Everyone began trading whispers—everyone but Chuck, that is. One by one they turned to peek at Todd Rosenthal. They all spent the morning wondering the exact same thing. Why in the world was he wearing that stupid thing? What was he hiding that he refused to show them? Someone wrote Todd a note during the American history lesson. Chuck glanced at it before passing it to Nathan Chowdhury. It read, “Do you have cancer (check yes or no)?”
Todd returned it with an extra box checked SCREW YOU. He sat high in his seat like a long-necked bird. He stared straight ahead at the writing on the chalkboard.
At lunch, Matthew Berry revealed the answer to the mystery. He crossed behind Todd Rosenthal and flipped his cap loose. A field of tiny lice marks shone from Todd’s scalp. They looked like stars on the dome of a planetarium. A party noise rose up from the fifth grade table. The lunchroom became loud with the overlapping bubbles of conversations.
“Did you see I think spots yeah must be bugs.”
And, “Man can you totally Todd-Rosenthal-believe head lice.”
And, “Hat-on-comb gag me contagious is this kindergarten?”
Matthew Berry gave a shudder and said, “Dude, that’s nasty.” Todd middle-fingered him, jamming his hat back on his head. He saw Chuck watching him quietly from a faraway seat. “What the hell are you looking at, Chuckles?” he growled. “You’ve got maybe three seconds to wipe that face off—”
The lunch monitor shouted, “Fifth grade table, quiet down immediately!”
There was a brief silence before the whispering began again. Todd Rosenthal filled eight minutes flicking French fries at Chuck. The fries blossomed with light as they broke into pieces. Food fights were against the rules, but Todd didn’t care. When the bell rang, everyone filed back to the classroom.
That afternoon, the rain cleared, and they had recess outside. The sun shone through the limbs of the big magnolias. Chuck looked for a spot where he could play alone. The green foam that carpeted the playground was still damp. He imagined his footsteps leaving dry peanut shapes behind him. Instead, they filled with water, then slowly emptied back out. Chuck stopped by the wooden tower and watched them disappear. He noticed Todd Rosenthal glancing over his shoulder at him. Todd turned and said something to Craig and Oscar Poissant. The two Poissant brothers were sixth-graders—twins, but not identical. The three of them were standing on the steep hillside. Their own footprints were pressed like stitches into the grass.
Chuck was living beneath the slide when they came over. Craig Poissant let his meaty arm rest on Chuck’s shoulder. “We were over there talking and had this crazy idea. We thought it would be fun to kick your ass.”
“Doesn’t that sound like fun to you?” Todd Rosenthal asked. “If it doesn’t, you only have to tell us so.”
“We only beat kids up if they really want it.”
“Yep, we’re nice that way, us three,” Todd Rosenthal said. “So what’s it going to be—ass-kicking or no ass-kicking?”
At first Chuck thought they were kidding around with him. They showed him their teeth, and he showed them his. They were four friends sharing a joke on the playground. Chuck didn’t get the joke, but he almost never did. Then the other Poissant brother, Oscar, said, “Kid’s not talking.”
“No, he doesn’t have a word to say for himself.”
“That must mean he wants us to beat him up.”
“Well, if that’s what he really wants,” Craig Poissant said.
Todd Rosenthal brought his palms out to push Chuck down. He leaned in so that Chuck could smell his breath. Chuck ducked and ran away as fast as he could. He could hear Todd and both the Poissants chasing him. He went tearing through the crowd of kids playing basketball. Some of them stopped and stared, some just kept shooting. Chuck curved away, sprinting behind a row of parked cars. Oscar Poissant dashed around the side to cut him off. Chuck avoided him by sliding between a pair of SUVs. He wriggled under the chunky mirrors and past the bumpers. Before he knew it, he was back on the playground. He crossed in front of the swings, dodging someone’s feet. Then he darted beneath the tower and the monkey bars. Suddenly he came face-to-face with the wooden fence.
He heard the drumbeat of sneakers landing on the foam. He barely had time to turn around before it happened. Todd lunged at him, landing a punch on his stomach. The second hit his neck, and the third his chest. The boards rattled as Todd shoved Chuck against the fence. A hard kick swept his legs out from under him. He found himself lying facedown, Todd squatting on his back. Todd didn’t say anything, just kept punching Chuck, smacking him.
The teachers came running with their strong arms and whistles.
Someone shouted, “Get off of Chuck Carter right this instant!”
Someone else shouted, “All right, break it up, you two!”
Todd Rosenthal’s cap slipped off as the teachers grabbed him. His scalp looked like a firework that had burst open. He said, “There, punk,” and gripped Chuck with his knees. “There it goes, and what do you think of that?”
Then Chuck felt himself losing a hundred pounds of weight. He was too shaken to stand up on his own. A green-shelled bug was crawling toward him, twitching its feelers. Its face was like a face from some other planet. Chuck wondered how long it would remember staring at him.
That afternoon, when he got home, he ached all over. He went to his room and took his clothes off. His bruises shone in the mouth of the bullfrog mirror. There were bunches of them, so sore that they glittered. A bruise below his ear and another on his shoulder. A bruise the size of an apple on his back. A row of small knuckle-shaped bruises above his belly button. Where he didn’t have bruises, he had cuts and scratches. He twisted his neck and listened to the joints pop. He wiggled one of his front teeth with his tongue. Falling down, he had scraped a patch from his chin. There was a crust of dried blood around the edges. The school nurse had put a Scooby-Doo Band-Aid on it. When he peeled it loose, it tugged at his skin. For a few seconds, the light poured out like water. It hurt just a little too much to be beautiful.
His body felt uncomfortable and strange, like someone else’s clothing. It seemed too small around him, or maybe too big. He collapsed in bed with his elephant and his bears. On TV, cops and detectives didn’t mind getting beaten up. They just brushed themselves off and began smoking a cigarette. In real life, getting punched made you tired and queasy. Chuck only wanted to lie there staring at the ceiling. Unfortunately, he had chores to do and homework to finish. His mom made him get dressed and sweep the driveway. The concrete was still wet from the hard morning rain. The water foamed and bubbled beneath the broom like soda. After he finished sweeping, he threw away the soggy leaves. He hauled the big green trash can to the curb. Then he went to his desk and did math problems. He read chapter nineteen from The Story of America. He studied the next ten words for his vocabulary quiz. Exasperation, paradise, fraying, infected, temporary, candid, camouflage, indignant, animated, cuticle. He knew the last word already, but not its spelling. The quizzes were actually working, he thought, improving his vocabulary. He wouldn’t have guessed they would work, but they did.
That evening, after dinner, his pretend dad called him outside. “What’s this I hear about you and the Rosenthal boy?”
Chuck bowed his head and looked down at his knees.
His pretend dad sighed and took hold of his chin. “It’s high time I taught you how to fight, son. Every man’s gotta know how to defend himself,” he insisted. “Now put up your fists,” and he thumped Chuck’s forehead. “You have one job: to keep me from doing that. Understand?” he asked, and though Chuck’s head hurt, he nodded.
Chuck moved his hands around in front of his face. He imagined that he was the Flash and had super-speed. He imagined that he was a robot with steel hands. It didn’t matter—his pretend dad kept thumping his forehead. He was a lot faster than Chuck, a lot stronger. Sometimes he came from the left, sometimes from the right. He used his index finger and also his middle finger. “Show some muscle,” he
told Chuck, and, “Stop jellyfishing around.” “Come on,” he said, and, “What’s the matter with you?” “Dodge and parry!” he shouted, but what did that mean?
After a while, Chuck quit believing he could stop him. This was just what the world was like, he thought. This was how the rest of his life would be. He was the boy who couldn’t learn to defend himself. The boy who stood outside waving his tiny fists around. The boy whose pretend dad would not stop poking him. The wind was moving across the yard, swirling, then resting. The leaves on the grass were all glossy and speckled. They kept lifting onto their edges, then slowly toppling over. It happened thirty or fifty times, too many to count. He was reminded of waves rolling gently onto a beach.
Eventually he realized that the poking and shouting had stopped. His pretend dad was gone, and he was alone again. His forehead hurt with the sting of a hundred taps. His bruises were glowing, beating like hearts through his clothing.
The sun vanished in a pool of thick red light. He went back inside, and he slipped into his bedroom. The diary he had taken was lying on his dresser. He sat down and opened the cover and began reading.
I love the way chocolate makes your eyes light up.
I love hearing you try to defend Hall and Oates.
I love your compassionate heart—your big, sloppy, sentimental heart.
The pages looked just as sensitive as they always had. They were like a giant mosquito bite, infected from scratching. Chuck closed the diary and tucked it under his pillow. He lay down, patting the sad square lump it made. He wanted to heal the book, to make it better. If he tried hard enough, maybe he could do it.
In the morning, when he woke, his muscles were sore. The light of his wounds had spread across his body. His bruised places were dimmer and hurt a little less. The rest of him was what hurt a little more. He had a hard time waking up and getting dressed. His mom had to yell his name three different times. His pretend dad had to throw a shoe at him. The shoe thunked against the wall, leaving a black scuff.
Chuck decided to take the diary to school with him. He spent the day petting its cover under his desk. He massaged the wave, smoothing it down with his hand. Maybe he was imagining things, but it seemed to help. The pages still shone, but not as brightly, he thought. Not as brightly and not with the same awful pain. The book rested a little more comfortably in his hands. He began carrying it around with him wherever he went. People whispered about it for a while and then stopped. It was one of the many weird things Chuck did. He never said anything, and he laughed at stupid jokes. He couldn’t reach the basket when he threw the basketball. Now he liked to stroke a book under his desk. No surprise, and who cared, and what else was new?
Todd Rosenthal had been suspended from school for the week. On Monday, when he returned, he avoided looking at Chuck. He stomped past his chair without even kicking the legs. His hair had grown up in a soft-looking brown fuzz. He kept rubbing it with the palm of his hand. Chuck bet it would feel the way a peach felt. Or slightly fuzzy, but also firm, like a tennis ball. Or prickly like Velcro, the side with the plastic bristles. He wanted to run his fingers over it but didn’t. Some things were so obvious that they weren’t even rules.
For the next two weeks, everything was good for Chuck. School was a paradise where no one noticed he existed. His bruises went away, and his scabs began to peel. Todd Rosenthal ignored him, sitting quietly next to the window. He did not step on Chuck’s shoes in the recess line. He did not ask him to be his gay boyfriend.
Then one morning Ms. Mount stayed home with a cold. They found a substitute—a man—sitting at her desk. He was Mr. Brady, he said, “but call me Felix.” He was skinny like Chuck, and short, and wore glasses. He forgot to collect their homework after he took roll. He didn’t understand what the bell meant when it rang. Worse, he began allowing the class to vote on everything. “Who votes we line up by height today?” he asked. “Who votes that we read out loud from the textbook?” “What would you like to study next: science or history?”
At the noon bell, Mariellen Chase asked him a question. “Is it okay if we eat lunch in class today?”
“Let’s put it to a vote,” Mr. Brady—Felix—said. “All in favor of eating in class, raise your hands.”
Fifteen hands shot up immediately, and only five stayed down.
“Okay, then,” he said, dropping his fist like a hammer. “By a count of fifteen to five, eating here wins.”
He spent the next half hour working on a crossword puzzle. He kept rolling a cough drop around in his mouth. Now and then he looked up, saying, “Quiet down, guys.” But everybody was too busy talking, and no one listened.
Chuck finished his bologna sandwich and his pack of Twinkies. He put his lunch box away and took out the diary. He stroked the cover, trying to brush its pain away. He pretended it was a cat, purring in his lap. He wished that he could feed it a cat treat.
Lunchtime was nearly over when Nathan Chowdhury grabbed the book. He caressed it and kissed it, murmuring, “Oh, baby, baby.”
Todd Rosenthal said to him, “Nathan, man, chuck it here.” Chuck’s heart beat faster at the sound of his name. (It wasn’t really his name—he knew that—but still …) He watched the diary’s pages flutter apart in the air. Todd caught it, smiled at Chuck, and cracked it open. Right away, without a thought, he tore a page out. The light was terrible and made Chuck’s stomach go tight. His mouth tasted bitter, and his hands began to sweat. To see all that love and sadness destroyed was agonizing. Todd Rosenthal noticed his reaction, laughed, and tore another page. The whole class turned around to watch what was happening. The sound of ripping paper was louder than their conversations. They looked at Chuck, at Todd, then at Chuck again. They wanted to see if he had started crying yet.
“Hey, what’s going on back there?” the substitute teacher asked. Suddenly he crossed the room, stopping next to Todd Rosenthal. “That’s enough monkey business,” he said, and took the diary. He handed it back to Chuck, torn pages and all. Then he brought him the Scotch tape from his desk. “It could be worse, right?” he said, squeezing Chuck’s shoulder. “Tape it back together and it’ll be good as new.”
Apparently, Mr. Brady didn’t know that he should punish Todd. He didn’t seem to understand how the check system worked.
Carefully, Chuck repaired the book, ignoring the whispers he heard. He slid the loose pages into place, squaring their edges. He fastened them together with long strips of invisible tape. He made sure all the broken words lined up correctly. When he was finished, he let the book fall shut.
It wasn’t as good as new—it was nowhere close. It shone like a man whose bones had been broken.
The rest of the afternoon passed slowly for Chuck, hazily. At recess, he spotted Todd Rosenthal climbing the wooden tower. It was freezing cold, and everyone had a sore throat. A few kids were playing soccer in the parking lot. A pale light flickered over their tongues as they shouted. Chuck saw the light but did not hear the words. He approached the tower and went up the ladder. It seemed that he was riding the glass elevator again. He felt tall and powerful and nothing whatsoever like himself. He rose quietly into the clear blue sky like Superman. Far below him, the kids turned into little moving dots.
He found Todd Rosenthal standing at the platform’s open edge. He was dangling a cord of spit from his mouth. Chuck shoved him and watched his body hit the ground.
In seconds, everything was over, and the teachers came running. The fall had wrenched Todd’s shoulder out of its socket. His arm had snapped with a sound like breaking chalk. His teeth had pierced the flesh of his lower lip. Blood, thick and shining, was already spilling from the wound.
The teachers bent down over him, trying to soothe him.
“Don’t worry,” they said, and, “Cry it all out, honey.”
“Mr. Kaczmarek is calling the doctor for you right now.”
“Your mom and dad will meet you at the hospital.”
Todd rolled onto his back and twisted his eyes shut.
He moaned, “Why does this shit always happen to me?” No one said anything to him about the curse word.
The teachers were trying hard not to look at Chuck. They seemed embarrassed by him—even the substitute, Mr. Brady. He marched Chuck inside, leaving him in the secretary’s office. Chuck sat on the couch listening to the clock tick. After a while, the principal summoned him to her desk. He could see the ambulance pulling away through the window. Its flashing red lights dipped like fish across the wall. The principal kept snapping her fingers and saying, “Pay attention.” And, “I must say your behavior surprises me, Mr. Carter.” And, “You realize this will go on your permanent record.” Her lipstick had leaked into the cracks between her teeth. Finally, she shook her head and turned away from him. She picked up the phone to call his pretend dad. And then it was Chuck’s turn to be in trouble.
The school punished him with two full weeks of suspension. His parents punished him by taking away his stuffed animals. “Plus no Cokes, TV, or comic books,” his mom said. His pretend dad even got her permission to spank him. He gave Chuck ten whacks with a wooden cutting board. Afterward, Chuck noticed him smothering the expression on his face. He looked like he did after he mowed the lawn. He was satisfied with the hard work he had done.
“This was for your own good now,” he told Chuck. “It’s a lesson I can just about guarantee you’ll remember.”
“This family doesn’t even believe in spanking,” his mom added. “You have no idea how disappointed I am in you. I always said I would never hit my child: ever. But this—oh, Chuckie, you broke that poor boy’s arm.”
She was standing at the kitchen counter tapping her feet. The heels of her shoes stabbed the floor like knives.
The days of Chuck’s suspension passed like a long dream. Because both his parents had jobs, he stayed home alone. He imagined he was an orphan without the sad parts. Over and over again, he walked through the empty house. He made little teepees—dominoes—out of his playing cards. He spent a while tossing beanbags at his tic-tac-toe game. (The spotted beanbags were his, the solid ones Todd Rosenthal’s.) He stood at the window looking out over the yard. Cars and trucks and bicycles drifted slowly down the street. Squirrels crossed the grass, their tails jerking on invisible wires. He could see the yellow bricks that lined the porch. As usual, they looked like something he would enjoy tasting. If he was a retard, then he was a retard. He had become too old to do anything about it.