Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key

by Jack Gantos

  Mrs. Maxy was trying to clean up the mess and calm the class down when Mrs. Jarzab returned with blood on her jacket and pointed at me.

  “Joey,” she said from the front of the room, “bring your things and come with me.”

  I pulled the front of my T-shirt way out and piled everything from inside my desk on it and carried it away. “Ill be back,” I said over my shoulder to everyone because everyone was still staring at me and looking scared. “I will.” And I was crying as I walked away and I couldn’t see with the tears in my eyes and my stupid ankle hurt and I hit the edge of the door with my shoulder and it gave me a charley horse. I let go of one side of my T-shirt and my stuff fell all over the floor. I turned to look at Mrs. Maxy and she was just biting her lip and I thought I could tell she really wanted me to stay. She knew I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Our eyes met and I said, “I’m a good kid. I just got dud meds.” She winced, then turned her eyes toward the class and said, “Now I want everyone to settle down. Take a deep breath, let it out slowly, and prepare to do some math drills.”

  “Math drills are one of my strengths!” I shouted.

  But by then Mrs. Jarzab had picked up all my stuff and grabbed my hand like it too was a piece of my stuff and led me down the hall toward the office.

  8

  SUSPENDED

  “It’s one thing for him to hurt himself,” Mrs. Jarzab said to my mother, pushing a flowered box of Kleenex toward her. Mom plucked a few out. She had changed the color of her fingernails and they were so bright red her fingertips looked like mine when they were covered with wet blood while I was trying to fix Maria’s nose.

  We were sitting in the principal’s office. I had been there since Mrs. Jarzab pulled me out of class. My mom had been called in from the beauty parlor and was still wearing the white smock with her name, FRAN, embroidered on the front. She borrowed a car and got here so fast Maria had just left in the ambulance and Mom was still breathing heavily as she wiped away the lines of sweat around her neck.

  “I’m sure it was just an accident,” my mother replied, and set the wad of damp Kleenex on the edge of the desk. “Kids will be kids. Things like this happen.”

  Mrs. Jarzab pulled a Kleenex out of the box and used it to pick up Mom’s like she was picking up something filthy. Then she tossed it in the trash can. “There are special circumstances in this case,” Mrs. Jarzab insisted, and tapped the top of my file. “Joey has a history of being harmful to himself, and to others.”

  “I know his history,” Mom said. “I’m his mother. Nobody knows him better than me and even though there have been some problems in the past they are all accidental. Joey is not a mean child.” She was sweating down the side of her face as if she was in trouble for what had happened to Maria.

  “I don’t disagree that it was an accident,” Mrs. Jarzab replied. “What alarms me is the number of accidents that Joey is responsible for.” She opened my file. “Let me cite what all happened this school year alone …”

  “Just skip it,” my mother said, sounding a little angry like when people at work tick her off.

  “Well, keep in mind we have informed you of his behavior in the past …”

  I started to ask Mom if she had any meds but she patted me on the leg. “Let’s just listen for now,” she whispered.

  “… and the last time I warned you,” Mrs. Jarzab continued, “that if we didn’t have the resources to help Joey here, that we would have to consider intensive counseling at the special-ed center downtown, where he would receive the attention he needs.”

  “I’m aware of all of this,” Mom said. But it was news to me.

  “What special-ed center?” I said suddenly. “What—”

  “Honey,” Mom interrupted. “Just listen for a minute, while I do the talking.”

  Mrs. Jarzab had already put the Kleenex away and Mom reached for her own purse. When she un-snapped it I could smell the makeup and lipstick and perfume, especially the perfume, and I wanted to leap onto her lap and bury my head against her neck where she always put a dab of something extra nice and when I smelled it I just imagined following it to a safe, soft, warm Mom place that would protect me from everything bad and I could protect her.

  “Joey,” Mom said. “Joey.” She gave me a quick little pinch on my thigh and I snapped out of it.

  “Yeah?” I said, real sleepy like I just woke up and wanted to go back to sleep. “What?”

  “Mrs. Jarzab wants you to tell your side of the story.”

  “What story?” I asked, kind of desperate, because I suddenly realized they had been talking for a while and I had no idea what they’d been saying.

  “Tell her,” Mom said, gently this time because she knew I had drifted far away. “About the scissors.”

  “Yes, tell me, Joey,” Mrs. Jarzab said, with her face all nice and soft like there was nothing in the world she wanted to hear about but me and the scissors.

  So I told her. “I was making bumper stickers for me and my mom to change the world. And my safety scissors were too small for the paper so I got Mrs. Maxy’s out of her teacher drawer and was running when Maria jumped in front of me just when I tripped over my slipper ear. I fell forward and after I got up everyone said I cut off her nose tip.”

  When I finished Mom was looking into her lap, and Mrs. Jarzab was writing furiously on a pad. Then she stopped writing and looked up.

  “Keep him at home tomorrow. The district special-ed bus will pick him up the day after. We need a day for the paperwork to go through.”

  “Okay,” Mom said. “But this is temporary, right?”

  “Because he has injured another student he has to be suspended for six weeks and receive mandatory counseling. That is school policy. But given Joey’s record, he was bound to end up at the center anyway, so maybe this is a blessing in disguise. What happens now is all up to him.”

  We left the office and nothing more was said. All the way out to the car I kept staring at the ground to see if I could spot Maria’s blood drops, or maybe she lost the tip of her nose and I thought if I could find it she would forgive me and I wouldn’t be in so much trouble. For one second I thought I saw it and I reached down and snatched up a little flesh-colored round thing, but it was just a used round Band-Aid. My mother slapped it out of my hand and that was the first moment I realized she was mad at me too. And suddenly it was as if my heart was as uncontrollable as my legs. All this time I thought she was on my side, because I was on her side. But maybe she had given up on me too. So I didn’t say anything more because I was scared she was going to be against me like everyone else.

  We drove away in silence. Not until we entered the Burger King drive-through did Mom speak again. She ordered for both of us without asking me what I wanted. And when we got the food from the side window Mom just pulled around the corner and parked on the street under a shade tree.

  “I want to talk with you,” she said as she handed out the food. “I’ve done my best,” she said. “Do you understand that?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I know it’s all me. I’m the one that’s messed, not you.”

  I started eating my French fries. First the bottom end, then the top. I put the middle to one side. The middles didn’t crunch when I bit into them so I saved them for last like a vegetable.

  “You’re not stupid, and you’re not messed up,” Mom said. “Don’t think that.”

  “Everybody else does,” I said, not looking at her face. “Or they call me Retard. So really, messed up is nicer than Retard, or Brain-damaged, or Zippy the Pinhead.”

  She just held a wad of napkins up to her eyes and her shoulders hunched forward and I knew she was crying because I had seen her trying to hide it from me a million times before.

  “I pulled it together for you,” she finally said, and wiped her nose. “When you were a baby I screwed up and left you behind but I loved you so much I pulled it together and came back to you. Now you have to pull it together for me,” she said. “It’s your turn. You
owe me that much. You owe yourself, because if you don’t pull it together now, I don’t know what will happen next. But it is bound to be worse. Way worse than anything that has ever happened to you.”

  I knew she was right. “I’ll have to go to a scary special-ed school,” I finally said, already crying by the time my face sunk into her shoulder.

  “Just for a while,” she said, and rubbed my neck. “Soon they’ll see what a good guy you are and send you back.”

  9

  BAD SEED

  The next day I broke one of Mom’s big rules. I left the house while she was at work and limped about ten blocks over to Maria’s house. All the way over I practiced what I wanted to say to her about how sorry I was, and I went over it again just before I knocked on her door.

  It opened really fast and a big man in a mechanic’s greasy jumpsuit who I figured must be her dad said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Joey Pigza,” I replied, and I was very nervous because all the way over in my mind she was going to answer the door. I was ready for that. But it didn’t turn out that way. Now I felt that I didn’t know what to do, so I just said what I meant to tell her. “I’m here to say I’m sorry,” I said, and I smiled like I had just stepped on the toe of a three-hundred-pound gorilla.

  He pulled the door behind him to close off the house like I was going to trick him and run through his legs and attack Maria’s nose again. “Get out of here,” he said.

  I held my two “scissors cuts paper” fingers up in front of my face. “I didn’t come here with any scissors,” I said.

  Then he stepped toward me. “They shouldn’t let messed-up kids go to school with regular kids,” he said.

  I backed away. “I’m only a little messed up,” I said quietly.

  He stepped toward me again, quickly, as if he were going to pick me up like a chunk of log and heave me off the property. “Come here,” he said, and reached for me.

  Even with my bad ankle I was pretty quick and I turned and ran down the sidewalk. I glanced over my shoulder and he wasn’t running at me but he was walking real quick like he just wanted to stick out his belly and bump me along. Behind him, in the big front window, Maria was watching with a huge bandage around her face and lots of silver “Get Well” balloons floating above her head and a fluffy white puppy squirming in her arms. For a moment I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to run over and apologize to her hurt face, and I wanted to run from him. But I just got jammed up, and as he came at me I stood there frozen and closed my eyes.

  But he didn’t hit me. “Get out of here,” he said.

  “It was an accident,” I replied. “I’m not a bad kid.”

  “I don’t care if you are the Baby Jesus,” he said. “You hurt my girl again and it’ll be lights out for you and your whole family.”

  “My mom had nothing to do with this,” I said.

  He just looked at me with a nasty face, threw his head back and laughed. “Your mom had everything to do with this.”

  “That’s a lie,” I said. “She wasn’t even there.” By then I was so mad at him for talking bad about my mom I was no longer afraid. “My mom is not the problem,” I shot back at him. “I am.” And I surprised him with that because he didn’t know what to do next.

  But I did. I put my hands on my hips, turned and walked off with my chin held high. And it wasn’t until I went all the way back home and sat on the porch and remembered that I’d no longer be going back to my regular school that I got scared. I’d be somewhere else, with a lot of strange kids and teachers, and I have to tell you that all of this worried me so much I went inside the house and tried to find my meds because I wanted to take a bunch of them and return myself to normal.

  But it was also one of Mom’s rules to bring them to work with her. And she didn’t break her own rules. So I just crawled up into the big La-Z-Boy chair and stared at the photograph of me being very still and gave myself a time-out. When Mom called to check up on me I told her everything was okay now.

  That night, after Mom cooked a dinner of macaroni and cheese, we took a walk.

  “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” she said, and kept her arm rested across my shoulders so that her warm hand covered my ear, which was nice because the wind was blowing.

  “I’ve been thinking about you too,” I said, looking up at her, then down at the sidewalk, then up at her again then down again because once I had stepped on dog poop and slipped and never forgot it.

  “Well, you’ve been on my mind because I have to work early tomorrow and can’t see you onto the bus in the morning.”

  “Oh,” I said in a small voice, and I felt my whole body get sad. “I was hoping you could.”

  “Me too,” she said softly, “but I just couldn’t shift my early appointments around at work. Those ladies get pretty fussy about having their hair done on time. Still, I have two presents for you.”

  I looked up at her. “Two?” I said. “For me?” I love presents.

  “The first one,” she said, “doesn’t look like a present. It isn’t gift-wrapped. It doesn’t have a ribbon around it, but I think it is a huge present.”

  “Well?”

  We stopped walking and stood still and she stared down at me and cupped my chin in her hand. “My first present,” she said very seriously, “is good advice. I want you to remember something that has always helped me. Whenever you think of something bad, you have to quick think of something good. And you can never, never think of three things bad in a row or else you will just feel awful.”

  “Okay,” I said, wishing there was more to the present than advice. Something more I could hold in my hands.

  “I mean it,” she said, because she knew I wasn’t listening as seriously as she was talking.

  “Does that mean if I have a good thought, then I have to think of something bad?” I asked, turning it all around.

  “No,” she replied. “You can think of all the good thoughts in a row you want.”

  “Okay, now what’s my second present?” I asked, because the thrill of the first one had worn off quickly.

  “It is a very small present,” she said.

  “Smaller than the last one?” I shouted, and began to stagger as if I was wounded in action.

  “Be patient. It starts small and gets bigger.”

  We passed the ice cream parlor, where I knew I was never allowed to go. And the Polish-American club, where my grandmother said my dad spent some of his time “bouncing around” before he went to Pittsburgh. And then we turned and walked into the used-book store.

  “A book?” I asked, thinking that my presents were getting really small.

  “A book is only part of it,” she said, and the way she was smiling told me it was really good. We walked to the back of the store and there was a short shelf of books on pets and pet care. She reached onto the shelf and pulled out a book on dogs.

  “Joey, if you do really well in special ed,” she said, “you can get a dog.”

  And I was beaming inside. I had always wanted a dog. A little dog that looked just like me. A Joey dog. A nice, springy dog. A good dog. I had told Grandma I wanted one but she said having a dog in the house would be just like having two of me. But now I flipped through the book with a huge smile on my face. There were about a million dogs to choose from, but I knew which one was for me. A Chihuahua.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m not thinking bad thoughts.”

  She knelt down and kissed me on the forehead. “You better not be,” she replied. “Your luck is changing. From now on you will be known as Joey Pigza, the lucky boy with his own dog.’”

  10

  THE CROSSING

  The next morning I was waiting on my front porch with my dog book when the blue-and-white handicapped bus for special ed pulled up. There was a loud hissing and suddenly the side door slapped open and a tiny platform lowered to the ground as the entire bus leaned to one side like an elephant kneeling down on one knee. I knew I was supposed to dash down the steps
and hop on like a good boy, like Mom told me to do, but I just stood there and stared at it. There were small round mirrors on long steel poles stuck all over the corners of the bus. And from where I was standing, when I looked into the closest mirror, the whole world was stretched and curved so that I could see into the mirror on the back corner, and in that one I could see the other back mirror until I could see all the way around the bus and the front of the driver’s face and the bald spot in back of his head and actually see myself standing on my own porch with my backpack between my feet and my new short haircut Mom had given me after our walk. And as I looked at the little picture of myself in the mirror I wished I could see around the corner of this morning, into tomorrow and the next day, and find out in advance what was going to happen to me because even though I promised Mom I wouldn’t think three bad thoughts in a row I felt I couldn’t stop them if they showed up.

  The driver flipped through some pages on a clipboard, then stood and opened the front door. “Are you the new foster kid?” he called out, and it was a question that was very spooky to me, as if somehow going to special ed meant I was losing my mom too.

  “I’m not a foster kid,” I said right back. “I’m Joey Pigza. Who said I was a foster kid? I have a mom. She’s just working. That doesn’t mean I’m a foster kid.”

  I could have kept going on because the more I talked the more upset I got. She was the only thing I had and it wasn’t funny to have someone tease me that I was a foster kid. And while I was thinking about all this and standing as rigid as a locked door on the porch he looked down at the clipboard again and flipped over some more pages.

  “Where’s your mom?” he asked.

  “I told you she’s working,” I replied.