by Tom Howard
My gut hurt and it felt like something was broken in me. I didn’t say anything at all. I only turned my head and went back to my Wild Dog lyrics.
When detention was over, I heard her get up behind me but I didn’t lift my head. I waited until she was gone, and then I stood up and grabbed my backpack. As I turned around I saw she’d left a note on the desk.
I’m sorry they asked me to write that because they liked my handwriting and I wanted them to like it but I was wrong to do it. Nobody knows anything about anybody. Franny.
* * *
After detention I went to Pence’s and lifted another magazine and another box of Dots. It was raining some by the time I left the store but I didn’t care. I had the note from Franny folded in my back pocket.
Nobody else was outside and I liked that. I liked being the only one walking the streets, like it was a mutant apocalypse. I opened the Dots and shook a few into my mouth, wishing Will was still around. Will would’ve appreciated the way the sky looked, and the empty streets and all. You never met anyone as smart as Will. He designed a trebuchet that we built to defend the town against mutants who were plotting on the east bank to swim across and eat our brains. I thought we ought to launch a preemptive strike in the black of night, but Will said we had to wait for an actual attack. He said we could fire test rounds into the water as a show of force, though, and so we did, and I agreed that was damned satisfying even if we didn’t end up slaughtering any mutants. We fell out of friendship, I guess, and he moved away a couple years back. I ran into him coming home from school the day before he moved, and I asked if he remembered that damn trebuchet and he said of course he remembered. I said it’s a shame things are like this, and he asked what I meant, and I said I didn’t know but I thought it was a shame anyhow.
I’d walked all the way to the old neighborhood without thinking about it, and I was soaking wet. Somehow I ended up in front of Franny’s house. It was getting dark but there weren’t any lights on in the main part of the house, only the blue-white glow from a TV in the living room behind the curtains. I didn’t want to be a creeper but I stood there for a little while longer. Just wondering what it was like in there. I pictured the family sitting around and watching some movie together, Franny and her parents. They probably had a bowl of popcorn and some other snacks, too, like Junior Mints, or maybe some kind of homemade movie snack that only they knew about. They probably even had some great name for it that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else, like snowbear necklaces. Which would be like Gummy bears dipped in white chocolate and then attached to a string so you could wear them and eat them at the same time. Probably Franny’s mom made the necklaces in the morning and kept them in the fridge. And then at night the three of them would sit on the couch together even though there were other chairs they could use, and they’d throw a blanket over themselves and watch the movie, and now and then one of them would take a bite from the snowbear necklace, not even thinking about it. Sometimes they’d have to slide the necklace around to get the next set of snowbears in line, but they wouldn’t think about that either because this was just part of the regular routine for the three of them.
I saw someone get up from the couch then, just a silhouette behind the curtain but I guessed it was Franny. She moved to the center of the room and raised her arms up over her head, hands pointing together, and she did a kind of slow ballerina spin. She did a few more moves that looked pretty nice, too, and then it looked like she took a bow toward the couch. That was great ballerina dancing, Franny, they were probably saying to her then, now why don’t you come back and sit down and have a couple more snowbears.
At dinner I told Roy I’d gotten detention for giving it to Hoyle.
He said Hoyle wasn’t even on the Board, and I said well he ought to be. I said also it wasn’t some kind of big deal but I met a girl named Franny when I was in detention. “She drew a picture of a skeleton family that was pretty nice,” I said. “She has green eyes and her hair’s sort of wild, and she’s a dancer too.”
“And?” he said.
“And I don’t know.”
“You think she likes you.”
My face heated up some. “Nobody said anybody likes anybody.”
“Sounds like somebody does.”
“It’s not like that,” I said.
“Just don’t get your hopes up, is all,” he said. “Better you don’t expect anything too fine from the world is the thing.”
I said I knew that. I asked him if he was going out with Neal.
“Neal is a coward and a son of a bitch,” he said. “I might do another shift tonight, though.”
After dinner I put on my boots and went up see Ma. The rain was still coming but it was dry enough under the big oak. I shone a flashlight on the marker and told her about Franny and said I felt better than I had in a while, and I wasn’t sure why. I said I didn’t want that feeling to go away but I wasn’t sure what I could do to keep that from happening.
So what am I supposed to say to that? she said.
I said I didn’t know, but maybe she could just be encouraging and cherublike.
Hell with cherubs, she said. Who said you deserve to feel anything as good as that? Who said anyone deserves that?
“Didn’t say I deserve it,” I told her. “Just want it, is all.”
Then maybe don’t be a hateful rotten fruit boy, she said, and she wouldn’t say anything else after that. Sometimes she was like that.
I went home and listened to music, and then I turned out the lights and lay in bed, running my fingers across the hand from Dillard’s and looking up at the glow-in-the-dark crucifix on the wall above my bed. It was Ma’s crucifix. I found it in a box and Roy hadn’t wanted it, so I’d hung it on the wall between two Toxic Death Spasm posters. It spooked me during the day, seeing Jesus all bloodied and hanging on the cross like that, but at night you couldn’t see the cross at all, only Jesus’s glow-in-the-dark body. So it looked like He was floating up there, like He was free and hovering with outstretched arms over all the bastards who nailed Him up there. Untouched by all that. I stared up at Him and thought about what Franny wrote, about how nobody knew anything about anybody. Then I fell asleep and dreamed I was driving one of the nails into His hands, and I said, Hold still you dummy kike, and Franny was there, except she was only a skeleton girl with a red hair ribbon. Her skeleton head was tilted down and she looked full of sorrow to me just because of the way her skull was hanging. Ma was in the dream, too, only she was behind a door and all I could hear was the faucet running and all I could see was the light under the door, but I knew she was cutting herself open in there. I woke up and listened to the rain pounding on the windows for a long time until the sun came up.
In the morning I made up my mind not to give it to anybody. So when I came out of the locker room for gym and I saw Hoyle talking with Stacy Adams by the chin-up bar and they both looked over at me and she laughed at something he said, probably something like Don’t look now but fish boy Vardy is coming by so keep your worms in your pocket, I kept my hands by my sides and tried out a smile as I walked by.
“Nobody’s stealing anybody’s worms here,” I said.
They both smiled back at me, but when I walked past I could see Hoyle out of the corner of my eye, spinning his finger around his temple, which made Stacy Adams giggle. He didn’t have to do that. I thought I wasn’t going to have any choice except to give it to him. Then I pictured skeleton Franny looking on wearing her red hair ribbon as I drove Hoyle’s head into the bleachers and knuckled him until his head caved in, and my gut hurt again all of a sudden. So all I did was keep smiling, and I started whistling some of the violin solo from “Wild Dog” as I walked away. I didn’t feel great about that. But I didn’t feel totally rotten either. I felt like half rotten.
Thanks Vardy, Franny said, in my head I mean. That’s something good in you that you just showed.
I kept to myself and tried not to get into conversations or listen to anyone. I figured th
at was a way to stay out of trouble. When I was between classes I even pictured Jesus hovering in the hallway, bobbing this way and that over all the kids with His arms spread wide, and glowing from head to toe. Free of all pain and worry.
“You and me, Vardy,” He said. “We’re like two peas in a pod.”
“Yessir,” I agreed.
A couple times I passed Franny between periods. I was hoping she’d make eye contact but she didn’t. I wanted to tell her it was okay what she’d done, writing that note. I didn’t blame her for that. I even wrote her a note myself when I was sitting at lunch, but I didn’t know what to say in it, so I just wrote some stuff about Toxic Death Spasm and about Will’s trebuchet and about the sound of the water splashing against the houseboat. Then I read it over and decided nobody wanted to hear about those things, and I didn’t know why I wrote them in the first place.
The only bad time was when I saw Headly after lunch, at his locker. Headly had grown a beard over the summer so his head wouldn’t look as big as it did on his shoulders. Otherwise he looked normal enough, but he was always talking to himself and smiling at nothing at all, like he was doing now. He was stroking his beard, too, and that set me off.
“What the hell are you smiling about and stroking your beard for, Headly?” I said to him.
He smiled back at me but his eyes were off in the corner somewhere.
“There’s nothing funny going on for fuck’s sake,” I said to him. That made him laugh, so I raised my fist, and Headly cowered down like a little boy, covering his damn face with his hands and giggling, and that set me off even more. “Jesus Christ, you think I’m really going to hit somebody like you, Headly,” I said. But he was crying by then so I only stomped off, feeling bad about everything. I felt like everything I’d done was falling apart.
When classes were over I walked back to my locker. Somebody had sprayed a fish on the locker door with white spray paint. It had whiskers like a catfish and the bottom jaw jutted out a bit. I thought it was probably a flathead catfish. I looked around and saw Swofford and Hoyle standing across the hall by their lockers, yapping about something, probably about how good a joke it was since flathead catfish are so damn big and ugly, and Hoyle was probably saying we should’ve put a wine stain on its face too somehow, and Swofford was probably saying, Now that’s an idea, Hoyle, and next time we’ll do exactly that, and next thing I had Swofford by the neck pinned against the locker and he was turning bright red, and I screamed in Swofford’s face that we didn’t even have flathead catfish in this part of the state and he was a fucker who didn’t know anything about catfish and nobody cared about his golden boy smile anyway. Then Swofford started crying himself and said he’d never done anything to me before and what the hell was I doing, and everyone was looking at us now, and even Franny was there, and Jesus floated by with his outstretched arms and He said, “Go on and bash his head in. You know you want to do it. We aren’t any two peas in a pod, Vardy. Just go on and do it.”
I didn’t say it but I thought He was a bastard for saying that to me. But I let go of Swofford’s neck and he slid down the locker. I had the black flecks again and it was hard for me to see straight but I made myself say, “I’m sorry, Swofford, there’s no call for that.” I looked over at Franny to see if maybe she’d have a kind look on her face for me, for saying that. I searched her face but I couldn’t tell if it was a kind expression she was wearing. But I imagined she was thinking, Now that couldn’t have been easy to stop from giving it to Swofford right there, so I appreciate you doing that. Me and Jesus and your Ma, we all do.
Then I turned back to Swofford, who’d climbed to his feet, and he socked me in the jaw.
I was off balance and went down hard, and he was on top of me then, pinning me down with his legs and whaling on my shoulders and my gut and my face, too, and I heard the other kids hooting and screaming, and I searched for Franny and she was looking down at me with her head cocked to one side, like she was trying to figure out if I was for real or not. I wanted her to know that I was for real so I took Swofford’s beating and didn’t try to stop him. He was red-faced and his perfect hair was all crazy and he just kept raining down punches on me. He was still crying too. Blood from my nose and my lip was splattered on the floor by my face. Pretty soon Graves came over and put a stop to everything, and by the time I looked up again Franny was gone.
“I hope you ran into a brick wall,” Roy said when I came home. He had a Ziploc bag full of ice and was holding it against my face. “I hope that’s the explanation for what I’m seeing.”
“Swofford gave it to me,” I said.
“Jesus,” he said. “Oh sweet Jesus.”
“I’m tired of it,” I said. “I don’t want to be who I am anymore.”
“Welcome to the club,” he said. “Maybe you can decide that after you give it to Swofford next time.” Then he went to the Board to add a star next to the skulls by Swofford’s name.
Later I went by Franny’s place. The moon was shining bright and her lights were off like they always were except for the television set. The living room curtains were drawn. Franny was dancing again, only this time it looked like her mom and dad were standing off to one side, watching her. Her dad was wearing a hat and her mom had a bonnet on. Franny danced over to them and she grabbed her dad’s hand and he leaned down like he was dipping her real low, and then she danced away.
The next day I was still banged up, and my eye was about swollen shut. I thought everyone was looking at me different. I thought maybe they’d decided I wasn’t so rotten, since I’d taken a beating from Swofford like that. Maybe they were angry with Swofford. Maybe he was getting those looks now, the looks where they’d pretend they weren’t looking at you at all, like their eyes just flitted right past you, and maybe they’d turn down the wrong hallway just to avoid going past you. I felt a little bad for Swofford about that. And I thought it wouldn’t be the craziest thing in the world if we ended up being friends, Swofford and me. Then I’d have to tell Roy, and Roy would get all worked up about it. But eventually Roy would be okay with it. Maybe he’d even take the Board down. We’d have a little ceremony, and Roy would say something that was surprising and made you cock your head and wonder what he had in him. Because nobody knows anything about anybody.
I left first period and I was thinking about the ceremony—I thought maybe we’d set the Board adrift on the river and shoot flaming arrows into it at midnight, if Roy would let us—when I turned the corner and saw Swofford and Hoyle.
“Swofford,” I said, nodding at them both. “Hoyle.”
“Fish boy,” Hoyle said, and held his nose.
“Now, damn,” I said. “You don’t got to do that.”
“That’s right,” Swofford said. “Leave fish boy alone. He’s got feelings.”
“Fish feelings,” said Hoyle. And he puffed out his cheeks like a blowfish.
I was full of meanness then but I kept it down and walked away.
“You thought it’d be easy,” Jesus said, popping up behind Hoyle’s shoulder, outstretched arms glowing fierce and green. “Does it look easy, fruit boy?”
“Damn, I didn’t say it looked easy,” I said. “Who the hell said that?”
The day didn’t get much better. Twice I was tripped in the hallways, and both times I landed hard and it took the wind out of me, and when I looked up kids were staring at me, waiting to see what I’d do. I wanted them to see I wasn’t going to do anything, so then they’d stop worrying about me and stop saying things about me and look at me the same way they looked at everybody else.
The second time I was tripped, Franny was there. She squatted down and said, “What are you doing anyways?”
“I got a plan,” I said.
“Seems dumb, whatever it is,” she said.
“I’m improving myself,” I said. I sat up against the locker and blinked at her with my good eye.
“You don’t look improved is the thing.”
“Maybe,” I said, “
we could meet up later. Just walk around or whatnot.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“Because you got to go off and watch movies and eat snowbears,” I said, angry.
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. She was close enough then that I could smell her shampoo. It smelled like strawberries and wood smoke.
Later in study hall, I found another note on the floor. The note said, Vardy’s getting what’s coming to him after school.
“Now what are you gonna do?” Jesus asked, when I was standing at my locker.
“Thinking on it,” I said.
That wasn’t fully true. I guess I’d been thinking on it but I hadn’t come up with anything. I was tired and didn’t have any damn idea about what to do, and I thought I was bound to let everybody down.
When school was done I went out to see what was coming.
Kids were out there milling around, dozens of them, standing on the front lawn by the flagpole or blocking the sidewalks in each direction. There was a buzz in the air too, everybody talking low, but the buzz died as soon as I stepped out.
In the middle of it all was Swofford.
“I thought we were done with things,” I said, coming up to him.
“You thought we were done,” he said. “You think you can just say when something is done?” And he slapped me in the face.
I looked around for Franny but I couldn’t find her. Jesus was there, hovering by the flagpole, but He was silent now, waiting to see what I’d do.
