Damaged (3 page)

Then, work calling, pity diminishing, she looked back down at the students' test papers and began to grade them.

Less than ten minutes passed when the bell rang again. As soon as the door opened, noise filled the building. Teenagers deafened the place with laughter, chattering, hollering.

Adam stood, threw his book-bag over his shoulder, and left the room. The halls of Blake High made him dizzy. There were far too many kids and way too narrow a path. And if you accidentally bumped into the wrong person, you would usually get knocked to the ground with a bloody nose. In addition, he feared their germs. He did not trust where any of them had been before their stinky breath or infected skin got too close to his. He didn't trust anything about any of them.

He walked down the hall, through a maze of young men and women, head lowered and eyes switching from ground to eye level. One boy, a freckle-faced behemoth, looked at him like he was going to break him in two. Then a stubble-faced girl with short, close-cropped hair, looked at him like he was infected with AIDS.

Their dirty looks hurt him every time.

"Hey, what's up, shitface?" one deep voice roared from behind. Adam thought his days were over. He thought the comment was directed straight at him, but when he turned, he realized it was Jason Corin, a rough, dirty redneck with an eighties mullet, joking around with one of his own buddies.

Relieved, Adam turned and continued walking, headed for locker 108 to get his first round of school books. He was almost there and was trying to hurry before the bell rang again. He didn't want to be late like before, when Mrs. Steiner, his first-period English teacher, gave him a lecture about being tardy and ended up embarrassing him in front of the whole class.

But his eyes focused on locker 108. He dropped his book-bag and grabbed the padlock, trying to remember the combination. He had trouble remembering things in public environments, where the fight or flight response generally took over. At home, he had a pretty good memory. He could recall ten digit phone numbers almost psychically. Here, in school, remembering three lame digits was like trying to memorize an encyclopedia.

He got it right, luckily, and opened the door to a locker narrower than the pathway to Heaven. Adam knelt down and searched through his stack of books, looking for his English and Science texts. The English one, its cover bound in Kraft paper, displayed a very eerie pencil drawing of a fanged beast holding the severed head of a dead human.

Or schoolmate.

The science one had a drawing of a bleeding dagger with its blade piercing the top of a human skull.

That's me, Mr. Creative.

Before he could blink, he knew he was in danger. The sudden surge of fear struck him like a bolt of lightning. Somebody had sneaked up behind him and put him in a firm headlock.

He couldn't breathe.

"Hey, punk-assed bitch!"

Adam gagged.

"Who would win in a fight between me and you?" the voice said.

Adam's face turned red. He knew a crowd was watching, for they grew very quiet.

"Gah-" he groaned. Some kids started laughing. None came to his rescue.

Adam thrashed about, struggling to get out before he passed out.

"Yeah, that's what I thought, pussy." The kid released the sleeper hold and walked away.

Adam coughed, face not only red from lack of oxygen but from embarrassment, too.

He knew that voice.

Pete North, redneck hillbilly. Adam's age, Adam's size, multitude meaner. He'd been giving Adam trouble since the eighth grade for no apparent reason. Pete just did not like him. He was another bully reject with three older brothers who could literally crush skulls.

Adam sighed and grabbed his books while the kids around him spoke about him behind his back.

"Weak."

"Pussy from hell."

"Couldn't fight if he had four arms."

The bell rang, saving him from further accusation. He stumbled to his feet and ran down the hall, away from the laughing demons, and entered English class right before the shriek of the bell ended.

***

"Almost late again, Mr. McNicols," the teacher said.

“
Sorry," he grunted, taking his least favorite seat: front seat, third row.

The teacher, Mrs. Steiner, was a no-nonsense woman hell-bent on proper education. Just by counting the heavy wrinkles on her forehead, one could tell that she was knowledgeable. She could be crude and stubborn at times, and hated when students interrupted or asked dumb questions.

Adam knew that she didn't like
him
, but at the end of class, he was determined to hand her over a story he wrote: 'The Dead World'. Set in the Dark Ages, it was about a warlock who controlled demonic forces. A real page-turner, Adam strongly believed. Not too bloody but pretty weird. His goal was to get her to proofread it and edit it and maybe even help him publish it in some respectable horror magazine.

He just hoped like hell she would not criticize his work too seriously.

Rejection sucks.

"Okay, everybody, today we're going to read aloud a story, The Batter, a baseball story, from this book—" She reached into a box on her desk and pulled out a small, thin, paperback novella.

Adam was already shaking. The hand with which he held his pencil resembled a trembling leaf.

Talk... in front of other people!

Back in eighth grade, he had to do the same exact thing: take a turn reading aloud. He read only one sentence before he began to stutter like a crazed deaf-mute. The kids busted a gut and the teacher had to hold back his own laughter. Thank God, Adam thought, he never had to do the impossible and actually stand
up
in front of class to do it.

"We'll go row by row, each read about a page, and I'll ask you questions about the syntax of what you read."

Adam's face turned pink. He knew he couldn't do this, and he knew that his every other peer could do it without thinking twice. To them, it was nothing more than eating potatoes; to Adam, it was worse than death.

"Jim," the teacher said to the boy in the front row, nearest to the door, "will you start us?"

Jim, a messily-combed nerd with thick-rimmed glasses who actually had a knack for dating attractive Sophomores, opened the book and read without a worry in the world: "It all started on the first day in June, when a young man named George Baashim set out to—"

Adam looked around. There were twelve other kids lined up before him. That was not enough. She would eventually call his number.

Only one and a half minutes later, Jim finished the first page. The teacher stopped him. "Okay, Jim, about the first opening paragraph—can you tell me the main phrase there?"

"Um..." he said, scanning, "hit the ball?"

"Yes," the teacher said, "usually, class, but not always, the first sentence of the paragraph is saying what we're in store for. It sums the paragraph up.

“
Okay, Cindy."

Cindy started reading, and Adam's heart skipped a beat. With every proceeding person Mrs. Steiner called upon, the closer she got to him. He felt like he was walking the plank.

And there was no way out.

Ha, ha ha
, he heard one of his demonic characters laugh in the back of his mind.

You're doomed, child
.

Ten minutes passed. The kid sitting to Adam's left was reading page nine now. He was almost done, and Adam could see the teacher getting ready to pop a question. He could not stop swallowing. He licked his lips more times than a hungry bear. His hand, still holding the pencil, beat the eraser off the desk a thousand times a minute. His eyes were glued to the overhead clock. Still thirty minutes to go until the end of class.

Would she skip him? Would he get lucky and the fire alarm go off? Or would he die from doing something so basic as reading one page in front of a class of people who all probably hated him? Die to death from a heart attack? So many things to go wrong and not one thing to go right.

Mrs. Steiner asked Tammy, a pretty girl with big braces, some question nouns and pronouns. Tammy's high-pitched, chipmunk-like voice annoyed the hell out of Adam. He soon realized that the teacher was giving everyone progressively less reading time in response to her repetitive questions. He couldn't sit still. He shifted in his seat a dozen times, trying to dull the intense fear by daydreaming about one of his horror story adventures.

It wasn't helping. He strove to find a way to escape—
ask to use the bathroom? Run out of the room?

Either were a no-go. They each would have embarrassed him just as much. He was fated to make a complete ass of himself.

The blood really started to pump when Mrs. Steiner got to the second-to-last person in the second row. Adam cracked his knuckles, his neck, his feet, his back, waiting impatiently for the time to come just so he could get this dreadful deed over with.

"Thank you, John," she said as she walked up an aisle, hands behind her back. "Any pronoun is a standin for a noun. They take the place of a regular noun. So, instead of saying George, you could say he. If this was first person, you'd say I. Or, if talking about someone else—you.

“
Okay, Mr. Silverly," she said to the last boy in the row, a tubby with bad acne.

Still more accepted than Adam.

Adam's heart went into overdrive. He closed his eyes, then reopened them, sorry he did. Every time he closed his eyes in public places and reopened them, he remembered he was not home in bed. It was a foolproof recipe for becoming lightheaded.

He checked the clock seven times within a single moment. The tick of inevitability.
What do I fucking do!?

He looked at the door—his only way out. But if he took off, then came back, what would they think?

Seconds ticked away, and John finished reading his page. Mrs. Steiner asked him a question about adverbs.

Adam flipped through the book, bottom lip quivering, feet bouncing off the floor. He wondered if everyone else noticed his nervousness.

I should have stayed home.
Please, God, help me through this. I know I ask a lot, but just this once!

"Adam," the teacher called on him, "will you read page fourteen for us?"

For a long time he didn't know what to say or do. He almost forgot how to breathe. His groin burned from stress. He was not shaking or cracking his knuckles or moving around at all. And for a moment, he felt like he wasn't a part of his own physical body anymore but a spirit outside himself, observing himself.

Some of the kids giggled as they waited for him to read, but the teacher
shushed
them and repeated, "Adam, please read page fourteen."

They stared, some grinning, some shaking their heads, all wondering why this weirdo wasn't doing as he was told. Adam could feel their eyes. Everything was quickly becoming blurry, a mask of reality. His mind was going into overdrive.

Then he opened his mouth, and words actually came out: "Second to... bat—bat—was, um, Billy Straight, uh, the lef—left hand—handed... kid with, with the um—" Not only was the stuttering bad, but his voice was tragically uneven.

He tried and tried to read the words in the book, and even Tammy's distracting voice wasn't as high-pitched as Adam's.

Definitely not his best moment.

The teacher, however, seemed pleasant and patient enough. She stood by his side and looked down at him, confident he would get over his fear.

"And—and—and—"

The kids loved it. They were on the verge of turning the room into a barrel of laughs. They only kept quiet because they knew Mrs. Steiner was a tough old bitch.

Quietly
, anyway.

To Adam, the words on the page bled together, then apart, scrambling before his eyes. On the tip of his mind, the exit door looked ever so tempting through which to pass.

Maybe I can go home, jump into bed and cry.

Why am I so helpless?

"Um, the, uh—well he, uh, sa—said—"

Mark Simmons, a long-haired hippy two seats back on Adam's right, could not handle it anymore. He uncovered his mouth and roared. Afterward, everybody in the room besides an old woman and a scared teenage boy burst into laughter.

Adam stopped reading. He shifted restlessly in his seat, about to get up and fly out of the room.

"Quiet!" the teacher said as she laid a hand on Adam's.

The laughter died out so suddenly, it was as if it had been prerecorded.

“
It's okay," she told him, "read it to me later."

Adam felt like a steel bridge had been lifted off his shoulders. Everything was okay again. Some, but not all of the blurriness, went away.

Deep down inside his soul, the damage had been done. Slowly. Everlasting. Pain.

At the end of class, Adam tossed his favorite new story down onto Mrs. Steiner's desk and left the room, not without being gawked at by some of his fellow classmates. He knew what they thought of him. It was quite clear by that look of disgust in their eyes—he was the class clown, the moron, the nobody.