Slob

  You see what I mean about him?

  My thighs were beginning to burn from holding the awkward position. I didn’t move, though. I heard the sound of clanking in the equipment room, as though Mr. Wooly was rummaging around for something. How bad could it be? I reasoned. He can’t really do anything to physically hurt me. He’d get in too much trouble for that. And there were witnesses.

  But then I remembered that Mr. Wooly was a few fries short of a Happy Meal. That was when my heart started pounding so hard I thought it might stop.

  2

  The thing that he brought out of the equipment closet had buckles and straps and some nasty-looking hardware. I couldn’t tell what it was exactly, though, because I was staring at it between my knees, upside-down. Also, it was all jumbled up in Mr. Wooly’s ape hands and parts of it were dragging on the floor.

  Not good, I thought.

  Someone said a word that I won’t repeat, except to say that it had an “Oh” before it and an exclamation point after it. Mr. Wooly didn’t even bother to yell at the kid for saying it. In fact, he smiled a little bit as if to say, “You got that right, pal.”

  “Keep still, Mr. Birnbaum. This will only take a minute,” Wooly said. Suddenly, I was tangled in a web of heavy straps and Mr. Wooly was clacking buckles and clicking hooks. When it stopped there were a few seconds of dead silence. Then the snickering began.

  “Woof,” someone said.

  It took me a moment to realize what had happened. I saw Mr. Wooly step in front of me and then back up. He was holding a long strap. He gave it a quick yank, and I felt a tug from the straps that were secured around my torso. He had put me in a halter, like a dog, and he was holding my leash.

  “Okay, Birnbaum. Since you can’t manage to do a simple somersault on your own, I’ll have to help you do one.”

  For the next ten minutes I was yanked across the mat and forced to flop around in the most degrading way. I caught fleeting glimpses of my classmates’ faces as I tumbled around. Most of them were pink with hysteria. And of course there were the comments. They didn’t even bother to lower their voices, knowing instinctively that Mr. Wooly wouldn’t care.

  “Time to cut back on the puppy chow, Owen!”

  “That’s the fattest poodle I’ve ever seen!”

  And so on.

  It was Justin Esposito who bothered me the most. His hand was pressed against his mouth and his eyes were wide. It was exactly like one of those faces you see in the horror movies, where the Boy Scout wakes up to see a man with no nose and ten-inch iron claws tearing a hole in his pup tent. I was that vision of horror for Justin Esposito. That’s how bad it all looked.

  My friend Nima told me about these Tibetan monks who built a stone wall on a cliff by levitating huge rocks eight hundred feet into the air. During moments like these I sort of lift out of my body, rising up out of the situation, like a levitating rock. I’m there but I’m not there. It’s my way of dealing. But Justin’s face was holding me down, making me feel the full awfulness of what was happening.

  “There now.” Mr. Wooly dropped the leash suddenly. “I think that helped you get the hang of things.”

  He had a funny look on his face, as though he had suddenly become a little scared about what he’d just done.

  “Unbuckle him, Mr. Esposito!” Mr. Wooly ordered angrily, like the harness had been Justin’s idea.

  Justin rushed over and fumbled with the hooks while I sat back on my haunches, my face burning, my eyes focused on an indent on the mat where my head had been. It was slowly filling out, erasing what had just happened. When Justin undid the final buckle, he jumped up and away from me. The other kids were looking at me kind of funny too. They seemed nervous, like Mr. Wooly. I think they expected me to snap. It was a strange sensation. For a moment I felt really powerful. I felt large, but not in a fat way.

  The spotlight was on me. I smiled. First at all the kids and then at Mr. Wooly. They didn’t know what to do. They all stared at their sneakers in shame, including Mr. Wooly.

  That’s not true. That’s not what I did. That’s what Nima would have done. Here’s what I did:

  1. Turned red as shrimp cocktail sauce

  2. Lost control of all the muscles in my face

  3. Cried

  4. No, sobbed

  5. No, bawled like a three-year-old in Wal-Mart

  Mr. Wooly looked scared and also disgusted. Most of the other kids just looked disgusted. I had the opportunity to snap, to have a volcanic eruption of pure outrage, but I had botched it. Mr. Wooly told me to go to the locker room and collect myself. As I passed Andre, he slapped the back of my neck. I think it was meant to be reassuring, but then again he may just have taken the opportunity to slap me.

  By the time lunch rolled around, I had collected myself, though my eyes were still swollen. I looked around the lunchroom for Izzy Shank, the kid I always sit with. He wasn’t at our usual table. It didn’t take a genius to see why. Mason Ragg was sitting there, all by himself, of course, since no one else would dare sit near him. More about Mason Ragg later.

  When I sat down by Izzy, he looked at me carefully, noting the swollen eyes, I’m sure. He didn’t ask me about it, though. That’s one reason I like Izzy. He doesn’t make a big deal about things. He’s the least dramatic person I know.

  I opened my lunch sack and pulled out my shredded-tofu sandwich (there’s not enough mayo in New York City to make that taste better than it sounds) and my bottle of pomegranate green tea. That was when I noticed that the recycled shower curtain eco-container was empty. It was even sealed back up, and those recycled containers are tricky to seal. They don’t snap closed nice and easy like Tupperware. You really have to work at it.

  Anyway, the Oreos were gone. I stared and stared into the empty, sealed container and shook the sad black crumbs that were lying on the bottom. I couldn’t believe it.

  “I can’t believe it!” I said.

  “What?” Izzy asked. Izzy’s voice is as deep as a forty-year-old man’s talking into a bullhorn, by the way. I think it’s because of some glandular condition. I forgot what it’s called, but basically he’s huge. Six foot five, and still growing.

  “Someone stole my Oreos!” I shoved the empty container at him and he took it in his hands, which happen to be the size of Jeremy’s whole face. He gazed into the cloudy-looking container like he was staring into a crystal ball. In a way he was. My future lay in that empty container.

  “They sealed the container back up,” he said.

  “I know!” I was momentarily pleased that Izzy had noticed too. That little fact had struck me as totally perverse. Who is so cool and collected while stealing that they take the time to seal a difficult-to-seal eco-container back up?

  I looked around the lunchroom. Everyone looked suspicious but no one was eating any Oreos as far as I could see. I watched carefully all through lunch. Izzy did too. Nothing.

  “Check teeth!” I hissed at him.

  We paced through the lunchroom, trying to look inconspicuous as we searched for someone with black stuff caught between their teeth. Honestly, I don’t know what we would have done if we found someone who did. It would be hard to prove that it came from Oreos rather than a Ho Ho or something like that. Besides which, neither Izzy nor I are what you would call confrontational. Yes, Izzy is the biggest person in the school, but he’s more of a pacifist than I am. And I’m only a pacifist because I’m terrified of getting hurt. My sister, Jeremy, on the other hand, is always happy to pummel someone, especially if it’s on my behalf. But Jeremy’s grade has lunch before ours, so she wasn’t around.

  My eyes fell on Mason Ragg, who was sitting at our usual table. He was placed in my class a week and half ago. He’d been transferred from one of the other public schools. The word around school was that he’d been transferred because he was “unmanageable.” That was another thing about the Martha Doxie School—they prided themselves in enrolling kids who didn’t fit in at mainstream schools, including bona fide p
sychopaths, like Mason Ragg. People said that he carried a switchblade knife in his sock. They said in his last school, he had tried to strangle one of the girls in his class with her Molly Wildchild necklace (you’ve probably seen the commercials for the junk, but if you haven’t, it’s this lavender-haired cartoon character that girls just go insane over. Not Jeremy, though, of course). The girl’s older brother threw an M-80 firecracker at Mason’s face in retaliation. That was the story that went around school anyway. It was certainly possible. One whole side of his face was badly scarred. The skin was all bumpy and puckered, twisting up the right side of his lips so that he looked like he was always sneering. He resembled an evil character out of a comic book, no kidding, and he always looked like he was trying to catch someone staring at him.

  Now he had.

  You know why?

  Because sitting on the table in front of him, stacked in a tidy little column, were three Oreo cookies.

  “What are you staring at?” he asked in a quiet voice.

  “Cool scar,” I said. I really did. I do stuff like that when I’m nervous and can’t think of what to say.

  I can’t repeat his response, though. Use your imagination, you won’t be wrong.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  That’s correct, you heard me. I said sorry to the kid who stole my moment of bliss.

  You might have too. Did I mention that Mason Ragg’s right eye is a spooky milky blue while his left one is brown?

  “Too bad about the cookies, man,” Izzy said after the period buzzer sounded and we had to go our separate ways. “But no use tangling with Ragg. He has a buck knife strapped to his arm.”

  “I heard it was a switchblade in his sock,” I said.

  “Does it matter? I mean, really?”

  “No.”

  “Hey. Keep the faith.” Izzy could say things like that, which might sound sort of cool if a non-giant said them. But when he said them, it sounded like one of those deep, garbled voices you hear on the subway speaker system. You know, “Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway. Watch the closing doors. Keep the faith.”

  “Thanks, Izzy.”

  He squeezed my shoulder. It hurt. I didn’t say “Ow,” though, because he was only trying to be nice, and he couldn’t help being insanely strong.

  3

  After school I waited for Jeremy and we walked home together, like we always do. I was in a lousy mood, but she was in a very good one. Suspiciously good. She strode along beside me with a small, secretive smile.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing. Just a gwab thing, that’s all.”

  “By the way, I think there’s a girl in my class who’s a gwab,” I said.

  “Who? Oh, Rachel somebody or other, you mean?” Jeremy said.

  “Rachel Lowry.”

  “Nah. She looks like a gwab, but she’s not. Anyway, all the gwabs are in sixth grade not seventh. Hey, do people ever get expelled from our school?”

  “Why?” I looked at her. She was still smiling a small, secretive smile. I didn’t like it. “What did you do? Is it something about gwab?”

  It’s not “gwab,” actually, but GWAB. Girls Who Are Boys. Jeremy joined the club two weeks ago. There are seven other girls in the club and they have all changed their names to boys’ names. They only wear boys’ clothes and cut their hair in boy haircuts. Jeremy didn’t cut her hair. I don’t know how she got away with it, since GWAB is pretty strict. Jeremy is stubborn, though. Her hair is bright red, straight as a ruler, and reaches the last vertebra in her spine. Jeremy used to hate it when she was younger because someone in her class told her that redheads were freaks of nature. But our mother told her that redheads were genetically more courageous than other people and that she should always wear her hair long, like a warrior’s badge of honor. I don’t think there is any biological accuracy to that statement, by the way. In any case, Jeremy never cut her hair, except for a trim at the barbershop every now and then.

  “We all signed our boy names on our math test,” she said.

  “But how will Mr. Shackly know who you are?”

  “He won’t. He’ll have to ask. Then we will stand up in class and publicly declare that we are to be called by our boy names from now on.”

  “He won’t do it, you know,” I said. Mr. Shackly is one of the tougher teachers at our school.

  “He’ll have to,” Jeremy said simply. “We won’t answer him if he calls us by our girl names.”

  I groaned. There was going to be trouble. The GWAB members were pretty intense. I’ve seen them around, looking very determined. They recruited Jeremy after they saw her get into a fight with a boy in her class. They said she had the right stuff, and she agreed to join. I don’t think she did it because she actually wants to be a boy. I think she did it because she was just lonely. Things have been a little topsyturvy for us these past two years—new school, new apartment. New life. I think Jeremy was just glad to have some friends again. Plus, she loves a good fight and so do most of the GWAB members. It was a perfect fit, really.

  “Hey! Flapjack!”

  Jeremy and I both turned around to see Andre Bertoni jogging up to us. We occasionally meet him as we’re walking to or from school since he lives right across the street from us, in this fancy apartment building called Fuji Towers.

  More about Fuji Towers later.

  Andre was wearing his big-screen smile. I heard Jeremy swallow hard. Really, I heard it. She has a huge crush on Andre. She’s a sensible kid in every other way.

  “How you doing, man?” Andre said when he caught up to us. “Hey, Caitlin.”

  “She’s not Caitlin anymore,” I told him. “She’s changed her name to Jeremy.”

  “But that’s a boy’s name,” he said, his smile now looking confused.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  He looked over at Jeremy, and her face became roughly the same color as her hair.

  “You know what I would do if I were you, Flapjack?” he said, looking away from Jeremy.

  Kill yourself? I thought. But I said. “I have no idea, Andre.”

  “I’d sue,” he said confidently.

  “Sue who?” I asked.

  “The school,” Andre said. “Because of what Mr. Wooly did to you.”

  “What did he do?” Jeremy’s ears pricked up at this. She was always looking out for unfair things that people had done to other people, especially if it involved me.

  “Nothing, nothing,” I said.

  “What did he do to Owen?” she addressed this to Andre, completely forgetting herself and yanking Andre’s jacket sleeve. Andre looked a bit surprised himself. He smoothed down the material of his jacket (it was probably some fancy European jacket that his father had brought back from some super-suave country).

  “He put him in a dog harness and forced him to roll around on the floor,” Andre said.

  “It was nothing,” I insisted.

  Jeremy’s mouth gawped open. For a moment I thought she was about to bellow. She’s a little bit like a superhero with no superhero talents. She despises bullies and loves underdogs, much like the classic superhero. But she’s thin as a coat hanger and on the shortish side, and all she can do is punch reasonably hard with her bony knuckles. No jet-propelled flying, no invisibility skills.

  “I’ll pulverize him,” she said in this quiet voice. It was impressive. Even Andre gave her his full attention for about seven seconds before he turned back to me.

  “Tell your mother to call my dad. He might even be willing to take the case himself.” Then he jogged on, leaving me with the dismal, fleeting image of Mom sitting in Mr. Bertoni’s cushy leather office chair (it had to be leather) discussing how I had been trussed up in a dog harness.

  “How could Wooly treat you like that!” Jeremy blurted. “You!”

  She has this idea about me. She thinks I am a better person than I actually am. Nicer, funnier, smarter. I mean, I am smart, but she thinks I’m a genius, which I am not. Not quite. I missed genius rank
by one point.

  What she didn’t know was that people were always treating me like Mr. Wooly had, or thereabouts. I mean, I do think she understood I wasn’t exactly popular, but sixth graders and seventh graders live in totally different universes. She didn’t know that I had become an official bully magnet, the punch line of every joke. That people made fart noises when I walked by and murmured things like “Fatty Fatty Ding Dong.” She didn’t know and I wanted to keep it that way.

  “Just forget it,” I said. “It was no big deal.”

  But the anger was leaving her face and being replaced by a look of despair. “Oh, Owen. What a world.”

  They were gut-squeezing words. It made me think of other stuff besides Mr. Wooly and stolen Oreo cookies. I glanced at Jeremy. She was frowning down at the pavement. I worried that she might be thinking of the very same stuff.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to make my voice sound jolly. “How about we go to the demo site on Ninety-third Street?”

  “All right, I guess.” She didn’t sound enthusiastic, but once we arrived at the tall sheets of plywood that fenced off the demolition area, she started to perk up a little. The week before, Jeremy and I had found a loose board on one corner. Security around these places is shockingly slack. Every so often I consider writing the mayor of New York and letting him know what a shoddy job the demo crews are doing and that little kids could really get hurt, but that probably wouldn’t be in our best interest.

  We slipped inside. The site was a mess of rubble, of course. The tenement had a blazing fire a few weeks before and had burned down partway. The demolition crew knocked the rest of it down a little while after. There were some real gems scattered around. To date, we had scavenged the motors from a washing machine, a heap of bicycle chains, an old laptop that worked some of the time, half of a pair of handcuffs (no keys), and a really beautiful slab of marble.

  One time, we ran into a young guy who was also hunting there. He looked totally normal. Nice button-down shirt and jeans. He said he liked to furnish his apartment with recycled items. I thought that was a very polite way of saying he was a garbage picker, just like us. He was a pretty friendly guy, and he did give us some advice about new demo sites and a warning about metal scavengers. He said that they we should watch out for them. They were really protective of their sites, because they made a living out of collecting stuff like copper pipes, brass valves, and aluminum heating coils and selling it to scrap metal dealers. He said that they weren’t beyond using violence if they caught you on their sites. That scared the heck out of me, but it made Jeremy even more eager to go scavenging. She liked anything that might pose bodily danger.