Bullyville

by Francine Prose

  “What about your mom?” said Nola.

  “She worked there, too,” I said.

  “No,” said Nola. “Oh, no. Please tell me you’re not like a total orphan.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “My mom was supposed to go to work that morning. But I had the flu, I was home sick from school, and she stayed home with me, and it saved her life. There were stories about it in all the papers. I was really famous for about fifteen minutes. I was the Miracle Boy. I kept expecting people to ask me to pray for them and stuff.”

  A funny expression passed over Nola’s face. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I heard about that somewhere. Maybe I even read about you. I don’t know. It’s like I already know that story.”

  “Everybody knew that story,” I said. “And now I’m ready for everybody to forget it. It just makes the whole thing about my dad a million times more complicated.”

  “I’ve already forgotten,” Nola said. “I’ve forgotten the whole thing. You’re secret’s safe with me.”

  “What secret?” someone said, and we both turned to see Mrs. Straus standing in the doorway, beaming. “Why, that’s fantastic!” she said. “Already you two have a secret.”

  “When are you coming back?” Nola asked me.

  “Friday,” I said. I checked with Mrs. Straus. Suddenly I was afraid that, after my failures with Ramón and Stimmer, they weren’t going to let me come back at all. Maybe I’d be transferred to the homeless shelter to work with Tyro. And then it struck me that the time I’d spent talking to Nola was the longest I’d gone without thinking about Tyro since I’d started at Bullywell. What was even more bizarre was that Tyro no longer seemed so scary. Though I never would have said this to anyone, it felt almost as if Nola was my guardian angel, keeping me safe.

  “You know what?” Mrs. Straus said as I was leaving. “Since it worked out so well with Nola, why don’t we leave Ramón and Stimmer for some other time? Some other volunteer. Maybe as the program expands we’ll find someone more in sync with their needs. You can just come visit Nola.”

  For a moment I felt guilty for not being more in sync, whatever that was. But I let it go, because the last thing I wanted was for Mrs. Straus to decide that maybe I should hang out with Ramón and Stimmer until we did get more in sync.

  “That’s fine with me,” I said, and it was.

  When I got to the front of the hospital, Fat Freddie was waiting for me in the bus.

  “How did you do with the kids?” he said.

  “I killed it,” I said. “I really did. I was everybody’s new best friend. And you know what? One little girl called me her guardian angel.”

  “Bless your heart,” Fat Freddie said.

  “Thank you, Frederick,” I said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE MINUTE I WALKED into school after Christmas vacation, I could feel the change, like a shift in the weather or a sudden rise in the barometric pressure. I was no longer one of the bullied, no longer a victim.

  Maybe it was just because the second semester had begun, and I’d survived the first term. Maybe it was because three new kids had enrolled at Bullywell for the second term, and the bullies had fresh meat to pick over. Or maybe Tyro’s parents had leaned on him to call off his team of thugs. I didn’t care why it happened, but I liked the result. The bullying—I mean the bullying of me—had stopped just as suddenly as it had started.

  No one called me Fart Strangely, no one tripped me or pushed me, no one sent me hate text messages. No one drowned my lunch in condiments. And somehow I knew that they weren’t going to. Without the daily torture to worry about, I could actually pay attention to my classes. They weren’t difficult, they weren’t easy. It was school. I was fine.

  I figured I could stick it out until June and then I’d bring the subject up again with Mom. Over the summer I’d persuade her that, scholarship or no scholarship, it was time for me to go back to public school. Bullywell wasn’t the place for me. I promised myself that by next year I’d be back in my old school, and I’d have my old friends back, and my life would return to something as close to normal as it would ever be again.

  When Mom asked, I told her that the bullying had stopped. She knew I was telling her the truth this time, and I could tell she was relieved. She stopped asking me if I’d made any friends, so I no longer had to lie about that. Okay, I didn’t have any friends at school, but I no longer had any enemies, and for now that was good enough.

  Besides, I had Nola. Every Wednesday and Friday, I went to visit her. We always found things to talk about, and it was amazing, because she never went anywhere or did anything, but she always had something interesting to say. For example, she’d tell me her dreams, and while it’s usually really boring to listen to other people’s dreams, hers were always fascinating and strange. Once she told me that she dreamed she was getting married to a giant squid, and she was in a bridal dress and the squid was in a top hat and tails. Another day she told me she dreamed she was on a cloud with a lion and a tiger and a gorilla, and the animals kept spitting on people who were walking around down on the earth. She read a lot, and she told me the plots of books that, I noticed, often involved people who had been shrunk to the size of tiny insects or else magnified into giants. We always laughed at the same things. We laughed till tears came into our eyes, though often I couldn’t have said exactly what was so funny.

  When it was time to leave, I always asked her if there was anything she wanted me to bring her the next time I came. At first she said no, no thanks. Maybe she was afraid that if she asked for anything, I’d stop coming back. But after a while, she must have trusted me more, because she’d make little requests, nothing complicated or hard to find. And on the weekends, when I’d go shopping with my mom, I’d try to get what she wanted. Sometimes it was food, like a tangerine or strawberries. Sometimes it was a book she wanted and couldn’t get from the rolling cart they brought around the wards.

  Mom was always glad to help me get what Nola wanted. She liked hearing about Nola. She said, “That’s what’s going to teach you about compassion. Not whatever that dopey Dr. Bratton—”

  “Dr. Bratwurst,” I said.

  It took Mom a minute to get it. Then she laughed.

  “I mean, Dr. Bratwurst,” she said.

  One day, when I asked Nola if there was anything she wanted me to bring her, she said, “Actually, yes. But it’s not something you can bring, exactly. It’s just something I really want, something you can help me do.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I’d like to get out of here,” Nola said. “I’d like you to help me escape.”

  “Er…how we would do that?” I asked.

  “Lots of ways,” she said. “You could bring me some clothes, like maybe your clothes, and I could dress up like a normal person and just walk out of here. Or else we could do something dramatic, like pull the fire alarm, and then when everyone was running around evacuating the place, I could slip out.”

  “I think that one’s illegal,” I said. “Pulling the fire alarm.”

  “Okay,” said Nola. “Back to Plan A.”

  After that we used to talk about it. We’d plan what I was going to bring her, what she was going to wear. I could never tell how serious Nola was. I kept thinking that I’d also have to bring some of my mom’s makeup, because no matter what Nola wore, someone was bound to notice that we were trying to smuggle a bright yellow person out of the hospital. Also I’d wonder what we were supposed to do with all the tubes and bottles she was attached to, and beyond that, what I would do with her, where I would bring her. Home to live with me and Mom? Not even Mom would go for that. To say nothing of the fact that, whether I liked to admit it or not, Nola was sick. What would I do if she got worse? Mainly, the whole subject made me realize how brave Nola was, and how strong. She never felt sorry for herself or gave up, and she never wanted anyone to feel sorry for her.

  From time to time I would forget that she was sick. And then one afternoon I woul
d get to her room and she would be lying there with her eyes closed, and I would say, “Nola, how are you feeling?”

  “I’m excellent,” she’d say. “I couldn’t be more excellent.”

  Still, I could tell she was making an effort to open her eyes and look as if she was all right. By the time I left, I could also tell that she was sort of glad I was going, because she was tired and not feeling well, and she needed to rest.

  Pretty soon, I couldn’t help noticing that I was thinking about Nola even when I wasn’t with her. It was almost as if I had a crush on her. How weird was that? Having a crush on a little kid with some kind of mysterious disease. But it wasn’t as if I wanted to date her or ask her to a dance or make out with her or anything. It was more like I had a crush on her spirit. I felt like she knew what I was thinking without my having to say it. I felt like she got me—all the best things about me. And I felt like all the good things about her rubbed off on me when I was with her.

  Being around Nola made me feel smarter and funnier and nicer. And having her as a friend made me feel better about what had happened to me, about losing my dad, and the towers falling, and life in general. She was the only high spot in my life that year.

  It was embarrassing, but whenever Fat Freddie dropped me off at the hospital—as soon as he pulled away from the curb—I always began to speed walk, and then to run. I was that eager to see Nola. I couldn’t run in the hospital, of course, but I was still moving fast.

  Sometimes, not very often, Nola talked about being sick. Once she told me how, when she was five, she’d slipped into a coma, and that had been the first real sign that something was seriously wrong. She’d been in kindergarten, and they’d been playing some stupid game like Simon Says, and suddenly she started feeling like she was at the bottom of an aquarium.

  “Underwater?” I said. “As in drowning?”

  “Sort of,” said Nola. “But more like I was swimming, like I was a fish surrounded by other fish. All the other kids turned into minnows and angelfish and striped tropical fish, and the mean ones were nasty fish, baby sharks and piranhas, and they were all swimming past me. I could see their bright, beady fish eyes and watch their gills pumping. And my teacher was the biggest fish, almost like a whale, she just kept getting bigger and bigger. Her voice was booming, and the last thing I remember hearing before I passed out was her superloud, echoey voice saying, ‘Nola, pay attention!’ Then, ‘Nola, are you okay?’”

  “Were you?” I asked. “You were okay, right?”

  “Eventually,” said Nola. “But first I died.”

  “You what?”

  “I died,” Nola said. “I was clinically dead. And you know what? It’s true, or sort of true, what people say about seeing this light-filled tunnel. Except that they always make it sound like some heavenly tunnel, and I kept thinking I was in an actual tunnel. I mean, like the Holland Tunnel. I thought we were driving into the city, and the lights were splashing all over the ceiling like they do on rainy days.”

  “Then what?”

  “They brought me back,” she said. “The doctors saved me. I don’t know how. I wasn’t supposed to know I’d been dead, but I read it in my chart. None of the doctors or nurses knew I could read yet, so they would just leave my records lying around, and I read them. That’s how I found out that I’d died.”

  “Wow” was all I could say.

  I got up and went over to the window. Tears had filled my eyes, and I didn’t want Nola to see. Because it seemed to me that if she’d died once, she might die again, and I didn’t want that to happen. It made me think of the other dead person I knew—namely, my dad. I wondered if it had been like that for him, but I knew it hadn’t. It couldn’t have felt like being underwater. Because my dad, I was pretty sure, had died in the heat of fire.

  One day, at lunch, I was sitting all by myself, as usual, in the refectory and Tyro—who also happened to be alone, without his usual entourage—came and sat next to me. I could feel my whole body tense, and I leaned forward as if I needed to protect my food. We were having some kind of dog-foodlike stew, supposedly beef.

  Watching me hunched over my stew must have reminded Tyro of the old days, because he said, “Remember when I put all that ketchup on your burger?”

  “Yeah,” I said warily. “What about it?”

  “That was pretty funny, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “Actually,” I said, “it wasn’t funny at all. It was really dumb.” Strangely, I wasn’t scared of him anymore. We’d crossed some border or passed some threshold. We could have been two different people. We were nothing like the bully and the bully-ee we’d been all through the first semester.

  “I guess it wasn’t that funny,” he said. “I’m sorry about that, okay?”

  We concentrated on our stew for a while. Then he said, “How’s the hospital thing going?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “There’s this one little kid I like. We get along. So it makes it sort of fun.” I stopped myself, not wanting to tell him any more about Nola. It was as if telling him might spoil everything, as if he might decide to take it all away from me. What if he persuaded his dad to switch our jobs? Then he would get to go to the hospital, and Nola would be his friend instead of mine.

  “How’s the homeless thing?” I said. “I’ll bet that’s really…rewarding.”

  “It’s all right, I guess. A lot of the guys smell really bad. And last week, one guy pulled a knife on another guy and got kicked out of the shelter. That was exciting, for about two minutes. Otherwise, it’s mostly boring. And the food I have to dish out is totally gross and repulsive. It makes this shit look like something you’d get at a fancy restaurant in the city.”

  “That’s hard to imagine,” I said.

  “Don’t try,” he said. “You don’t want to.”

  I laughed. It wasn’t funny, but it was funny enough.

  “How are things going otherwise?” he asked. I wondered why he was asking until I remembered that he was supposed to be my Big Brother.

  “Fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.” And that was that. We ate our lunch, and the lunch period ended, and we went back to our classes as if there had never been any bad feeling between us, as if we were just two guys—the Big Brother and the new student he’d been asked to watch over—meeting for a friendly catch-up session after the official phase of their relationship, the Big Brother–Little Brother part, was officially over.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ONE AFTERNOON, A few weeks before spring break, I went to see Nola and she wasn’t in her room.

  Not only was her bed empty, but it looked as if she’d moved out. The stuffed animals were gone, and there was nothing there but the empty bed and the yellow walls that Nola claimed that she’d turned yellow to match. My first thought was that Nola was cured and they’d sent her home. I wondered if I would still be allowed to visit her, if we could still be friends. Even though I’d hoped she would recover, somehow I’d never planned for the possibility that she might not be in the hospital forever, and that our friendship wouldn’t go on exactly the way it was.

  Then another thought occurred to me, and suddenly I was afraid that Nola had died. I was shaking so hard that, before I left the room, I had to go into the bathroom and splash cold water on my face because I thought I was going to throw up.

  I ran to Mrs. Straus’s office.

  “Oh, Bart,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I’ve been trying to reach you all day, but I think I must have the wrong number for you.”

  I turned my phone on and flipped it open: six missed calls.

  “We’re not allowed to keep our phones on at school,” I said.

  “Oh, dear, I wish you had gotten the message,” she said. “Because I would have told you not to come.”

  “Where’s Nola?”

  “She’s had a little setback,” said Mrs. Straus. “She’s been moved to the pediatric step-down unit.”

  “What’s a step-down unit?” I asked.

  “It’s
a place where the nurses can watch the kids more closely,” said Mrs. Straus.

  “Why do they need to watch her?”

  “She was having some trouble breathing. Nothing serious, nothing that hasn’t happened before—”

  “What do you mean, trouble?”

  Mrs. Straus put her arm around my shoulders.

  “Bart, honey,” she said, “maybe you should just go home this afternoon. I’m not sure they’ll let you see her in the unit. In fact, I’m almost positive they won’t. I’ll keep in touch with you by phone. I promise I’ll call. I’ll let you know how she’s doing. And as soon as this little crisis is over, you can come visit her again.”

  I didn’t like the sound of it. I didn’t like it at all.

  “When is it going to be over?” I asked.

  “What?” said Mrs. Straus.

  “Nola’s setback,” I said.

  “That’s hard to predict,” said Mrs. Straus.

  “So how do you know it will be over?”

  Mrs. Straus sighed. “Because this isn’t the first time. It’s happened before. And she’s always pulled through. Nola’s a strong girl.”

  That made me feel a little better. But not much.

  “I want to see her,” I said. “I’m not going home till I see her.”

  “Okay, said Mrs. Straus. “You two are such good buddies, it might make Nola feel better to see you. But I can’t promise anything. And if they do let you see her, it will only be for a few minutes.”

  “Fine,” I said. “A few minutes will be fine. I just want to say hi.”

  Mrs. Straus led me down the corridor to another wing of the hospital. And I could tell—just as I could tell about the visitors getting off at the different floors that first day in the elevator—that things were more serious here, sadder and more dangerous. No one looked at anyone else, no one smiled, and the waiting room was filled with family members talking quietly on their cell phones, or holding on to one another, or dozing on the chairs, under blankets, as if they’d been there for days. As if they’d left their homes and moved into the waiting room and were camped out, waiting for some signal that would allow them to go see a desperately sick relative.