by David Lubar
We burst from the cave and headed across the parking lot toward the safety of the bus. I was clutching Debbie’s hand all the way to the bus as she pulled me along.
“Are you okay?” I asked when we got inside and tumbled into our seats. I was out of breath, and my heart was pounding, but I realized I hadn’t felt this alive in months.
“Yeah,” she said. “You?”
“I think so.” I felt my head, and checked my arms. No bites or scratches. “Bats don’t act like that,” I said.
“Rabid bats would,” Debbie said. Then, she gasped and pointed out the bus window. I looked where she pointed, and gasped, too.
Billy stumbled out from the cavern. He had something on his head. Lots of things, actually.
“Bats,” I said, as the creepy reality hit me. “He’s covered with them.”
“Bad hair day,” Debbie said.
For sure. Or bat hair day. Billy had dozens of bats anchored in his hair. So did his friends, who emerged right after him. The bats were flapping their wings so frantically, I expected them to carry the bullies off. Eventually, Billy and the others swatted the bats out of their hair and got on the bus, crying, whimpering, and shaking so badly, I almost felt sorry for them. As a bonus, they were too traumatized to tease me at all during the ride home.
My parents took me for my final chemo that evening. Debbie’s folks dropped her off at the hospital so she could meet me and ride home with us.
“Great day,” she said when I saw her in the waiting area.
“Very great,” I said.
Then her eyes got wide. She looked like she was about to scream.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as she slapped her hand over her mouth. I was always a bit worn out after chemo, but Debbie had seen me like that before now. I wondered whether I looked worse than usual this time.
Her whole body was shaking.
“Is it that bad?” I asked.
She shook her head, spoke a muffled, “Nope,” through her hand, and pointed past me with her other hand. When I glanced over my shoulder, I realized she wasn’t fighting against a scream. She was trying to keep from roaring with laughter.
So was I, when I saw who else was getting released. Though I felt a bit shocked, too, as I stared at Billy and his friends. They reminded me of extras from a low-budget zombie movie. Their heads had been shaved—I suppose to allow the doctors to treat the deep scratches and bites from the bats. All of them had needed stitches. I’d imagine they’d probably also gotten rabies shots and tons of antibiotics.
I guess I felt a bit sorry for them. But not sorry enough to resist saying, “Bald is beautiful,” as they slinked past me.
“I’ll bet this is one class trip they’ll never forget,” Debbie said.
“Especially after next Monday,” I said. That was something I’d sort of been dreading for weeks, but now I was very eager for it.
“Right,” Debbie said. “School photos. This is perfect.”
And it was.
TOUGH CROWD
I had five minutes to live. No joke. And I was stuck in a room with seven kids who would have no problem letting me die. For that matter, they’d probably even volunteer to help me toward that exit, if they thought they could get away with it.
Everything would have worked out just fine if I hadn’t gotten sent to lunch detention. I can get my friends rolling on the floor at my regular lunch table without even trying. I can almost always come up with a joke. Even if no good jokes pop into my mind, I can definitely get a laugh by doing something gross with my milk. But that wouldn’t work here, in this windowless basement classroom. The detention crowd was basically made up of mean and angry brutes who hated kids like me at first sight. If you looked up “nerd” in the dictionary, my picture would be there, complete with taped-together eyeglasses and three pens in my shirt pocket. Unless one of the brutes had ripped the picture out, crumpled it up, and flushed it down the toilet.
Right after lunch started, Mr. Spalter, who was never supposed to leave us alone, dashed out. Probably for coffee. I knew it would be dangerous to attract attention in this room—I’d taken a seat off to one side and invested a lot of effort into breathing as quietly as possible—but I was desperate. I searched for the best killer line I could think of. And yeah, I noted the irony of using “killer” in a room filled with hostile slabs of flesh. It wasn’t hard finding the perfect joke.
“Hey,” I said, “did you hear the one about—”
“Shut up, jerk,” Angus Loutman yelled. “Or I’ll rip your head off and feed it to you.”
I shut up, though it was hard to keep myself from pointing out the basic impossibility of what he’d threatened to do. It would have made more sense to threaten to shove my head down my throat, as opposed to feeding it to me. Still, in my experience, bullies don’t like being corrected about the flawed logic of their threats, or anything else, for that matter.
The others laughed.
But that laughter didn’t count. I hadn’t made them laugh. Angus had.
My brain raced through my options. They were, as the old saying goes, slim and none. I had only one slender chance to make things work. And it wasn’t a very good chance. I needed to try to get them to understand my situation, and have enough curiosity to let me explain what I needed.
“Listen!” I said, standing up and backing toward the corner until the walls stopped me from edging farther away.
Seven brutish heads rotated toward me. I saw three of my fellow detainees bracing themselves to rise from their desks. A fourth grabbed a book to throw at me.
I leaped into an explanation, hoping that my audience would be captivated by the weirdness of the story I was about to tell long enough for me to reach the finish. If not, I was really finished.
“I’ll be dead in five minutes,” I said, pointing to the clock over the door. “At noon, I will drop dead. Want to know why?”
This was the moment when everything could fail. I held my breath. It was always a risk to ask dangerous people a question. But it was also a good way to grab their attention. If my gamble failed, and they silenced me, either with words or with actions, it was over. Totally and horribly over in ways I didn’t want to think about.
“This should be good,” Angus said. He wore the smug smile a gamer gets when the final boss’s hit bar is down to one last tick. Given that Angus was the biggest, meanest guy in the room, I knew the others would go along with him.
“But if it’s some kind of stupid joke, you’ll die even sooner,” he added. “You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
“No,” I said. “I definitely don’t want to die sooner.”
I waited a second, to make sure I had their attention. There was little time to waste, but I’ve been a joker all my life, and I knew a bit about holding a crowd. This was going to be a tough crowd to hold, so I had to make sure I started off the right way. If I lost them before I even started, I was doomed. As soon as I was sure they were listening, I plunged into the story.
That was the key to keeping their attention—make it into a story. Our brains are wired to like stories. And I had an amazing tale to tell.
“I thought I’d found a genie,” I said, diving right into the part they might find hardest to believe. I didn’t waste time with the background details about uncovering an old brass bottle when I was digging in the yard, or even describing the bottle. Nobody cares about that stuff. And I didn’t waste time explaining I was in the backyard because I’d gotten in a fight with my sister. That’s where I go when I’m angry. Her boyfriend had given her a box of these awesome chocolates, and she wouldn’t even let me have one. She just sat there, eating them, licking her fingers, and going, “Yummmm,” right in my face.
I raced to the next part about my discovery. “But he was some other kind of magical creature who was far more dangerous. Genies grant wishes. This thing offered me a bargain.”
They were all listening. Or, at least, all still looking at me. I knew the best way to keep thei
r attention. I told the rest of my story like I was reading it out loud from a book.
“Anything you want,” he said. “For a price.”
“Chocolate,” I said. “I want the most delicious chocolate ever made.”
He rubbed his hands together, pulled them apart, and held out a piece of chocolate.
“What do I have to do for it?” I asked.
“Nothing, yet,” he said.
I took it. I ate it. It was amazing. I can’t even describe how great it was. I’d never tasted chocolate that wonderful.
“Want more?” he asked me.
“Yeah. I’d love more,” I said. My mouth watered at the thought.
“You can have a whole box. A special box that will last a month, no matter how much you take from it. It will never become empty. But you need to give me something in return,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“Something special. What do you have to offer?”
“I can tell you a great joke,” I said. “I know tons of jokes.”
“That won’t work,” he said. “I don’t laugh at jokes.”
I wondered whether he was kidding, but he seemed dead serious. As I tried to think of something else, he said, “I have an offer. It should be easy for you.”
“What?” I asked.
“You have to make someone laugh each day before noon, for a whole month,” he said.
“No problem.”
“But if you fail, even once…”
“You’ll take back the rest of the chocolate?” I guessed.
He shook his head. “If you fail, you will die. Your death will be slow and painful. And that will give me pleasure.”
“I was shocked,” I told my stone-faced audience. “I’ll admit it. I didn’t want to risk my life. But these were awesome chocolates. And I knew I could do it. I make people laugh all the time. I’m a natural-born joker. And I managed to do it easily enough each day, especially since I had lunch at 11:40, and my friends like my jokes. Weekends weren’t a problem, since I had plenty of friends who lived on my street.”
Angus, who’d been leaning forward in his seat, started to lean back. I knew I had to get to the finish before I lost my battle against his limited attention span.
“But here I am. Stuck with you, and you aren’t going to laugh at anything I say because, let’s face it, you hate me. I’m the kind of kid you crush for fun. But I’m begging you, just this once, listen to a joke and let yourself laugh. I really do know some great jokes. And it feels good to laugh.”
That was it. The moment of truth was here. My life was in their hands. I looked at each of them, one by one, and tried to guess what sort of audience I was facing. Did they totally not care about other people? Their eyes gave me no clue.
The clock ticked. I looked over at it. So did all of them. The two hands pointed straight up. They’d reached twelve, noon.
I gasped, clutched my chest, and fell to the floor. As I closed my eyes, I heard Angus laugh.
“Dead,” he said. “Cool.”
It was a nasty, mean-spirited laugh. But it was a laugh. And I’d made it happen.
“Get off the floor!” Mr. Spalter yelled as he walked back into the classroom clutching a large mug of coffee. He had no idea how perfect his timing was.
“Sure,” I said, springing up. I was happy to be alive, and totally thrilled that I’d finished my month of making people laugh. Timing really is the secret to comedy, and to many other things in life. I had actually, as Angus threatened, died sooner. Though not for real. I knew the clock in this room was thirty seconds fast, like all the other clocks in the building. I’d checked that very carefully after I’d made the bargain. And I knew that at least one of the kids in the room would laugh at my death. That’s the nature of bullies. Death and suffering amuse them. That’s why I’d pretended to die when the clock in the classroom struck noon. And that’s how I made someone laugh before my real deadline.
I slipped my hand in my pocket and grabbed a chocolate. A few minutes later, when Mr. Spalter was distracted with yelling at Angus, I popped it into my mouth.
It was delicious. It was worth it. But it was my last one. The month was over. The box would be empty when I got home. That wouldn’t do. I guess it was time to hunt down that genie, or whatever he was, and ask for another deal. No joke.
GORDIE’S GONNA GIT YA
I guess a lot of kids would hate the idea of leaving the city where they were born. Not me. I couldn’t wait to move away. However bad my new school would be, it wouldn’t be worse than the one I’d left. I didn’t have a single friend.
“Make friends,” Mom told me at the start of each year.
She never explained how.
“Man up,” Dad said.
Whatever that means.
At least we’d moved during the summer, so I wouldn’t have to show up at my new school in the middle of the year. But, eventually, it was time for school, and time for me to meet my classmates and discover what sort of torments they might have in store for the new kid. The bus stopped right in front of my house. They had to do that, here. The houses are pretty far apart. I can’t even see the next house from the road. Our new place used to be a farm. Mom and Dad bought it because they could run their business anywhere, and the city was an expensive place to live.
Here goes, I thought when the bus pulled up. I got ready for stares and sneers, and hoped I could find an empty seat.
“Hey, you’re new,” a kid said. He was sitting by the window in the second row. He was big, almost scary big, with short dark hair, wearing a T-shirt for a band I’d stopped listening to at least a year ago, and a ball cap with the logo of a tractor company.
“Obviously,” I said. I waited for the first insult.
He patted the empty spot next to him. “Have a seat.”
I looked down the aisle. There were some empty seats in the back.
“Come on,” the kid said. “Before you get Orland yelling at you.”
I guess Orland was the bus driver. I dropped into the seat. “Thanks.”
He held out his hand. “I’m Leo.”
A handshake? Seriously? “Duncan,” I said.
We shook. His grip was way stronger than mine, but he didn’t crush my hand. And he didn’t mock me. He just talked about the things kids could do for fun in town, and asked me about where I’d come from.
Leo was on the football team. No big surprise, there. He was the quarterback. Again, no surprise. But he wasn’t stuck up, like the star athletes at my old school.
That was a nice surprise.
When we got to the school, he introduced me to his friends. They all wanted to know about the city. Most of them had never been there. This was great.
Somehow, Leo even managed to get me onto the football team. It was sort of nice. I sat with the other players at lunch, and hung out with them after practice.
It wasn’t until October that I first started hearing about Gordie. It was usually just one kid pushing another and saying, “Gordie’s gonna git ya!”
The other would push back, of course, and say, “Nope. He’s gonna git you!”
“Who’s Gordie?” I asked Leo.
“Nobody,” Leo said. “Kids just scare each other with stories about him. He’s not real.”
For someone who wasn’t real, he sure got mentioned a lot. Eventually, I pieced a bit more of it together. Gordie was supposed to appear on Halloween. But that’s as much as I could find out. I wasn’t worried. Stuff like that just isn’t real.
Halloween was on a Friday, which meant we had a football game before we could go out for candy. It started out badly. Leo threw two interceptions. Even so, the other team wasn’t able to take much advantage of that. All they managed was one field goal. So we were just down three to nothing. And then, near the end of the fourth quarter, Leo called a play where I had to run the ball. It went perfectly. The whole team blocked for me. I got the ball into the end zone for a touchdown.
We won. I was the her
o.
Everyone went wild. And then, they all slipped off while I was changing. By the time I got out of the locker room, the whole school felt empty. Now I was creeped out. But instead of going home, I went to the library. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but if Gordie had some sort of connection to the school, the library was the best place to dig for information.
The school published a literary magazine every year, full of stories and poems, as well as drawings and articles. I found a stack of old issues and thumbed through the indexes. And there it was, an article from six years ago, “The Legend of Gordie.”
According to the article, fifty or sixty years ago, there was a kid nobody liked. His name was Gordie Vetnari. He didn’t have any friends. Everybody picked on him. One night, on Halloween, some of the kids in town chased after him to steal his candy. When he was running away, he stepped right in front of a car. He got killed.
Every year since then, on Halloween, Gordie comes back to school and drags off the most popular kid, kicking and screaming. That kid is never seen again.
“Stupid story,” I said. I got up from the table, leaving the magazine where it was, and stepped out of the library. I didn’t get far. Someone was standing at the end of the hall.
“Must be nice to have friends,” he said.
He was wearing a Halloween costume—cowboy hat and boots, gun belt with a toy gun in a holster, and a leather vest over a flannel shirt—but his body looked kind of funny, like it had been crumpled and then straightened out. And the hat was tilted at an odd angle.
“Who are you?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he said, “I thought it would be Leo. But you really snatched the title from him at the last minute. Nice touchdown.” He stepped closer. Beneath the tilted hat, half his head was crushed. “Congratulations, Mister Popularity. You’re my new best friend. For as long as you live. Which won’t be long.”
