Lunchmeat

by Ben D'Alessio

  I turned back around the corner and slid down the wall and sat with my knees tucked into my chin.

  “Victor.” She came around the corner, almost tripping over me seated in the hall. “Victor, honey, you’re going to have dinner at the Geigers’ tonight. Tony’s mother will drop him off there tomorrow.”

  “What’s wrong with Britney, Mom?”

  “We’re not sure. I’m going to take her to the hospital, but she’ll be fine, okay?”

  “Mom, are you lying?”

  “What? Honey, no. Just… she’ll be fine. We don’t know exactly what’s going on. Go ahead over to the Geigers’ and I’ll call later tonight.”

  We both turned toward the open bedroom door when Britney started to cough, and scream, and cry.

  “Go ahead, Victor.” And she knelt down and kissed me on the forehead.

  It was fun getting to stay over at the Geigers’ so late on a school night. I even helped myself to extra Stewart’s Root Beer to celebrate. But when the chuggachuggachugga choo choo! of their train phone went off, I figured the fun was over and it was time to head back to my soda-less abode. I even started putting my shoes back on, expecting Mrs. Geiger to call down the steps that it was time to go home. But as I started tying the second sneaker, I could hear someone coming down the creaking basement steps.

  Mrs. Geiger stood in the doorway, holding the train phone in her hand. George muted the TV and Karl even turned around from the desktop, pausing his Warcraft campaign.

  “Hey boys. That was Mrs. Ferraro. Britney is going to be staying in the hospital for a little while. She has pneumonia.”

  I couldn’t even pretend to know what that was. I turned to Karl for an answer, but he didn’t say anything. I envisioned the black plague.

  “Can you die from pneumonia?” I could barely pronounce the word, my tongue fumbling around my mouth, but did my best to ask Mrs. G.

  “Well, Vic… yes. But it’s unlikely, and it’s good that she’s in the hospital. Your parents are there and they’ll make sure she gets the best treatment. I’ll take you tomorrow when Tony gets here. His mother is going to bring him right after school.”

  I felt nauseous as I sat in the back of Mrs. G’s Jeep on the way to Saint Mark’s hospital. All day at school I couldn’t stop replaying the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where everyone is dumping their dead into the street to be picked up by the squeaking cart.

  “You have to stay positive, Vito,” my father told me on the phone. I could hear my mother screaming in the background but could only make out bits and pieces of the colorful threats. “She’ll be okay, my friend. She’s getting better.”

  Hospitals reminded me of buildings from the future, where everyone wore the same thing, color-coded depending on your rank. Where the piercing bright lights never went out on people hooked up to machines keeping them alive. But I had rarely been in hospitals in person, instead forming my futuristic interpretation from the comforts of the couch or La-Z-Boy recliner. And the longer we walked down the halls, passing room after room of the sick and wounded, my confidence in my father’s reassurances began to fade, making room for an overwhelming darkness like the changing season.

  I could hear my mother before we reached the room. Mrs. Geiger said she would wait outside for Tony and me, and to give Britney a hug and a kiss for her.

  Britney appeared tiny in the hospital bed. Her skinny arm poked out of the hospital gown and a mask covered her nose and mouth, making her look like Batman’s sworn enemy, Bane.

  “Hey boys!” my father shouted, approaching us with a smile. “She’s going to be okay, right, hun?”

  Tony walked up to Britney and planted a kiss on her forehead as he held her hand. I remained a few feet from the doorway, frozen.

  “I’m going to sue that arrogant piece of shit.”

  “Hey! The boys are here. Can you calm down for a second, please? Come on. She’s in a different hospital now and we know what’s wrong with her. We can discuss that piece of you-know-what later.”

  A nurse in teal scrubs the same color as a Miami Dolphins jersey joined us in the room and stopped at Britney’s bedside. “How are we doing, dear?” She spoke with a thick accent that reminded me of a character from Gullah Gullah Island. She turned to me standing by the door and said, “Oh, she’ll be just fine, dear.” When she smiled, I smiled too.

  A doctor came rushing into the room with a clipboard. He didn’t look up when he asked the Ferraro family, “How are we doing?”

  When my mother didn’t “clock him right in his stupid face” or “choke his little chicken-shit neck,” I realized that this doctor was not the cause of my mother’s rage.

  The doctor looked up and smiled at me too—the hospital of contagious smiles—and asked my mother and father to join him at the bedside.

  But quickly my smile faded as the doctor unsheathed a needle so large I thought he was going to tuck it under his arm and use it for a joust. My mother, father, and the Caribbean nurse eased Britney into an upright position, and the doctor stuck her with the lance.

  Her cry sent me sprinting from the room, past Mrs. Geiger, and down the sterile white hospital halls bright with artificial light as if I were tearing down an empty Lincoln Tunnel. I found a gurney sitting in the hall, dropped to my knees, and recited the Lord’s Prayer as if I was in front of the Holy Sepulcher itself.

  “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

  “Vic, you okay?” Tony asked, standing at the edge of the hall.

  “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.”

  I remembered the whole thing.

  The new millennium came and went with much ado about nothing. I had been under the impression there would be a robotic takeover of some sort and planned an entire arsenal of weapons with Karl to defeat the cyborgs, but nothing happened besides my mom having to work late every night before the New Year—I still didn’t know what she did for a job.

  But instead of cyborgs, we should’ve been preparing to fight terrorists. Mrs. Geiger pulled Karl and me out of school early on September 11, 2001, before anyone else at Glenwood knew what had happened. I remember she was walking so quickly that I—the fastest kid in school—could barely keep up. Karl and I didn’t know what was going on. It wasn’t either of our birthdays, and my parents only let me miss school if I was sick: “We don’t pay these taxes for you to sit at home,” my mother would say.

  “We’ve been attacked,” Mrs. Geiger said as we followed the pavement to the Jeep parked in front of the school. At the time I didn’t know what she meant, but I figured any “attack” warranted us cutting across the grass. In 2001 I was made a Safety, against my will, but I turned a blind eye to the “no grass” rule to avoid becoming a hypocrite—a term Karl taught me.

  I pictured an invading army launching flaming boulders from catapults into Washington D.C., shirtless, with long hair, wielding axes and circular shields like the Visigoths sacking Rome.

  “Two planes were flown into the Twin Towers. Your father didn’t go into the office today,” she said to Karl. “Vic, your mother is at our house.”

  I remember my parents and Mr. and Mrs. Geiger standing around the television; my mother was crying. They kept replaying the footage of this plane—it honestly looked so tiny as it pierced through the air—crashing into one of the towers and disappearing into a cloud of orange and black.

  Teachers would say we would always remember where we were, who we were with, what we did that day—they compared it to the day President Kennedy was shot. In the Geigers’ basement with Karl, sucking down Stewart’s Root Beer and swapping turns at the desktop to play a War
craft campaign, didn’t seem like the poignant story I’d want to tell my children one day.

  Brad Knight’s father died on 9/11. It didn’t matter then that Brad was a malignant; I felt bad for him still. Actually, eight other parents died in the attack, but I didn’t know their kids. Mr. Geiger didn’t go to work that day or he could’ve been the ninth.

  I didn’t see Karl as much when I started sixth grade at Millburn Middle School. My school-day started earlier in the morning and I had to take the bus to downtown Millburn. I instantly missed getting dropped off at Alfonso’s corner to walk downhill and turn underneath the train-track overpass with Karl, bursting out on the fringes of Glenwood’s lush front lawn.

  But the corner of West Road and Lakeview—where Nero (rest in peace, my friend) jumped into that lake in front of the retired tennis player’s house—was a cold and barren place. My mom started coming out to wait with me on the corner because a seventh-grader up the block had the school pick him up right in front of his house.

  “There it is,” she said as the bus came barreling down West Road. “Another Short Hills kid getting an exception in life.”

  The five Millburn Township elementary schools funneled into the middle school, and on the first day we were all thrown into the auditorium to fend for ourselves. Before I got on the bus, my mother told me that today I could start over, that I should make new friends and avoid the kids who gave me trouble at Glenwood. I didn’t want new friends, but I didn’t have a choice.

  Lenny moved to a town in Somerset County where his mother could afford a house and they didn’t have to live in an apartment anymore. Maine Ogden went to a private school called Pingry—I’d only see him at Little League now. Andrius went to Lithuania one summer and never came back—I never saw my first love again. And Karl was still at Glenwood, where I had been told the regime adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward the trading of Pokémon cards, as the fervor had mostly died down by 2002.

  I did look forward to seeing Kader again, as Hartshorn kids and Glenwood kids would finally engage in educational cross-pollination. But as I stood in the auditorium growing steadily more saturated with newly minted sixth-graders, I couldn’t find him. I would discover that Kader and his family moved shortly after 9/11 to somewhere in the Midwest, where there would be plenty of room for the Kalans’ horses—I pictured Kader as a dark-skinned cowboy wielding one of those Ali Baba swords that hung in their house. I had asked my mom if Iraq attacked us on 9/11.

  “Sorta,” she said.

  I felt like the new kid all over again, like some type of barbarian—Visigoth, Ostrogoth, Vandal, Hun, you name it.

  “Hey Vic! Vic, over here.” Paxton waved me over to a row full of malignants and kids I had never seen before—potential malignants, I suppose. My mother had told me to start over, and I wanted to start sixth grade Paxton-free, but I had been standing in the aisle for far too long and took a seat in his row—at least Silas joined us too.

  The ungodly hour at which I now had to wake up for school left me delirious; I didn’t notice Pierce Stone seated directly in front of me. I looked for an escape, but either side of me was filled with kids from Deerfield—the elementary school serving “new” Short Hills. George called it “B’nai Deerfield.”

  All of the Deerfield kids spoke about a place of infinite joy, devoid of the auspices of parental guidance, where they had entire gangs of other friends from places like Colts Neck, White Plains, and even Livingston—when I told the Deerfielder next to me that I had cousins in Livingston, he asked what temple they went to. I had trouble picturing a pantheonic structure in New Jersey filled with statues to the Roman gods—I figured my father would’ve taken us there by now. They referred to this place of wonderment simply as “camp,” and prated on, exchanging stories of their own personal Edens like they were Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island but in Maine or New Hampshire. I knew Matt Dershowitz went to camp someplace in Pennsylvania—nowhere near Philadelphia—but he didn’t talk about it like they did. But the old malignants and the new ones from Hartshorn with whom I was not yet acquainted but could tell they were just as malignant as my nemeses from Glenwood, seemed to mesh and mold in with the Deerfielders as if they had known each other for years. Sure, I knew some of them from Little League and youth football, but everyone seemed to get along like they’d had pre-class meetings over the summer where they outlined all topics and trends and inside jokes to prepare for the first day of school.

  “Ferraro? I thought I heard you back there,” said Pierce Stone, turning around in his seat. “What did you do this summer? Go to that Southern trash beach town?”

  Before I could throw out a lie about my trip to Bonaire, a plump woman with hair like golden wheat spouting from volcanic ash began commencement and welcomed us to the middle school. I didn’t really listen to her; I never could just sit and listen when adults discussed boring things you couldn’t write stories about. That’s why I daydreamed so much, especially if I had a window to look out or a pencil and paper on which to draw paladins battling berserkers.

  But in middle school I had new muses to clog my brain from absorbing adult borings, and those were the girls.

  They were named Jamie, Julie, Jessie, and Jenna—at least half of them were, anyway. They walked in groups of six, ten, eighteen, and wore these tight black pants with the words So Low on the folded-over waists in the back. Glenwood had its own beauties (I’d put Avery Burnham up against any of them), but there was something exotic about this group, like they all belonged on an island in the Caribbean, playing volleyball and splashing in the crystal waves.

  But I couldn’t possibly speak to any of them, at least not initiate a conversation.

  By the second week of school there were already “hot lists” circling around Mrs. McNulty’s social studies class. “Location, location, location,” she would have us repeat, stressing the importance of civilization thriving on river valleys and sea coasts.

  I sat in the back whenever we weren’t assigned seats alphabetically. Not because I thought it was cool or anything banal like that, but because back there I could drift off to worlds that offered more than my own.

  As I was deep in a steel-clashing melee with a formidable orc named Grim Bloodhammer, a crumpled-up folded piece of paper slid underneath my sneaker. It was weathered and dirty from being unfolded and refolded repeatedly. I picked it up without searching for its sender and splayed it out on my desk—it was the hot list. Why the sixth-grade magnum opus had been so haphazardly shared from contributor to contributor wasn’t on my mind at that moment. I scanned the list in a frenzy, hoping all the years of aunts and grandmothers telling me how handsome I was weren’t just sweet nothings.

  1. Josh Glassman, 2. Mitch Farber, 3. John Thompson, 4. Pierce Stone (the sock), 5. Alex Liebersfeld, 6. Silas Badenhorst… I continued, scanning, searching, praying for a “V”: 13. Vic Ferraro.

  Thirteen? I’d take thirteen. I was thrilled for thirteen.

  “Psst, Vic…”

  Besides Paxton, who sat comfortably at nine, thirteen made me only the fourth Glenwood kid on the list.

  “Psssst, Vic, that was meant for me,” said Jessie Levinson, seated in front of me.

  “Oh, here. Sorry,” I refolded the list and dropped it on the back of her armrest.

  “Thanks. Hey Vic,” she said, not turning around, surreptitiously engrossed in Mrs. McNulty’s spiel concerning the maritime might of the Phoenicians, “Jenna thinks you’re cute.”

  Jenna thinks I’m cute? But it’s the “hot list,” not the “cute list.”

  “Is cute like hot?” I whispered to Jessie, leaning over my desk.

  “What? Yes, it’s like, the same thing.”

  I couldn’t remember where Jenna ranked on the guys’ hot list. Wait, which Jenna is it?

  “Which Jenna? Hey, hey Jessie, which Jenna? Tisch or Goldenberg?”

  “Tisch.”

 
I would have to consult the list again—I believe Paxton had it—but Jenna Tisch fell anywhere between four and seven. Four and seven! What a day it had been. I smiled for the first time in middle school and suddenly found the Phoenicians enthralling.

  I stopped writing once I hit the sixth grade. At first I couldn’t write because I was upset and tired all the time. I was still waking up at that godforsaken hour for school, sometimes even before my mother, and had football practice four times a week. Then I asked Jenna to be my girlfriend. Well, I asked Stephanie Hinkle to ask Jenna if she would be my girlfriend, who successful relayed the message and told me “yes.” I was in and thrusted into the fracas of middle school social life where, between going to parties in the basements of Short Hills mansions on the weekends and talking on the phone or AOL Instant Messenger during the week, there was no time to write epics of night elves and mages. I hadn’t seen Karl in three weeks—longer than when we went down the Shore; I usually had to call Karl midweek from Ocean City just to catch up.

  I spent a lot of time at Freddy “Tank” DeVallo’s house. Tank was a little over five feet but was built from Italian marble and ran the football like a boulder rolling down the Dolomites. He lived in the Deerfield section even though he wasn’t Jewish. His mother was never home and his father lived on Staten Island. We would order Dominos—sometimes twice a day—and stay up late trying to catch boobs on Sex and the City or in a movie on HBO.

  Tank’s older sister, Carina, blared the same pop songs all night from down the hall and always used the phone line to talk to boys—always older ones from different towns, like Union, Springfield, and New Providence.

  “Hey Tank, do you believe John Thompson when he says he’s seven inches?”

  “Seven inches, what?” said Tank as he covered his shirt in Axe body spray for the third time.

  “Oh, uh… you know. What the girls asked us the other day?”