by Jeff Strand
“Like trying to pull off a spectacular illusion or get killed by a madman if I mess it up. I’m not happy about the situation, but I’m certainly not going to just drive off. I thought you said your mom was your hero?”
“She is. I don’t know what I was saying.” Peter was quiet for a moment. “Sorry.”
“Stop talking. Just take me to the hospital.”
• • •
“It’s not broken,” said Dr. Webber, pointing to an X-ray. “Keep the ice pack on it, and the swelling will go down. You’ll be okay in a few days.”
“Thanks,” said Marcus. Mom and Dad were in the room with him. Nobody questioned the idea that a hammer had fallen off a shelf and hit his hand, but he supposed there was no reason for anybody to think he’d made up a cover story.
“Hammers are dangerous beasts,” said Dr. Webber. “I’ve never trusted them.”
“Seriously?”
“No, that was a joke. I suppose that’s why I became a doctor instead of a stand-up comedian. Just trying to bring a little levity into a generally unpleasant experience. I never imagined that you’d take me at my word. I apologize.”
“I’m just stressed out, I guess,” said Marcus.
“Well, of course. You were attacked by a hammer.” Dr. Webber smiled. “Now before you go getting yourself worked up, that was another joke. I try to perform at the open mic at the Wacky Chuckle Farm on Wednesdays whenever I’m not too busy.”
“I’m sure you’re very amusing,” said Dad.
“Obviously, I use better material than the hammer thing. That was just an ad-lib. I’ll refine it a bit for the next time somebody comes in here with a hammer injury.”
“It’s fine the way you said it,” said Marcus and sighed.
“You think so? Thanks. I appreciate that.”
• • •
“You’ve had a rough few days,” said Mom as they drove home. “Grandpa Zachary passed away, and now you hurt your hand. Things can’t get much worse.”
“Nope,” said Marcus.
“So this Peter, is he always that clumsy?”
“I guess. I don’t know him that well.”
“I’m not sure you should be hanging out with kids who bump into shelves,” Mom said.
“He’s fine.”
“What will he bump into next? You’re lucky it was only a hammer on that shelf and not a chainsaw.”
“A lot of kids are clumsy at that age,” Dad said. “Give him a break. And I don’t think Marcus is entirely blameless here.”
“What do you mean?” asked Marcus.
Dad glanced up at him in the rearview mirror. “Your reflexes are too fast to get hit by a falling hammer. You were trying to catch it, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Marcus admitted, figuring, Hey, why not?
“It’s understandable. In the moment you see something fall, your first instinct is to reach out and catch it. Sometimes it works out for you like if it was a hamster, and sometimes it doesn’t like if it was a hammer. Unfortunately, tonight you got the hammer.”
20
The next day at school, it was difficult for Marcus to concentrate. He gave wildly incorrect answers to every question he was asked. He even gave a biology-related answer to a history question, and everybody started laughing at him.
At lunchtime he sat outside again, hoping to avoid Peter. He felt too sick to his stomach to eat anything, so he just sat there, wallowing in good old-fashioned self-pity.
Peter came around the corner of the school and saw Marcus sitting on the bench. His mouth opened as if he were going to say something, but then he seemed to realize that Marcus was not in the mood for conversation. His closed his mouth and left.
For the rest of the day, Marcus continued to give remarkably unintelligent answers to the questions his teachers asked, including the most incorrect usage of the word hypotenuse ever uttered. His teachers seemed to realize how distracted he was because they called on him five times more often than usual.
Between classes he tried to relax himself by shuffling cards, but he ended up dropping the entire deck on the floor.
“Hur-hur, wanna play fifty-two pickup?” asked some kid walking past.
Marcus gathered up his cards and wondered if his stomach would ever stop hurting. It felt as if he’d eaten seventeen slices of pizza with triple grease and a six-inch-high pile of jalapenos on top, except without the enjoyment of actually eating any pizza.
How difficult was it to fake one’s death and move to another country under a different name? He’d never heard of anybody successfully accomplishing this, but of course, he’d only hear about it if they got caught. In theory, hundreds of people faked their own deaths every day. It would be the ultimate illusion.
Marcus knew he wouldn’t be faking his own death and moving to New Zealand, but it felt good to think about it for a few moments.
At the merciful sound of the final bell, Marcus got his books from his locker and walked down the hallway. He had the daunting fear a shark might burst through the tile floor at any moment, biting him in half, but that was probably an irrational fear.
As he walked out of the building, he heard Peter call out, “Hey, Marcus!”
And then Kimberly also said, “Hey, Marcus!”
He turned around. Both of them were coming toward him from slightly different directions. Peter reached him first.
“I really need to apologize,” said Peter.
Kimberly joined them a couple of seconds later. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but I really need to apologize.”
“No, you don’t,” said Marcus.
“Yes, I do,” said Peter.
“You do, for sure,” said Marcus. He looked at Kimberly. “You don’t.”
“I think I should.” She looked at Peter. “By the way, I’m Kimberly. Hi.”
“Hi,” said Peter. “I’m Peter.”
“It’s been eating away at me all day,” said Kimberly.
“You already apologized a bunch of times.”
“I know, but I wanted to apologize after some time had passed, so you knew it was sincere. But I probably shouldn’t be apologizing in front of your new friend because that’d make everything even weirder, but apparently, I’ve lost my ability to interact with people without making it weird.”
“Do you want me to go?” asked Peter.
“No,” said Kimberly.
“Yes,” said Marcus.
“I don’t know who I should listen to,” said Peter.
“Me,” said Marcus.
“Me,” said Kimberly. “You don’t need to go. I’m not here to interrupt whatever you two were talking about. I came over here to say I’m sorry, and I did it, even though it was kind of long-winded, and now I’m heading off to orchestra practice, so you two can return to your conversation and pretend I never interrupted.”
“Fine,” said Marcus. “Thank you for apologizing. We’re okay now, right?”
Kimberly nodded. “Yes.”
“Hey, Magic Boy,” said a voice that Marcus desperately hoped didn’t belong to Ken but sounded exactly like him. Ken, flanked by his best buddies Joe and Chris, walked over to them. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Home,” said Marcus.
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” Ken frowned, apparently having expected some sort of sarcastic response that he could get angry about. “You can’t go yet.”
“Are you going to beat me up here right in front of the school?” Marcus asked.
“Nah, I figured we’d walk off school property first.”
“Not going to happen,” said Marcus.
“What are you going to do? Live at school? Eat scraps from the lunchroom?”
“You could eat them out of Peter’s hair,” Chris voluntee
red. He and Joe both laughed hysterically.
“Aw, man, that was a knee-slapper!” said Joe, slapping his own knee.
“Did you just call it a knee-slapper and then slap your knee?” Ken asked.
Joe frowned. “Yeah. I mean, should I not have?”
“If you want to command any respect in this school, you don’t use the phrase knee-slapper in response to a joke. It’s one of the least cool things you can do. When you add actually slapping your knee to the mix, I don’t even want to associate with you anymore.”
“I was doing it ironically.”
“I don’t think you were.”
“No, seriously, it was total irony. I would never have done something like that if it weren’t, uh, you know, social commentary.”
“Go away,” said Ken. “We’re done.”
“I’m out of the group?”
“Yes.”
Joe looked to Chris for help. “Are you going to let him do this to me?”
“I…I think it might be kind of extreme, but you have to admit that your reaction to my joke was pretty embarrassing.”
“You’ve said ‘knee-slapper’ before! I’ve heard you! And it wasn’t all that long ago!”
“But I didn’t say it in front of Ken!”
“So? It happened! You still said it!”
“I didn’t actually slap my knee. I think that’s the most important element.”
“I was being ironic!”
“You’re saying that retroactively. In the moment you were speaking and acting from the heart.”
“Fine,” said Joe. “I don’t need you guys. I’ve got other friends.”
“No, you don’t,” said Chris.
“I’ve got friends all over the place.” He pointed and waved at somebody walking by. “That was a friend right there. I just don’t talk to him very much because I spend so much time hanging out with you guys. See that girl over there? Friend. Total friend. More than a friend, if you get my meaning.”
“Then why are you always with us instead of your girlfriend?” asked Chris.
“Because I thought you guys were cool. I was wrong. All these years I misjudged you two. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” said Chris.
Joe began to walk away and then turned back around. “Please don’t banish me! I have no one else!”
“This has been fun, but I have to go to practice my cello now,” said Kimberly.
“Don’t go yet,” said Marcus. “They’ll stop talking soon, I promise.”
“I want my marbles back,” Joe told Chris.
“What marbles?”
“The ones I let you borrow that one time.”
“We haven’t played marbles since we were eight!”
“Yeah, and I want them back! There was a blue clear one and a lopsided one and an orange one.”
“I don’t have those anymore.”
“You threw away my marbles?”
“Years ago.”
“Why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you return them to me?”
“Because they’re marbles!” said Chris. “I didn’t know you were obsessed with them.”
“Now that our friendship is over, I want them back. And you know how we keep a bag of those circus peanuts in the cupboard at my house even though nobody in my house likes them? I’m throwing them away.”
“I hate those things,” said Chris.
“No, you don’t.”
“I only ate them to be polite.”
“I’ve seen you eat an entire bag in less than a minute!”
“Yeah, I was feeling really polite that day.”
“You’re lying to me about circus peanuts!” said Joe. “What’s happened to us?”
Chris shrugged and avoided eye contact.
“I’ll go now,” said Joe. “I take back every high-five we ever exchanged.”
Joe walked away, his head hanging low.
“I don’t remember what we were talking about before,” said Ken.
“We were going to beat him up,” said Chris, pointing to Marcus.
“That’s right.”
Marcus held up his gauze-covered hand. “I can’t fight right now,” he said.
“Oh, wow, did that happen when you punched Ken?” asked Chris.
That was an excellent question. The best answer was not necessarily the truthful one. Peter wouldn’t correct him if he said, “Why, yes, I acquired this injury whilst punching Kenneth as punishment for his bullying behavior,” but it would be a lie. He should tell the truth.
Or should he?
Yeah, he should.
“Nah,” he said. “It happened after that.”
“You’d better clear out,” said Kimberly. “His other hand is fine, and he might break that one on the other side of your face.”
“My face?” asked Ken. “He never punched me in the face.”
Marcus squirmed a bit as he realized that this discussion might not end in his favor.
21
“I thought you punched him?” Kimberly asked Marcus.
“He did,” said Chris. “Right in the gut. You should’ve seen Ken hit the ground! Wham! Thud!” Chris laughed and then started to lift his arm to high-five Joe but then remembered that he’d left.
“Oh,” said Kimberly. “That’s not how I was led to believe it happened.”
Marcus continued to squirm. He wasn’t sure how much trouble he might be in. He had indeed won the fight with Ken (if you could call it an actual fight), so it wasn’t as if he said, “Oh, yeah, I destroyed him!” when in fact he’d run off with his tail between his legs, going “Yip! Yip! Yip!” On the other hand, he’d known when he was telling the story to Kimberly that admitting to a sucker punch might make him look bad. And even if it didn’t, now he’d entered dicey territory. It’s not about what happened. It’s that you lied about it.
“He took out a deck of cards and started doing a trick,” said Chris. “And then at the moment when Ken was least expecting it, whammo! Right in the gut!”
“Whammo is just as bad as knee-slapper,” said Ken.
“Stop trying to judge everyone’s vocabulary.”
Ken rolled his eyes. “Anyway, I’m just saying he hit me when I wasn’t prepared for it. If it sounds like he was being all brave and stuff, he wasn’t. It was a cowardly move. It wasn’t anything he should be bragging about. I’d be ashamed of myself if I punched somebody in the stomach when they weren’t expecting it. I’d have to make up a different story about what happened because there’s no honor in that. None at all.”
“In my defense,” said Marcus, “there were three of you. I had to use my wits.”
“That wasn’t wits,” said Ken. “That was being sneaky and unsportsmanlike.”
Marcus wanted to say something about how it wasn’t particularly sportsmanlike for them to pick on him and Peter in the first place, and he wanted to compare himself to a little-known sports team with no resources and compare Ken to an extremely popular and well-funded sports team too. Unfortunately, Marcus didn’t know any sports teams well enough to be sure he didn’t embarrass himself with his analogy.
“I disagree,” he said instead.
“Disagree all you want,” said Ken. “But you didn’t do anything impressive. It was no great feat. Anybody can win a fight with a sucker punch.”
“Anyway,” said Kimberly, “I’m heading off. Enjoy the rest of your conflict.”
Kimberly walked back to the main school entrance. Marcus wanted to go after her, but there really wasn’t much he could say at this point except to offer her the opportunity to bash him over the head with her cello. (She would decline, of course, though she might use the bow. And she didn’t have the cello with her anyway, so she’d have to go inside, retrieve a rather heavy instrument, carry it back out here, and then
bash him with it, which was hopefully too much trouble to bother doing.)
“What was her deal?” asked Ken.
“Nothing,” said Marcus.
“She seemed mad.”
“Nah.”
“It was like she was disappointed in you or something.”
“Mind your own business.”
Should he have said that? The expression on Ken’s face seemed to indicate that Marcus should not have.
“You think you can talk to me like that?” Ken asked. He pointed to Peter. “He’s sure not going to stick up for you.”
Peter looked at the ground. Marcus had this horrifying vision of Peter putting on his mask and shouting, “This looks like a job for…Witch-Man!” and then springing into action. Neither of them would ever live that down. It would haunt them until the end of their existence. Fortunately, instead of revealing his superhero identity to the world, Peter continued to stare at the ground.
“If you need revenge, go for it,” Marcus told Ken. “I can’t stop you. But I’ve got an injured hand. If you’re the kind of person who would beat up somebody when they’ve got an injured hand, well, that tells all of the kids who are watching us everything they need to know.”
Ken glanced around. A bunch of kids were watching them. For his own sanity, Marcus assumed that they were all hoping for a peaceful resolution.
“Hmmmm,” said Ken. His brow furrowed. His eyes glazed over. Marcus guessed that Ken’s mind was like a website that was taking a long time to load.
Ken stopped furrowing his brow and blinked. “I’m okay with people knowing that I’d beat up a kid with a hurt hand,” he said. “But we can’t do it on school property.”
“Then I’m not leaving school property.”
“You have to eventually,” said Ken.
“I think we already covered this,” said Chris. “That’s when I made the comment about eating scraps of cafeteria food out of Peter’s hair.”
“Look, I can’t keep dealing with you,” Marcus told Ken. “Like I said the last time you threatened me, I’ve got too much going on right now. What’ll it take to satisfy you? Do I have to go to the hospital, or do you just need to get in one good punch?”
