Bullettime (2 page)

There is a noise from the hall, and it isn’t the endless baritone of the bells, but a sound like the sun breaking winter on a frozen river. A crushing high-pitched squeal-screech of song: ice against ice. Then she walks in,
she walks in at his speed
, all snaking black curls and almond eyes, the ether collapsing around her like she’s walking through plate glass. In a long black coat. An apple in her left hand, Golden Delicious. She takes an enthusiastic bite, smacks her lips and speaks.

Speaks to me!

“Hey, fag,” she says, nodding toward the silhouette shimmering in the front of the room by the slate chemistry lab table, “is this Mr. Ottatti’s homeroom?”

It wasn’t.

Dave opens his mouth to say something, but just comes to with a mouthful of blood. He keels right over and hits the back of his head on the floor. Unconsciousness is full of stars.

I
never learned much about classical music, but that day I felt the holy sweep of violins cradling and rocking me like a babe in arms. The flute (was it a flute, or some other, rarer instrument?) whispered the sweetest hints of dreams.

Dave comes to near the big radiator in the nurse’s office, which was always and inexplicably whining away to keep the room at a constant temperature of 85 degrees. Dave is clammy, but he was the only one not sweating. Nurse Alvarez, a thick older woman, hovers over him. Her lips are wet with perspiration. Standing over her shoulder is Officer Levine, the friendliest-looking of Hamilton’s cops. He’s a black guy with a Jewish name, the perfect person to meet parents after a fight or someone’s purse goes missing—white parents hear the name and relax a bit before he walks in; black parents like seeing a face of authority that looks a bit like their own. Dave wonders if the school planned it that way, then he wonders why he’s even thinking about stuff like this.

“How long was I out?”

“Out? You weren’t out,” Nurse Alvarez says, “you just walked in here and laid down.”

Dave reaches up to his mouth and touches the blood on his lip.

“You bit the inside of your cheek, but it’s nothing that needs stitches.”

“Are you on drugs?” asks Officer Levine, but he does it in a friendly, joking way, like a television uncle who wants to buy some pot.

“He’s not on drugs! Look at him.”

“I
am
looking at him, Nurse Alvarez,” Levine says. Again: “Are you on drugs, son?” but now his tone is serious, as if he knows the answer.

“He’s not on drugs. He’s a good kid.” Alvarez nods to herself. “I can tell.”

“I do . . .” Dave starts. The adults lean in and leer.

“—take allergy medication. I mean, sometimes it might make me dizzy.”

Officer Levine glances away to write a note in his little pad, but Nurse Alvarez stares on owlishly. “Allergy medication,” she repeats.

“I thought he was a good kid, nurse.”

“He
looks
like a good kid.”

“Uh . . . I don’t think I remember walking here. Do I have a hall pass?”

“Why do you say that? Because he’s white?”

“Maybe I should go home, and change my shirt?”

“It could be a health hazard, walking around with all that blood, right, nurse?”

“Oh no, there’s no damn health hazard. That’s crazy talk. This school is full of crazy talk.”

“How do you know?”

“How would
you
know?”

“Okay, can you give me a hall pass so I can get to first period? I mean, if I’m not under arrest or anything?”

“No, because he’s a nerd.”

“There’s a lot of blood. Is that normal?”

“Oh, it’s normal when you’re bleeding.”

“I’ve seen men who have been shot who have bled less, actually.”

“Yeah, but were they shot on the inside of the cheek? Were they sitting around, drooling all over themselves and humming?”

“Uh, are you two still talking about me?”

“Easy, there, guy. I know this has to be rough for you—”

“Everything’s rough for kids like him.”

“Like me?”

“Nerds!” hisses the nurse.

Officer Levine laughs a sharp
Ha
! at that. Dave contemplates objecting to the appellation but decides he’d rather spend the rest of the day in a slightly less smelly room. The adults, or at least their stained clothing, both reek. And it’s hot, and the radiator is too loud.

Levine tears a page out of his note pad. “Here’s your pass. Go right to where you need to go.”

Dave isn’t quite sure where that is, Social Studies never being all that high on anyone’s list of the mandatory, but he takes the note and steps to the door.

“You come back,” Nurse Alvarez calls out after him, “if you get any more blood on you.”

Dave is glad to walk the near-empty halls, to avoid the hooting, the casually thrust shoulders to his chest, the occasional catcall.

A few kids, cutting or on their way to some errand, mill by a water fountain. They’re big kids, seniors—one of them has a friggin’ mustache and maybe a few grey hairs in his tight curls—but they don’t jeer or call out to him. Instead, they just shut up and look. Dave is nearly upon them when one of them speaks.

“Damn, what happened?” He stares pointedly at Dave’s shirt, a powder blue button-down number. Dave thought it was sticking to his chest from the cold sweats, or his time baking by the radiator. Blood, thick and almost purple, coats it like bad tomato sauce.

“You get stabbed or something?” asks another kid. His name’s Lee. Dave knows him a bit. Not too bright.

“Naw, it’s his lip,” says the third guy, the one with the mustache. “Get fucked up? Fall down?”

Dave shrugs. “Something like that.”

Lee smiles. “Want us to fuck him up for you? We’ll fuck him up good. Got a hundred, we’ll kill him. We’ll throw his body in the fucking swamp under the overpass. Hundred bucks, just name the motherfucker.” He raises his hand, looking for a high-five for something, from his friends if not from Dave. He gets a trio of eyerolls instead.

“Shut the fuck up, Lee,” says the mustachioed guy.

“You’re gonna go to class like that?” the first kid asks Dave.

“Sure.”

“Aww—this we gotta see.”

So they march behind him, whatever their previous plans were forgotten. Dave wonders if he should offer a handshake or an introduction, but the mustache does it instead. “I’m Malik. That’s Lee—”

“I know this kid!” says Lee. “He’s in PE with me. Can’t even serve a volleyball. His name’s Damien or some shit.”

“—and George.”

“Yo,” says George. “Your name is really Damien? That’s the devil’s name!”

“Dave,” says Dave.

“Naw, it’s Damien. I know this kid!”

“Motherfucker, he knows his own fucking name!” says Malik.

Down the steps. Dave lightly, the guys behind him waterfalls of stomping. Then to Room 216 and Social Studies. Dave opens the door and interrupts the lesson. Mr. McCann isn’t sure what to say at first. He pushes his glasses up to the bridge of his nose and says, “I hope you have a pass from the nurse, if not the hospital.”

Dave steps into the room and the students get their first look. “Well, find a seat, son,” McCann says pointedly and just loud enough to cover some of the mumbling of
night of the living dead, yo
and
hope that motherfucker doesn’t have AIDS
from the crowd. Dave shuffles to the back by the heavy grated windows, where there are two free desks so he won’t have to sit next to anyone. In the doorway, the three older kids stare.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” Mr. McCann asks. “Are you the honour guard or from the CDC?”

“Nah, we’re good,” says Malik. He doesn’t move from the doorway though.

Mr. McCann steps to the door and grips the knob. “Well, so are we. I’m sure you boys have some place to be,” he says, and shuts the door.

He walks back to the blackboard in front of the crowded classroom and sighs as he retrieves his chalk from the ledge. A knock on the door. Mr. McCann ignores it and raises his arm. The knock, louder. He answers the door. It’s Malik.

“Don’t call us
boys
, man,” he says. “Damn, don’t you know nothing?”

“Malcolm X!” shouts Lee from somewhere out in the hallway.

McCann holds his hands over his heart and says, “You have my deepest apologies. I meant nothing by it. I’m sure you fine, upstanding young men have some place to be.” He nudges the door shut with his foot and heads back to the blackboard.

A knock at the door.

McCann ignores it.

A knock at the door. Louder, more insistent.

McCann turns back to the door and opens it.

There she is. She offers McCann a pass. “I’m supposed to be here,” she says. “Honours Social, right?”

McCann glances over at the rest of the room. “Such that it is, you are right indeed. Take a seat, Ms.—”

She winds through the rows, passing the few empty seats on the way to the one next to Dave, then she sits and shrugs off her coat, shakes out her hair, and says, “Zevgolis.”

McCann turns back to the board, and she turns to Dave.

“Can I offer you a Wetnap, or will you just pass out again?” She has the little towelette, its foil package decorated with a tiny Acropolis in blue and white, in her hand. Dave stares at it, fighting his drug-brain’s anxious desire to transform it into a wrapped condom.

“I think I’m good,” he says. Then he spends the rest of the class inhaling deeply. Her hair smells like a symphony.

Dave doesn’t see the girl in Spanish (
she’s sophisticated, probably taking French instead
, I thought at the time), or in his Honours Biology section. Then it was study hall, so Dave decides to look around for her, but Hamilton’s hallways weren’t cooperating like they normally do. They seem longer, somehow, and hotter. From the Ylem, it was almost embarrassing to watch me back then, a droopy-eyed duck looking for mama. And she is everywhere, if only for a moment. A swath of long, dark hair (whoops, a dude), the swivel of a hip (wrong girl), a bobbing head at about her height (nope, an Asian girl), the shadow of a long coat around the corner (that annoying guy who wore a duster and a fedora every day). And just as everywhere, the gawking and staring as Dave shuffles, smiles, and talks to himself, his shirt coated in drying brown blood. It is enough to make the kids forget his nickname, if just for one day.

“D’ya know where she is?” Dave asks with a squint. He can just barely see me, moving along with him a femtosecond out of sync. Of course I didn’t, not at the time. Of course, I didn’t have the means to say anything to him either. I can tell you where she was though.

Where she was just then—and her name is Eris and she is the goddess of discord—was in the main office, leaning over the high desk and spelling her last name for the secretary who was trying vainly to call up her permanent record, a record that was being stitched together, electron by electron, by the goddess herself as she slowly spelled out Z-E-V-G-O-L-I-S. Though it happened outside of my realm of experience, I know this because when she exiled me to the Ylem, she made sure this was the one moment I could see without David Holbrook’s eyes.

“Oh, here you are,” the secretary said. “Erin.”

And Eris yawned and stretched out her arms and set a cup of pencils tumbling onto the keyboard, deleting the N, inputting an S, and pressing the
RETURN
key all at once, formalizing the record. “Whoops!” she said, like a human might, as the secretary scrambled to pick up the rolling pencils and shove them back into the can.

“Sorry about that,” said Eris back then—the first and last time she ever even pretended to apologize for anything.

The secretary just frowned and turned back to her computer and changed Eris’s schedule to make sure that all of her classes matched Dave’s.

“Where is she; is it time for class?” Dave asks himself a little too loudly, like he’s alone in the hallway when he’s actually not. “I dunno,” he answers himself, which is even more dangerous. And here one of them comes, with a meaty palm to the shoulder and a twisted smear of lips when he catches a glimpse of Dave’s shirt.

“Hey, fag!” he says. “Who the fuck are you talking to?”

“Huh?” Dave takes him in. A member of Cult of the Shell Necklace. Surprisingly dangerous for white people, these cultists, because they fear nothing. No prisons can hold them, no lawsuits tame them. High school wrestling coaches, the very people administrators look to for discipline, are drawn from their ranks. They’re not known for asking rhetorical questions.