RAGE (5 page)

I’d been given permission to sit out today. When I told Mr. Laughlin I didn’t feel like participating because I had a headache from getting hit with the make-believe baseball, he reminded me that I sit out most days, and then told me to stretch and take a bleacher. I did as I was told, finishing just as the boys were emerging from the locker room.

Occasionally, I watched the boys playing basketball, but most of my attention was on Carly. Her hair was in a ponytail today. I liked it when she wore it that way. But then again, I liked it no matter how she wore it.

Halfway through the hour, a rumble rolled through my lower stomach area, followed by a sharp pain. I had to use the restroom. Now.

I jogged around the gym, butt clenched tightly. By the time I entered the locker room, I was running. I ran into the nearest stall and barely got my jeans unfastened and pulled down before it happened. It must’ve been the meat loaf at lunch that wasn’t agreeing with me because I hadn’t had breakfast.

I sat there, stomach gurgling, emptying my bowels. Even though it was little more than liquid, it smelled horrible.

Several minutes later, I finally trusted that I was finished. I stood, feeling weaker than when I’d come into the restroom. I pulled up my underwear and jeans, and just as I was fastening the button, the stall door burst open, nearly hitting me in the face.

Standing there smiling was Dominic and Taylor.

Dominic said, “Hey, shithead.”

Taylor laughed.

Dominic looked around me at the stuff floating in the toilet. “I always knew you were full of shit, Boozer.”

I stood there like an idiot, just like always, hoping they’d go away and forget I was alive. And just like always, they didn’t. It seemed everyone could forget I was alive but the people I wanted to.

Taylor, still laughing at Dominic’s hilarious joke, tried to make one of his own. “Looks like you filled your diaper,” he said.

“Leave me alone,” I managed to say, though it was far quieter than it should’ve been.

Dominic stepped into the stall. “What’s that, turd?”

“Turd,” Taylor said to himself, laughing. “That’s funny.”

Oh, yes. Dominic was bound for comedic stardom.

Dominic glanced back at him over his shoulder and smiled. “Yeah, it’s funny.” He looked down at the mess in the toilet. “Turds from a turd.”

“Please,” I said.

“You hear that, Taylor? He’s begging me.”

“Yeah, begging like a little girl,” Taylor smirked.

“A little girl who shits little turds,” Dominic said.

“Just leave me alone, guys,” I said, feeling my stomach gurgling again.

Dominic stepped even closer. He was in my face now, looking down at me. Taylor took up the doorway.

“You think you can tell me what to do, Boozer Loser?”

I shook my head no.

“Yeah, he does,” Taylor said from behind Dominic. “He has shit for brains.”

Dominic nodded. Then he laughed. “He has shit for brains. Let me show you what shit for brains looks like, Boozer.”

He grabbed the back of my head and spun me around so fast I thought I was turning circles. Taylor was in the stall before I was even facing the toilet. I felt him grab my wrists and hold my arms behind my back. Dominic forced me to my knees. He placed one of his knees against my spine and pushed, causing me a great amount of pain. His knee pushed on my back, forcing my stomach and ribs against the cold, hard porcelain. Then, with his hands on the back of my head, fists holding wads of my hair, he pushed my head forward, toward the smelly brown water with the floating chunks.

“No,” I said. “Please don’t.” I wanted to cry, but didn’t want them to see me. Plus, I didn’t have time to cry. At least not right now.

“Shut up, Boozer,” Dominic said and pushed my face further into the toilet. I panicked. My heart was beating frantically, and my breaths came in gasps and gulps.

I struggled as much as I could. I couldn’t push away from the toilet as my hands were being held behind me by Taylor, whose grip was cutting off the circulation to my fingers. They were starting to tingle. I couldn’t lean back because they were holding me forward with their hands and legs. I was stuck.

And my load loomed before me.

“You ever hear that saying, Boozer? Eat shit and die? Well, open up,” Dominic said.

Before I could plead any more, he shoved my face into the murky water. I didn’t even have a chance to take a deep breath or close my mouth. I did manage to get my eyes closed before plunging into the darkness.

I felt some pieces bump against my face and I gagged. When I felt pieces bumping against my tongue and the inside of my cheeks, I nearly puked.

He kept holding me under, and I kept struggling. It was muffled because my head was under water, but I heard them laughing.

Just when I thought I was going to drown, I felt myself being pulled up. When I felt my face hit air, I gasped a deep breath of air.

Then I smelled it. Everything my body had rejected filled my hair, my eyes, my ears, my nose, and my mouth.

I threw up. I couldn’t help it. I threw up in the toilet, getting plenty on me and the toilet seat. I watched as my vomit mingled with my diarrhea, and hoped this was only a nightmare.

“Gross,” Taylor shrieked.

Funny. He thought me puking was gross but thought nothing of shoving my face into my own diarrhea.

“Let’s go,” Taylor said.

“Wait,” Dominic demanded. “One more time.”

He plunged me forward again, this time, submerging me in diarrhea and vomit.

My body retched and shook. I jerked and struggled, but it didn’t help. He didn’t hold me down as long this time. He pulled me up, let go of my hair, and kicked me in the lower back before leaving.

“Shit for brains,” he said as he left the stall.

The two of them laughed hysterically as they left the restroom, probably to go tell the other boys how they’d once again made a fool of ol’ Boozer Loser.

I collapsed onto my side on the floor of the stall and vomited.

My stomach gurgled again, and this time it didn’t stop there. I wouldn’t have had time to get up and get my pants down and sit on the toilet even if I’d have had the energy to try. So I emptied myself into my pants, and I didn’t care. What was a little diarrhea in my jeans when my upper body was covered in it?

For a while, I lay there, praying for death to find me. When I saw that it wasn’t going to, I got up, weak and exhausted, and made my way to the sink, breathing only through my mouth.

I turned on the water and stuck my head under the faucet. I rinsed off the best I could, watching chunks of meat loaf and poop fall from my hair and find their way down the drain. Using the rough paper towels, I wiped myself off the best I could. I looked in the mirror and knew it was going to take far more than a rinse in a sink and some cheap paper towels to make me look better.

I had chunks of crap still in my hair and stuck to my shirt. The puke had soaked into the shirt and couldn’t be wiped away. And then there was my jeans and underwear. Both were filled with watery crap. It was running down my legs.

Two thoughts were in my head.

One, at least it was my own puke and crap.

Two, how was I going to get home? I wasn’t going to my next class for sure. And that sucked because it was Art, and it was my favorite class. But I couldn’t go like this.

I was too tired and angry to go anyway. The best thing for me to do was go home, which brought me back to how I was going to get there from here. I didn’t want to show my face in the hall. I would just have to leave my backpack in my locker. Other kids were in class, and other grown-ups were at work. Surely no one would see me.

I took a deep breath, smelled the awful odor of vomit and diarrhea, gagged, and then headed home.

I stood in the shower, letting the hot water turn my skin red, until Travis pounded on the door. Just when I thought my day couldn’t get any worse. I’d hoped he would stay in bed until I’d had a chance to sneak into my room. But I guess not because he was beating on the door hard enough to rattle the mirror hanging above the sink.

Quickly, I got out of the shower, wrapped a towel around my waist, and left the bathroom without drying myself.

Travis glared hatefully at me as I walked past him. Surprisingly, he didn’t say anything. He went into the bathroom, and I went into my bedroom and closed the door.

After I dried myself, I put on sweatpants and a t-shirt, and crawled into bed, pulling the blanket over me. I laid there for awhile thinking about what Dominic and Taylor had done to me, and I fell asleep thinking about all the things I’d like to do to them.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, it took a second for me to remember the events of the previous day. When the memory came back to me, it brought with it the anger I’d felt toward them. The memory of my head plunged into the toilet filled with my own diarrhea was enough to make me want to puke again. I quickly pushed away the thoughts and got out of bed.

Looking at the alarm clock on my nightstand, I saw I was already late so I dressed for school in no hurry at all. For the first time, I considered not going. Usually, I was eager to leave the house and be away from Travis. But lately, Dominic was just as bad as my step-father, just in a different way. So I had to ask myself, which was the lesser of the two evils. I could stay home and be raped and beaten. Or I could go to school and be broken down and humiliated in front of everyone. I was used to both of them. And I was tired of both of them. I really didn’t know how much more of either I could stand.

I went ahead and went to school. After all, it was Thursday. Just one more day would finish out the week. Then, I could spend two days only worrying about one bully instead of five. I took my breaks where I could get them.

The hall was empty as I walked to my locker. I was still in no hurry. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be home, either. In fact, I didn’t want to be anywhere. There was nowhere for me to be.

When I opened my locker, the smell hit me. At first, I thought maybe it was my all in my head. Perhaps a lingering smell from yesterday’s incident. A figment of my imagination.

Standing there looking into the small space, I tried to find the source of the foul odor, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. My books were on the shelf and my backpack hung from the hook below it, just like I’d left it.

I reached in and unzipped the backpack, afraid of what I might find. As I pulled the front flap of the bag toward me to peer inside, the smell grew worse. I leaned to the side to allow in more light. Lying at the bottom of my backpack was a plastic bag, the kind with the zipper. Beside the bag was a pile of crap.

There was no doubt who’d done this. I couldn’t believe he’d go to the trouble of scooping up crap in a bag and dumping it into my locker, though. It seemed like a lot of work. Usually, he just used whatever was handy at the time to torment me. Like a toilet. But this, he’d put thought into. This, he’d planned.

I thought of dumping the contents of my backpack into his locker. Or throwing it at him. Or shoving it down his throat. That’s what I wanted to do. But instead, I took my backpack down the hall and threw it into the trashcan.

By this time, I was so late that by the time I walked to Algebra, it would be over. So when I returned to my locker, which still smelled horrible, I grabbed my English Lit book and slowly walked to class, thinking about how much I hated my life.

I passed through most of the day invisible, as I preferred. None of the teachers called on me. None of the students talked to me. Well, none except Carly.

She was watching as I sanded the edge of one of her boards in Woodworking class.

“So have you asked anyone yet?”

“Asked anyone what?” I asked, still sanding.

“To the dance.”

“Oh. No.” The dance hadn’t even crossed my mind since yesterday at lunch. A lot had happened to me since then.

“You don’t have much time left, you know.”

I didn’t reply. I still wasn’t sure if she was hinting to me to ask her, so I kept quiet. Better safe than sorry, I figured.

“Your eye looks better today.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t tell her that it might look better, but it didn’t feel any better. It still hurt to touch, and it hurt even worse if I squeezed my eyes shut.

An awkward silence fell between us while she thought of what to say next.

“Are you okay, Brian?”

I nodded. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes, I feel like...I don’t know. Like you’re somewhere else. Like you’re not there. Like now. You’re standing right here beside me, but I feel like your mind is somewhere else.”

I stopped sanding and looked at her. She had no idea how right she was. That’s exactly the way I felt. But I didn’t want to tell her that.

Instead, I said, “Yeah. Sometimes I do a lot of thinking. I’m sorry.”

She smiled. “Don’t be sorry.”

I went back to sanding.

“Brian?”

“Yeah?”

“How do crazy people go through the forest?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“They take the psycho path,” she said, laughing. She reached over and tapped my arm with her hand. “Come on, Brian. That’s funny.”

I nodded. “Yeah, it is.”

“Then why aren’t you laughing? You’re not even smiling. You never smile. Why not?” she asked, turning serious again.

I shook my head. “I guess I don’t have much to smile about.”

She was silent for so long, I had to stop sanding and look at her to see what was wrong. She had a strange look on her face.

“That’s so sad,” she said. “I want to see you smile, Brian. And I will.” She smiled and nodded once, firmly, confirming that her mission now was to make me smile.

I turned my attention back to her shelf, feeling pretty good that she cared. It was a new feeling for me to have someone care about me. Well, I suppose it wasn’t new, but it had been so long since I’d felt it, it was like new.

Twenty minutes passed before Carly tried to make me laugh again.

“Brian,” she said, sitting on the stool beside me, elbows on the worktable. “What do Eskimos get from sitting on the ice too long?”

I gave it a bit of thought, but couldn’t think of anything so I shrugged. “I don’t know. What?”

“Polaroids.”

I felt her watching me, waiting for me to smile. And I wanted to. But there just wasn’t one in there. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d smiled. Or for that matter, the last time I’d had a reason to.

She sighed.

In the last five minutes of the hour, as we put our tools and wood away, she gave it another shot.

“Brian, why don’t aliens eat clowns?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t they?”

“Because clowns taste funny.”

She almost got me. That one was pretty funny. But I guess my level of sadness was greater than I’d thought because I just couldn’t get my lips to widen into the smile she longed to see.

“Dang it. I just knew that would get you. Don’t worry, Brian. I will make you smile,” she said with emphasis on ‘will’.

As we walked to the cafeteria, Carly gave it one more try.

“Alright, Brian. If this doesn’t do it, something’s wrong. What do prisoners use to call each other?”

Nothing came to mind so I said, “I don’t know.”

“Cell phones.”

Again, nothing. I didn’t even feel my face try to smile.

“Oh, Brian. You’re impossible. But I’m not giving up. It may not be today, maybe not even tomorrow, but I will make you smile. Just watch.”

I did watch. I watched as she giggled and ran to catch up with her group of friends. I don’t think she realized what a job this was going to be for her. But I loved her for trying.