Fum

by Adam Rapp

  Mayor Ossining’s secretary, a woman in a violet cardigan sweater named Eula who has a face like a stunned rabbit, hangs up the phone and says, “Mayor Ossining will be with you in a moment.” She’s echoed this phrase four times now, and before Corinthia can nod and thank her, the mayor’s office door opens, and Dole Ossining — the mayor of Lugo himself — stands at the threshold. He is tall and old and bowlegged. He possesses thick white hair and smiling eyes.

  “Corinthia Bledsoe,” he says. “Come on in.”

  After he closes the door, Mayor Ossining offers Corinthia a handsome leather club chair in the “meeting area” of his wooden office. The mayor chooses to arrange himself on the forest-green tufted leather sofa with many buttons. When he sits, the cuffs of his trousers ride up, exposing hairless pale shins that look like undercooked pork.

  “Can I get you anything?” he asks. “Water? A coffee?”

  “No, thank you,” Corinthia replies.

  “You sure? I’m happy to send Eula downstairs for a Starbucks.”

  “I’m afraid coffee would just upset my stomach,” Corinthia says.

  “So, what brings you to my office?” he asks.

  “I’m worried about the wolves,” she says.

  “What wolves are you speaking of?”

  “The ones that have been living in the woods by the frontage road. The ones killing all the deer.”

  “Well, that’s very thoughtful of you, Corinthia, but why worry?”

  “Because I think something bad is going to happen.”

  Mayor Ossining smiles, revealing bright-yellow teeth, and says, “If this is an animal-rights concern, I applaud your initiative, Corinthia. But you have to realize that we’ve had a deer problem. A very serious one. Over the summer they were meddling in our gardens and defecating on our front lawns.” He reaches down and scratches one of his bald shins. “And as I see it,” he continues, “the wolves gettin’ to ’em, well, that’s just Mother Nature doing her thing.”

  “But this goes beyond deer,” Corinthia says.

  “It does? In what way?”

  “It’s going to become a people problem.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  That yellow smile again. Mayor Ossining suddenly seems to possess more teeth than your average human. Corinthia imagines him eating the carcass of a dead deer, his naked body hunched over it, pawing out its innards like some primitive half-human.

  “Meaning the wolves will start attacking the people of Lugo,” she says.

  “Well, forgive me for saying this, Corinthia, but that just seems awfully far-fetched.”

  “But it’s not,” she says. “It’s not far-fetched at all.”

  As Dr. Flung suggested, Corinthia is doing her best to remain poised, continue breathing, and keep her pulse at a reasonable level. She can feel her hands starting to clutch the hide on the arm supports of the leather club chair. She exhales through her nostrils and eases her grip.

  “I saw the tornadoes,” she continues, “before they came. I saw all three of them. And I told people, but no one would listen. And then I saw the geese — the geese that destroyed the Lugo Memorial football field. You know that happened, too, right?”

  “Of course I do,” Dole Ossining says. “I’m the mayor.”

  “Well, I saw those geese coming, and then they did. And now I’m telling you that something’s going to happen with these wolves. Someone’s going to get seriously hurt.”

  Mayor Ossining sucks on his teeth a moment, steeples his hands, and sets their point on the bridge of his nose. He studies Corinthia Bledsoe for a bit.

  “Do you realize how you sound, Ms. Bledsoe?” he finally says.

  Corinthia doesn’t respond. She simply sits there.

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  “Call County Animal Control.”

  “And tell them what, exactly? A young woman came into my office with some sort of vision?”

  “Yes,” Corinthia hears herself say.

  “And based on this vision, this fantasy, I’d like your organization to kill a bunch of wolves? The same wolves that are finally starting to rectify Lugo’s deer problem? Do you hear how silly that sounds?”

  “The tornadoes weren’t fantasies. The geese weren’t fantasies.”

  “Then what would you call them?” Mayor Ossining says. “Coincidences?”

  Corinthia can feel anger starting to simmer in her hands.

  “Can I ask you a question, Ms. Bledsoe?” And before Corinthia can even offer a nod, Mayor Ossining says, “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “Because I’ve been temporarily suspended.”

  “May I ask for what reason?”

  Corinthia decides that she’s through appealing to this man, Lugo’s so-called civic leader.

  “Because I destroyed school property,” she says.

  “I see,” he says. “Do your parents know you’ve made a visit to my office?”

  “No.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Brill and Marlene Bledsoe.”

  “Brill and Marlene Bledsoe,” he repeats. “And where are they right now?”

  “My dad’s at work, and my mom’s probably at home.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I’m sitting in your office, talking to you.”

  “But where are you supposed to be, is what I’m asking. Because that’s the key to good citizenship, Corinthia: knowing where you’re supposed to be.”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” she says. She can feel hot tears welling in the corners of her eyes. “The library?”

  “Then I suggest you get there.”

  Corinthia slowly stands. It’s miraculous to her that Dole Ossining hasn’t made a remark about her size, her height. She stands before him, tears streaming down her face now. She wants to shout, “Don’t you see how enormous I am?” but she is overwhelmed with the terrible feeling that he does not; that she’s disappearing.

  So she exits his office, her knees throbbing, her ankles weak with inflammation, and shuffles down the marble hallway, past the Starbucks, where several Lugonites are lining up for their afternoon mochas and toasted graham lattes and shots of espresso.

  Corinthia slowly descends the dozen or so steps of the municipal building, crosses the street, and moves out onto the small, well-mown park lawn, where she approaches the statue of Captain Clyde Lugo. She rises up on her tiptoes and stares into the legendary Civil War and agricultural hero’s face. She notices the slightest hint of a smile, suggesting pride and humility. His nose is perfect, almost absurd in its symmetry. His blank brass eyes are no more expressive than those of the bloated fish living in her mother’s koi pond.

  In a flash, Corinthia can feel rage pulsing up her calves and thighs, surging through her hips and torso and chest. Before she can even think about it, with the same explosive force that sent her careening through Bob Sluba’s life sciences door almost two months ago, Corinthia throws her shoulder into the effigy of the town’s namesake and proceeds to rock it off its rectangular foundation.

  The sound that the quarter-ton polished brass statue makes upon crashing down on the little redbrick circular pathway is not unlike a compact car colliding with a U.S. mailbox. Within what seems like seconds, several Lugonites are surrounding Corinthia, who also finds herself on the ground now, on her back, to be exact, beside the statue of Clyde Lugo, arranged almost like his lover.

  Corinthia peers up at the cluster of fleshy, jowly adult faces. It’s as if she and Clyde Lugo have been caught having sex while picnicking and someone has pulled a blanket off their naked, conjoined bodies. Corinthia is dazed, to say the least.

  Although Corinthia recognizes Mayor Dole Ossining’s head of thick white hair and his long yellow teeth, the most assertive person emerging through the crowd is Sheriff Burges Beckett, who is uniformed in his crisp police khakis and polished black shoes. The late-afternoon sun glints off the gold badge pinned to his chest. It just so happens that Sheriff Beckett,
an old friend of Corinthia’s father, was ordering a venti caramel macchiato from Starbucks when, through the street-facing window, he witnessed with his own two eyes the great figure of Clyde Lugo teetering and falling to the earth.

  Approximately two hours later, Marlene Bledsoe arrives at the police precinct to pick up her daughter. Through a series of conversations with Mayor Ossining, Lugo Memorial Principal Margo Ticonderoga, and his old high-school buddy Brill Bledsoe, Sheriff Beckett decides it is best to forgo charging Corinthia with any crime. Destruction of public property would have certainly fit the bill, but knowing of the Bledsoes’ recent troubles, benevolent Sheriff Beckett decided it was best to let this incident slip through the system and not mar the permanent record and immediate future of one of Lugo’s brightest young women.

  “You’re better than this,” Sherriff Beckett told Corinthia as he tore up the incident report he’d started to fill out. “You Bledsoes are good people.”

  When Marlene arrives to collect her daughter she tries to write Sheriff Beckett a check for five hundred dollars, but he will have no part of it.

  “Just take it,” she pleaded with him. “Please.”

  “I will not take your money,” he replied, insistent, and then unlocked the men’s jail cell and released Corinthia, who seemed completely drained, her face as bloodless as a cafeteria plate.

  It should be noted that Corinthia was being detained in the men’s cell because the wooden bench in the women’s cell was just too small, and when she tried to sit on it, it snapped in half and caused Corinthia to land smartly on her tailbone, which now throbs along with her knees, ankles, wrists, and elbows. Her entire body is like an orchestra of pain. The men’s cell featured a much sturdier bench, one made of brushed steel, in fact, and since the cell was vacant, Sheriff Beckett thought it prudent to keep Corinthia detained in there.

  “Please give Brill my best,” the sheriff told Marlene when he hugged her good-bye.

  Marlene Bledsoe, who shed legitimate tears at the police precinct, has grown cold in the car.

  During the ride home, very little is said. Corinthia lies in the backseat of the Hyundai. Her knees are tented, so that, through the rearview mirror, Marlene can see how badly they’ve been skinned. Corinthia’s enormous kneecaps look like hamburger meat, and Marlene is disgusted by the image and has to stop herself from retching.

  “Your knees are bleeding,” she tells her daughter evenly, swallowing hard. “Please don’t get any blood back there.”

  At home, not quite an hour later, Corinthia is lying on her bed, trying to ignore the pounding in her head, when her mother knocks on the door and enters, holding a bottle of iodine, a blob of cotton balls, and the program for The Beautiful Apocalypse.

  “For your knees,” she says, placing the bottle of iodine and the cotton balls on Corinthia’s bedside stand. “And I thought you should have this, too,” she adds, proffering the traveling freak-show program she’d brought back from Group some weeks before.

  Corinthia accepts it.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “Just look through it,” Marlene says. “I think what they’re doing is very interesting.”

  And then her mother turns, closes the door, and heads downstairs.

  October 19, Monday (My Birthday)

  Dave,

  It was my birthday today. I turned fifteen. But it was not a good day, Dave. No, not at all. It was actually a day of ubiquitous shade. “Ubiquitous” means omnipresent. Manifold kinds of shade, you could say. “Manifold” means multiple and assorted. So that gives you a pretty good idea of what transpired, Dave. Ubiquitous, manifold shade.

  I woke with a feeling of hope.

  But before I share the details of this inauspicious birthday, I need to tell you that my Fake Dave diary worked, Dave! It worked! I gave it to Principal Ticonderoga, and it’s three weeks later now, and I haven’t heard a word from her. She hasn’t given it back to me, Dave, which I’m pretty certain is some kind of crime against my student rights, but for now I’m just happy that The Fake List in The Fake Dave was a success!

  Generally speaking, since the episode with Britney Purina that unfurled and transpired in the cafeteria (when she threatened me with sexual violence and accused me of absconding with her iPhone 6), things at school have been surprisingly devoid and barren of conflict. For instance, I haven’t heard a lot of people calling me the Ball Boy, and for the most part, lunch has gone smoothly, except for the fact that Durdin Royko stopped sitting at the Frog table. Durdin sits elsewhere now, Dave. In fact, he’s chosen to sit on the other side of the cafeteria, in the corner, with a junior boy named Keith Kybzanski, who is mildly mentally challenged, meaning he’s allowed to attend a regular high school but he takes classes with freshmen.

  Once, during a fire drill, Keith Kybzanski defecated in his pants, and this is likely why no one would sit with him in the cafeteria until now. I’ve seen Mark Maestro and Lars Silence follow him down the hall and call him the Duke of Dooky.

  I am disappointed in Durdin Royko, Dave, but Keiko Cho and I are still holding it down at the Frog table, eating quietly, keeping to ourselves.

  On the bus, I listened to music on my Android. Currently, my choice musical selection is a band from the ’90s called Hootie and the Blowfish. They have this song called “Let Her Cry” that I like to play on continuous repeat. Darius Rucker is the name of the lead singer. He’s African American and possesses a very appealing voice. A few weeks ago, I heard Mom listening to their first album, Cracked Rear View, in the privacy of her bedroom, and I was quite seduced and bewitched by Mr. Rucker’s voice. I think Mom cries when she listens to “Let Her Cry,” so for her the song is like an instructional manual and a permission slip to let forth the flow of her emotions. After some Internet investigation, I was able to find this song and purchased it via my Android. After my dad died, I was awarded a sum of money, which is distributed into my checking account on a weekly basis, and this money allows me to make various purchases. I would like to buy a gift for Camila. I’m thinking of maybe buying her a box of high-quality chocolates or perhaps a scarf for the winter.

  But back to my day . . .

  So the bus ride to school was replete with my favorite song, during which I imagined Camila and me partaking of romantic scenarios, such as playing a round of mini-golf in Shawneetown and sharing a serving of Dippin’ Dots in Kaskaskia.

  In homeroom, during morning announcements, my birthday was declared, and Mrs. Klubek led the class in singing “Happy Birthday” to me. Everything was going so well until the last verse, when you’re supposed to sing “Happy birthday, dear Billy / Happy birthday to you,” and Rose Bryant, Breanne Billson, and Rod Benedict sang “Happy Birthday, dear Ball Boy / Happy birthday to you.” But, of course, Mrs. Klubek didn’t hear them. I was still happy to hear so many of my fellow students in homeroom singing “Happy Birthday” to me, so I tried not to let the three others’ mischief bother me too much, but I should’ve known it was a harbinger of things to come. Dave, a “harbinger,” as I learned the other day during the vocab portion of my English class, is an “omen.”

  So I’ll get right to it. In the cafeteria, Keiko Cho and I enjoyed our lunches, but the normal day ended there. On my way to sixth period, which is algebra, whose classroom is on the second floor, Todd Chicklis sort of kidnapped me by grabbing my belt, and then the door to Corinthia Bledsoe’s private bathroom opened, and he forced me inside. Also populating this particular bathroom was Bronson Kaminski, as well as Britney Purina. Britney Purina nodded to Bronson Kaminski, and then, like a magic trick, he made some duct tape appear and tore a few strips off and forced it over my mouth and around my head so that I couldn’t make any noise. And then Todd Chicklis locked the door from the inside and Britney Purina started whispering, and her voice was a like a hot wind with wild saws, and she said “Happy birthday” in a rather condescending manner, and then she called me Ball Boy and said she wanted to see my Ball Boy baby balls, and then Bronson Kaminski
undid my belt, and even though I kicked and ran in place and tried to turn myself into a human windmill, Bronson Kaminski was successful in overwhelming me and pulled my pants and underwear down to my ankles, and my stomach started gurgling, and I could feel my intestines filling with swampish gas, and then I could see Britney Purina make an expression that I can only accurately modify with the word “ghastly,” and I realized she was looking down at my underwear, and then I looked down and I could see that what she was looking at was a feces stain. It was brown and shaped like a rocket flame. Or maybe it was shaped like a canoe. Or maybe it was shaped like a canoe on fire. Anyway, then Britney Purina whispered that I was a fucking idiot Ball Boy and not only was I an idiot but that I was a bald idiot and where’s my giant now and why wasn’t she protecting me on my Ball Boy birthday, and then I started crying, and she whispered/sang “Happy Birthday,” and like Rose Bryant, Breanne Billson, and Rod Benedict in homeroom, she replaced “Billy” with “Ball Boy,” and then I was snotting through my nostrils because my mouth was still covered with that duct tape, and I couldn’t get enough air, and then everyone was laughing, and Bronson Kaminski was snapping his fingers below my testicles, which was making me flinch and dance, and I wished it was Wednesday, my gym class day, because I would’ve superglued some of Mom’s hair that I’d collected from the bathroom floor to my upper junk area, and I could feel my penis responding to all of this shade, because it was so hard and small like it had turned itself into a light switch maybe so I would reach down and turn the whole scenario off, and then Britney Purina was holding a black Sharpie and she proceeded to remove the cap and write something on my forehead and then she spit in my face, which made me squint hard, and I kept my eyes closed for a moment, and during this moment I thought they were going to beat me to death, that Britney Purina, Todd Chicklis, and Bronson Kaminski were going to take turns slapping me and then break my jaw and then my arm and then my feet and then they’d pull a rib out of my side and stab my eyes with it and then my heart and then they would set me on fire, and part of me wanted them to do this, Dave, part of me wanted this. I wanted to be set on fire and die in Corinthia Bledsoe’s private bathroom.