“I love that book,” says Max.
Just then Lisa pulls up to the curb.
“Happy last day, kids!” she sings out. The brakes heave a pent-up breath of air and we push out of the bus in a big pile. But then the sight before us stops us in our tracks.
It’s our own private amusement park.
Carnival games, popcorn, cotton candy, dunk tank, beanbag toss, water balloons, prizes … and it’s all untouched. Just waiting for us.
“Field Day,” says Ash in a half whisper.
Max’s eyes get big too. “We never had this at my old school.”
A car horn honks behind us just as a woman bellows, “You call this an education?”
We turn in time to see Devon get out of his mom’s car, ignoring her as best he can.
“Hey, Ash,” he says. “Hey, Ian.”
He steps right in front of Max and cuts him out of our circle without saying hello.
“Hey, Devon,” says Max, his face stormy. “Mommy dropped her special boy off today, huh?”
“Did anyone else hear a giant sucking sound?” Devon says. Max barely has time to get angry before Devon adds, “Oh, hey, Max! You ready to have fun today?”
“It’d be a real shame if we didn’t get to have a little fun, you and me,” says Max.
“Was that a threat?” Devon asks, a little bit confused.
“Are you a moron?”
Everyone freezes.
“What did you say?” says Devon.
Max looks right at Devon and presses on: “Hey, Ian, is Devon a moron?”
“Uh …” My face goes blank.
“Leave him out of this.” Devon isn’t used to someone challenging him at his own game, and he shoves Max with his elbow.
It’s a good thing Mark’s bus arrives just then. He runs up to us with a big smile. “Field Day! Come on, guys, what’re you waiting for?”
I guess no one has a good answer to that, so we hurry inside. Everyone except Max. He just stands there, watching the crowd disappear. The sad music playing inside his skull is so loud I can hear it too.
“Hey,” I call back to him. “You coming, Max?”
He gives this look like he can’t tell if I’m making fun of him. But before he can say anything, Mark yells, “Ian, come on!” and I chase after my friends.
As I plop at my desk, I feel the back of my neck tingle and, looking over my shoulder, catch a glimpse of Amy glaring at me. Trying to set me on fire with her eyes, from the look of things.
“Hey, Amy,” I say.
“Yes?” she says coldly.
I don’t get it. Is she still mad from yesterday?
I could ask, I guess, but then she’d know I’m confused—and if the first rule for being a kid is be quiet and fit in, the second rule is never let on when there’s something you don’t understand. Just agree with what the other kids are saying, or be really vague, or pull the fire alarm maybe.
Before I can do any of that, the classroom door slams shut and Mr. Dunford calls out, “Good morning, almost middle schoolers! Everyone excited to go outside?”
The room erupts in a cheer.
“Good. We just have one piece of business to get out of the way. Everyone please take out your reflections and pass them forward.”
Suddenly the air is full of riffling sounds as everyone passes up their assignments. And I’m trying to think of a way to get Dunford to go easy on me when Amy whacks me in the shoulder with a stack of papers—
I pass them forward without pausing and Amy sighs as she figures out I forgot.
“Don’t tell him, Ian,” says Mark from the next row over. “He might not notice …”
I think about pretending I turned in my reflection, but pretty much right away my whole body goes hot and cold at the same time. Nope. Not an option.
“Mr. Dunford?” I say. “I forgot.”
“That’s not a problem, Ian,” says Dunford. “I’ll stay inside with you as long as it takes for you to finish.”
“Wow,” says Mark, passing my desk on his way outside. “Way to screw up our Field Day, Ian.” He shakes his head and abandons me to my fate. At least Ash gives me a little smile as he runs outside to have fun. But then they’re all gone and I’m alone in the classroom, feeling lame.
I stare at the blank piece of paper in front of me, trying to focus: How do words work? Was I even in this class this year? With every cheer and splash, my eyes go to the windows.
“All right,” Dunford says at last. “Are you writing a novel, Ian? Bring me what you have.”
As I hand over my five hard-earned sentences, he takes a quick look and holds the paper up, like it’s a dead fish I put on his desk. “You missed the point of this exercise, you know.”
“I don’t know what you want!” I say.
He lifts an eyebrow.
“Mr. Dunford, come on. Please?”
He doesn’t move.
“It’s the last day, Mr. Dunford. If I don’t get it by now …”
For a long time he just watches. Waiting. “All right, Ian,” he says in a voice he can’t make sound stern. “Just copy it down neatly. You can go outside.”
By the time I get outside I’m a tornado in the shape of a kid. I run through half the activities with an intensity that’s never been seen at East Huron Elementary. At one point I manage to combine beanbag toss and water balloons into a supersport that should probably be in the Olympics.
But before I can perfect it we’re called inside for lunch. I’m halfway through explaining the rules when Devon says, “We get it, Ian. Give it a rest!”
And when I look up at him, I realize that I’ve forgotten the very first rule: keep quiet until you know what other people want to hear.
“Sure, Dev,” I say.
“Whatever.” His eyes linger on my food. My peanut butter and jelly sandwich, apple, and sensible granola bar. His expression softens a little.
“I’m sorry, dude,” he says. “Wanna trade?”
“Really?” I ask. Devon’s lunch is a big upgrade: cold pizza and Fritos.
He nods and pushes it across the table. “Not really hungry.”
“You sure?” I ask. “Thanks, man.”
For the rest of lunch Ash and I recite old jokes and Mark and Devon argue about sports, and then all our heads turn at once as we see the teachers bringing out ice cream and cookies. Which is when a cough escapes the little table where Max is sitting.
Devon and Mark look at each other immediately.
“You okay, Maxy?” Devon calls out.
When I turn, Max is nearly white and his eyes are really wide. He tries to say something, but he can’t get a word out. There’s just this weird whistling sound …
The other kids at the table with Max must know what’s going on. “Nurse Mike!” they call out as Max fumbles with a terrifying needle.
Next thing I know, that crazy-looking thing is sticking out of Max’s thigh. It all happens so fast I can barely keep up, and even Devon looks scared. Max’s lips have turned blue—he’s wheezing like he can’t breathe and I don’t know if it’s been a second or a minute or an hour … but at the end of it a hand tightens on my upper arm. It’s the lunch lady. “Come with me.”
“What?” I ask.
“Now.”
“But—”
“Not a word.”
The voice carries so much weight that I jump to obey, and as I’m led through the hall I see Mark and Devon and Ash there too. They look angry. Or afraid.
An ambulance waits outside the school and a stretcher rolls into the hall. Looking back to the lunchroom I can see Max is on his feet, insisting on walking to the ambulance himself.
He avoids looking at us mostly, but there’s one moment when our eyes connect and I almost feel like I can’t breathe now, either.
Does he think we hurt him?
I’ve never been to the principal’s office before. It’s a weird combination of library and dungeon and twice as musty smelling as either one. The only sound comes from the wal
l clock’s ticking and the muffled voices in the hall: the gods, discussing our fate.
I jump a little when the door swings open and our principal comes in with an unreadable expression.
“Hello, boys.” She looks us all over. “Devon Crawford … I know you. Who are your friends?”
Ash and Mark mumble their names, and suddenly my friends seem weirdly unfamiliar to me. Like we’re robots playing the role of ourselves. I’m last to say my name, and when I do, she makes me say it three times until it’s loud enough to hear.
I’ve never been treated like this by grown-ups before. Like I’ve committed some crime, and I have no idea what I did.
“Ms. King?” Devon asks. “What happened to Max?”
The principal takes a long, hard look at Devon before she answers.
“Max has an allergy to peanuts, Devon. That’s why we have a special place in the cafeteria for him to eat. Did you know that?”
“That was allergies?” Devon asks with surprise.
“Boys, did you know that Max was allergic to peanuts?”
Ash nods. The rest of us look at him.
Ms. King sits down on the edge of her desk. “Okay, I’m still a little confused about what happened. Can someone explain to me what’s been going on between you boys and Max Willis, please?”
She pauses, but no one volunteers. I can feel her eyes linger on me, even though I’m looking at my shoes and thinking back to trading my sandwich.
“Ian?” she says. “Help me understand.”
I feel my heart trying to escape from my rib cage, and all of my words stick in my throat. Just like usual. I don’t know what to say, and I can’t look at my friends … but all of them are being quiet, so it feels like that’s what I should be doing too. It’s my only choice, I guess, since I’ve lost the power of speech.
The principal looks disappointed. She turns back to Devon and says, “Okay. Well you’re free to go for now, boys.”
A wave of relief washes over me.
“We are?” Ash says, surprised.
“Yes.”
“Really?” says Mark.
“Ash, Mark? Your parents are here to take you home. I’ll let them talk to you about what’s going to happen next. Devon, Ian? Your parents couldn’t make it, so you’ve got detention with Mr. Dunford for the afternoon. We’ll pick this up next week.”
Something about the shock of the words next week unfreezes my tongue again. “Next week is vacation, Ms. King,” I remind her. “Today’s the last day of school.”
Principal King’s face forms a smile, but there’s absolutely no amusement in her expression. “Mr. Hart,” she says, “you don’t think that you boys are still getting a summer vacation after what happened today, do you?”
“Because of my sandwich?” I squeak.
“If you want to act like bullies, then that’s how you’ll be treated,” she says. And then she keeps going, but I can’t really understand it very well—
There’s this dull ringing in my ears, and her voice sounds like it’s very far away, even though she’s right there in front of me. I feel this weird separation between my mind and my body, and all I can figure out is that she’s sending us to a summer school or something—a reform school full of bullies.
Bullies like me.
As I try to wrap my head around everything that’s going on, the world moves forward without me. We leave the principal’s office, and Devon and I go to Mr. Dunford’s room. He’s sitting at a little desk in the back, like a student does.
You might expect we’d be copying lines from the board or something—but Mr. Dunford “just wants to talk.”
And I want to talk—I want to confess. To apologize. To stop everything, and go back.
“Mr. Dunford?” I begin. But then I stop. I can’t find any words that will send me back in time and fix everything. And also Devon glares at me with such ferocity that I decide to keep my mouth shut very, very tight.
“What’s up, Ian?” says Mr. Dunford with lifted eyebrows.
I can feel Devon’s eyes drilling into my skull.
“…. can I go to the bathroom, please?”
When you need to be alone, there’s no place like a huge, empty bathroom with a tiny, lockable stall. Other people might listen to their favorite song, or have a snack, or pick on a kid who can’t fight back, but when I need a break from it all, I come here. You can escape for three and a half minutes—be alone without worrying what other people think.
I close the lid on the toilet and sit down on top with my knees to my chest.
It was my sandwich that did all this. The thought of that tiny peanut rips me free of earth’s gravity and sends me drifting in the darkness—like I’m in outer space, silent and frozen and alone.
My brain replays the morning over and over, and with every replay I feel my heart sucked down all over again. Like it’s being flushed down the toilet, pulling the rest of me with it into some other place and some alternate when.
And then that story I heard in class yesterday bubbles up in my mind.
Thomas Edison, what would you do if you were here?
You didn’t start out a famous scientist. You were my age once—how did you survive it all? How did you transform from a twelve-year-old dropout to a self-taught inventor guy?
I wait for an answer from young Thomas Edison, but he stays very quiet.
Like he’s not even there.
And I pull my heart back out of the toilet and push the lever to flush. I want to go back to my real life, but everything feels different as I try to stand up.
The sound of that flush, like an angry wolverine gargling, makes my head swirl with it … like I’m spinning and spinning, out of control. Into some awful and blurry new future.
It feels like the car is going off the edge of a cliff, but every time I look out the window the road is solid beneath us.
“We’ll be at the school soon, honey,” says Mom. Reform school, she means. I’m going to a new school, full of bullies. I stare out the window, trying to match up my old life with this new one. The last few days have been such a weird, fuzzy forever. I haven’t heard from Devon or Mark, or even Ash. I haven’t wanted to talk to them, really, but still it’d be nice to be reminded I’m not alone.
All I’ve wanted this week is sleep—but sleep is impossible for me now, so I’ve played a lot of video games. When I play video games I can almost forget what happened to Max. But after a while I’ll be sitting there and there’ll be this explosion. Except it’s not the stuff on the screen, it’s the guilt in my chest.
Your friend Max could’ve died, I hear in my head.
And there I am, video game music playing and an impossible world whooshing past on the TV—it’s all turned into dumb little dots. My eyes go unfocused and objects scroll past, and I push the controls to the right so my character gets knocked off a cliff and tumbles off the edge of the world.
It feels good to destroy your hard work sometimes.
But only for a minute. Because then you have to beat the whole level again—setting the table, pushing food around your plate, taking out the trash. Only, halfway through you stop and realize it’s not a video game.
It’s your stupid life.
And then you find yourself sitting in your room with your huge duffel bag packed for this crazy summer school thing, and that little freak in your head reminds you about the thousand-page list of banned items that came in your admission packet. So you dump everything out again and repack a toothbrush and some underwear and sit there with that sad little bundle, and start to laugh.
The Freak in my head likes to laugh when there’s nothing funny about what’s going on. It likes to speak up when I should probably stay quiet. It wants to consume me and take control for good—and it’s always there, lurking and waiting for its moment …
And right now, driving to reform school, I feel the Freak’s laughter roll around inside me like a silent scream, drowning out all of Mom’s “we love yous” and “we’ll
miss yous” and “don’t panics”—which is probably not a bad thing, because saying “don’t panic” only makes me panic more.
Is this stupid thing ever going to plummet off a cliff or what?
But the car just rumbles onto the highway exit ramp, like a turtle slides into a river. We turn onto a gravel road, bumper to bumper with other cars ferrying doomed children to the Juvenile Academy for Noncompliant and Underachieving Students. JANUS.
“There it is!” says Dad, pointing at a building that must be the school. “Looks okay, right?”
“It’s so pretty!” says Mom.
It does look pretty from a distance, I guess. It’s this sprawling, green campus, and the buildings have these huge, bright banners hung all around. There’s hardly any hint of the grimness that lurks in the hearts of the bullies who will come to call this place home.
That’s the way it usually is with evil, though. First it lurks—then it leaps up and clobbers you, like a big cat in the jungle.
And that’s what this place is, right? A jungle. With fields full of poisonous flowers and endless stretches of quicksand bog. And this one crazy valley where the angry monkeys live. You know, the angry monkeys in those gnarled, ancient trees with fruit shaped like dodgeballs? Oh! You don’t know about the dodgeball monkeys? If you’re gonna die, dodgeball monkeys are a decent choice. Top five maybe. Solid top ten for sure. I can almost hear the sounds of their bruising artillery across the open fields when Dad shuts the engine off.
“You ready, kid?” he says.
Okay, Hart, I tell myself. One thing at a time. Breathe, then once you’ve got the breathing thing down you can try opening the car door. Now. Pick up your bag and don’t look around.
My heart is beating a little too hard and I take a second to control my breathing.
Just put one foot in front of the other. Good man. Now keep walking, but listen to me: hugging Mom and Dad good-bye’s gonna be hard, so let’s not get caught by surprise, okay? Start working up to that now while you’re walking to that check-in table. Go.
I take one last step, and there I am. The pink bunting around the table does a rumba in the breeze.
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