Somebody poured milk down my back when we were leaving.
56.
Bethany turned up in school for the first time on Friday. She was wearing her black turtleneck, tight black jeans, and new sneakers. She looked like she hadn’t eaten in a month, and her eyes were swollen under the makeup.
They said that her parents were forcing her to go to school as punishment for going to the Rawson party.
Mr. Hughes met me at the front door and informed me that “until the matter was resolved,” I’d be spending homeroom in the main office.
“It would be best for everyone,” he said. “I’m sure you understand.”
Chip Milbury passed me in the hall on the way to first period. He pointed to his eyes, then at me.
Great. Chip was watching. Now my life was complete.
Mr. Salvatore attacked me in English class. “What was Doctor Faustus tempted with, Tyler?” he asked. He was perched on a corner of his desk, smiling like he gave a damn.
“I don’t know.”
“What was the author, Marlowe, trying to tell us?”
“To pay attention in English class?”
A few people giggled. Salvatore stood up. “Did you read last night’s assignment?”
Why was he always doing that? Say “yes,” and I’d be hammered again. Say “no,” and the same thing would happen.
I shrugged.
“Did anyone read last night’s assignment?”
Everyone who was not me raised their hands.
“Someone please summarize Doctor Faustus for us,” he said. As a girl sitting by the window explained, Mr. Salvatore took a book from his desk, opened it, and set it on my desk. He patted me on the shoulder, twice, and went to the board, where he started scribbling.
I tried to read, but the letters kept moving around.
I stopped at my locker after English. Mistake. Something accidentally hit me on the right side of the head. It felt like the bumper of a pick-up truck.
Nobody saw anything.
The nurse gave me ice and called Mr. Hughes. An hour later he joined me in the nurse’s office and told me that I would be spending the rest of the day in study hall. He had already talked to my parents. They would be coming to school for a meeting on Monday.
If I hadn’t been so tired, I might have said something.
I went to the study hall room and laid my head down on my books. A trickle of water leaked from the ice bag and escaped down the back of my neck.
As the day wore on, the room filled with bees and emptied, first buzzing, then silence, buzzing, silence, as the members of the hive flew through their rigid, patterned dances. The sound of their beating wings filled my mind and smothered it.
When I finally woke up, the room was empty except for Joe the janitor leaning against a mop and giving me the evil eye.
“Hey,” I said. “Did I miss the bell?”
“Did you do what they say you did?” he asked.
“No.”
He examined the end of the mop for splinters. “I didn’t think so,” he finally said. “Keep your chin up.”
I laid my head back down until I heard him leave the room.
57.
After dinner that night we drove to the photography studio for our annual Christmas photo. We did not talk in the car.
Mr. Gunnarson had a giant mirror on one wall of his studio. Mom dug a brush out of her purse and handed it to me without a word. After I brushed my hair, she handed me my brown felt antlers. I put them on. Mom and Hannah wore antlers, too, along with the stoned reindeer sweatshirts. I wore a red sweater.
Dad was in his suit. He refused to wear antlers, or even a Santa hat. He held the prop, an empty box covered with red-and-green wrapping paper, while sitting in the leather armchair in front of the fake fireplace. A plastic tree poked up at the back of the shot. We all gathered around Dad: Mom to his right, Hannah to the left, me behind the chair.
“No, no, no,” Gunnarson scolded me. “Your head is too far off the ground. I can’t get it in the frame. Let’s try something else.”
Four “something else”s later, we found the right combination: Mom perched lightly on the arm of the chair, Hannah hanging over the back, and me down on one knee to the left, like someone had just been injured on a soccer field. Dad held the empty present in his lap.
“Very festive,” Gunnarson said, clicking away. “Say ‘Peace.’ That’s it, big smiles. Peeeeeace.”
58.
Dad woke me up at seven o’clock Saturday morning.
“No sleeping in,” he said. “I have chores for you.”
It didn’t take too long to climb the ladder and step onto the roof. I planted my butt on the shingles and inched my way up to the peak. An ugly-looking cloud bank was building in the west. The air smelled like winter.
The mail truck was coming down the street, dodging potholes. Our neighbors on either side—we never talked to them—had aboveground pools half-filled with stagnant water. The sidewalk in front of our house was more cracked than I remembered. I shuffled my boots back and forth on a loose shingle.
I studied the Christmas lights that I was supposed to replace. Mom had tried to yank them down, but they wouldn’t budge. From up here, the problem was obvious. After Dad looped the wires over nails he had driven into the roof, he had bent the nails over, so that the lights wouldn’t blow down in a strong wind. Which is why he hadn’t taken them down himself: good idea, bad execution, difficult cleanup job. Story of his life.
And I had forgotten to bring up a pair of pliers or a claw hammer. Bad idea, no preparation, giant mess. Story of my life.
Dad came out of the house, shielded his eyes from the sun, and looked up at me. “How long will it take? I need you to help me down here.”
“I need a pair of pliers.”
“You didn’t bring them up with you? Hold on.”
It only took him a second to find them, and he was back out of the garage. He stood below me. “Catch.”
“No. Wait!”
The pliers bounced off the roof, hit the gutter, and dropped back to the ground.
“I’ll come down,” I said. “I have to go to the bathroom anyway.”
“No, no. You stay put. I’ll bring them up.” Dad stuck the pliers in his back pocket, pushed up his sleeves, and blew out a sharp blast of air as he put his hand on a rung above his head.
“Want me to hold it?” I asked.
“I’m fine.” He climbed five feet off the ground, pulled out the pliers, and held them up. “If you lean down, you should be able to reach them.”
I stretched on my stomach, toes dug in for grip, but he was too far away. “You have to come up a couple more rungs at least, Dad. Or I can come down the ladder.”
He frowned, but he put the pliers back in his pocket and climbed, one shaky step after the next.
“Lean your weight towards the house,” I suggested.
He didn’t say anything, but he leaned and climbed three more rungs, until his head popped over the edge of the roof. There was sweat coating his upper lip, and he was breathing like he just ran the 400.
“Didn’t think I could do it, did you?” He held on to the ladder with a death grip, reached into his pocket in slow motion, then handed the pliers to me.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t mention it.” He glanced around. “I forgot how nice the view is from up here. A man should climb on his roof more often.”
“Yeah.”
“Indeed.” He nodded like we were having an everyday conversation, just two regular guys twenty feet in the air. “It is a nice view.”
He glanced down, then leaned closer to the ladder.
“Do you need something else?” I asked.
He cleared his throat. “Your mother…I’m supposed to talk to you. She thinks I was too hard on you the other night. After the police left.”
I scratched at a spot of rust on the pliers.
“I was upset,” he said. “We were all upset.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“About Bethany,” he started. “You could have taken advantage of that situation.”
“Totally.”
“Why didn’t you?”
I grabbed a nail with the pliers and twisted it, freeing the strand of Christmas lights. “It would have been wrong.”
The wind blew through the naked branches of the maple trees, tangled in the strands of Dad’s comb-over, and teased them up straight. He smelled a little, the old-guy smell of dirty socks and underwear sweat. There were black smudges under his eyes.
“I’m proud of you for that, Tyler,” he said. “I just wish you could have applied that thinking to the entire incident.”
I resisted the temptation to shove the ladder away from the house and send him plunging to the ground.
He eyed the Christmas lights. “How long will this take?”
“Twenty minutes, tops, but I need a pit stop first. I drank a lot of juice at breakfast.”
He didn’t move.
“Uh, Dad? You have to go down first,” I said, “because you’re on the ladder.”
“Right.”
I waited. “Is something wrong?” I asked.
He peered up at me, then at the ground again, and then at his hands, which were gripping the ladder so tightly, the tendons and veins looked like they had been carved out of a block of granite.
“I am experiencing vertigo.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m dizzy.”
“Oh, man. okay. Well, I’ll yell for Mom. She can hold the bottom of the ladder for you.”
His eyes widened. “Don’t you dare. I’ll be fine.”
It took me fifteen minutes to coax him down the ladder, one rung at a time:”…move your foot, Dad—no, a little to the left, feel it? Right there. Now move your hand. You have to let go of the ladder first. Right, that’s good. No, don’t look down. The ground is still there. Okay, next step…”
Once down, he stood on the lawn and watched me descend. Sweat trickled off his scalp. When I was on the ground, he said, “Thank you, son.”
Officer Adams interviewed me the second time on Sunday. The interview was only “informational,” he said. “A friendly discussion.” We sat in our living room with my parents on the couch looking like they had forgotten their lines.
He asked the same questions.
I gave him the same answers.
I was beginning to think I needed a lawyer, but Dad said no, it would be an admission of guilt. He would handle it.
Mom gave Dad a look like she was ready to rip out his throat with her teeth.
59.
I stayed in Yoda’s car during homeroom on Monday and signed in ten minutes after Calc began. The call for me to go to Mr. Hughes’s office came half an hour into gym class, second period. Pissed me off. We were doing a personal-fitness unit. Most of the girls were yoga-ing and gossiping. Some guys were jogging laps. I had a corner all to myself where I alternated between sets of push-ups, sit-ups, and squats. The back of my shirt was dark with sweat, and the spot on my abs was growing.
I asked if I had time to change my clothes. The teacher said no.
The secretary waved me in with a nod of her head. She and I were going to be on a first-name basis soon.
I opened the door. Hughes looked up from his desk without smiling. So did my parents, sitting directly across from him in the nice chairs.
“Hi,” I said.
“Have a seat,” Mr. Hughes said. “I was just telling your parents how grateful I am that they took the time to come here personally and discuss the situation.”
“Of course,” Dad said.
Mom had a yellow pad on her lap and a pen in her right hand.
I sat on the hard plastic chair under the clock.
Hughes started talking and blew a lot of smoke out of his butt, but what it boiled down to was this: he didn’t know what to do with me.
“But he’s not suspended,” Dad pointed out.
“No,” Hughes admitted.
“And you let him go to class this morning,” Mom said. “Obviously.”
“That was something of an oversight,” Hughes said. “Tyler was supposed to report to the office when he arrived.”
“So I’m in trouble for going to class?” I asked.
Hughes straightened his blotter. “I didn’t say that. This is an unusual circumstance—one that, frankly, our handbook doesn’t cover.”
Mom leaned forward. “I must admit, I’m a little confused.”
Dad’s eyes rolled up to heaven just a fraction.
“Has Tyler broken any rules this semester?” she continued.
“No,” Hughes admitted.
“And Officer Adams has explained that he has not been arrested.”
“But the police are talking to him,” Hughes said.
“The police are talking to a lot of kids,” Dad said. “Why is Tyler the only one being singled out?”
“Because Tyler is the one we’re worried about. I’m told there were several incidents last week, not just what happened on Friday. We want to protect him from students who may not yet understand the concept of innocent until proven guilty.”
Mom nodded. She was scribbling on the pad as fast as I had ever seen anyone write.
“How will he keep up with his classes if you stuff him in isolation?” Dad asked. “This semester is critical to his chances of getting into the right school.”
“His teachers have agreed to tutor him in their free periods and provide him with class notes, whatever he needs. We don’t anticipate this will go on too long. A few days, maybe a week.”
Mom raised her hand a little. “And why is it he can’t stay at home, exactly?”
Hughes relaxed, now that it was clear that my parents weren’t going to attack him. “Keeping him at home would have to be considered a suspension. We don’t have the grounds for that. This compromise will work best for everyone concerned.”
Dad glanced at the clock. Mom finished writing the last words that Hughes said, then raised her finger, said, “Hold on a sec,” and drew a business card out of her purse. She stood slightly and passed it across the desk to Hughes. He read it with a frown.
“That’s the name of my lawyer,” Mom explained.
“You called Pete Satterfield?” Dad asked. “I told you we could handle this.”
Mom smiled. “I didn’t call Pete. That’s from Hewson, Heiligman, and Keehn. My lawyers.”
“Since when do you have a lawyer?”
Mom ignored the question. “I spoke to Jill Hewson this morning. She said to tell you that if you isolate Tyler and single him out for doing absolutely nothing, then you should notify the school district’s attorney that we’ll be filing suit for unlawfully denying him his education.”
Dad threw his hands in the air. “For Christ’s sake, Linda, they’re trying to help him. Do you want him beat up every day?”
“Do we want our kids in a school that would allow that to happen?” she responded. She pointed at Hughes. “If you do this, you’re admitting that you don’t have control over your own students. How is that going to look in the newspaper?”
“Now, wait just a minute—” Hughes’s face was turning red.
“You’re way off base,” Dad said.
“Excuse me,” I tried.
Mom wasn’t smiling anymore. “My son has done nothing wrong.”
“Hello?” I demanded. “Do I get an opinion here?”
They all turned to me.
“Of course you do,” Mom said. Mr. Hughes nodded.
“I don’t mind it,” I said. “If they want to put me in a study hall, or just take me out of class until this all dies down, I’m cool with it.”
“Are you sure?” Mom asked.
“Yeah.”
“This wouldn’t be an excuse for you to slack off,” Dad warned.
“Oh, God,” Mom sighed.
“No, it’s okay. Mr. Hughes is right.” (Yeah, I sa
id that.) “It’s not worth the aggravation. And this is hard enough on Bethany. Maybe it’ll be easier on her if I’m not around.”
Dad smiled slightly at Mom.
“I don’t want to cause trouble,” I finished.
“Well, then,” Hughes said.
“Are you sure?” Mom repeated. “Are you one hundred percent sure this is what you want?”
I shifted in my chair, pulling my sweat-sticky legs off the plastic. Dad glanced at the clock again.
“Yeah,” I said.
Mom and Dad left in separate cars. Hughes gave me time to change back into my clothes and get my stuff out of my locker.
My new room was just down the hall from the administration office. It had a table and three chairs, an empty bookshelf, a trash can, and a door with a window in it. They used it for tutoring or as a holding cell, depending on the situation.
I opened my English book to finish the Faustus play. It was written in 1588.
Not marching in the fields of Thrasymene,
Where Mars did mate the warlike Carthagens;
Nor sporting in the dalliance of love,
In courts of kings where state is overturn’d;
Oh, yeah, that made sense.
The bell rang and the halls filled, then emptied. A few curious faces stared in at me. I could hear the whispers through the walls. They were saying that I was part of a network of Internet perverts.
They were saying that I had a trench coat.
They were saying that I was heavily medicated.
They were saying that the cops were looking at a couple of other guys, too.
But they were still saying I was a piece of garbage.
60.
Tuesday I sat on my chair at my table in my cell. Day two of limbo. In school, but not in school. Suspended, but not really. Every time the bell rang, kids passing in the hall would slap and kick my door. Every time it happened, I jumped.