Chapter 1
The Pimple-Kid, Answer Boy, Squealer they called him.
Runt that he was. Bookworm that he was. Therefore…he was.
His name to himself was victim.
He was a teenager…a human being.
He was afraid.
- From His Recorded Words
Monday mornings at Peyton Hill High School were usually slow motion downers. So it was almost good news when I got to my locker and someone passing by said, “Hey, Joe Maddy, they’re messin’ with Answer-Boy at the donut stand.”
I didn’t say anything, just swore under my breath and hurried in that direction. The hallway was naturally crowded with the post weekend catch up and I had to push through them a like bull through bunnies. I’m 6’2 and about 200 pounds—a little bigger than most sixteen year olds. I turned left and there it was, right in front of the donut stand, no teachers present and a bunch of the school jocks kicking around Answer-Boy’s—I mean, Danny’s–stuff.
Danny was on his hands and knees scrambling to pull all his books and papers together. It wasn’t working since four or five jock-types were shuffling them around with their feet like air hockey pucks. A larger group of kids was just standing there gawking. Several were laughing out loud, and taunting. “Answer-Boy.” “Hey, Answer-Boy.” “Mind your own business, squealer.” In the middle, sticking out a head taller than the rest, Tim Hanson seemed to be goading everyone on. Danny looked up. His face was blotchy with tears and anger.
“Back off!” I exploded, grabbing the nearest tormentor by the shirt and sweeping him out of the way. I jumped in the thick of it, Danny beneath me on all fours, and began shoving people back. Everything went razor for me, that good fighting feeling where the edges get sharp, and when I put my hand on Dave Holdstrum’s shoulder to pull him away from Danny, he spun around with a fist ready to fly. I appreciated the startled “Oops” look when he recognized my face, but dropped him anyway with a bloody nose. I was eager to pop a few more noses in the frenzy, but a couple of girls stepped in and began shouting, “Stop it, everyone!” “Stop it!” “Enough!”
I stood where I was, hands half-raised still ready to slug, as the jocks and the other kids backed away. I recognized a couple of the shouters as cheerleaders—Michelle Connelly, Jen Wright, and another small red-haired girl whose name I didn’t know. Michelle was pulling on Tim Hanson, whose face and arms were twitching with anger.
Now I’m talking about the Tim Hanson, Mr. Cool, the school’s high-throwing quarterback, top-scoring hockey player, and also last year’s state archery champion (which is less well known, possibly because some sneaky bastard swiped the trophy from the school display case). Add having a wealthy sporting goods store owner for a father, curly raven hair and a lantern jaw, plus a natural gift for being a loud mouthed jerk and getting away with it, and you had the one guy all the others wanted to be. So when Michelle got him calmed down and he raised his hands and said to the crowd with authority, “Okay everyone. That’s enough. This is out of hand. Everyone get to class,” well…everyone did.
“Who started it, Tim?” I asked, as he walked away with his jock buddies, Michelle still holding his arm.
At that moment the bell for first period rang. Tim gave me a defiant stare and called out, “Hey, Answer-Boy, I don’t cheat. So watch your lying mouth.” Michelle tugged him away with a frown and I could hear her voice get sharp, “Enough, Tim! We’re gonna talk about this.”
Danny was still pulling his books together. The kid was a non-stop reader. And as far as I could tell he remembered everything. They didn’t call him Answer-Boy for nothing. “You, okay?” I asked. I bent down to help him. He had all the school texts of course, mathematics, biology, psychology, etc… He also carried a lot of extra books from the library including one by that scientist in the wheel chair and another called Brave New World by some guy, or girl, named Aldous. “You really need a backpack, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
It was a dumb thing to say. He couldn’t afford one of those fancy bags which had become so popular at school this year. And using some lousy makeshift bag would just draw more attention to the fact that he couldn’t afford a real bag. Danny’s family was poor and lived in a tiny house in a crummy neighborhood. I knew that because I lived there too. His father was some kind of maintenance guy in a hospital, but at home he swore clean through the walls and drank a lot. His mother did odd jobs, took care of their baby girl, and didn’t swear or say much at all that I’d ever noticed.
“You alright? Want to see the nurse?”
“I’ll be okay.”
I patted out some of the wrinkles in his yellow Kmart short sleeve. “Good as new,” I announced. There was no help for his tattered jeans. You couldn’t make those old things any less shabby. Truth is, neither one of us had very nice clothes. Kmart shirts and Wal-Mart jeans, and fifteen dollar, on-sale tennis shoes
“I’ll walk you.”
“You’ll be late.”
“That’s okay. When they find out I leveled a couple people I’ll probably spend a day in detention anyway.”
“Hopefully, just a day, with your situation. And you only leveled one.”
“And popped him good. Did you see that?”
We walked through the emptying halls and Danny suddenly began sniffling. I said, “You know, you can’t tell on people stealing answers from your tests. Especially cool people.”
“I didn’t tell anyone. That stupid Tim Hanson was just so obvious looking over my desk, the teacher finally gave up and grabbed the test out of his hands. He thinks he can get away with anything.”
“Maybe he can,” I said. “But he’ll get his one day. Just stay close to me for now and you’ll be okay.”
As we walked I pictured myself punching Tim’s head. My imagination is limited but I can handle that. I did it often. It was a face-off I viewed as inevitable. Tim, the top jock in the school with everything. Me, the top tough kid with nothing. We’d had a few hard-staring, pushing confrontations in the past—even when we’d played football together—but it had never gotten to a real fight. Still, like two fast-draw gun-slingers in one of those old cowboy movies…eventually we’d have to see who could kick whose ass.
Danny and I stopped just outside the door to biology. He was one of those odd kids who gets turned on by learning, and I knew he liked biology so hopefully this would perk up his mood. “Hey, got a Conan for me? You know, in case I go to detention.”
He pulled out a used paperback from his back pocket. It had creases, but fortunately most of the cover art was clear—a glorious picture of the wild, black-haired barbarian standing on a mountain of bloody subhuman creatures he’d just creamed with an axe, and a slinky babe in a fur bikini at his side. I could look at the covers for hours. Danny always held my Conans for me to read in study hall, and sometimes classes. I tended to lose things like books outside of school, so he kept them for me and I gave them back to him at the end of day. It was a good system.
“If you do get into trouble and need someone to vouch for you, I can always turn on the faucets for Principal Steele,” he said pointing to his eyes with a grin.
“Good deal. See you last period, man.”
I did end up in detention, so I was glad I asked for the Conan. Dave Holdstrum had turned me in to Principal Steele and had a bloody nose and a beginning shiner to back up his story. I wasn’t too angry at him for telling on me. He was a wuss. Wusses tattle.
Principal Steele started out pretty grim. “Joe, you’re still on last chance parole from last year and this is a clear violation. Now, what do you have to say for yourself?”
I gave him a brief run down on the bullying that had provoked me into bashing Holdstrum. I asked at the end of it. “What would you have done?”
He nodded and sighed, “Okay. You’ve been pretty quiet this year and I’ve already talked to a few other witnesses. I underst
and you were just protecting Danny Perkins, but I’m drawing the line at bloody noses.” He shook his finger. “No more of this, for any reason. Are we clear?”
I said, “Clear.”
He sent me out with one day’s detention.
I spent the rest of the day sitting in a corner in the admin waiting area. There was nothing to look at but the horned rimmed receptionist, Mrs. France, and two paintings of deer following their noses through a birch forest with a big square air vent between them. Whenever she glanced my way, Mrs. France frowned with a disapproving clicking sound. Not very friendly, but it didn’t bother me. I could smile because I knew behind her high counter and prim appearance she was sitting on a funny-looking donut pillow for people with hemorrhoids. I knew this from a day some weeks past when I’d discovered a trap door into the ceiling sir duct system in an old storage room and after a few hours crawling around found myself looking down from that very vent between the two deer pictures. That was a fun couple of hours—I didn’t even get in trouble since no one missed me in classes—and I had quite an adventure spying on different rooms behind the gratings. I wished I was in there now, sneaking around, making silent fun of Mrs. France’s butt problems.
The standard the detention routine I knew well from a year back when I was a practicing tough kid and beating up a lot of people. Sit still, be quiet. I opened Conan the Usurper and started reading a random page. “Khostral spread his great arms, and Conan, crouching beneath them, slashed at the giant’s belly with his broadsword. Then he bounded back, eyes blazing with surprise. There was a fleeting concussion, a fierce writhing and intertwining of limbs and bodies, and then Conan sprang clear, every limb quivering from the violence of his efforts…”
It was possible I’d read the story before. I couldn’t remember plots. It was the words and descriptions I got into. I’d read the action scenes over and over until I could see them in my head. As for what happened in the stories, they all took place in some ancient land that never existed and Conan was the greatest of all the heros—a barbarian, which I sort of imagined as the tough guys of the ancient world. Danny said I had some of Conan’s features from the book covers: a square jaw and nose, thick cheek bones—although his eyes were the same clear blue as Danny’s and mine were just plain brown. In the course of any given story, Conan would knock off a dozen-or-so bad guys and monsters, maybe an evil wizard, usually cleaving them in two with a sword or an axe. The stories always included a lot of gory details and I tended to recall my own fights in the same language—in the middle of a brawl, for instance, Conan and I both reject the “civilized courtesies” and instead fight with “primordial speed” and “animal ferocity”. I admit, I liked to see myself as Conan. Strong, street smart, wild and unstoppable, with a rough code of honor. The long barbarian hair was cool too, and I grew my own brown hair to my shoulders so it looked rough and barbarian-like. Below the shoulders would have been sissy.
So the day dragged on. In the morning, Conan was fighting a clan of Minotaurs in an underground labyrinthine city (much like the air ducts). For lunch, I ate the apple I’d brought and drank some of the secretaries’ coffee. In between afternoon yawns, more Conan, this time stealing into a sorcerer’s castle to free a kidnapped princess.
At 3:00, final bell rang and woke me up. I had fallen asleep head towards the ceiling. I glanced around embarrassed. Mrs. France said in a weary voice, “Don’t worry, Joe, you didn’t snore. Stay out of trouble now, will you?”
“I’ll try that,” I said, and ran out to catch Danny.
His last class, psychology, was almost empty by the time I got there. It’s the only class we shared so I knew exactly where to go. The halls were clearing—everyone was headed home or to the football field or to one of the near-by fast food joints. Taco Johns was the official cool-crowd hangout. I went there occasionally ‘cause I really like tacos, but never right after school. I don’t belong to a crowd. I’m really more of a lone wolf.
In the psychology room, Mr. Tan and Danny were standing at the white board and Mr. Tan was drawing circles and arrows around the words, “Ego”, “Superego”, “Id”. He was tall, reedy, with wiry hair, and pretty young. Even if you ignored his lectures you could tell he enjoyed the whole teaching thing, not just going through the motions like a lot of them. He even had an advanced degree in psychology which he had gotten after his teaching degree, so you knew he was into the topic and not just spouting from some teacher’s answer book. As usual, Danny was asking questions and they were having some deep conversation. They did this a lot after class, because Danny likes to understand what makes people tick. Most teachers who gave a damn liked Danny because he seemed to appreciate what they taught and asked good questions. Mr. Tan gave him more attention than most. It must have been hard being a good teacher with a bunch of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen year olds who mostly wanted to get out as soon as possible and go to a taco or burger joint.
When Mr. Tan saw me come in, he said, “Hey, Joe, I missed you reading Conan the Barbarian today. Word is you were in detention for saving this guy’s bacon.” I think because I was his best student’s best friend, Mr. Tan was nice to me, despite my reading through his lectures.
I just shrugged and, since it looked like they were finishing up, said to Danny, “Ready to go?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
I handed him the Conan.
We only lived about five or six blocks away, and I wasn’t allowed to drive my motorcycle to school, so we always walked. When the monster magnet was built a few years ago to move over nine hundred kids from three separate high schools into one big building, the one thing they did for the poorer area was to locate within walking distance. The rest of the city had plenty of money so a lot of the kids had cars, and definitely all their parents did. I never understood why they lumped all the schools together.
About a block away we crossed the old stone bridge over Congdon Creek and Danny stopped to look down. I had been trying to cheer him up. I was telling in Conan-like detail my account of the ruckus from the morning: “And Joe’s fist blazed into the loser jock’s nose, like a…a Mack truck into silly putty. No wait, like a truck into a tomato, a giant tomato. Red goo all over the place. What do you think? Danny, come on!”
He stayed silent, looking down into the river. It was smelly and full of liter—cast-away hamburger containers, plastic cups, and newspapers. Now and then you heard someone talk about a school cleanup project, but it was always voluntary so it never happened. Why pull garbage out of a river you’d probably gunk up again in a few months? I split my last few peanut M&Ms with Danny and then tossed the crumpled yellow wrapper into the water and watched it flutter back and forth in the current.
“You got all your books back, right?”
“Yeah.”
“No one else bothered you today?”
“No.”
“Good. Why are you so bummed out?”
I worried about Danny when he got like this, gloomy and withdrawn. Especially when he stared too intensely into the river below, if you know what I mean. Not that you’d really get hurt if you threw yourself off the bridge. It was only about fifteen feet down and the water was slow, maybe a foot deep, and maybe ten feet wide. I just didn’t like that “what’s-the-point” gaze in his eyes, and it was becoming more frequent.
“What’s up?”
“Sometimes I get tired of it.”
“Of what? School? Who doesn’t get tired of school.”
“No, you know I don’t mind school. I’m tired of being scared.”
“Scared? Come on. Scared of what?”
“Everything. Never fitting in, no matter what I do. I’m tired of being picked on all the time. I almost never talk in class anymore, and kids still call me Answer-Boy.” (Answer-Boy was actually an improvement. They used to call him The Pimple Kid, like The Sundance Kid, because beneath his sandy hair was a serious pepperoni problem. Eventually I took care of the name calling, one day giving an exceptional and p
ublic beating to Stu Mechlin after he’d called Danny “pimple puppy” to his face. After that, people stopped saying it. I’d always considered Answer-Boy a compliment.)
“Sorry to whine. I know Conan wouldn’t approve. Sometimes everything feels so bad that it just sort of bubbles over and I get…”
I never knew exactly how Danny became the school victim, the nerd everyone picked on. I knew he always had been, and that someone had to be according to the rules. It’s like how some people throw rocks at birds or step on ants, when they’re actually mad at other things. Birds and ants can hardly be a person’s enemy. But they’re convenient and puny. Like Danny. Even his parents took it out on him. I mean, he could even bring home his usual straight “A” report card and if something stupid like the phys-ed rating was only satisfactory they would yell at him, then they’d add on things like forgetting to make his bed, or maybe even criticize his pimples—imagine a parent being that nasty. Mostly, they’d carp about his “dubious” friend, meaning me. For a lot of reasons—a run-down house, crummy jobs, crummy lives, a new baby they hadn’t planned on—they probably weren’t the happiest people around.
I was stumped about what to do to make Danny feel better, as he stood there kicking the bridge. But what the hell—diversions always worked for me. “Hey. Let’s go to the amusement park tonight.” He looked at me with one eyebrow cocked. “Yeah. My treat. We’ll do all the fast rides and have some fun.” He said “okay” in not much more than a whisper.
A few blocks from the bridge we went our separate ways. Danny lived on Hawthorne Road and I was on Millway. It was the same general neighborhood but a couple blocks apart. I said I’d pick him up at 6:30. Then I kicked him in the butt for good measure adding, “And you know what, kiddo?”
“What?”
“I’m going to make sure you have a good time tonight, even if it kills you.”