Harry Sue

by Sue Stauffacher

  “Jolly Roger,” I said calmly. “I didn’t know you had an interest in ladies’ underwear.” There was a fit of laughter and shoulder punching by Roger’s crew.

  “But since you asked, I’ll tell you. I do have one, but it was under so much strain that it broke, see? And I had to order the replacement parts from the Victoria’s Secret catalog.”

  Course everybody knows about Victoria’s Secret ‘cause the catalog got passed around the school plenty before Mr. Hernandez confiscated it.

  Roger glared at me.

  I gave him my look that said: Mess with H.S. and live to regret it.

  He pushed my shoulders to get something started.

  I pushed back.

  He shoved me so hard, I fell out of line.

  “I saw that, Mr. Coindine,” Mr. Hernandez said. “You can come with me.”

  “If you’re lucky, J.R., I’ll let you try it on when it’s all fixed up,” I whispered as Mr. Hernandez took him roughly by the elbow.

  One of these days, Jolly Roger and his road dogs were going to flatten me, I knew. I didn’t have a crew at school, so like Homer said, I had to watch my back twice as sharp.

  Homer just hated that he didn’t have my back at school. I never told him about any trouble on the yard he couldn’t have a hand in fixing. He had to know he was still there for me somehow, didn’t he?

  Beau says that when you’re on the outs, you got friends who will take a hit for you, but in the joint, they just dry up and blow. Nobody comes to see you. Nobody writes.

  But not everything Beau said would hang true for me. I mean, I ask you, Fish. What were my options here? Click up with Jolly Roger? Hang tough with Violet Chump?

  I don’t think so. Violet is what Beau calls a “buster.”

  Rhymes with “can’t trust her.”

  Remember that.

  Everything but one thing went just the way Homer and I figured it would. It was during social studies, when Ms. Lanier wanted to draw a map of the United States to show where the major crops of our great country were grown, that it happened.

  She tried to erase the chalkboard she used for map drawing, but all she made was big eraser prints on the board.

  “I guess I need a volunteer to clap these erasers,” she said.

  I waved my hand in the air like I knew the answer to the million-dollar question.

  “Oh! Oh! Oh!” I said. Pretty convincing, I must admit.

  That got Violet’s attention, because if I wanted something, she was sure to want to take it away from me. That was just Violet.

  She propped her elbow on the desk and wiggled her fingers.

  “Thank you, Violet,” Ms. Lanier said, and held out both erasers.

  Violet had no way of knowing those erasers had an entire box of chalk on them. I figured she’d take them outside for a little clap and her dress would be covered in chalk. There would be chalk in her hair, on her eyelashes, up her nose. Violet hated dirt of any kind. She would have to sit in her seat, covered from head to toe in white powder, because no matter how you try, the only thing that gets off chalk is soap and water. She would sit there, looking like a prissy ghost, and feel the way she made Harry Sue feel as the other kids giggled and pointed.

  As she sat in her seat for the rest of the day, trying to disappear, I would lean over and say calmly, “Gee, Violet, looks like there was a whole box of chalk on those erasers. That’s strange. They weren’t like that before you disrespected Harry Sue.”

  And I’d give a repeat performance of my look that said: Mess with Harry Sue and live to regret it.

  But that didn’t happen.

  It was in the middle of her sentence: “The Great Plains states formed the backbone of the country’s grain cro—” that Ms. Lanier looked toward the door, squinted, dropped her chalk, and ran.

  She didn’t go anywhere at first because she always wore those pumps with shiny bottoms that aren’t good for scratch. But after a couple seconds we saw her little knees pop out from her skirt and Ms. Lanier made tracks. That was such an unusual sight that the rest of us froze in our seats. It got so quiet you coulda heard a rat piss on cotton. That is, until J.R. ran to the door to eye hustle.

  “Ole Violet’s having a fit,” he said.

  Ms. Lanier nearly toppled him rushing back into the room. She threw open Violet’s desk, scooping the contents onto the floor.

  “Where is the inhaler?” she sobbed. “Where is Violet’s inhaler?”

  That’s where I left her, scrabbling in the bottom of Violet’s desk.

  I shot out of the room. Nobody runs faster than Harry Sue. Violet was doubled over in the hall, her face blue, her hair white with chalk dust.

  Down the hall I ran. When I got to the main office, I busted through the double doors, detoured around the secretary’s desk, and swung open the door to the nurse’s office. Mrs. Finster looked up from the magazine she was reading and blinked at me.

  “Give me Violet Chump’s rescue inhaler,” I managed to croak out.

  Mrs. Finster straightened her nurse’s cap and reached into the file drawer of her metal desk.

  “Now Harry Sue,” she said, beginning to push herself up from the chair with the inhaler in her left hand. “You know I can’t just give you someone else’s—”

  As soon as I could get a clear grab, I snatched it. “You better call an ambulance,” I shouted back as I took off running once again.

  Ms. Lanier was trying to get Violet to sit up when I returned. Her legs were twitching all over the place. Her dress was bunched up around her waist.

  Without waiting for instructions, I shoved the inhaler in her mouth and pressed hard. Violet sucked on it greedily, making little sobbing noises until her eyes stopped looking like a cornered chipmunk’s. Ms. Lanier tried to hold her still and pull the hair back off her face. The ambulance men came clattering down the hall and pushed me aside, pressing a plastic oxygen mask to Violet’s mouth.

  When it looked like Violet was out of the woods, Ms. Lanier grabbed me from behind and started to cry.

  “Thank you, Harry Sue. I don’t know what happened in there. I lost my head for a minute.”

  She pulled my chin up and gave me a peck on the cheek. Then she sat down next to me and Violet and rubbed her eyes, smearing mascara all over them. Then Ms. Lanier looked at me as if I were someone else. The look she gave me was not in her normal catalog of looks.

  Violet, who’d been clenching both my wrists in her hands while she was choking, gave me a funny look, too.

  Mr. Hernandez came rushing down the hall, followed by Mrs. Finster. “Ms. Lanier! What is happening here?”

  “Harry Sue just saved Violet’s life is what’s happening here,” she declared proudly.

  I shrank back. This was the part Homer and I had not predicted. I mean, if I’d sat in my seat and let old Violet find her eternal reward, they’d be clapping me in handcuffs right now instead of looking at me all googly-eyed.

  Why couldn’t I be more like Dorothy?

  She wastes two witches without even trying and doesn’t lose sleep over it.

  I couldn’t even do an accident right.

  Chapter 13

  My weak heart did a couple of flip-flops before I thought of something to keep the day from being an entire loss.

  “Mr. Hernandez,” I said, “I might as well tell you, I messed up that new art teacher’s room. Yeah, that was me. I wrecked his project.”

  Mr. Hernandez gazed at me over his skinny glasses. “You’ve been busy today, Harry Sue.” He helped me to my feet and put his arm around my shoulders as we started walking down the hall.

  “Why don’t you let me get back to you on that one? It may be hard to work up enthusiasm for punishing you today, Harry Sue, seeing as you just saved Violet’s life.”

  He patted me on the back and continued to his office. I slid down the wall and put my head in my hands. Who else could mess up so royally?

  “Maybe you could grant Mr. Olatanju some special dispensation,” Mr. He
rnandez added from a few feet away. “After all, he’s only here until we complete our new search.”

  But I wasn’t really listening to Mr. Hernandez anymore. I was too busy losing my balance.

  In point of fact, Fish, I was already falling.

  Now everyone would think of me as a hero— which was bad enough—but even worse, I had almost killed Violet. I didn’t want to kill anybody. I never did. I was already responsible for one death I hadn’t meant to happen. Couldn’t that be enough?

  Nobody was playing by the rules. A conette needs order. She needs the joint mentality. Good guys. Bad guys. Hacks. Road dogs. Fish.

  I started to cry in that way I have that doesn’t involve tears, just little gulps of air that swirled the muck at the bottom of my stomach.

  Why didn’t she write me? They’d have to tell me, wouldn’t they, if she’d been paralyzed like Homer? Could she really be in lockdown these last six years? Maybe she was writing and Granny filched the letters? But how? Was she hiding them somewhere? Why would Mary Bell leave me all alone with Granny, knowing what a bad influence she was? I’d rather be in the joint, rather be locked up tight, if it meant we could be together again. And she would read to me … something with a happy ending so I could fall asleep, not thinking about how it had been at the end. For Garnett …

  Homer wasn’t the only one who went to the hole. I went there, too.

  When you go to the SHU, it means you’ve done something very bad, like started a riot or knifed somebody. Think about it. What do you do to a conette who breaks the law in prison? You have to have someplace very bad to send her.

  Sometimes you get a bed, sometimes not. Sometimes they make it completely dark. You can go crazy in there when it’s dark for days at a time. You start talking to yourself, hearing voices. The walls close in.

  A button can be your best friend. Or an ant. Throwing a button in the dark and playing hide-and-seek with it. Or feeling an ant crawl across your bare skin. It keeps your mind occupied.

  I didn’t want to go to the hole today.

  I didn’t want to be left alone with my thoughts.

  So I took off running.

  I ran out the side door and down a muddy path and through two neighborhoods with tight brick houses and across four busy streets without looking until I was damp with sweat and spattered with mud and there was a cramp inside that grabbed a chunk of skin and ribs and squeezed tight.

  I was fighting for breath by the time I reached Homer’s tree and hauled myself up, arm over arm, without using my legs at all. I liked pain when I was on the edge of the hole. Pain helped me to balance, to concentrate. Maybe I wouldn’t fall in.

  “Homer,” I panted, out of breath, clenching my biceps where they throbbed. My back and shoulder were on fire like always when I ran too fast.

  His bed was tilted up and he stared dreamily out the window.

  “The leaves have started their free fall,” he said. Once the leaves were gone, Homer would have to stay all day in the house with Mrs. Dinkins for the winter.

  But I didn’t want to talk about the leaves.

  “I need an invention to teach those juveniles to respect me,” I said, gulping, running the back of my hand over my face.

  “But I don’t want to hurt anybody, Homes.”

  He turned to look at me, but I kept my eyes down, picking at the dried spots of mud on the tails of my shirt.

  “You going soft, Harry Sue?”

  I shook my head. “I just don’t want to hurt anybody,” I repeated. “I just want to do my own time.”

  Homer said nothing.

  “Be left alone.”

  He nodded, waiting. But I wasn’t ready to let him in on it.

  “How’d it go with old Violet?”

  Every once in a while a look slipped out, a desperate look that said: Please, Homer, not now!

  And Homer turned his head to the wall, which meant: It’s okay, dog, we don’t have to go there.

  “What kind of invention?”

  I told Homer about Jolly Roger and what he said in the morning line regarding my female parts. How he called me “it.”

  “Those are fighting words, Homes,” I said, trying to care about it, trying to keep my edge.

  Down in the street, I heard a noise like the recycling truck ca-chunking along, then a screech of tires and silence.

  Homer didn’t seem to notice the commotion at all. He just stared out his window. He was concentrating. Sometimes, he said, he could will a leaf to let go with his mind. He would watch it carefully for minutes, thinking, Jump, jump! Until finally it couldn’t take the pressure and it went, just like Homer did, leaving behind everything it knew, falling slowly toward the dark unknown.

  “I got an idea that’ll knock him off his feet,” he said finally.

  “Okay …”

  “But we’ll need some battery power.”

  “Where am I going to hide batteries?”

  I could tell he liked the idea. I started to let myself breathe regular. Everything would be fine. Nothing permanent happened to Violet. She was a little slow on the uptake, so less oxygen to her brain probably wouldn’t cause much of a stir.

  It was just me and Homer now, cooking up another plan.

  “Let me think on it for a minute and I’ll give you my list,” he said.

  I retreated to the corner closest to Homer’s head and pulled out the notepad I’d tucked away under the mattress. I had nothing new to add, except this thought that occurred to me in the hall outside Ms. Lanier’s room that maybe Granny had a stash of my letters from Mary Bell. It wasn’t the first time it had occurred to me. Hiding a letter Mary Bell sent to me would be a worse punishment than any I could dream up, so of course Granny would do it.

  But I couldn’t write that down because I didn’t have any evidence for it. The notepad was only for real things. Still, reading the other entries calmed me, and I held the pad in front of my face, pushing my back against the wall and sliding down until my knees were under my chin. Sometimes I just sat there, pushing my heels closer to my butt by pressing on my toes, trying to see how small a space I could take up. When I was done looking, I slipped the notepad back into its place.

  Homer needed quiet to think. I tried to use my thumbnail to press my initials in the floor, but it just bent back, giving me a new pain to think about. And that made fresh the desperate look of pain in Violet’s eyes when she couldn’t get any air.

  So instead I stared at Homer’s hand, lying still on the cover, as stiff and still as the wooden hand on Mr. Blue-midnight-art-teacher’s desk. That’s when I decided on my punishment for accidentally saving Violet’s life.

  I couldn’t stroke Homer’s hand today, no matter that it would be like touching a tree. Today, even touching trees was off-limits.

  Chapter 14

  Suddenly Homer turned to look at me in surprise, and I realized that the winch holding the rope was creaking. Just a second later, the trap door popped open and the skinny arm and head of a lady with short orange hair and hands the size of Ping-Pong paddles appeared in Homer’s private space.

  She stared at me with surprise but didn’t say anything, just hauled herself up and took a look around. She stood there, glaring down at Homer, her long fingers twitching on his bedcover.

  “Where’s Beau?” Homer asked.

  “Where do you think? Cooling his heels in the Cook County Correctional Facility for drawing with a knife.”

  There was a long silence.

  “On people,” she added, as if we didn’t already get it.

  There was a look on her face. I couldn’t read it, but it bothered me. It made me push myself up so that I stood against the wall, ready, in case Homer needed me. She stood completely still, except for the twitching fingers on the bedcover.

  She was wearing a turtleneck and over that a thin shapeless dress, like a sundress for a fat lady. But even all that flimsy cloth couldn’t hide that she was small and tight, like she’d been twisted out of metal coat hangers.r />
  A long slow smile spread across her face. She looked like she wanted to eat Homer.

  Pulling a slip of paper out of one of the bulging front pockets of her dress, she read: “Christopher Dinkins, aka Homer Price. Quad with contingent psycho-social factors …”

  She paused. Looked around.

  “I assume that’s why we’re up in this tree?”

  “Because I’m a quad or because I have psycho-social factors?” Homer asked, his head turned to the opposite wall.

  The woman rubbed her fingers along her chin in an exaggerated way.

  “I have seen quads do amazing things, but climb trees? No, that I have never seen. So it must be because you’re a bit of a nut.

  “A nut in a tree. I like that. A nut in a tree. That’s good.”

  I could see she was having a bad effect on Homer, and I searched through all my tricks to think of something to throw her off balance.

  “Now, if you’d be so kind as to move over, Homer. I’d like to experience the world from your point of view.”

  Without waiting for permission, her hands disappeared under the cover and she slid Homer to the side of the bed.

  He turned to look at me, but I stayed where I was. I wanted to know what she was playing at. It wasn’t safe to take her down in the tree house, anyway. Not with the bed taking up half the room.

  Then her little body was under the cover with her arms down at her sides, just like Homer’s. She smiled and closed her eyes.

  “Just like Matisse,” she said. And then she stopped talking.

  We waited for her to make her point. Just like Matisse … because … what?!

  When I thought I couldn’t stand still another second, she propped her head on her hand and said to Homer: “Did you know that at the end of his life, the great painter Matisse was confined to his bed? Instead of lying there all wasted, he taped a piece of chalk to a stick and drew shapes on the ceiling.”

  “Then this isn’t just like Matisse, is it?” Homer asked sharply. “Because I can’t draw.”

  She had the nerve to move a lock of Homer’s hair off his face. He looked like he might bite her for that.