Sully Messed Up

by Stephanie Simpson McLellan

  The lake ached to pull them forward. Numb and sluggish, Sully reached wildly, as he and Blossom floated under the branch. He grabbed the noose and pulled it over his head and shoulders, gasping as it cinched across his chest. No longer sure which way to go, he lost sight of land altogether as the water closed over their heads.

  CHAPTER 57

  The first time Sully woke, a cocoon of darkness enveloped him. Feeling his arms at his sides, he jerked them forward, grasping for Blossom in the murky water. Acute pressure stabbed in his right forearm, and a warm hand landed on his forehead.

  The second time Sully woke, warm pressure encased his right hand. As car headlights illuminated the room from a window on the left, Sully turned his head in the direction of the warmth to see his mother sleeping in a chair by his bed. Her neck bent back at an awkward tilt. Her light snoring kept time with the passing cars. What was his mother doing in his room? It was beyond creepy.

  The third time Sully woke, harsh light pressed on his eyelids, and a fist of pain hammered on the inside of his skull.

  “Welcome back, Dude.”

  Sully opened his eyes to see a pale blue curtain partially surrounding his bed. An odor, vaguely poisonous yet vigorously clean, clung to the inside of his nostrils.

  “Your mom just left to get coffee,” said Morsixx. “You’ve been out a long time.”

  “Blossom—” said Sully.

  “She’s going to be okay,” said Morsixx. “They pumped her stomach of the bottle of aspirin she swallowed. They’re going to keep her in an extra day, but they said we could visit, once you woke up.”

  “You saved us,” said Sully.

  “I think we all kind of saved each other, Dude. You mom’s invited us to dinner next week.”

  “Sullivan!”

  Mom pushed past a nurse to reach his bedside. Her eyes brimmed as she took his hand. For the first time in Sully’s memory, she was speechless.

  A jab of pain snaked across Sully’s skull, and he reached his hand up to cradle the area that hurt.

  “It’ll grow back, Sullivan,” said his mom.

  “What will grow?” Sully’s fingers crept past matted curls to trace a raised area that ran several inches along the side of his head.

  “Your hair. They had to shave that part for the stitches is all,” she said. “You saved that girl’s life, Sullivan.”

  “It wasn’t just me, Mom.”

  “I know, dear. Morsixx and I have had lots of time to talk. I was wrong about your friends, Sullivan. He’s a lovely young man.”

  That’s two people now who’ve described Morsixx as lovely. We’ve clearly crossed into some alternate universe, thought Sully.

  Blossom looked tiny and frail when Morsixx wheeled Sully into her room, but her hair haloed her bruised face like the petals of some brilliant flower. In contrast to his own, her hospital gown was bright fuchsia.

  “I’m going to stay with my aunt for a while,” she said. Morsixx held her hand the way Sully’s mom had held his. Well, maybe a bit different than that.

  “It’s going to be okay.” She reached for Sully’s hand and squeezed it. “My dad’s promised to get help. Both of us are having a hard time with my mom’s death. We’re going to help each other.”

  CHAPTER 58

  On the way to school on Monday, Sully made a detour onto True Street, surprised to see the fence void of figurines. Puzzled, he scanned the length, and finally located Goyle and The Riddler clinging to the lower rail in an obscure corner. Darth Vader lay in a scrubby patch of weeds at the base of one of the posts.

  Sully started along the path to the front door, when Mr. C. gave him a thumbs up from the front window and then pointed toward Perdu Avenue. Following the old man’s magnified gaze, Sully saw the missing characters on the top rail at the point where Perdu ended and True began.

  Sleeping Beauty and Lancelot sat close together with Pumbaa nearby. Beside them, Charlie Brown stood facing Madonna, who now had a small clump of rainbow-colored putty plugging the hole in her chest. The black pack previously glued to her back was gone.

  Sully glanced back at the house as sunlight glinted off Mr. C.’s glasses. Turning back, he found himself face-to-face with the Purse Lady. As if this meeting were prearranged, she put out her hand. Her lips trembled on her left cheek, and her sad eyes surveyed him from opposite sides of her chin.

  Sully pulled the rainbow ball out of his pocket and placed it on her palm. As she closed her hand around it, years seemed to fall away from her face, and her features rolled gently into place—still slightly off-kilter, but almost normal.

  Miss Winters greeted Sully at the front entrance to the school, almost as if she’d been waiting for him.

  “So good to see you this morning, Sullivan.” She reached for his hand and clasped it in both of hers. This was clearly a foreign agent in the old lady’s skin.

  “I am not often wrong, but I have to say I misjudged you, young man. I hope we can start again.” Her thin lips widened into a smile that was slightly terrifying.

  “Um, okay,” said Sully.

  “Excellent,” she said. “I think you have a very promising future, Sullivan Brewster.”

  Sully nodded and awkwardly removed his hand from her grasp. “Thank you, Miss Winters. You, too.”

  Someone had clearly kidnapped the principal, but he decided to let it ride.

  “You’ve been tricking me!” Winston approached Sully and Morsixx at the locker. “You’re that guy! My mom told me.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell—”

  “Sully,” Winston said, as if tasting the name. “I like it. I like you, Sully.”

  “I like you, too, Winston,” Sully said.

  “But I don’t like him,” Winston said.

  Sully looked over to where Winston pointed. Tank was cleaning out his locker under the supervision of both Miss Winters and a huge, muscled man Sully surmised was Tank’s father. The older version of Tank grabbed his son’s forearm and rammed it into the locker, while barking something at him. Tank scowled in Sully’s direction. Before Sully turned away, Tank’s eyes darted out of sight around the side of his face, as his nose jumped for cover behind one of his ears.

  “That’s okay, Winston,” Sully said, smiling. “He’s just a little messed up.”

  As more and more students poured into the hallways, the school began to resemble a Mr. Potato Head convention. Dodger’s ears bloomed like fungus from his cheekbones, and Ox’s mouth gaped sideways between his eyes. Rebecca and Cindy had matching misplaced lips, and even Blake Muir’s perfect Greek God nose flapped from side to side on the tip of his chin.

  “I guess we all are.” Sully patted Winston’s back before heading to Sex Ed. “Except maybe for you.”

  CHAPTER 59

  After dinner on Sunday, Blossom insisted on doing dishes with Sully’s mom and Eva.

  “Dishes were a ritual with me and my mom,” she said. “I could use a little ‘girl time.’ I’ll be along in a bit, okay?”

  “You got scissors, Dude?”

  “What do you want scissors for?”

  “You’re hurting my eyes, Dude,” said Morsixx. “Just come with me for a minute.”

  Morsixx led Sully to the bathroom and pointed in the mirror. The bald patch on Sully’s head looked like a crop circle. “That look no longer works for you. Besides, my mom told me that in our culture, many will cut their hair when there’s a death in the family, as a symbol of the loss. It divides things into the before and after. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to say goodbye to the old Sully.”

  Morsixx held the scissors up to Sully’s hair.

  Sully winced at his reflection. “Do it fast before I change my mind,” he said.

  “The right side’s shorter than the left, Dude,” he said after a minute. “I’m going to have to cut more off.”

  Sully
gazed at his reflection. It looked like he’d had a close encounter with a kitchen blender. The pile of hair at his feet sprawled like roadkill.

  “Watch out for my nose!” As the blades dove for Sully’s bangs, his nose clung to the middle of his face as if on a suicide mission.

  “I’m not that bad, Dude.”

  “Hate to disagree,” said Sully.

  By the time both sides were somewhat even, Sully’s features trembled, with nowhere to hide. His startling hairlessness broadcast his face with alarming shame-lessness.

  His right cheekbone was swollen and green, and his lip was split and encrusted with dried blood. His nose, broken in the encounter with Tank, was off-kilter and a little crooked, but other than that, each body part was where it was supposed to be.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so much like himself.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m grateful to Richard Dionne for pulling Sully out of a half-decade’s old pile, thus giving this messed-up kid a chance to show his face.

  I’m equally thankful to have had the opportunity to work with Peter Carver as editor. Peter is legend, and was just suspicious enough about my messed-up hero that he asked the tough, insightful questions that helped me reshape Sully’s world and wrestle the story under control.

  Thank you also to Penny Hozy for copyediting the manuscript so carefully and for providing helpful insight to make it as clean as possible.

  The idea for this book was conceived so long ago that I’ve lost the exact thread of how it came to be at all. Over the years, the story has morphed and evolved, perhaps more than Sully’s face. If Sully had actually launched into the world when I first started to write about him, he’d be as old as my son Trysten is now (24). As the before and after of the wrong and right way to deal with bullies, Trysten was the inspiration for both Sully and Morsixx.

  My family (jets: Jeff, Eryn, Trysten and Sarah) lurks not far beneath the surface of everything I write. Sarah and Eryn, my strong, creative, insightful, compassionate daughters, aren’t so very hidden behind the tattoos Blossom paints on herself.

  A thanks also to the family I grew up in, who were there when I navigated my own choppy waters of high school. My late father, Sid, would have helped Sully find his way. My mother Shirley and brother Geoff are my close friends, and I couldn’t ask for two more supportive sisters than my own, JoAnne and Leighanne. Thank you.

  Photo credit: JoAnne and Dennis Murphy

  Interview with Stephanie Simpson McLellan

  Could you tell us where the idea for this story originated?

  It’s no secret that schoolyard bullying is a reality. I volunteered in my children’s classrooms when they were younger, and was dismayed to see that some kids become bullies even in kindergarten. My son is deaf in one ear, which made him appear a little different to others, which in turn made him feel a little unsure of himself. Bullies smell fear and pounce on insecurities, and it took some time for my son to find his way through this. Let’s just say that the way he navigated elementary school inspired the character of Sully, and the change in his attitude and feelings about himself, along with the way he reinvented his “look,”* inspired the character of Morsixx.

  * Between elementary school and high school, my son (who is a musician) became passionate about heavy metal music. He decided to cut his long, curly brown hair short, dye it black, and change what he wore to reflect the music he loved. Before he cut his hair, he ran a campaign to have people pledge money if he followed through and shaved his head. As a result, he raised over $2,000 for cancer research and donated his hair to make a wig for someone who’d lost their hair because of chemotherapy.

  What made you think about the concept of Sully’s face rearranging itself as he muddles through the early days of Grade 9?

  With the popularity of social media, little is private. Both the good and bad things that happen to you—and everything in between—are very public. It’s like one giant bulletin board where everything about you is posted for everyone to see. No hiding! We even post emojis to tell people how we’re feeling, which is like giving people permission to look into your heart.

  The metaphor of Sully’s messed-up face plays with how public everything is these days, by taking it out of the digital space and putting it back into the physical world. Sully’s misery feels very public to him—so real and uncomfortable that surely everyone must be able to see his fears and insecurities.

  But here’s something I want you to think about. You learn in the story that Sully is the only one who can actually see his disfiguration (with the exception of The Purse Lady). So, if all your big and little thoughts are poured into social media all the time, does that make you more visible or less so? In other words, when we tell everything to everybody all the time, are as many people really listening as we think, or is there just so much information—too much information for anyone to really take in—that we actually become invisible again?

  What led to your deciding to create the set of figurines on Mr. C.’s fence?

  True Street is loosely based on a real street in my town that comes off Newmarket’s Fairy Lake Park. While I’ve changed the geography a bit, and bent the exact look and placement of the house on this short street, the real house actually did have a snake-rail fence about a decade ago, to which plastic figurines were affixed and often rearranged. While I never knew (or even saw) the owner, those figurines on the fence intrigued me, and I wondered what motivated someone to do this.

  The character of Mr. C. is based on an old man who happened to be on the same tour I was on in Italy, when we visited Pompeii. Like the fictitious Mr. C., this old man relied on canes, wore glasses with impossibly thick lenses, and moved wickedly fast, despite how frail he looked.

  You have chosen a number of interesting characters from other stories as models for these figurines. Why did you decide to also include “The Lady of Shalott” among the references Sully comes across in his Grade 9 year?

  When Blossom crept into Sully’s story, and I thought about what she was struggling with, Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott” instantly came to mind—visually as well as lyrically, as this work has been the inspiration for many paintings. In the poem, the Lady of Shalott lives alone in a tower. She must weave a colorful web and only watch the outside world through a mirror. If she looks at the real world of Camelot directly, she will die. When her mirror breaks, leaving even her reflection of the world fractured, she leaves the tower and floats down the river in a boat to her death. In her way, Blossom is also unable to look directly at her real world, because it has become too painful. Instead of weaving tapestries to imitate life, Blossom paints an artificial life on herself.

  Sometimes we discover that the bully has himself been a victim of abuse—Tank is an example of that. But what do you think leads kids like Dodger and Ox to participate in harassing Sully?

  I guess the question is, how do any gangs form? Bullies usually have sidekicks—both in movies / comics and in the real world—as I guess it’s easier and safer to side with power than to fight against it. Certainly, we’re living at a time when many are confusing authoritarian power with leadership and strength. If you study what makes someone a bully, you’ll find that a bully attacks someone they see as weak, and they do this so they don’t have to think about their own insecurities and weaknesses. After all, as the saying goes, the best defense is a good offense. The themes of exposure and reflection run through the novel. Bullies and their sidekicks likely don’t do the hard work of self-reflection. Ox and Dodger use Tank as their mirror—they see themselves reflected in what they perceive as his strength.

  While Sully becomes the target of Tank and his friends, somehow Morsixx does not. Why do you think that is?

  As I mentioned, the character of Morsixx was inspired by the person my son became in Grade 9. Thinking about the motives and characters of his previous tormentors, he came t
o realize that their selection of a victim wasn’t really personal, and that by cowering, he was giving the bullies what they needed—a victim. He was offering himself up as victim.

  Eleanor Roosevelt said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” In the book, I say that “Morsixx’s armor is that he doesn’t care.” Morsixx himself says his father “broke himself on other people’s arrows.” I’m not saying bullies can’t gain power over others (history gives us enough of those examples), but I believe that on a personal level, you can shrink a bully’s power by refusing to consent to the opinion they have of you. Decide that their opinion is not valid and then live that.

  While Tank has become a bully because of the treatment he’s experienced from his father, Blossom disdains bullying and becomes one of Sully’s protectors. How do you explain her being able to rise above what is happening to her at home?

  Blossom’s strength has roots in the strong and loving family she had before her mother died. While her father lost his way with alcohol in his grief, we know that Blossom’s life was not always this way. In other words, she knows the difference and remains strong, believing she can put things back the way she knows they could be. That’s part of it. But the other part is that Blossom’s very mature, take-charge attitude is one of the common personality roles taken on by a child of an alcoholic. Some children of alcoholics adopt the role of Clown (to reduce household stress through humor), while others become the Scapegoat (blamed for the family problems), or Lost Child (who escapes household anxiety by becoming invisible). Blossom embodies a fourth alternative, which is the role of Hero. In a situation where the addicted parent is not fulfilling their role as responsible adult, the Hero child steps in to try to fill that space; to create control where there is none. As Blossom finds herself increasingly unable to change her own situation, she takes Sully under her wing. If she cannot save herself, perhaps she can save someone else.