able to defend myself. I promise never to use any of the moves except in extreme emergencies or when the teacher’s not looking.”
Kennedy pestered me for the rest of recess and for most of the morning, until Ms. Nolan finally moved him to the head of the class. As soon as the lunch bell rang, I slipped into the hallway and ducked out the door without grabbing my lunch bag. Missing out on lunch was a small price to pay to get him off my back. I rushed into the schoolyard and headed to the school shed, where I hoped to meet up with Trina and Remi.
Remi showed up a few minutes later, but there was no sign of Trina. I scoped out the schoolyard for her, but I could only make out Kennedy pestering Nathan about karate lessons. I pulled back from the bushes, while Remi was tearing his ham and cheese sandwich in half. He handed me one of the ragged halves.
“Thanks, Remi. I’ll split my lunch with you at afternoon recess.”
He cocked his head to one side. “Did your mom slip more octopus tentacles in your sandwich?” He was still leery of my sandwiches after my mom decided to make me a seafood salad using leftovers of shark fin, octopus and jellyfish. Remi set a world record for fastest spit take.
“No, I made it myself,” I said. “No seafood. You know what I’m looking forward to next year when we get into junior high school? Cafeteria food.”
“Monique said it’s not all that great,” Remi said.
“Your sister’s a vegetarian. Of course she wouldn’t like it, but me, I’d be ordering hamburgers and fries every day. What about you?”
“Two burgers. Extra fries.”
“Yeah. But you know the coolest thing about junior high? We get to take classes together.”
He mumbled. “Depends on a couple of things.”
My friend’s odd reaction worried me. He eked past grade five with help from Trina and me, but we hadn’t been studying as hard this year. I wondered if he wasn’t going to pass grade six.
“You want to get together after school today and go over math homework?” I asked.
His face twisted like I had just shoved a lemon into his mouth.
“I don’t mind, Remi.”
“Shhh,” he said, putting a finger to his lips. “I think I hear something.”
He peeked around the corner of the shed. He straightened up and motioned me to step back. Before I could move, Trina and Samantha came around the corner.
“Marty, your turn to hide,” Remi said, tugging at his ear to signal me to go along.
“Sure thing. You found me pretty easy this time. Oh, hi Trina.”
Remi asked, “You girls want to play hide and seek?”
“Yes, Trina,” I said. “I hear you’re pretty good at going undercover.”
“Maybe Samantha should hide first,” Remi suggested.
Trina shook her head. “She knows what you’re doing. I told her everything.”
Remi gaped at our undercover agent. I scratched my head. Had she gone so far undercover that she was now working with Samantha? Our cover was blown.
“Whatever Trina said to you is a lie,” I said.
Samantha looked at me. “She said you were the best detectives she ever worked with.”
Remi and I shared a look of wide-eyed surprise. I turned to Trina, silently asking for some kind of explanation.
She offered one: “I thought it was better for you to hear straight from her. Samantha, why don’t you show them?”
Our suspect slowly nodded. She stepped forward and reached into her pocket. She withdrew the stolen bottle of pink nail polish.
“I’m sorry I took this,” she mumbled.
Remi jumped up and down. “I knew it. I knew she stole it. You ditched it in one of the yards, didn’t you?”
She shook her head.
“Then where did you hide it?” I asked.
Samantha slipped the bottle under her wide wristband until the entire bottle disappeared from sight. Remi let out a low whistle and nodded in admiration as he examined the wristband.
“Clever,” I said. “Good job, Trina. We’ll take it from here.”
She shook her head. “Hear her out, Marty.”
Samantha pulled out the bottle and handed it to me. Most of her black makeup had been wiped away and her moist eyes glistened in the afternoon sunlight. “I would have paid for it, but I didn’t want anyone to know.”
“Know what?” Remi asked.
Silence.
“She wanted to change her look,” Trina answered.
“Why?” he asked. “I thought it looked cool.”
Samantha mumbled, “You’re the only one. I’ve been teased for the last month.”
I shook my head. “Principal Henday has a no-bully zone. No one would dare do anything at school.”
Trina put a finger to her lips. I said nothing more.
“It’s not at school,” Samantha said. “It’s at home.”
Remi let out a snort of disbelief. I let out a harsh laugh, but cut it short when I noticed Trina giving me a dirty look.
“Samantha, do you expect us to believe that you’re being bullied at home for the way you look?” Remi asked.
I added, “Your mom telling you to dress nice doesn’t count as bullying.”
“It’s not my mom.”
“Who is it, then?” I asked. “Your dog?”
Remi chuckled. Trina shushed me.
“It’s a cyber bully,” she answered.
No one said a thing. Cyber bully was an easy term to remember. I knew the bully part all too well. The cyber part was what gave the bullying a cruel twist. Cyber bullies could pick on their victims through the internet. At least with a real bully, you were safe at home. With cyber bullies, home was the worst place to be, unless you didn’t have a computer, because they could send you messages anywhere and at any time. Often, they hid their identities. Some kids believed this was because schools had strict no cyber-bully policies, but I believed it was because cyber bullies were cowards.
“Why don’t you go to Principal Henday?” I asked. “He’ll track down the jerk.”
Samantha shook her head. “I can’t. It’s complicated. If he saw what the cyber bully was making fun of, well . . . I . . . I . . . ”
Trina patted her on the shoulder, “Maybe it’s easier if you show the guys.”
She nodded and reached into her pocket to pull out her cell phone. She turned it on as Trina beckoned us to gather around the tiny screen.
“The cyber bully zeroed in on a video that Samantha posted on YouTube,” she explained.
Remi crossed his arms. “Wait a minute. That could be anyone. It doesn’t mean someone at school is the cyber bully.”
“That’s what I thought at first, but you’ll see wh
y it has to be someone from school in a minute.”
He leaned in closer, blocking my view. I shuffled to the other side of Samantha and got a clear view just as she loaded the video on her cell phone. On the tiny screen, Samantha was dressed from head to toe in a black hoodie and jeans. Judging by the rumpled blue blanket on the bed behind her and the closet full of black T-shirts and jeans behind it, I guessed she was filming the video in her bedroom. The lighting was dim, but I could make out her face, which was pale except for the black eyeliner and black lipstick. Electronic music started over the video and she began to sway to the music, losing herself in the moment. Then she flipped off her hoodie and zoomed into the camera as she started to sing. She didn’t sound bad, but it was hard to make out the lyrics because the music was too loud. I thought I heard her sing, “Don’t let him put you down; he’s nothing but a clown.”
She danced away from the camera, and bent low while she sang something that sounded like, “Thinks he’s in charge of you, but there’s nothing he can do.” I wondered if she was singing about her dad after he gave her curfew or something, but it all became clear when Samantha stood up, holding a garden rake. Taped to the green tines was a picture. It was hard to make out the face, but the rake gave away the identity. She was singing about Principal Henday.
“The video was up for about two days when the cyber bully started posting. He made fun of my outfit, mostly, but sometimes, he’d write things about how I sang like a strangled cat. I posted a comment to tell him to shut up or I’d tell, and he wrote that I’d never talk or else he’d share the video with Principal Henday. Every day, he’d send some snarky comment about my hair, my makeup, my fingernails. I couldn’t take it any more and I removed the video, but he kept hounding me about how I looked, and I thought the best thing to do was just change my look. That’s why I took the nail polish. I thought it would stop him.”
Nothing stopped a bully. The Boissonault twins taught me that much. When they were at school, they picked on me every day. Sometimes, they made fun of my eyes and how they were slanted. Other times, they said my hair looked too weird. Once, they teased me for the black armband I had to wear after my grandmother’s funeral. Even if I could change the way I looked, the brothers would find another reason to pick on me. Bullies don’t need a reason. They need victims.
