“Because you’re the only kid in this entire junior high who can write like this. You have a talent with language, Mr. Calhoune, but you’re letting that talent work against you.”
“Maybe someone from the high school wrote it,” I offered. “You know, dropped it off right before school. Like maybe they’re trying to get some kid here in trouble.”
Mautz smiled. “Some kid here is in trouble. Every article in this piece of trash is about someone at this school.” He sat forward in his plush, high-backed chair—the one Sarah Byrnes called his throne—regarding me with the utterest contempt. “Now I’m going to say this once…”
Here comes, I thought. For my sake, Sarah Byrnes, this better work.
“Did you create this newspaper?”
I took a deep breath, my throat tightening over it. “I stand on the Fifth Amendment,” I squeaked, “on the grounds that my answer may tend to incriminate me.”
For the briefest of moments Mautz sat stunned.
I held my breath, wide-eyed.
“You what?” he said in a near whisper, his eyes slits.
“I stand on…”
“I HEARD YOU!”
I sank back as he quickly gathered what there was of his wits. “So you’re going to lie.”
“I’m not lying. I’m standing on the Fifth Amendment. That’s this thing where…”
“I know what the Fifth Amendment is, Mr. Calhoune. It’s used in a court of law, not in a principal’s office.”
“Sarah Byrnes’s report on the Bill of Rights said it was a basic…”
“So Sarah Byrnes is in on this, too?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“And you didn’t say she wasn’t. Why don’t you stand on the Fifth Amendment?”
By now I was sweating so hard I began to slide across the seat. I said, “Okay. We stand on the Fifth Amendment.”
“On the grounds that you may tend to incriminate yourselves.”
I nodded. “Uh-huh.”
Mautz stood. He was a full six feet five inches, weighing more than 235 pounds, carrying not one ounce of fat. His striped black-and-gray necktie spilled over his massive chest like a roller coaster track. His nearly black hair and dark beard served only to amplify the intensity of those unforgiving blue eyes. Mr. Mautz was one very scary dude. “Let me make something clear, Mr. Perry Mason,” he said. “I’m willing to let you stand on the Fifth Amendment. One time. And I’m willing to let this Crispy Pork Rinds thing go. One time. But there will be no publications at this school without official approval, which means my approval. And if I see this again, I promise you I will make your life a living hell. Do you understand me?”
I can only nod.
“Very well. You may go.”
I stood, turning to do just that, my pants plastered to the backs of my legs like wet cellophane and sweat pouring from my brow like rain.
“Eric,” Mautz said as I reached the door.
“Huh?”
“You’re perspiring. I take that as a sign you know you’ve made a big mistake.”
In the outer office, Ms. Barker glanced up and smiled, searching for signs of the battle, finding them in my colorless face and soaked shirt. “Oh, Eric,” she said, crinkling her nose. “Not so good, huh?”
“Not so good.”
She reached into her center desk drawer, withdrawing a copy of Crispy Pork Rinds. “It’s a little rough for a finished product,” she whispered, smiling, “but I’ve seen worse. Why Crispy Pork Rinds?”
I looked to make sure Mautz’s door remained closed. “Don’t you get it? Sarah Byrnes is crispy, I’m a porker, and rinds are the part that’s left—that no one pays attention to. We print the news the regular newspaper misses.”
“Very clever,” she said. “May I assume the first copy was the last?”
I looked toward the closed door, raised my eyebrows, and shrugged.
“So, how’d it go? You take the Fifth?” Sarah Byrnes asked in the hallway outside the math room.
I slapped a flat palm to my chest in a hopeless gesture to quiet the jackhammer beating of my heart and breathed deep. “Yeah. I took the Fifth.”
“And?”
“It must work better in court than here,” I said. “And now he knows you’re in on it because my brain went dead and I told him where I learned about the Fifth. I’m sorry, Sarah Byrnes. It just slipped out.”
“I don’t care if he knows I’m in on it,” she said. “In fact, I hope he knows. I think we should get extra credit. This book I read says some of the best journalism in the whole 1960s came from underground newspapers.”
“Well, Mautz says he’s going to forget it this time, but if it comes out again he’s going to make my life a living hell.”
“Like this is heaven?” Sarah Byrnes said.
“Yeah.” I looked down at my body, the target of every fat joke since Eve walked up behind Adam and grabbed his love handles. Like Sarah Byrnes, I wondered what Old Man Mautz could do to make things worse. “He could make me come to school without a shirt,” I said out loud. “Or make me wear a bra, like the kids did in sixth grade.”
Sarah Byrnes laughed. “He’d get fired. Your mom could sue the school for all the money it’s worth, which can’t be much. I say we get busy with Crispy Pork Rinds Two.”
CHAPTER 2
“Okay, Mobe,” Ms. Lemry is saying, “you dragged us off in this impossible direction, you tell us whether the world is a good place or a bad place.” It’s the first day of second semester. Thirteen of us have signed up for Lemry’s baby, an elective class called Contemporary American Thought. To be enrolled, you must be a second semester senior willing to examine your beliefs. Through a magnifying glass. It’s a Lemry class, so you’d best be serious.
“Considering the alternative,” I say in answer to her query, “it’s a good place.” That gets a titter.
“All you’re saying,” she says back, “is that the known is better than the unknown. There’s a strong case to be made for that belief being a core factor in keeping humans on their knees.” She looks around the room, seeing mild interest. “I call this class Contemporary American Thought. That’s so it will look good on your transcript. Its subtitle is Accountability, because you will be held accountable for everything you say. If Mr. Calhoune tells me the world is a good place to live given the alternative, he needs to define ‘good’ and he needs to convince us he knows the alternative. In other words, he’s required to be careful when he opens his mouth. We need to put value back into words and ideas.”
She scans the room again. Interest is picking up. I believe the prospect of talking about what we think in this class is exciting to most of us. Particularly when we’re going to do it with one of the most exquisite human beings alive, for my money. Lemry is something else to look at, for one thing. She’s petite and about as sexy as you can get without being a movie star or a belly dancer, with shoulder-length blond hair, dark brown eyes that look right through you, and big dangly earrings that push her face out at you. If you have impure thoughts about her, however, you better keep them to yourself, because she’ll flat cut you up if you get disrespectful. Lemry is the women’s rights poster girl. I mean poster person.
“So let’s take a trial run,” she says. “The subject’s a little broad, but go with it, Mobe. Is the world a good place or a bad place?”
I picture Sarah Byrnes up in Sacred Heart, as physically ugly as a person gets, staring into an empty pit. No one home. “It’s a bad place,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because you can’t win,” I say. “Not for long.”
“Back yourself up, Mobe.”
I look around the room, into expectant eyes. They want me to go first; see if I’m going to get eaten up. Send the pig to slaughter. It’s a little scary because, though I have good friends here, I also have mortal enemies, and you don’t want your enemies to know what you think. Or feel.
“I went to see Sarah Byrnes last night,” I say.
“And?”
“It was bad.”
“Make your point,” Lemry says gently. “You’re telling us why the world is a bad place to live.”
“Well, I was thinking. Sarah Byrnes is up there just staring into space. She doesn’t talk or respond to anything. When I looked at her close, when I saw her without her razor-sharp words and her fire—all the stuff she cuts us up with—she looked gone. And I thought, I don’t blame you. I’d go away, too, because the world doesn’t provide any place safe for her. Every day when she gets up, she knows she has to bring her scarred-up face to school, knowing what everyone thinks and won’t say. There’s no place to hide and it never lets up. I’d call that a bad place to live.” I look over to my good friend Ellerby for support, but he stares at his desk.
Lemry is quiet a second. “I’m not real comfortable talking about someone who isn’t here,” she says finally, “but I think this is worth pursuing. What does anyone else think?”
Kathy Gould sits forward. “That only makes the world a bad place for Sarah Byrnes.”
“Yeah,” I start, “but there are thousands of other people…”
“That still only makes it a bad place for them. Not all of us. The question is whether it’s a good or bad place, period. If it’s bad, it’s bad for everybody. Or at least a majority.” Kathy is a tall redhead, smarter than hell, with the sense of humor of a brussels sprout. It’s hard for me to imagine her taking the side of the world in this one; depression has been her job—her way of life—since grade school.
I feel instant anger that I don’t completely understand, and I want to hurt her some way, but Lemry reads my mind. “Tell you what,” she says, “this is a good subject to get started with, broad as it is, but I’m really not comfortable letting it go too far without the person we’re talking about being here and giving us permission. So what I need are examples a little farther from home for the time being, okay?”
I pull back while the rest of the class drags out examples from real life, newspapers, fiction, or wherever, pitting human joy against human pain. I realize I didn’t want to talk about philosophy, I wanted to talk about Sarah Byrnes. She’s my best friend and she’s dying. We became friends when I was as fat as she is ugly, and I promised a long time ago that I would never turn away from her—told us both that my feelings for her weren’t selfish, that I didn’t like her only because we shared “terminal uglies,” as she put it.
Actually, Dale Thornton provided the reason for Crispy Pork Rinds. By eighth grade, Dale should have been in his second year of the Army, as many times as he’d been held back. The guy had a driver’s license, for Crissake. Teachers didn’t know what to do with him because every year he was just that much bigger than the other kids in class and not one bit smarter. Every spring they tried to pass him on into high school and every spring his dad lumbered into the front office to say by dang Dale was gonna stay right there in eighth until he got it right and the only way he’d finally learn was to do it over and over and over. Then Mr. Thornton would say he’d hate to sue the school, but if they passed Dale on without his necessary life skills, well then he’d sure have to look into that. I don’t know what kind of “necessary life skills” our school taught that Dale could have used in his life. The teachers all had license plates on their cars, and the parking lot was already paved.
And I’ll tell you what. I’d seen Dale try to do his homework, and if old man Thornton thought he did anything over and over and over, he had another think coming, which, by the looks of him, he probably wouldn’t use. Dale was so big that year he couldn’t even get a good fight. We just rolled over like poodles in the path of a doberman when we saw him coming. I’m telling you, Dale Thornton was pulling down a darn decent living from second-degree lunch money extortion alone, not to mention his protection racket.
But then he ran into Sarah Byrnes. When you live with a dad who has been rejected by the producers of the Halloween movies because he’s too mean for the role, and your face has been burned beyond recognition for most of your memory, and you’ve been reminded every stinking day of your life with funny looks and nasty names, you don’t get too excited when some two-bit would-be dropout sticks his fist in your face and wants your stuff. Sarah Byrnes has always used pretty rough language, so I won’t say exactly what she said the first time Dale confronted her, but I will say she said it twice: once about Dale and once about his mother.
Now, probably half the people in our town knew Dale’s mother ran off with his uncle, leaving Dale with his dad, who isn’t exactly Bill Cosby, and Dale himself had said things about her that were five times worse than what Sarah Byrnes said. But he took immense offense, and he punched Sarah Byrnes square in the nose, or what’s left of it, because Sarah Byrnes’s nose is mostly scar tissue.
Sarah Byrnes’s blond pigtails stood straight out on contact, and she hit the ground so hard the air rushed out of her lungs like a blown popcorn bag, but she sprang back like a plastic Rocky Balboa punching bag, swinging to kill.
“Just give me your money, Scarface,” Dale said, “and I’ll leave you alone.”
She stuck her chin right in his face and said, “Take it,” and he punched her again.
I don’t think Sarah Byrnes got in one good lick. Dale was twice her size if he was a pound, and born to fight. But Sarah Byrnes kept getting up and getting up and pretty soon the bruising and swelling beneath the scars got to looking so bad it even scared Dale, so he said it one more time: “Just gimme your money. Gimme the money and I’ll quit.”
“When I’m dead you’ll get my money,” she said, her teeth clenched so tight I thought I heard them begin to crumble. Then she turned to me. “Eric Calhoune, if he kills me, you better make sure he doesn’t get nothin’ of mine,” and I said okay, but if he really killed her I was pretty sure I’d be hard to find.
Dale glared at her again and dropped his fists. “You ain’t worth it,” he said. “You probably ain’t got no money anyway. I’ll just take it from your fat friend.”
Well, my hands were into my pockets about up to the elbows when I heard Sarah Byrnes’s voice. “You give him anything, I’ll kill you,” she said, and all of a sudden my choices were to get killed by Dale Thornton or get killed by Sarah Byrnes. Hanging or lethal injection. I figured just in case I only got crippled for life, I’d still need a friend to carry my stuff around, so I took my hands out of my pockets real slow like, and stood there, shaking like a jellyfish riding a jackhammer and sweating like I was going to melt.
Old Dale must have been plain worn out and frustrated from hammering on Sarah Byrnes so long with so little result, because instead of beating me into whimpering slime, he said “Forget it” and walked away—though not before I lost at least twelve pounds in nervous runoff. My knees felt so weak I dropped to my butt like a shotput right there on the ground and closed my eyes, but a shadow passed in front of them and they popped right back open. Two scarred hands grabbed my collar and yanked me to my feet, and I stood sucking air, inches from Sarah Byrnes’s pummeled face. “You fat little dork!” she said. “You were going to give that juvenile delinquent money.”
“He was going to kill me.”
She pulled me closer and sneered. “Every time you let somebody take your stuff, or let them see you hurt, you get killed.”
I already knew that, but the threat of her decking me had not completely passed. I changed the subject. “Hey, I thought we weren’t going to call each other names. You called me a fat dork.”
“You’re right,” she said, releasing my collar. “Remind me of that tomorrow, and if I’m not still so mad I want to skin you alive, I’ll say I’m sorry.”
Well, Sarah Byrnes never did say she was sorry, and I really didn’t think she would, but it was the next day, when she really wasn’t mad at me anymore, that we began plans for Crispy Pork Rinds. And on Friday of that week, right before first period, a copy appeared on the desk of every kid in eighth grade. The headline read:
* * *
/> SIXTEEN YEARS AGO IN HISTORY
Man with Brain the Size of Tic Tac Mates with Amoeba
Couple gives birth to giant adjusto; names him Dale
* * *
It didn’t equal the level of National Enquirer journalism we planned to reach with a little practice, but it was a pretty good start.
The bell rings, jarring my mind back into CAT class, where my body has been filling up space. I drop my books into my backpack, and as I pass Lemry’s desk, she stops me. “You zoned on me,” she says. “Where’d you go?”
I say, “Away from Kathy Gould.”
“Couldn’t take the heat?”
“Not today. You got a minute?”
“Just about. You want to talk about Sarah Byrnes?”
“I don’t know. Yeah. She just sits. It scares me, Coach, seeing her with everything stripped away. She looked like a beat-up old container or something. She looked dead.”
“Did you talk to anyone?”
“A counselor. She said to keep coming and act normal and talk about things we’d talk about if Sarah Byrnes were answering me.”
Lemry puts an arm on my shoulder. “That must have been hard.”
I smile. “And not just because I look like some kind of unconscious cretin holding a half-hour conversation with someone who doesn’t give out answer number one, either. Sarah Byrnes is really important to me and…I need to be important to her, too. But I’m not right now. Nothin’ is. God, back before there was swimming or you or Ellerby or anything, there was me and Sarah Byrnes.”
Lemry starts gathering her books. “You need to remember what’s going on with her right now isn’t about you. You were right, Mobe. We forget she has to get up every day and face herself. This could be her way of taking a vacation.”
“What if she never comes back?”
Lemry raises her eyebrows and grimaces. “I don’t know. I’m not a shrink.”
CHAPTER 3