Bullyville (5 page)

Suddenly I understood what seemed so strange about all this. It wasn't only that Tyro acted as if he didn't recognize me even though you'd think the hours we'd spent on that embarrassing school tour might have been what Dr. Bratton would call a “bonding experience.” The weird thing was, I'd gotten used to
everyone
recognizing me, to being our town's version of a local celebrity. Hel-
lo
! I was the Miracle Boy! I was the kid who'd saved his mother from dying on 9/11.

Hadn't any of these guys heard of that? Didn't they read the papers? It crossed my mind that maybe they knew perfectly well who I was, and that they were just pretending not to. Why? So that I would feel like even more of an outsider than I already did.

Every so often, someone would ask Tyro, “Who's the new dude?”

And he would say, “Fart Strangely. I mean Bart Rangely. Fart, this is Buff. This is Pork. This is Dog. This is Ex. Say hi to Fart, guys.”

I'd only been at Bullywell for less than five minutes and already I was learning to laugh hysterically at unfunny jokes—jokes on me!

“Hi, Fart,” the kids all said. And each time I would think: Thanks, Big Brother. All this time, Tyro kept walking a few steps ahead of me, as if he really were an older sibling annoyed that he had to bring his kid brother along on some fun outing with his friends. By now I was practically skipping to keep up, so that when at last Tyro stopped short outside a classroom door, I had to put on the
brakes fast—but I didn't do it fast enough. I plowed right into him.

“Watch it, okay?” he said. “No touching, Fag Face. This is your homeroom, Fart-o. Have fun. Look for me in the lunchroom if you can't find anyone else who can stand to sit with you. Little Bro.” And he gave me a friendly push in the direction of the doorway, a push that felt ever so slightly like a nasty shove.

I found myself in a room full of kids who looked like younger, shrunk-down versions of the friends to whom Tyro had so charmingly introduced me. None of these eighth graders had pimples or braces or oily hair or any of the physical defects I'd gotten to know and love among my public school friends. It was as if they'd been born with perfect skin and hair and teeth, and with the promise that, from here on in, things were only going to get better. A funny murmur—not a sound so much as a
feeling
, as if everyone had felt a chill and shivered at once—traveled around the room. I could tell these kids were too young to be very
good at pretending not to know who I was. Miracle Boy. The 9/11 semi-orphan. Tragedy Kid. Their new classmate.

I was having such a hard time processing the kids that I didn't even
notice
the teacher until she cleared her throat and said, “Why, hello, Bart. I'm Mrs. Day.”

Later, I would learn that everyone called her Mrs. Die, because she looked as if she were just about to. She was positively ancient, though later I began to think that maybe she wasn't as old as she looked, that teaching at Bullywell was one of those experiences, like seeing a ghost or having a loved one die, that turns your hair white overnight. Mrs. Day was so pale she was nearly translucent, as if the light of another world were already shining through her. For a long moment she zoned out, and a film covered her eyes, as if she were gazing into that other world. Then she awoke out of her trance, or whatever it was. Her eyes filled with globby tears and I knew that she recognized me, she knew
exactly
who I was.

“Class,” she said. “I want you to meet a new student. A very
special
new student.”

In a way, it was worse than Tyro introducing me as Fart Strangely. Because the last thing I wanted was to feel more special than I already did.

“Say hello to Bart, class,” said Mrs. Day.

“Hello, Bart,” they said in an obedient chorus that was like one big group sneer.

“Bart, why don't you take a seat next to Seth?” said Mrs. Day. “Seth, why don't you hold up your hand so Bart will know who you are?”

A set of fingers rose just barely above the heads of the others, and I walked toward the hand to find myself standing over a kid I recognized from the day-student bus. Great! Was this pure coincidence, or had dotty old Mrs. Day sat me next to a fellow loser on purpose?

Actually, Seth
did
have braces and pimples. I guess the reason I hadn't noticed him before was that he slumped so low in his seat that his chin was practically resting on the desk.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said. End of conversation.

It turned out that Mrs. Day was also the English teacher. So we stayed where we were and had English right after homeroom, which at least spared me the nightmare of going back into the hall and rejoining the stream of perfect human specimens masquerading as high school students. To mark the division between homeroom and English class, Mrs. Day said, “All right, gentleman, everybody get up and stretch your legs. Everybody touch your toes and reach up toward the ceiling.” No one was going to do
that
! In fact, no one moved, except for a few jocky guys who rolled their shoulders and raised their arms above their heads and cracked their knuckles so loud that the popping sounds seemed to echo off the walls.

“Oh, dear”—Mrs. Day put her hands over her ears—“I do so hate it when you gentlemen do that.” Underneath the knuckle popping, Seth—my homeboy, my new fellow-day-student buddy—hissed, “Hey, I saw you walking around with Tyro
Bergen. You
know
him?”

“He's supposed to be my Big Brother,” I said. “You know, to help me get used to the school.”

“Oh, man,” said Seth. “I pity you, dude. He is the baddest of the bad. I mean, he's the meanest of the mean. I'd hate to be your life insurance provider.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, stupidly, though I could have figured it out.

Before Seth could answer, if he
was
going to answer, Mrs. Day said, “All right, gentlemen, turn to page thirty-five of
The Great Gatsby
. Let's read aloud, starting from the top of the page.”

Everyone groaned and opened their books, except me. Naturally, I didn't have a book. No one had told me to get one. I glanced over at Seth's book, thinking I could look on with him, but he wrapped his elbow around the page, as if he were taking a test and I was trying to copy. I looked up, and Mrs. Day met my eye and grasped my predicament.

“On second thought,” she said, “let's take a
little break from poor sad Mr. Gatsby.”

Everybody applauded. I hoped they were thanking me for saving them from the boring book! But everyone just moaned again when Mrs. Day said, “Let's all do a little writing exercise. Let's write about…hmm. Let's write a little essay about what we did this summer.”

“Are you kidding?” someone called out. “We did that the first day of school.”

For a moment Mrs. Day looked vaguely alarmed. Then she said, “Let's write about something we didn't mention the first time. Anyway, it'll be nice for Bart. It's a way of getting acquainted. That's
why
we do it the first day of school.”

It was clear what Mrs. Day was trying to do—to somehow turn back the clock so that it would be almost as if I was starting the year at the same time as everyone else. I was grateful to her for the effort, but it couldn't have worked. Bullywell had been in session for more than a month before I got there. I felt as if I'd come in on a movie that was
already halfway through, so I couldn't understand what was happening on-screen, and some kindly person in the audience was asking the projectionist to rewind the film, for my benefit, and rerun it from the beginning.

Everyone turned to glare at me, as if they wanted their eyes to drill deep, painful holes into my head, as if it were my fault that they were being made to put something down on paper instead of just reading aloud from a book they were supposed to have read. Still grumbling, they took out their notebooks. I tried not to look at anyone, but I could hear a lot of sighing and shifting around, and the sounds of writing and scratching things out and of papers being ripped from their bindings.

I didn't know what to write. I clutched my pen and moved my arm back and forth, scowling at the page as if words were going to appear on it by magic. But of course none did, and the page stayed empty. During the summer, I'd been a counselor-in-training at the town rec program, the
same program I'd gone to as a little kid. I guess I could have written about how I'd saved a little girl from drowning. Or maybe she hadn't been drowning, the water wasn't that deep. She'd just gotten freaked and started squealing and I'd had to haul her out.

I could have written about that, but I didn't want to. Because when I thought about the summer, what had really happened was that I came to accept the fact that Dad had traded us in for Caroline. I thought I'd gotten my mind around the fact that he wasn't coming back. Except that I hadn't known what
not coming back
meant. Now I did know, and what had happened to Dad stood, as tall and as terrifying as a building on fire, between me and that glorious day, the pinnacle of my counselor-in-training career, when I'd dragged little Heather, or Molly, or whatever her name was, out of the shallow end of the pool.

After a silence so long I was sure the class would end before anyone got a chance to read his essay, Mrs. Day said, “All right, gentleman, five
more minutes.” About another hour passed, and then she said, “All right. Time's up. Bart, would you like to go first?”

“I'd rather go last,” I said.

For some reason everyone thought this was screamingly funny. When the laughter stopped, Mrs. Day said, “All right. I can respect that. Would someone else like to volunteer?”

One kid—the one whom Tyro had introduced as Ex, which I later learned stood for Extra Credit—read what sounded like a whole novel about how his family had rented a yacht and cruised the Greek islands and every night they snorkeled for octopus and squid (the other kids said “Gross!” and “Yuck!”) and the cook who came with the boat would grill the catch over coals on the beach and they'd eat it for dinner. The next kid read about his African safari, another read about his summer house on the Jersey shore. The kid Mrs. Day called on after that said he didn't want to read his, he'd gone to his beach house, too, he'd eaten a ton of lobster, but otherwise his
summer was pretty much like that of the kid who'd read before. Meanwhile, I kept thinking that everything anyone read made my richest friends at Hillbrook sound like poor people!

A lot of the pieces were extremely long, which made me realize that, compared to normal teenagers, the students at Bullywell really liked talking about themselves. One kid read for what seemed like twenty minutes about how he saw a bear on his family's otherwise dull trip to some national park. And a lot of the pieces were horribly bad, full of the kind of grammatical mistakes that made me think there were probably lots of spelling errors, too. Until that moment, I hadn't realized that I'd been worried about whether Bullywell might be hard—or “academically challenging,” as Dr. Bratton had said—as well as full of vicious bullies. But now I realized that the academic part wasn't going to be the problem.

I'd stopped paying attention, and suddenly I was sweating with dread that Mrs. Day was about to call on me. Then I'd have to confess that I'd just
been pretending to write, that there was nothing on the page. I was literally saved by the bell, if you called it being saved to be ejected from my seat in Mrs. Day's uninspiring but harmless classroom and thrown into the churning sea of sharks and barracudas that passed for the halls of Bullywell Prep.

The bizarre thing was, it didn't bother me all that much, because by that point I'd slipped into a kind of fog. All the stuff going on at school seemed amazingly unreal compared to what I was only now starting to see as the hopeless misery of my entire life. If I'd had to find one word for what I was feeling, I guess it would have been:
homesick
. I felt so homesick, it was as if I'd been sent away to live at Bullywell forever and ever. Dude, I told myself, you're a day student. You're going home on the bus tonight. You're going to have dinner with Mom.

Still, it was almost as if the reality of everything that had happened to me—Dad leaving us and then dying in that terrible way—was finally
creeping in around the edges of things and making me feel unbelievably lonely and abandoned. When I'd first gotten off the bus, I'd been totally self-conscious, as if I was being watched and judged and sneered at by everyone who saw me. But now I just felt like a big rock stuck in the middle of the school while everything flowed around me. I went to a couple of other classes. I knew what the subjects were: social studies, biology. But that was all I knew. I couldn't understand what anyone was saying.

I was
really
disconnected.

And then at last it was lunchtime, and the dread returned because I could no longer get by just by sitting in class and being silent and passive. I was going to have to find someone to eat with or else face the shame of being that kid in the lunchroom who has to eat all by himself and pretend that he doesn't mind—or that maybe he even
likes
it.

We'd skipped the lunchroom on the school tour we'd taken with Dr. Bratton, and now I
understood why. Outside the door was an engraved brass sign that said “Refectory.” Paneled in dark wood and decorated with portraits of famous graduates whose expressions of major indigestion seemed like bad advertisements for the food, the lunchroom looked like a banquet hall where some wicked king might serve a lavish feast and poison all the guests. The noise was like rush hour without cars. But the talking and shouting, the clattering dishes and the rattling silverware, and underneath that a smacking sound that I could have sworn was the noise of everyone chewing—all that was nothing compared to the smell: teenage-boy body odor and bad breath and something like spoiled milk, but most of all grease, old grease that had stayed in the air since those guys on the wall used to eat lunch here.