Bullyville (9 page)

“All right, then Baileywellers,” said Dr. Bratwurst. “Have a happy, healthy holiday.”

The whole student body began to applaud, and the applause got louder and louder until it became a kind of roar. Then one person got up, and another, and then everyone rose and exploded out of the auditorium and into the halls and out of the building and into the arms of their happy, healthy, rich, intact two-parent families.

I
T WAS GREAT TO BE
out of school for a few days, to be able to get up in the morning without being afraid that by the end of the day I would be stuffed in my locker or tortured or terrorized or dead. On the other hand, I wasn't exactly looking forward to Thanksgiving.

As usual, we were having dinner at Gran's house, with all the aunts and uncles and cousins. I'd always liked holidays with my mom's family. It was sort of like spending time with a bunch of very talkative, affectionate octopuses. Arms and hands
everywhere, everyone kissing and hugging, everyone eating and laughing and talking with their hands and reaching out to touch you when they wanted to make some kind of point that you could never hear anyway, because everyone was talking at once.

I also liked the fact that even though everyone got older—especially me and my cousins—nothing ever changed. Sooner or later, Aunt Grace, who talked in that strange British accent, always got into some kind of argument with Aunt Barb. Aunt Faye's husband, Joe, always drank too much wine and said something really stupid, and Aunt Barb's husband always insisted on watching the football game on TV and fell asleep in front of it. Then someone waded into the fight between whatever aunts were arguing until finally Gran put her hands over her ears and said, Stop, stop, she couldn't stand it anymore, and everyone stopped.

Plus my cousins were fun: The little ones were cute and the older ones always had some trick up
their sleeves. Once, at Christmas, when I was really small, my cousin Steve took me outside and gave me a cigarette to smoke and I came back inside and vomited all over Gran's table. And once, when I wasn't much older than that, my cousin Suzanne painted my fingernails purple, and everyone laughed, except for my uncle Ernie, who for some reason bopped my gay cousin Billy—who'd had nothing to with it—on the side of the head.

But this year, when everything else was going so terribly wrong, it made sense that not even Thanksgiving could come without its own ready-made problem looming on the horizon.

About two weeks before the holiday, Mom informed me that she was inviting a guest to Gran's Thanksgiving. I didn't like the way she said “guest.”

“Who?” I asked.

“A guy from work.” I liked the way she said “guy from work” even less than I'd liked “guest.”

“What's his name?” I asked.

“Bernie,” she said.

“You're inviting a guy named
Bernie
?
Bernie?
” It
was
a dorky name, but obviously the name wasn't what was bothering me

“Actually, everyone calls him Bern,” said Mom, which made me feel worse. Mom hadn't been at her new job all that long, and she already knew this dork well enough to be calling him
Bern
? It was all I could do not to make a really vicious, stupid joke and say something mean and hurtful, like “Burn? That's what happened to Dad, isn't it?”

That's how freaked I was. Because I was suddenly afraid that this Bern was Mom's new boyfriend or maybe tryout boyfriend or wannabe boyfriend, and it didn't seem right. Dad had only been dead for two months. But if you counted the six months before that, I mean the six months since he'd left us, and if you factored in Caroline, well, that changed the equation, too. I didn't care. I didn't want Mom to have a boyfriend. I couldn't handle any more changes.

I didn't know what to say, or if I had a right to say anything at all. But what I couldn't help saying was, “Is Bern your new boyfriend or something?”

“It's not like that, sweetie,” said Mom. “It's not like that at all. Bern's wife died this summer. Of cancer. He has no kids, his family lives in California, and he has no one to spend Thanksgiving with. It just seemed like a kind thing to do. A simple good deed. And you know, something about what happened to us, and what happened to all those families…it just makes you want to be extra caring and extra kind to people.”

I stared at Mom. It wasn't like her to say things like “extra caring” and “extra kind”; it seemed like just one more sign of how much she'd changed. Well, of course she'd changed. I'd changed, too. The whole world had changed. And it
did
make you want to be a nicer, extra kind person. I just couldn't help wondering why it didn't have that same effect on Tyro.

“All right,” I said. “Fine. Go ahead. Invite this
Bern
dude if you absolutely
have
to.” Meanwhile I
was thinking: Definitely the tryout boyfriend. Mom's trying him out on me and the rest of the family. Go ahead and ruin Thanksgiving, Mom. Who cared? This Thanksgiving was pretty much ruined in advance, what with all we'd gone through, and everything that had happened, and the fact that not just us but everyone in the country seemed to be still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

 

I loved the feeling of walking into Gran's house on Thanksgiving. It was always warm, too warm, and it always smelled awesome. It smelled like turkey, of course, but mixed with the other dishes: pasta and meatballs, eggplant parmesan, fried calamari—all sorts of delicious food that Gran could never get through her head weren't part of your typical basic American Thanksgiving.

We were a little late. Mom was bringing her special Brussels sprouts and chestnut casserole and a green salad, and we were halfway to Gran's when she remembered she'd forgotten the vinai
grette, and we had to go all the way home and get it. So most of the family was already there, and everyone swarmed all over us, hugging and kissing us, telling me how much I'd grown, telling Mom how pretty she looked. In other words, the usual.

But this year I couldn't help thinking that they were hugging and kissing me twice as much, or maybe the hugs were just lasting twice as long, because I was the poor pitiful orphan whose dad had been killed, and also the Miracle Boy who had saved their beloved daughter and sister and sister-in-law and aunt—that is, Mom—from the same terrible fate.

It was positively weird how everyone was on their best behavior, trying to avoid the usual arguments. And how everyone was treating Mom and me as if we were as fragile as Gran's shepherd and shepherdess figurines, delicate china statues that, we were always told, would break if we looked at them too hard. Every so often, tears would pop into Gran's eyes, or one of the aunts would reach in her purse for a Kleenex, and I'd know that they
were thinking about Dad, maybe thinking that this was the first Thanksgiving, the first holiday, without him. I half wanted to tell them that Dad might not have been here even if he were still alive. He might have been celebrating with Caroline. But I couldn't see how that would help. It would only make everything more confusing, and worse for Mom and me.

Even so, it was all good. In fact, I was sort of happy, because after all those days of feeling despised and excluded at Bullywell, it was great to be around people who knew me, who'd known me since I was born. And who liked me—well, actually, they
loved
me. I concentrated really hard, as if my brain were a video camera that could somehow record everything that my family was saying and doing. Then I could play the tape back to myself during the next bad time at Bullywell, which, I was pretty sure, would begin the minute school started again. I tried not to think about Bullywell, and just to enjoy the moment. And it would have been one hundred percent perfect if I
hadn't noticed that Mom kept glancing nervously toward the door.

Great, I thought. She's waiting for Bern to arrive.

Every time Mom looked toward the door, everyone else did, too. I could tell they were wondering who this guy, this
Bern
, was, wondering whether he was the replacement husband, the replacement dad, and wondering whether it wasn't a little
soon
after the real dad had been killed to start thinking about a replacement.

Finally the doorbell rang. I took one look at the guy who walked in, and I thought: Mom must be really desperate or else her taste has gone drastically downhill since Dad. Dad had been confident and good-looking, but Bern looked like the nerds I rode to school with on the day-student bus. He wore glasses, and he was bald but for a little tuft of fluffy hair growing out of the top of his forehead. Not only did he have no chin but he was
so
chinless that the bottom of his face seemed to be attached directly to his neck.

When Mom greeted him and introduced him to all the relatives, he looked up only briefly, as if he were afraid that any contact with another human being might interrupt whatever serious communication he was having with his own feet. When Mom introduced him to me, he checked me out for a second or two, not long or carefully enough for me to even imagine that he was looking over a kid who might be a part of his future. So, in a way, I could begin to take it easy. This certainly wasn't my future dad. It occurred to me that Mom was actually doing what she'd said—being kind to a sad guy who would otherwise have spent Thanksgiving all alone. And I could tell that Gran and the aunts and uncles were coming to the same conclusion at the same time, so everyone could just relax around the whole Bern question.

Even so, there was something about Bern's presence—maybe it was the fact of his being a stranger in a house where everyone else was family—that made me nervous. And I had the definite
feeling that Bern had the same effect on everyone, even my youngest cousins. We were all jumping out of our skins. Everyone shook hands awkwardly except for Gran, who threw her arms around Bern and kissed him on both cheeks, and then for some reason everyone laughed and for a few moments the mood lightened.

In a way, I thought, there was something good about Bern's having been invited. He was sort of a distraction. Without this creepy stranger here for us to focus on, we might have been even more aware of—even sadder about—Dad's absence. And maybe Mom had known that, too.

Still, something about Bern really bothered me, but I couldn't figure out what it was. He was given the guest-of-honor seat next to Gran. He mumbled please and thank you when the dishes were passed his way. When Uncle Ernie carved the turkey, Bern said, “Only a little white meat for me, please.”

Everyone looked at everyone else.
Only a little white meat, please?

In fact, Bern took only small portions of everything—which was so totally un-Thanksgivinglike, he could have been celebrating a different holiday than the rest of us. As we loaded our plates and tucked into our meal, Bern lowered his head so near his food that he hardly had to use a fork to lift that scrap of white meat to his mouth. He could have just scarfed it up directly off the dish.

Gran and a couple of the aunts tried to strike up conversations with him. “So, Bern, I hear you work with Corinne.” “How long have you worked with Corinne, Bern?” How long
could
Bern have worked with Corinne? Most everyone who used to work with Corinne before September was dead. Anyway, Old Bern could only spare one syllable at a time—“Yes, two weeks”—lest anything get in the way of the teensy, pleasureless bites he was taking, one after another; lest anything interrupt his chewing very slowly and methodically, as if he were scared of choking. Bern took a morsel of stuffing, a dab of potatoes, a mini-taste of Gran's meatballs and lasagna. And then, amazingly, Bern
opened his mouth and spoke.

“What was that?” asked Uncle Dan.

Mumble mumble mumble.

“Excuse me?” said Aunt Barb.

Bern said, “Do you have any ketchup?”

Ketchup? At Thanksgiving? Hadn't this guy ever heard of gravy and cranberry sauce? But what the hell, Bern was the guest. Mom started to get up, but Aunt Grace practically shoved her back into her chair, and returned from the kitchen with a bottle of ketchup, all crusted over as if it had been in the refrigerator for about thirty years. Bern shook it and shook it and then a watery stream emerged. It looked as if someone had been bleeding onto his turkey. And all at once I had the shameful desire to do to Bern what Tyro had done to me, that first day at Bullywell, to shake ketchup all over his food until his plate was a sea of red.

All at once, I knew what bothered me so much about Bern. He didn't just remind me of the geeks I rode to school with. He reminded me of
me
. He reminded me of me at school, the person I became
as soon as I walked in the front door of Bullywell Prep. No one knew him, no one liked him, no one knew anything about him, and at the end of the day, no one would.

I knew that should have made me feel sympathy for Bern, who was suffering, like me. But the truth was, it made me hate him. It made me wish he would just get up and leave Gran's house immediately. So I guessed I wasn't becoming the kind of person Dr. Bratwurst wanted us to become—full of compassion and heart. Whatever was happening to me at school seemed to be hardening my heart instead of softening it, shrinking it instead of making it larger. I couldn't stop thinking about that, couldn't stop feeling my heart clench and grow smaller inside me. And somehow that made me sadder than anything else. I
had
changed, I had
really
changed. And not for the better.

Then I thought of Tyro, and I wondered about
his
Thanksgiving. I imagined silver and fine china and a gleaming mahogany table surrounded by
super-uptight, superrich relatives not talking to each other except to say, Pass the canned peas, Pass the skim milk, Pass the white bread. Maybe he had a rotten family, maybe that was why he was so mean to me. There had to be some explanation. But I didn't know that for sure. All I knew was that his dad had tons of money. Maybe his family was wealthy
and
loving and warm, maybe he tortured me for me no reason except that he liked the feeling of making other people miserable, and he could do it and could get away with it and not have to pay the price.