Bystander

by James Preller

  Eric reached for them, a little too hastily.

  Griffin pulled away, sensing their value. He read one out loud: “ ‘Eric, Rock On! Love, Dad.’ Aw, isn’t that sweet!” he teased.

  “Give me those,” Eric demanded.

  Griffin spun around, pretending to tuck them into his shirt. When Eric grabbed his arm, Griffin laughed. “Here you go—chill out, buddy. I’m just messing with you.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “Don’t get all sensitive on me, Eric.” Griffin could see that Eric was flustered. He seemed to take pleasure in it.

  Eric glanced at the digital clock, the way a drowning man might scan the water in hope of a life preserver. “Look, it’s getting—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve got to go anyway.”

  Eric escorted Griffin down the stairs and out the door. He watched Griffin pick up a skateboard and push off down the driveway and into the street. No helmet, naturally. Eric felt relieved—and more confused than ever.

  What is he up to? Eric wondered.

  Later that night, after dinner, Rudy made a discovery. Teary-eyed, he came into the television room holding his ceramic baseball bank. “I’m missing twenty-seven dollars. All my birthday money is gone.”

  Two sets of eyes—Rudy’s and his mother’s—settled on Eric. “Don’t look at me. I never touched your money.”

  Rudy’s lip quivered. “Mom?”

  “Are you sure, Rudy? Maybe you misplaced it.”

  Rudy was positive. “But if Eric didn’t take it, and Mom, if you didn’t take it . . .”

  Mrs. Hayes fixed her eyes on Eric. The look on her face said it all. She had a pretty good idea where the money had gone.

  A sudden thought leaped into Eric’s mind. A few minutes later, he went to check on his CDs.

  The gifts from his father.

  One of them was missing.

  16

  [mary]

  GINGER, A LONG-HAIRED GOLDEN RETRIEVER, WAS READY to bound out the door when Eric arrived to take her for a Saturday-afternoon walk. The minute she heard the keys rattle outside the door—Eric always struggled with the Martins’ sticky deadbolt—Ginger would leap out of her socks. If, of course, she were wearing any (she wasn’t).

  The dog-walking business had turned out well for Eric. Back in Ohio, he once took care of a neighbor’s dog when they went away on vacation. That job led to others, and Eric considered it easy money. He just had to be trustworthy and responsible, and those qualities came naturally enough. Now on Long Island, Eric had two steady clients, the Parkers and the Oropesas, plus some side jobs when people went away for weekend trips or vacations. He didn’t have to do much to drum up business, just hung up a poster at the coffee shop in town. He’d walk the dogs in the morning and evening, play with them a little, give them food, water, and something resembling love, and that was it. Besides, Eric liked dogs. They were a lot simpler than human beings.

  On a walk with Ginger the day after Griffin’s visit, Eric came across Mary in front of a large, brown house. She was raking a pile of leaves down to the curbside.

  Eric lingered there, letting Ginger sniff around, hoping that Mary would notice him. “Hey.” She finally smiled.

  In truth, she seemed more interested in Ginger than in Eric, but he could live with that, happily. Mary bent down to greet the perky golden, who strained on the leash, lapping up the attention. Thoroughly slimed by sloppy kisses, Mary enthused, “I didn’t know you had a dog.”

  “She’s not mine,” Eric replied. He told her about his dog-walking business. “You live here?”

  “No, I just randomly rake leaves at strangers’ houses,” she deadpanned.

  “Oh. Dumb question, I guess.”

  She smiled at Eric, then spoke directly to Ginger in a high-pitched trill that, Eric figured, she reserved exclusively for canines: “You look thirsty. Are you thirsty, with your long tongue hanging out? I’ll get you some water, that’s right, you wait one minute. I’ll be right back.”

  Ginger seemed to think this was a great idea. Eric was okay with it, too.

  While Ginger slurped from a Tupperware bowl, Eric relaxed the leash and sat on the curb alongside Mary. He thought about Griffin, and David Hallenback, and what had happened yesterday with Rudy’s money. Eric wanted to talk about it, but he wasn’t sure if he could trust Mary. Was she one of them? So he danced around the subject. “What have you been up to? I haven’t seen you hanging out with Griffin and Cody and those guys,” he said.

  Mary intently tore at a maple leaf, until only the skeletal veins remained. “I’m trying to stay away from them,” she confessed. “Too much weirdness.”

  “Oh?”

  Mary shrugged, picked up another leaf, and began the shredding process over again.

  “Griffin can be . . .” Eric paused, trying to find the right words, “I don’t know, kind of hard to figure out.”

  Mary snorted. “It takes a while, but you’ll figure him out eventually.”

  “Do you want to give me any tips?”

  Mary smiled tightly, her lips stretched thin. “I don’t want to talk about him, to tell you the truth.”

  “Okay, sure.” Eric looked away, stood up.

  “Do you want company?” Mary asked.

  “Really?”

  “Beats raking.”

  “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  “There’s a dog park not far from here,” Mary suggested. “Ginger can run around off-leash.”

  It was Eric’s first time alone with Mary. Of course, not counting Ginger’s company. The dog somehow made it easier, gave them a third thing, something outside of themselves that they could share. Mary found an old tennis ball, hurled it across the field. Ginger took off like a rocket, proudly retrieving it. Just an animal, doing what came naturally. They played that game for a long while, Eric and Mary taking turns throwing the ball, Ginger tireless and impatient.

  A few times Mary’s cell phone sounded. She’d flip it open, read a text message, flip it closed.

  At a certain point she stopped talking.

  “You’re frowning,” Eric noted. “Is something the matter?”

  Mary shook her head. But a moment later she pulled out her cell, punched a few buttons, and handed it to Eric. “Here, look at this.”

  There was a photograph of a girl’s thick body. She wore shorts and a midriff-baring shirt, with the head of a pig Photoshopped onto it. “Who’s this supposed to be?” Eric asked.

  “That’s Chantel Williams, you know her?”

  “Sort of, we’re in a couple of classes together.”

  “Well, everybody is really mad at her—”

  “Everybody?”

  “Okay, not everybody,” Mary replied, conceding the point. “It’s mostly Chrissie and Alexis. They want me to come over, because they want to get her back.”

  Eric didn’t know Chantel well. She seemed okay. “What did she do?”

  “Flirted with the wrong guy, according to Alexis.” After a pause, Mary confessed, “I know, you don’t have to say anything. It’s all so stupid.”

  “What are they going to do?”

  Ginger dropped the ball at Eric’s feet, then plopped to the ground herself, exhausted. He picked the ball up and threw it. Ginger watched it sail through the air, but did not otherwise stir.

  “Go on, go get it!” Eric urged.

  Ginger rested her chin on the cool earth. She wasn’t going anywhere. The ball could stay lost forever.

  It was time to go. Eric reattached Ginger’s leash and gave a tug. He reminded Mary that she still hadn’t answered his question.

  Mary sighed, shrugged, rearranged a loose strand of hair. “Something mean,” she said, eyes narrowing. “They are talking about maybe some fake Web page. Alexis has a new iMac in her room. They want me to help. I’m good with computers.”

  “You’ve done stuff like that before?”

  Mary looked away, nodded. “A little bit.”

  “So are you going over there?”r />
  “No, I’m sick of it,” Mary said with surprising conviction. “Girls are the worst. We can be so freaking mean.”

  Eric laughed. “Guys aren’t always so great, either, you know.”

  “Yeah, but at least a guy will punch you in the face, you know what I mean? They do it and then it’s over. But with girls, we slice you up piece by piece. It’s like death by a thousand cuts.”

  Eric playfully pushed Ginger on the rump. He told the animal, “Good thing you’re a dog, Ginger. Life is simple. Eat, walk, poop, let somebody else pick it up. You don’t have to deal with any of this crap—not even your own.”

  They walked in silence for a while longer.

  “Want to get a slice of pizza at Mario’s?” Eric offered. “My treat.”

  They dropped Ginger off at the Martins’ house. Mary came inside, but waited by the door while Eric went into the kitchen to give Ginger a fresh bowl of water. Eric picked up an envelope with his name on it; two twenty-dollar bills were inside. “They go away a lot,” Eric explained. “But they, like, totally trust me. Really nice people.” He locked the house and put the spare keys in his pocket.

  “I feel sorry for Ginger,” Mary said. “It must be boring for her alone in that big, fancy house.”

  Then Mary said something that Eric couldn’t quite hear. “What?”

  “Nothing,” Mary answered. “I was thinking about Chantel. I guess I said, ‘Poor Chantel.’ ”

  Eric touched her on the shoulder, letting his hand rest there for a moment. “Well, at least you aren’t a part of it.”

  “Yeah,” Mary said. “I haven’t done anything. I wonder why it feels like I did?”

  17

  [slander]

  AROUND THAT TIME, ONE OF THE SCHOOL COUNSELORS, the loose-limbed, goateed Mr. Floyd, came into Eric’s science class. The topic of the day was “Bullying: Rumors and Gossip.”

  Mr. Floyd explained that it was a normal thing they do a few times every year. He reminded the class that he’d given a similar talk in early September. Even so, Eric wondered if this particular visit might be in response to what had been swirling around the hallways for the past few weeks.

  After setting some guidelines—everybody had to listen to and respect one another, basically—Mr. Floyd began by reminding the class of the definition of bullying. He read from the screen, “Bullying is whenever someone uses his or her power unfairly or repeatedly to hurt someone.”

  Eric glanced around the classroom. Pat Daly was in there, along with Hakeem, and Drew Peterson. A couple of Mary’s friends, Chrissie and Alexis, were in the class, along with Mary herself; at times, Eric couldn’t help but feel that Mr. Floyd was speaking directly to those girls.

  Mr. Floyd said there were four types of bullying: verbal, physical, intimidation, and indirect bullying. Today, he seemed most interested in indirect bullying. When Mr. Floyd asked for examples, a bunch of students spoke up, mentioning things like lies and gossip. One by one, different students told about their experiences, either as targets or bullies or bystanders. Except they always said things like “I know a kid who knows a girl who . . .” or, “It didn’t happen to me, but . . .”

  Yeah, right, Eric thought.

  Tamara Agee admitted, “I’ve teased people about the way they looked,” she said. “I didn’t think it was bullying.”

  Drew Peterson raised his hand. “Are you doing this in all the classes, or just ours?”

  “I’ll be presenting this to every student in grade seven,” Mr. Floyd said. “No one is being singled out. But,” he admitted, “there have been some things going on lately that we’re not happy about.”

  Eric could almost hear Chrissie’s eyeballs roll in their sockets. By her body language—long torso poured across her desk, head resting on her arm—Chrissie made it clear that she was soooo bored by everything.

  Mr. Floyd steered the discussion to rumors and how they spread. He asked, “What is slander?”

  Together the class decided that slander was like a mean rumor, done purposely to hurt someone. When he asked if anyone knew of any examples, about six hands instantly shot up. Some girls found mean notes in their lockers, or received anonymous phone calls, all sorts of brutal stuff. Eric was fascinated and horrified at the same time. Mostly, though, he felt relieved, once again, for the 937th time in his life, that he was born a boy. Those girls were murder on one another.

  Through it all, Mary never moved. She sat perfectly still, eyes fixed forward. Once, she almost raised her hand to speak. Eric saw her lean forward, tighten her grip on the desk, but then she seemed to think better of it.

  She never said a word.

  The fun part was when they got to play classroom Jeopardy! Mr. Floyd had a big whiteboard, with four main categories: 1) How Can You Stop Bullies? 2) Rumors; 3) Types of Bullying; and 4) Grab Bag. Each category had five questions, ranging from one hundred to five hundred points.

  When it was Eric’s turn to pick, he landed on a Double Jeopardy question. Mr. Floyd read from a card, “A person who witnesses a bullying situation.”

  Eric sat in silence, uncomfortable in his own skin. So he waited, head down, pretending to think. A couple of boys hummed the Jeopardy! theme song, “Do-do-DO-do do-do-DO . . .”

  “Buzz! Time’s up,” Mr. Floyd announced. “Anyone else have the answer?”

  “What is . . . bystander?!” someone shouted.

  “Correct! For eight hundred points!”

  For the last few minutes, each group had to brainstorm a list of strategies to create a bully-free zone. The clock was ticking and Asi, the writer in Eric’s group, had to scribble really fast:

  respect

  tell an adult

  don’t spread rumors

  don’t encourage a bully

  stand up for a friend

  walk away

  don’t be a bystander

  help victims

  say “Stop it!”

  don’t laugh at bully’s jokes

  be nice to target

  Everybody had lots of ideas. It was fun. Besides, it beat listening to another dull lecture from his science teacher, Mrs. Wilcox. Anything was better than that. Eric’s thoughts turned to Griffin Connelly, then David Hallenback. Eric decided that he’d try a little harder. Like Mr. Floyd said, be an “ally,” not a bystander.

  All the while, Eric kept glancing over at Mary. She was staring out the window, picking at the frayed hems of her jeans.

  18

  [story]

  ENGLISH WAS ERIC’S LAST CLASS, THE HAPPY PERIOD AT the end of the day’s long sentence. But when Mr. Scofield heard a few boys joking about Mr. Floyd’s presentation earlier in the day, he snapped, “You think it’s funny?”

  “Kind of, a little bit,” one boy demurred. “It was fun, Mr. Scofield. We even played Jeopardy!”

  “Jeopardy!? Jeopardy!? This isn’t a game.” Mr. Scofield snapped a piece of chalk in half. It echoed like a gunshot. “Put away that snack, Emily,” he demanded. “Everyone, desks cleared. No talking. Eyes on me.”

  “Why are you being such a grouch, Mr. Scofield?” Emily asked. “We haven’t done anything.”

  Mr. Scofield turned and strode to the chalkboard. He wrote hastily, the chalk clicking against the board: WE DO WHAT WE’RE TOLD.

  He read the words in a slow, loud voice: “We do what we’re told.”

  A few kids grumbled. Mr. Scofield replied sharply, “I am not asking for your cooperation—it’s a requirement. Is that understood?”

  His face reddened. The vein in his forehead flared. It was the first time Eric had seen Mr. Scofield so angry.

  The class responded with silence.

  Mr. Scofield wiped the chalk dust off his hands. He launched into a story. “In the early 1960s, a Yale professor named Stanley Milgram wondered about the Nazi atrocities in Germany. The Holocaust. The slaughter of six million Jews. How was it, Milgram wondered, that these German soldiers could have participated in such unspeakable acts? Someone had to light the ov
ens. Someone had to stand by and watch it happen. How could these ordinary men and women have allowed this to go on?

  “So Milgram set up an experiment. He recruited forty volunteers. They were average, everyday people, like you or me.”

  Eric’s eyes roamed around the room. A few kids had their heads on their desks, but overall, they seemed to be listening. Even Mary.

  The volunteers, Scofield explained, were brought to a laboratory where they met a distinguished-looking scientist in a white lab coat. One by one, each volunteer met a man whom he or she believed to be a middle-aged accountant. After drawing the short straw, the accountant was selected to be the “learner” in the experiment. “The volunteers did not realize,” the teacher said, “that the accountant was actually a professional actor, hired to play a role. The selection process was rigged.”

  A boy called out, “They were punked!”

  Mr. Scofield nodded. “Yes, you could say that.”

  Each volunteer was assured that this was important research. They had critical jobs to perform. The accountant/actor was taken to an adjacent room, where he was hooked up with wires to a large electrical generator. The scientist in the lab coat then asked the man a series of questions. If he replied incorrectly, the volunteer was instructed to flip a switch, delivering an electric shock to the accountant.

  “Here’s where it gets interesting,” Mr. Scofield said.

  “Finally,” Mary joked. The class laughed, but quickly grew quiet. They were already curious.

  “The machine had thirty switches, all carefully labeled, ranging from fifteen volts all the way up to four hundred and fifty volts of electricity. With each shock,” Mr. Scofield said, “the volunteer was told to increase the voltage. The switches were not actually connected to the electrical generator, but the volunteers did not realize that.

  “As the experiment progressed, the accountant began to moan in pain, then scream, then frantically pound the walls. He begged and pleaded for them to stop the experiment. Hearing this, fourteen out of forty volunteers refused to continue. But twenty-six others ignored the cries and completed the experiment. They delivered all thirty shocks, all the way to the maximum level.”