by Alex George
“You have a mongoose?” I said.
“I’m scared that the Russians are going to blow us all to smithereens,” continued Nathan Tilly. “I’m scared that I’ll never fall in love. And, just between you and me”—he leaned in conspiratorially—“I’m a tiny bit scared of spiders. You know, the fat, hairy ones.” He paused and looked directly at Hollis. “But one thing I am not scared of,” he said, “is you.”
I gazed at Nathan Tilly in wonder. Hollis Calhoun was staring at him, too.
When we had read “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” in seventh grade, we’d done a whole unit on the mongoose. “Mongooses are illegal in this country,” I said.
“Maybe they are, maybe not,” said Nathan Tilly carelessly.
“Why do you have a mongoose?” I asked.
“To catch snakes.”
“Snakes?”
“This was when we lived in Texas,” explained Nathan Tilly. “Our backyard was full of copperheads and cottonmouths. My mongoose loves to kill snakes, but he hasn’t found a single one since we moved to Maine. I think he’s bored.” He turned to Hollis. “That’s why I’m scared he’ll run away,” he explained.
Hollis was still unable to speak.
“Is he a pet?” I asked.
“Well, we keep him outside. He’s tethered to a rope, near the house. Otherwise he’d disappear into the forest and we’d never see him again.”
I imagined the mongoose hitching a lift south, back to Texas and the snakes. “Where in Texas are you from?” I asked him.
“A small town in the west. Nowhere you’ve heard of.”
All I knew about Texas was that the Johnson Space Center was in Houston, and President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. In my imagination it was a vast desert, populated by rugged, dusty cowboys with big hats. It couldn’t have been much more different from coastal Maine.
“When did you move here?” I asked him.
“At the start of the summer.”
“Do you like it?”
Nathan Tilly looked at me. “You sure do ask a lot of questions,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said, blushing.
“What’s your name?” asked Nathan.
“Oh, don’t you know? This is the great Robert Carter.” Hollis had finally recovered the use of his voice. “But he’s far too important to bother with people like you and me.”
“He doesn’t look very important,” said Nathan.
Hollis gave me a quick cuff on the back of my head. “His family owns the amusement park outside of town. I just spent the summer working there, earning crap wages.” He looked at me with contempt. “I didn’t see him working, though. He was probably sitting by his swimming pool being fed ice cream by his butler.”
I closed my eyes. So that was why Hollis had been picking on me—he thought I was a member of the town’s privileged elite. When he hit me, he was (literally) striking a blow for the downtrodden proletariat. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Hollis wasn’t the first person to imagine that my family was wealthy. I’d been encountering the same assumptions and petty jealousies since kindergarten.
“We don’t have a butler,” I said wearily. “Or a swimming pool.”
“I didn’t even know there was an amusement park,” said Nathan.
I looked at him gratefully.
“Listen,” said Hollis. “When they ask us what was going on back there, we’ll tell them that we were fooling around, okay? Just a little bit of fun. Nothing serious. Got it?”
The last thing I wanted was to give Hollis Calhoun’s bullying the additional fuel of self-righteous vengeance. I nodded. “Nothing serious,” I repeated.
“What about you?” said Hollis to Nathan. “Do we have a deal?”
Before Nathan could answer, a familiar voice called my name, followed by the anxious clip of sensible shoes hurrying down the corridor. My mother came to a stop in front of the bench. She clutched her handbag in front of her like a shield, as if it might ward off whatever unpleasantness was about to happen. She looked me up and down. “Robert,” she said. “You’re soaking wet. What’s been going on?”
Hollis Calhoun shifted a little closer to me, radiating menace. “We were just having a bit of fun,” I mumbled. “Nothing serious.”
My mother glanced between Hollis and Nathan Tilly. “I got called into school because of a bit of fun?” she said. Hollis stared down at the space between his feet, smirking. Nathan Tilly looked my mother in the eye and winked at her. To my astonishment, she blushed. Without another word, she turned away and pushed open the door to the principal’s office.
The three of us sat in uneasy silence for a few minutes. I wondered what story my mother was being told. Over the years she had spent many hours in tense conference with school principals, but never because of me. My flawless behavioral record was about to be compromised, and she looked as if her heart was going to break. I gazed resentfully at Nathan Tilly. This was all his fault. Whatever private misery Hollis Calhoun might have inflicted on me would have been preferable to the public circus of recrimination that I would now have to endure. I had never told anyone about Hollis’s bullying, because my silence allowed me to contain the damage he could cause. The last thing I needed was well-meaning adults clucking in disapproval and trying to make things better. I knew they would only make things worse.
More footsteps echoed down the corridor. When I looked up I was surprised to see a man approaching us. (I had seen countless mothers arrive to collect their children from the principal’s office, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing a father show up before.) The man had an untamed beard, peppered with gray. A dark blue sailor’s cap was pulled down over his forehead at an incongruously jaunty angle.
“Ahoy!” called the man, his deep voice booming down the deserted corridor.
“That’s my dad,” said Nathan, unnecessarily.
Mr. Tilly stopped in front of us and looked at his son. “Didn’t take you long to be sent to the principal’s office, did it?” he said. To my surprise, his face broke into a wide grin. “Excellent work, Nathan. First-class.” He turned to me. “Who are you?” he asked.
“This is Robert Carter,” said Nathan.
Nathan’s father looked at me. “Why are you so wet, Robert Carter?”
I felt Hollis’s flat eyes on me. “We were just having a bit of fun,” I said.
“Really. Fun for whom, I wonder,” said Mr. Tilly. This was met with three blank looks. “Oh, I see,” he said cheerfully. “Honor among thieves, is it?” He removed his cap and tucked it under his arm. “Well, we’ll get to the bottom of it soon enough.” With that he turned and pushed through the door of the principal’s office.
After a moment Hollis spoke. “If we all keep quiet, they won’t be able to prove anything.”
“Which would be great for you,” said Nathan.
Hollis looked at him. “And for you.”
“What about Robert, though?” said Nathan.
“I’m fine,” I said anxiously.
Just then the door to the office opened and the principal’s secretary stuck her head out. “You can come in now,” she said.
The principal of Longfellow Middle School, Mr. Pritchard, was in the twilight of a long and dispiriting career. He had taught eighth-grade English for twenty years, and his heart still beat blackly with the accumulated disappointments born of unsuccessfully cajoling generations of sullen thirteen-year-olds into reading Huckleberry Finn. But if his time as an educator had been unfulfilling for everyone involved, now Mr. Pritchard had found his true métier. He was a born administrator. He loved to impose order upon chaos. Insubordination and rule-breaking were not tolerated. Sanctions were imposed swiftly and without mercy.
As we filed in silently, Mr. Pritchard glared at us from behind his desk. My mother and Mr. Tilly were sitting to one side. We shuffled to an awkward halt in the mi
ddle of the room. Principal Pritchard looked us over, not bothering to hide his irritation.
“We might as well begin,” he said. “We called your mother, Hollis, but apparently she was too busy to come in.” He did not sound surprised. I guessed that Hollis’s mother and the principal were already well acquainted. “So, gentlemen. Restroom stalls are designed to accommodate one person, not three. And they really just have one function. So will someone explain what the three of you were doing?”
There was a long silence. Finally Hollis spoke up. “We were just having a little bit of fun,” he said.
“A bit of fun,” said Mr. Pritchard.
“You know, fooling around,” elaborated Hollis.
Mr. Pritchard’s eyes settled on me. “Would you agree, Robert? You were just fooling around? Because it looks as if you were fooling around more than anyone else.”
I didn’t dare look up. I didn’t want to see the disappointment on my mother’s face. “Just a bit of fun,” I agreed.
“That’s a big fat lie.” Nathan Tilly pointed at Hollis and then at me. “He was flushing his head down the toilet. And before that he was hitting him and kicking him. I heard it all.”
My mother stiffened in her seat.
Mr. Pritchard looked at me. “Is that true?”
“Of course it’s true,” said Nathan’s father. “He’s soaking wet, for God’s sake. How else do you explain that?”
“We were just fooling around,” said Hollis again.
Mr. Pritchard cleared his throat. “And what were you doing in the boys’ locker room so long after the last bell, Nathan? You should have been out of the school gates and on your way home by then.”
“I got lost,” said Nathan.
“Lost?” echoed Mr. Pritchard. As the word hung in the air, the question seemed to morph into an accusation.
“It’s his first day,” said Nathan’s father. “Haven’t you ever taken a wrong turn before?”
“I’m just trying to establish what happened here,” answered Mr. Pritchard stiffly.
“He’s already told you,” said Mr. Tilly. “Robert was being bullied, and Nathan tried to stop it. My son’s done nothing wrong.” He pointed at the principal. “You have a bullying problem. And I want to know what the hell you’re going to do about it.”
Mr. Pritchard looked rattled. He didn’t like having his prosecutorial process disrupted by rowdy parents. “First of all,” he said, bristling, “we don’t use that kind of language here.”
Nathan’s father frowned. “What kind of language?”
“What you said. That word.” Mr. Pritchard paused. “H–E–double hockey sticks.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Mr. Tilly began to roar with laughter. A rich, deep, thunderous gale of unbounded hilarity ricocheted off the office walls. He was laughing so hard that he bent forward and grabbed his stomach as it shook—it was, quite literally, a belly laugh. Mr. Tilly’s amusement was infectious. As I watched him, it was impossible not to smile, too. I glanced across at Nathan, who had begun to laugh as well. My mother was looking at her shoes, but the corner of her mouth was twitching upward into a grin. Hollis smirked. The only person who was not laughing was Mr. Pritchard, who sat behind his desk, his cheeks pink with anger.
Nathan’s father did his best to compose himself, but it was clear that he was having difficulty keeping a straight face. “I’m sorry,” he said, obviously not sorry in the slightest, “but do people really talk that way around here?”
“Some of us do,” said Mr. Pritchard, tight-lipped. “You’re not in Texas anymore, Mr. Tilly.”
“Oh, don’t I know it. In Texas people would be more worried about the fact that students are being bullied instead of objecting to my language.” Mr. Tilly had stopped laughing now. “I should give you a real four-letter word to complain about.”
I decided that I liked Nathan’s father.
Mr. Pritchard had picked up a pen and was stabbing its nib into the topmost piece of paper on his desk. He finally looked up at me. “Has this ever happened before, Robert?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“That’s a big fat lie, too,” said Nathan. “I heard them talking in the locker room. This was going on last year, too.”
“Is that true?” asked my mother sharply.
“You need to get your house in order,” Nathan’s father told Mr. Pritchard. “Who knows how much longer this would have gone on if Nathan hadn’t intervened? I want to know what you’re going to do to stop this from happening again.”
Mr. Pritchard went very still for a moment, and then he stood up. “I don’t think we’ll need to worry about that,” he said.
We all looked at him, surprised.
“This matter is closed,” said Mr. Pritchard. “I can assure you, Mr. Tilly, and you, Mrs. Carter, that everything will be taken care of. You may all go. Except you, Hollis. You stay.”
Hollis shot me a poisonous look as my mother ushered me out of the room. We stood in the empty corridor with Nathan and his father. My mother’s face was pale. I wasn’t looking forward to the trip home.
“I’m Leonard Tilly,” said Nathan’s father, extending his hand toward my mother.
They shook. “Mary Carter.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“I wish the circumstances had been different,” said my mother. She turned to Nathan. “Thank you, Nathan,” she said. “That was a brave thing you did.” She nudged me.
“Yeah, thanks,” I mumbled.
Nathan beamed at us, oblivious to the bucketfuls of discomfort he had heaped upon me. My mother was right. It was a brave thing that he’d done. And he wasn’t scared of Hollis Calhoun, not one bit. Nathan Tilly, I decided, was either a hero or an idiot. Whichever it was, I couldn’t help but like him.
“Well look,” said Mr. Tilly, “I think this calls for some sort of celebration.” He rubbed his hands together. “Good conquering evil, a triumph for the underdog, all that stuff. We should all go and have some ice cream, or gin, or something. What do you say?”
“We really need to be getting home,” said my mother. “Robert’s brother is in the house on his own, and he doesn’t like to be left alone for too long.”
This wasn’t true, and she knew it. Whenever he had the house to himself Liam played his records as loud as he could, gleefully rocking back and forth in his wheelchair, rattling the window frames with all the noise.
“Perhaps another time, then,” said Mr. Tilly.
“That would be great,” I said.
He looked at me kindly. “We’ll plan on it,” he said. “And don’t worry,” he added, turning to my mother, “we’ll mainly eat ice cream. No more than a glass or two of gin, I promise.”
My mother smiled wanly.
“Quite an eventful first day of school, all in all,” said Mr. Tilly, ruffling his son’s hair. “Are you ready to go home?” Nathan nodded. They turned and began to walk down the corridor. As I watched them go, something occurred to me.
“Mr. Tilly?” I called.
He turned back to look at me.
I cleared my throat. “Do you really have a mongoose?”
“Of course we do.”
I couldn’t help myself. “But aren’t mongooses illegal?”
Nathan’s father grinned at me.
“Maybe they are, maybe not,” he said.
THREE
The following morning I walked into school in a state of high agitation. I didn’t know what kind of punishment Mr. Pritchard had given Hollis the afternoon before, but I was sure that he would exact retribution from me in proportionate terms.
My mood wasn’t helped by the awkward display of parental hand-wringing that I’d endured the previous evening. When my father had arrived home, my mother had pulled him into their bedroom for a whispered conference. When they
emerged, both of them wore the same expression of saddened concern. What worries us, said my father more than once over the course of the painful conversation that followed, is that you never asked us for help. I had denied them the opportunity to swoop down and fix everything; my silence about Hollis had prevented them from playing the role of involved and caring parents. That was what was so disappointing. As I listened to them talk, the thought occurred to me that if either my mother or my father had been paying the slightest attention, they would have noticed that something was wrong. But my happiness, or lack of it, didn’t make even the tiniest ping on their emotional radar. My brother was like a World War II bomber dropping strips of foil into the air, scrambling their screens. Nothing else registered.
I was late and hurried down the corridor. Mr. Pritchard was waiting for me outside my classroom. “Ah, Robert,” he said. “I thought you would want to know that I’ve rescinded my earlier decision about Hollis Calhoun’s academic development.”
“Hollis?” I frowned. “I don’t—”
“Boys like Hollis don’t care about rules. No matter what punishment I gave him, he would have kept on bullying you, maybe worse than before. Am I right?”
I nodded.
“Then I realized that there was one thing I could do.” Mr. Pritchard gave me a small smile. “Last night, with my blessing, Hollis graduated. We did a little grade management, shall we say, and as of this morning he is no longer a student at Longfellow. He’s where he belongs, which is in high school, where he can push around people his own size.”
I looked around me. “So he’s not—?”
“No,” said Mr. Pritchard. “He’s not.”
The heavy weight of dread that had been pressing between my shoulder blades disappeared. I felt light, free, able to fly.
“I won’t pretend that it doesn’t stick in my craw that Hollis is getting rewarded for his bad behavior,” continued Mr. Pritchard. “The boy is an idiot, and lazy, too. But this looked like the best result for you, and the best result for the school.”
