The hidden lives of Ushers (chapter 2)

Danny Lynne:

Detention sucked.  I think that was the point of detention, just to drive you totally bat shit insane.  I knew that I was crucified as soon as I got home.  Tommy was probably all worried about me; there would be nobody to get him off the bus.  And if there was, god help us both.

It was beyond awkward in that stupid room.  I had crap to do, I couldn't be sitting around looking at the walls.  But I was, and I didn't have much of a choice.  We were pretty much unsupervised, and I guess that that's how it started.  Messed up, stupid, unsupervised kids usually always got into some kind of trouble. 

It started out innocent enough.  Mrs. Kirchner had this stupid, dumb taxidermy beaver on one of her shelves, and so I made a game of flicking spitballs at it and seeing if they stuck.  Soon Caleb joined in, and it became a contest of who could make the most stick.  Caleb was a cool guy.  He was sort of quiet, and everybody knew about his brother, so nobody had much to say to him.  But he was cool once a conversation started up. 

We started talking about this stupid movie from history class, "the patriot".  It was ok, a little too much talking and not enough blood.  And then we started talking about the 9th grade US History teacher, Mr. Hosara.  We made a few jokes about the size of his massive ass, and a few more about his accent, which didn't match up to any nation that we knew of.  And then the jokes sort of turned into bad mouthing. 

It didn't take long before the topic of hate turned to Mrs. Kirchner.
"I can't believe that bitch just out of nowhere started handing out bullshit homework" Rachelle joined in. 
"I'm not doing it" Mackenzie took up the invitation to join too.

We all started going on and on in a hate filled whirlwind of
"to hell with the assignment!".  All of us except for Isaac.  I really didn't like him at all, he scarred the shit out of me.  I could just imagine him coming in with a handgun and splattering everybody's brains, or slitting somebody's throat in the locker room, or setting off a bomb or something crazy like that.  Especially since everybody knew that in the middle of seventh grade he gunned down an armed drug dealer three towns over, drunk out of his mind with a nineteen year old.  Normal people just didn't do stuff like that.

The other thing about him that I didn't like was the makeup.  He wore more eye makeup than some of the girls in our grade, and laid on his mascara thicker than Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork orange.  And there was something in his eyes, something that made me plain out not trust him.  He was just a creep.  He kept eyeballing Rachelle, like he liked her or something, but in a truly freak way, like some sort of crazy rapist. 

And then out of nowhere, that creep picked the book up off his desk and hurled it across the room, over our heads, and hit the beaver.  So I guess that if it was anybody's fault, it was Isaac's.  We all looked at him for a second, like we couldn't believe that he'd chucked a hardcover copy of Oedipus Rex at a stuffed animal.  And he just looked at us all wide-eyed like we were gonna jump up and kill him.  He sunk back into his seat and fixed his eyes on his desk, mouthing what looked like the word "sorry".

The force of the book had knocked the beaver from the shelf, and so we all just looked over at it, like we had suddenly gotten a single collective thought that ran through our heads at the same time.  Steal it.

"we should chuck it off a bridge" Caleb finally spoke up.  The rest of us just nodded.
"who's gonna take it?" Mackenzie asked "I mean, if only one person touches it, nobody else will get in trouble."

I looked back at Isaac, who seamed pretty oblivious to the whole thing, like he was off in his own world.  And a little twinge of hate made me point back to him.
"Isaac can take it, and then on Saturday, we'll all meet by Frog Bridge and toss it into the creek"
"Sounds like a plan" Isaac finally spoke.  Even his voice was creepy, about an octave too high for his age, but raspy.  There was something uneasy in everything he did, from the slightly off way that he walked to the way that he bent at the knees to get the stupid thing from the floor.  He was so impossibly easy to hate.  It was too simple to despise him.

He zipped the beaver away in his freakishly large backpack.  Something caught my eye as he bent over to zip the backpack shut, a few vein-like, stringy blue lines that obviously made some pattern, but not any familiar geometric shape or letter.  I only caught a quick glance, but it threw me off balance.  Like maybe he was some sort of mutant freak. 

But I had my own problems to worry about.  I could imagine my little brother coming home to an empty house with absolutely no explanation for why I wasn't there to get him off the bus.  I wasn't even sure if he'd safely made it off the bus.  And that made me feel sick.  I could imagine him at the bus station afraid and alone.  Or worse, on his way to Mexico to spend the rest of his life picking beans in the hot sun against his will.  I practically stood up and ran out of the room at that thought.  That's what mother always tolled us, that if we left her sight we'd be dragged into a van and be on our way to Mexico before we could even scream. 

And back in grade five when there actually was an abduction, she had a field day, telling stories about how she saw the little boy in her dreams picking beans and being savagely beaten by men with clubs, and screaming out for water but he couldn't have any.  And she went on and on for the full two days that the kid was missing.  And then they found his body.

I never really knew the kid, but my friend Josh did.  He was in josh's third grade class, and the two of them had had a few play dates and gone to the park with another kid named Rocky a few times, but that was my closest connection to the dead kid, Mike Donau.  And even after they found the body, my mother still insisted that he'd died in the hot Mexican sun picking beans, and that his kidnappers brought him all the way back just to dump the body.  But after the towers fell, she didn't have anything else to say about the boy who died picking beans in the fields of Mexico.  And so it sort of went away.

I felt my stomach tighten up all of a sudden, like somebody was standing over me, about to hit me.  But I sort of shrugged it off; it was just a bad feeling.  I looked over at Isaac again.  I even hated his name, it just sounded wrong in my head.  I don't know why I was suddenly obsessing over my hate for him.  And it wasn't even hate, just annoyance.  His presence pissed me off in ways that I couldn't even begin to understand.  He was like a cell phone on a mountaintop, useless and disconnected from the rest of the world.  And when you finally got the slightest response, it was like there was a hundred miles of pure chaotic static between him and the rest of the world.  Looking hi in the eyes, I could practically hear the "tick-tick-hiss" of cut wires still being pumped full of electricity.  It just made me want to hit him. 

I sort of fell back at the thought.  Hitting him would probably be pretty fun, he looked easy to hit.  He didn't look like he'd fight back.  If I wanted to, I was pretty sure that I could have him halfway dead before anybody could run for help.  But I knew that, as much fun as it would be to beat his face bloody, I'd feel bad afterward.  I shook the idea off.  If I hit him, or stepped out of line, I'd get marked as a freak.  I'd be no better than him.  And I couldn't have that happen, I couldn't have people talking about me. 

Plus, any violence that I did to him would find it's way back to me once the school called mother.  I tried to direct my attention to another person in the room.  But nobody caught my attention in the way he did.  He was just so... I don't know.  Just so easy to focus all of my anger on.  Worse than anything I just wanted to smash his freak scull in.  I guess that makes me a freak too.  But we were all freaks, just some were better at hiding it.  I guess that's life.

I sat there and worried and dwelled for the next 40 minutes.  I was so beyond screwed, a dead man walking.  Or sitting, I guess.  I looked over at Caleb and thought of some way to maybe start up a conversation, but my brain was all dried up.  All I could do was look over at Isaac, feeling the hate pumping through me, still hearing that same "tick-tick-hiss" as always. 

I opened my notebook and started on the essay.
Organization is defined by Webster's dictionary as...
I scrawled it out with my pen, I didn't have a dictionary on me, and was too damned lazy to get up and get one. 
Organization is an important aspect of a successful life...
I scrawled it out again.  It wasn't my voice making those words; it was the dull sounding British guy from the movie we'd watched in science class about beach erosion. 

The others were all scribbling out words too, like the room just completely sucked the words out of our head.  I started on a new essay.
Organization is a useless skill, as when we come of working age, everything will be done by computers and E-mail, so the machine will organize things for you.  So if you think that I'm gonna sit in this room and hand write you a pointless essay that does nothing to enrich my learning, you're out of your mind.  Furthermore, I did not neglect the homework because I was unorganized, but because knowing the answer to two essay questions from a short story in a ninth grade textbook will not make me a better person, or better prepare me for the real world, so damn you to hell. Die in a hole.

But I scrawled that out too.  If I turned that in, I'd get in trouble, and they'd call my house.  But I regretted scribbling it out.  I started to write it down again, then looked at the words on the paper.  It wasn't worth it.  And so I started off from my second idea, and let the dull British guy in my head dictate to me what to scribble down, feeling a little bit sick as I did.  They were training us like dogs.  Jump at the bell, do your work, take the right notes, believe what they tolled you to believe.  It was sickening.  But everybody bought it, and so I guess that I had to too. 

I just wanted to rebel.  Adults owned the whole world, and there was no getting away from them.  It drove me crazy to have to sit back and take crap from everybody and never be able to do anything about it.  I scribbled out the words, then re-wrote them. 

Organization is an important aspect of a successful life.  If one is not organized, he or she can not keep track of work, costing both time and, in some cases, money...

And so I wrote down that damn stupid essay, just like everybody else in the room.  The teacher strolled back in as I was writing the last sentence.  She sort of looked right through me and back at Isaac.  And a stupid sort of satisfaction grew in my gut as she towered over him, demanded to see what he's spent the last hour doing.  And he looked her right in the eye and just shrugged.
"Nothing" and there was defiance in his eyes that I was beyond jealous of.  The way he spoke to her like he was totally unafraid of any consequences.  And the most amazing part was that he wasn't even trying. 
"That essay is due by the end of the period Mr. Dehker, and if you don't finish it, you'll be spending tomorrow in the In School Support room"
"I'll try" he sounded so indifferent, so unafraid.  I knew that if somebody waved an ISS in my face, I would have all but killed to do that they wanted me to do. 
"Mr. Dehker, it's September and you're already on thin ice.  That's not a good place to be for a boy with a criminal record."
"I'm aware of that" he was even looking past her shoulder, like he was trying to piss her off by not looking at her.  She glared at him, then turned away.  And all the time I was just praying that she'd hit him good and hard across the mouth to teach him some respect.  A good hard hand across the mouth had done me good, I never mouthed off.  In fact, a few good hard hands across the mouth and up the side of my head kept me neatly and nicely in line.  He looked back at her in that stupid, detached way that he always did and pulled out his notebook. 

She ignored me, which almost made me a little bit pissed off.  I'd done good and written her essay and used nice big words and double-checked the spelling and grammar and Isaac got all of her attention.  It was just plain out unfair.  And that made me hate him ten times more.  I thought again about hitting him, about teaching him some damn respect, about beating him back into reality, back into humanity.  But I didn't, because I knew that if I did, people would talk bad about me.  They'd think bad things.  And I didn't want that.  She corrected a misspelled word on Caleb's paper and walked back out of the room.  And as soon as she did, Isaac put down his pen and started looking at Rachelle again. 

I started to doodle on the sides of my paper, making little flames and block letters in the margin.  Isaac had a good three inches on me, but I thought to myself almost obsessively that I could kick his jailbird ass if I wanted to.  I could pretty much kill him if I wanted to.  But I didn't want to.  Not that I didn't think it would be cool to smash his face in and know that I had the power to make him bleed.  I just didn't want to risk my own safety half killing a kid who'd shot a guy in the stomach and torched a car with the guy's girlfriend in it.  A guy he didn't even know.  It scarred me to think of what he'd do to somebody who pissed him off. 

Sitting in the room all of a sudden felt like sitting in the same room as Charles Manson.  And suddenly I wasn't so sure that I could beat his scull in.  A paranoia rose up in me, and I wondered if he could hear my thoughts.  It was a stupid fear, but if aliens could abduct hicks, why couldn't somebody read my mind.  And in a stupid way, it made sense. 

I went back to my doodles, drawing a ringing alarm clock that looked more like a head floating in a puddle.  Everybody in the room was dead quiet, and tension started sinking into my skin like a bug, crawling around and making me itch. 

My thoughts strayed from Isaac to Tommy.  He was probably scarred and cold on the front porch on the house, wondering if we'd left him for dead.  Mother had threatened to do that a few times, threatened to pick up and leave us behind.  When Tommy was just a baby she'd always run around yelling
"Danny I swear to god if I ever hear you say that word again, I'll take the money and the baby and leave you all alone to rot.  You think anybody wants you're sorry stupid ass but me?  You think anybody else will put up with your crap?  No, no way in hell.  They'll leave you to starve to death and spit on you're dead body, that's what they'll do if I leave you here." 

But once Tommy turned three, the threat was
"If either one of you thinks that you can trash my house I'll take everything and leave you to trash it all by yourself.  And do you know what they'll do?  They'll put you up in a military school, any you'll never see each other again.  They wont even try foster care because nobody will ever love either of you, no damn respect.  Danny I swear to god that if you don't come over here and take you're beating you'll be in a boot camp scrubbing a toilette with your tooth brush" and then she'd start piling anything that she could get a hold of into a suite case until I finally sucked it up and went over to take my beating for whatever sin I'd committed.  And I'd take it damn happily, anything to avoid boot camp. 

I started to pick at a scab on my arm.  The scaly white edge peeled off easy, it was the yellowish part that I really had to pry off of the skin, and then once that was off, the red part slid right off.  I took the edge of my essay and pressed it up against the cut, watching the mixture of blood and scab oil come through the back of my paper.  There was my rebellion.

My thoughts started to calm down, moving away from worry and hate and toward entertaining myself for the last 15 minutes.  She walked back in to collect the papers.  She moved down the rows, ripping things out of people's hands and jumbling them up in a neat little pile.  She started on about Mackenzie's handwriting and Caleb's spelling and my doodles in the margins, and then came to Isaac.  He handed in his paper, and as he did, I lost the small spark of respect that I had left for him.  The defiance in his eyes and tone hadn't lived up to defiance in his actions. He was all talk.  And I guess that that pissed me off.  I was sort of looking forward to seeing him reprimanded or humiliated or something else unpleasant. 

So maybe I was sick, but we were all sick in our own way.  Some of us were just good at hiding it.  She sort of looked at him funny.  I wanted beyond words just to see him get hit.  I don't know why, but the hate was bubbling up inside of me like lava in a volcano.  He'd never done anything bad to me, and yet I hated him more than any adult that I'd ever met.  He was just so damn creepy, so untrustworthy.  Maybe it was fear and not hate.  But looking back on it, I feel sort of bad for thinking all of those things about him.