The Eyes Of Kid Midas

by Нил Шустерман

  In Bertram's book you were born into your place in life. Bertram's place was well guarded and well worn. He knew who he was and what was expected of him; he was and would always be the Mean Kid—and he liked that just fine.

  But it seemed Kevin had forgotten who he was.

  Kevin was the Victim. He had been the Victim since first grade, and someday in the far-off future, when Bertram was teaching his own kids all about being mean, Kevin Midas would be suffering some dumb life in some stupid boring town, the Victim of some big stupid company that would fire him for no good reason.

  Thoughts like this kept Bertram going.

  But seeing Kevin Midas succeeding—this didn't fit the Bertram World View. It made him chomping mad.

  Kevin was wise to keep away from Bertram—and he did for three whole days. On Friday, however, the fine threads of Kevin's handmade universe began to unravel.

  8

  KEVIN'S TANGLED WEB

  Winds blew in from the north that Friday—strange winds that swirled together, forming tiny candy-wrapper tornadoes on the baseball field.

  It was all some distant effect of the inland hurricane, which still had meteorologists scratching their heads. These were the kinds of winds that stirred kids up, and like the others, Kevin had felt the itch of excitement, like static electricity, all morning.

  During lunch, Kevin sat by himself beneath the flapping sails of a lunch-table umbrella. The rest of the week he had managed to surround himself with other kids, but since he was not producing an endless supply of goodies from his backpack today, no one was very interested in him.

  That was fine with Kevin, because he had a plan to weave. He stared out into the baseball field, where kids were sitting in small groups eating their lunches, and he thought long and hard.

  "I'd like it a lot better if I could see your eyes," said Josh as he took a seat next to Kevin. "What's so interesting out in right field?"

  Kevin took off his glasses and squinted at Josh. "Nicole Patterson."

  "Forget her," advised Josh. "She thinks you're a pinhead."

  "Dare me, Josh," said Kevin. "Dare me to go over and talk to her."

  "I dare you," said Josh with a devious grin.

  "Now dare me to ask her out."

  Josh laughed, beginning to enjoy the game. "I dare you to!" he said.

  Kevin smiled. "Remember," he said, "you dared me." Kevin stood up and prepared himself for the excursion. His clothes looked great, his shoes were tied, his nose was clean, and his armpits were about as fresh as they could be after half a day at school. He was ready.

  "What are you gonna do if she says no?"

  Kevin grinned a grin as big as all outdoors. "How could she resist a man in shades?" He put his glasses back on. They hugged his ears and nose, no longer slipping off, as if his head had swelled to fit them . . . or as if they had sized themselves down to make a perfect match with Kevin's face.

  With the glasses firmly stuck on Kevin's face, Josh was quick to catch on.

  "Hold it!" said Josh. "Hold it a second. You're not planning to . . . you know . . . use the glasses on Nicole, are you, Kevin?"

  Kevin's all-outdoor smile seemed to wrap itself halfway around his head. "Do you dare me to?"

  "No!" said Josh. "I definitely do not dare you to!"

  Kevin shrugged. "Okay, then, I dare myself."

  Josh shook his head. "I liked you better when you were a gutless wonder who got beaten up all the time."

  "Aw, c'mon, Josh, if you were me you'd be doing the same thing!"

  "No. If I were you," said Josh as he got up to leave, "I'd be scared. Real scared."

  ***

  Nicole Patterson was part of an eternal trio that also included Iris Beecham and Alexa Macolini. They might as well have been born attached at the hip.

  The three of them, like all the other girls in school, were in love with Dash Kaminsky. Kevin imagined that he was all they talked about when they sat down at lunchtime.

  Kevin approached and cleared his throat. "Hey, ya wanna see a magic trick?" The three girls turned to him as he approached.

  "Not really," said Iris.

  "It's a good one ..."

  "Does it involve pulling your finger?" asked Alexa.

  "No, nothing like that," said Kevin. "I hold in my hand an ordinary..." He looked down, then bent to pull up some sod. "An ordinary lump of dirt—but watch closely."

  Kevin closed his fist on the dirt. The girls watched, but only because there was nothing better to do.

  "I say the magic words," said Kevin. "Abracadabra—"

  "Is this lame, or what?" Iris sneered.

  "Shut up. This trick needs total concentration."

  "Kevin," said Nicole, "I don't know if anyone has told you this, but you are truly weird."

  "Abracadabra, hocus pocus, alakazam," said Kevin. "And presto, this clump of dirt is now a diamond."

  Kevin opened his palm to reveal a small blue diamond that sparkled coolly in the sun.

  The girls stared. "How'd you do that?" asked Alexa.

  "I know how he did it," said Nicole. "He tricked us by making us look somewhere else while he switched the dirt for the diamond. It's called misdirection."

  "Yeah," said Kevin, closing his fist. "But now the diamond is at the bottom of Iris's Coke. How did it get there?"

  Kevin opened his palm and the diamond was gone. Iris shook her Coke and something was, indeed, down there. She guzzled it all the way down until she came up with a diamond between her front teeth. She spit it into her palm and studied it. It was the same diamond.

  "Yeah, Nicole, how did it get there?" asked Alexa.

  And then, Nicole Patterson uttered a phrase Kevin never believed he'd ever hear her say:

  "I don't know."

  Kevin smiled and reached behind her ear.

  "Another diamond," he said, pulling it out from the strands of her auburn hair. "For you."

  He held it out to Nicole with such unashamed sincerity that Iris and Alexa had to break out in wicked laughter. Nicole, now poised on the jagged edge of sheer embarrassment, pushed Kevin's hand away.

  "I don't want your dumb diamond," said Nicole. "I just want to know how the other one got into Iris's Coke." "Yeah," said Alexa, "how did it get there?"

  "A magician never tells," said Kevin smugly.

  "Hey," said Iris, "he's a magic midget!" The others giggled.

  Kevin stiffened and bit his lip, but he refused to be humiliated. Not when he had come this far.

  The school bell rang, echoing off the handball court across the field. Kevin was running out of time. If he was going to do something, he'd have to do it soon.

  Iris pocketed her diamond. "It's probably plastic, anyhow." And the matter was closed. The girls shoved their sandwich wrappers into their lunch bags and prepared to go inside.

  "Wait," said Kevin. "I need to talk to you, Nicole."

  "About what?" asked Iris.

  "Uh . . . It's private."

  Iris and Alexa looked at each other and began to snicker.

  "Oh!" said Iris. "That kind of talk."

  "Will you two shut up?" said Nicole.

  "No," said Iris. "That's okay, we'll leave you two alone!"

  "No, wait!" Nicole said desperately, but it was too late. Iris ran off with Alexa, both of them finding this unbearably funny. Nicole turned to Kevin. "Great. You've just ruined my life. Now the whole school is going to think I actually like you."

  "Well, don't you like me?" Kevin dared to ask. "I mean . . . just a little bit?"

  No answer. Kevin tried again.

  "Well . . . you don't hate me, do you?"

  "No," Nicole had to admit, "I don't hate you."

  Kevin smiled. It was a start. Most of the kids had filtered back into the school. In a few moments they would be completely alone.

  "Kevin, this is too weird," said Nicole. "I gotta go." As she turned to leave, Kevin tried to stop her by grabbing her shoulder. Instead, he got his hand tangled in her long hair.
>
  "Ow! Stop it! That hurts!"

  "Sorry." This wasn't going as smoothly as Kevin had planned. The second bell rang, and the school's steel doors closed with a heavy echoing thud.

  "Listen," said Nicole, "why don't we both just go to class and pretend this never happened, okay?"

  "First," said Kevin, "I want you to look me straight in the eye and tell me you don't like me."

  Nicole stared straight into Kevin's glasses and said, "Kevin, I..."

  But Kevin didn't let her finish.

  "You like me!" said Kevin, and the glasses began to hum. The lenses went dark, and Kevin saw colors swimming in Nicole's eyes. She was frozen, hypnotized; trapped in the invisible web Kevin had spun with his glasses.

  "You like me better than any other boy in school..." Kevin swore he could see right through her eyes. He could feel his mind spilling through into hers.

  "You want to go out with me more than anything else in the world...."

  Nicole just stood there, unable to speak or move. Kevin could feel the glasses begin to strain. It seemed for an instant that the sun itself dimmed as the glasses pulled in all the energy they could, to move Nicole's mind. A circle of fine frost appeared on the grass around them, and they were surrounded by a pocket of frigid air.

  Then it was over. The glasses rested, the cold air blew away, and Kevin, standing alone in the field with a dazed Nicole Patterson, dared to do the unimaginable. He pushed himself up on his tiptoes, leaned forward, and planted on Nicole Patterson's lips the most remarkable kiss on school record.

  In spite of the devious, underhanded way Kevin had brought this moment about, his kiss was from the heart. It was the kiss he had always wished he could give Nicole.

  When Kevin pulled away, Nicole just stared at him, lost in whatever place it is people get lost in when they've just received such an intensely sincere kiss. But then her lips began to curl, and her eyebrows furrowed. She shivered and blinked; shaking off the spell, snapping out of the trance.

  She reached out to grab Kevin's shoulders, and for an instant, he thought she was coming back for more, but instead she pushed him away with superhuman strength.

  "Ughhh!" she said. "Ughhh, blaaach blah ugh!" She ran the back of her hand across her lips. "Salami!" she said. "Yuk! Blahhhh!"

  She turned on Kevin in such fury, he could only cower from her rage.

  "Why, you creep!" she said. "You little troll! You think you can just hypnotize me?"

  Kevin was speechless. He kept opening his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. What went wrong? The glasses were all-powerful, weren't they? Nicole threw her lunch bag at him, and an apple core fell out, bouncing off Kevin's hair. "You can take your dumb plastic diamond and your stupid glasses and your salami kisses and flush them for all I care!"

  You had this coming, you bozo, said a voice inside Kevin's head. You deserve this.

  "You're a tiny-minded, tiny-bodied, pinheaded dweeb of a shrimpoid nerd!" Nicole wiped her mouth again.

  The pressure on Kevin now was unbearable. All the humiliation, all the rejection. He felt on the verge of some frightening explosion, the way a dwarf star blows up into a supernova.

  "You're the shortest, creepiest, dwarfiest little midget on the face of the earth!" shouted Nicole.

  Kevin could stand it no longer.

  "OH YEAH?" he screamed....

  And that's when Kevin, the dwarf star, went nova.

  ***

  Mr. Kirkpatrick was out sick that day—down with a cold he had picked up at the Divine Watch.

  The substitute was a mealy-looking woman in polyester, whose name was so ridiculously long and unpronounceable she herself had problems trying to spell it when she wrote it on the board. In the end, she advised the students just to call her Ms. Q.

  Ms. Q. was trying to rein in the terror when Kevin Midas walked in. The classroom was raging with arguments and spitball wars that showed no signs of stopping.

  "Please simmer down," Ms. Q. said to the meltdown situation before her. "I'm taking roll."

  Kevin slithered into his seat, and Josh, who sat just across the aisle, watched him. "Kevin, you don't look too good," he said. Kevin imagined that if he took off the glasses, Josh would see in his eyes just how "not good" things were.

  Kevin ever so gently put his backpack on his desk.

  In the front of the room, Nicole's seat was empty. Josh noticed it right away.

  "Where's Nicole?" he asked Kevin.

  Kevin didn't know exactly how he should answer that question.

  "Kevin," Josh asked again, "what did you do to Nicole?"

  "She called me a midget," said Kevin.

  "And?"

  "She called me Shrimpoid...."

  "And?"

  "And I sort of got . . . mad."

  "Where is Nicole?"

  Kevin didn't say anything. Instead he nodded his head toward his backpack. The light bulb went on in Josh's head.

  "No!" said Josh. "You didn't!"

  But before Kevin could answer, his backpack was snatched off his desk.

  "The ball is in play!" yelled Bertram as Kevin's pack became the prime object hurtling around the room.

  "Noooo!" screamed Kevin. If there ever was a time not to play keep-away with Kevin's backpack, this was it. Kevin, as pale as the cloud-covered sky, leapt out of his seat in absolute terror.

  The backpack flew in the air, and Hal, in the back of the room, caught it.

  "I'm giving you five seconds to settle down," said Ms. Q.

  Kevin reached Hal, only to watch helplessly as Hal threw the pack to Bertram again. Kevin reached Bertram, and the pack flew again. Bertram laughed and bit down on his gum wad, squirting bubble-gum juice in Kevin's face.

  "That's it!" yelled Ms. Q., picking up the phone by the chalkboard. "I'm calling the office." But the joke was on her. The phone hadn't worked since school started.

  Bertram grabbed the pack by one thin strap and dangled it out the second-story window.

  "You don't know what you're doing!" screamed Kevin.

  "C'mon, Midas, come and get it," said Bertram brainlessly. "Toro, toro!"

  Kevin climbed Bertram's arm as if it were the limb of a tree. Bertram pulled the pack in from the window and prepared to hurl it across the room once more.

  What Kevin did next came as a complete surprise, to him as well as to Bertram. He simply had to get that pack back . . . so he hauled off and belted Bertram right in the face.

  The pack fell out of Bertram's hands, and Kevin caught it before it hit the ground.

  Now the room was a three-ring circus, raging fully out of control. In one corner, a slapping fight had turned into a brawl. In the center ring, a chorus of kids were performing armpit farts, and by the window, Bertram was reeling from Kevin's blow.

  Ms. Q. chose to break up the brawl in the corner and drag those two kids out in the hall for a reprimand, leaving the rest of the circus without a ringmaster.

  Bertram's lip had been cut against the sharp track of his braces, and his teeth were covered with blood, as if he had just bitten a chunk out of someone. The chain-saw look filled Bertram's face, and Kevin knew there was no escape. He carefully handed Josh his backpack.

  "Don't let anyone near her!" said Kevin. The second the backpack was out of his hands, Bertram's foot made contact with Kevin's butt, sending him flying across the room.

  "You made me bleed!" yelled Bertram.

  Kevin scrambled to his feet, and Bertram stepped on Kevin's toes, firmly pinning his to the ground. "Who do you think you are?" screamed Bertram. "You get a pair of glasses and all of a sudden you think you're king of the world."

  He pushed Kevin down, but since his feet were pinned under Bertram's, Kevin came bouncing back like a bobo doll.

  "Don't make him mad, Bertram!" warned Josh.

  "Why? What's he gonna do?"

  Bertram pushed Kevin down over and over again, and Kevin just kept trying to scramble away. He didn't want to fight Bertram—he had better thin
gs to do, and this was making him furious! Hadn't the day been screwed up enough?

  "I'll teach you to make me bleed!" said Bertram, and with that he spat his gum into his free hand and smeared it across the top of Kevin's head. He kicked Kevin's legs out from under him, and Kevin fell to the floor, his hair impossibly snarled with Bertram's gum.

  Bertram laughed. He had won. Just like always.

  "You're just a loser, Midas," he said, looking down at Kevin. "That's all you'll ever be, a loser."

  With every bit of his body aching, Kevin gritted his teeth in anger and spoke to Bertram with a deadly growl that seemed to climb up from the pit of his stomach.

  "Go to hell, Bertram!" said Kevin.

  And the glasses began to swirl with color.

  It all took place so quickly, everyone was caught off guard, and no one was sure what really happened. No one but Kevin, that is, who saw everything in 3-D Technicolor.

  The ground beneath Bertram's feet tore open, and flames brighter than lightning leapt out, wrapping around him like tentacles, pulling him downward. There was a far-away hollow sound—a distant chorus of wailing voices that blended with Bertram's wail as he fell. He grabbed for a chair and took the chair with him.

  Bertram slipped into the fiery mouth—as it swallowed him whole.

  Kevin caught sight of Bertram's eyes as he dropped into the pit. Then Bertram was gone, and the hole that had split open the wooden floor vanished as if it had never existed.

  All that was left of Bertram was the echo of a distant cry that soon became nothing more than the moaning of the wind. And then silence.

  Everything was exactly the way it was before; the only thing missing was a chair. And Bertram.

  It all happened in the blink of an eye, and kids were still turning their heads to see what that flash of light was.

  Ms. Q. came running back into the room. "What was that?" she asked.

  "Spontaneous Human Combustion!" screamed Ralphy Sherman, flapping his arms like a crazy pigeon. "Spontaneous Human Combustion!!"

  Ms. Q. dragged Ralphy straight to the principal's office.