He lived in hell for the entire school year, but the nature of that hell, and the laws that governed that hell, kept shifting from month to month. He had assumed it would largely be a matter of punches, of being punched and then punching back as hard as he could, but big battles in the open air were off the agenda, and although he was often punched during the first weeks of school, he never had a chance to punch back, for the punches he received were delivered without warning — a boy rushing up to him out of nowhere, belting him in the arm or the back or the shoulder, and then running away before Ferguson could respond. Punches that hurt, one-blow sneak attacks when no one was looking, always a different boy, nine different boys from the eleven other boys in his class, as if they had all conferred with one another and worked out their strategy in advance, and once Ferguson had received those nine punches from the nine different boys, the punches stopped. After that it was the cold shoulder, those same nine boys refusing to talk to him, pretending not to hear Ferguson when he opened his mouth and said something, looking at him with blank, indifferent faces, acting as if he were invisible, a drop of nothingness dissolving into the empty air. Then came the period of pushing him to the ground, the old trick of one boy getting down on his hands and knees behind him while another boy pushed from the front, a quick shove to make him lose his balance, and then Ferguson would find himself tumbling over the crouching boy’s back, and more than once his head hit the ground first, and not only was there the dishonor of being caught with his guard down once again, there was the pain. So much fun, so much laughter at his expense, and the boys were so cunning and efficient that Mr. Blasi never seemed to notice a thing. The defaced drawings, the scribbled-over math assignments, the missing lunch bags, the garbage in his cubby, the cut-off jacket sleeve, the snow in his galoshes, the dog turd in his desk. Winter was the time of pranks, the bitter season of indoor nastiness and ever-deepening despair, and then the ice thawed a couple of weeks after his twelfth birthday, and a new round of punches began.
If not for the girls, Ferguson surely would have crumbled to pieces, but none of the twelve girls in the class turned against him, and on top of that there were the two boys who refused to take part in the savagery, the fat and slightly moronic Anthony DeLucca, variously known as Chubs, Blubs, and Squish, who had always looked up to Ferguson and had often been victimized by Krolik and company in the past, and the new boy, Howard Small, a quiet, intelligent kid who had moved to West Orange from Manhattan over the summer and was still feeling his way as a neophyte in the suburban hinterlands. In effect, the majority of the students were in Ferguson’s camp, and because he wasn’t alone, at least not altogether alone, he managed to tough it out by adhering to his three central principles: never let them see you cry, never lash back in frustration or anger, and never breathe a word about it to anyone in authority, especially not his parents. It was a brutal and demoralizing business, of course, with countless tears shed into his pillow at night, ferocious, ever more elaborate dreams of revenge, prolonged descents into the rocky chasms of melancholia, a grotesque mental fugue in which he saw himself jumping off the top of the Empire State Building, silent harangues against the injustice of what was happening to him, accompanied by a fitful, frantic drumbeat of self-contempt, the secret conviction that he deserved to be punished because he had brought this horror upon himself. But that was in private. In public he forced himself to be hard, to take the punches without emitting a single yelp of pain, ignoring them in the way you ignored ants on the ground or the weather in China, walking away from each new humiliation as if he were the victor in some cosmic struggle between good and evil, reining in any expression of sorrow or defeat because he knew the girls were watching, and the more bravely he stood up to his attackers, the more the girls would be on his side.
It was all so complicated. They were twelve years old now, or on the cusp of turning twelve, and some of the boys and girls were beginning to pair off, the old divide between the sexes had narrowed to a point where male and female stood on almost common ground, suddenly there was talk about boyfriends and girlfriends, about going steady, nearly every weekend there were parties with dancing and spin-the-bottle games, and the same boys who just a year ago had tormented girls by pulling their hair and pinching their arms were now in favor of kissing them. Still the number one boy, Timmerman had forged a romantic alliance with the number one girl, Susie Krauss, and the two of them reigned over the class as a kind of royal couple, Mr. and Miss Popularity 1959. It helped Ferguson that he and Susie had been friends since kindergarten and that she was the leader of the anti-bully forces. When she and Timmerman became an item at the end of March, the atmosphere began to change somewhat, and before long Ferguson noticed that he was being attacked less often and that fewer boys were attacking him. Nothing was ever said. Ferguson suspected that Susie had given her new beau an ultimatum — stop torturing Archie or I’m gone — and because Timmerman was more interested in courting Susie than in hating Ferguson, he had backed off. He still treated Ferguson with contempt, but he stopped using his fists on him and no longer vandalized his belongings, and once Timmerman withdrew from the Gang of Nine, several other boys dropped out as well, since Timmerman was their leader and they followed him in all things, so that for the last two and a half months of school there were only four tormentors left, Krolik and his band of imbeciles, and while it was hardly pleasant to be given the treatment by those four, it was far better than being worked over by nine. Susie wouldn’t tell him whether she had spoken to Timmerman or not (protocol demanded that she remain silent on the subject out of loyalty to her love), but Ferguson was almost certain she had, and so grateful was he to Susie Krauss and her noble fighter’s heart that he began to long for the day when she would eventually dump Timmerman and the field would open for him to try his luck with her. He thought about it continually throughout the early weeks of spring, deciding that it would probably be best to begin by asking her to spend a Saturday afternoon with him at his father’s tennis center, where he could show her around and demonstrate how knowledgeable he was about the inner workings of the place, which would no doubt impress her and put her in the right mood for a kiss, or perhaps several kisses, and if not a kiss, then at least holding hands. Given the volatility of preteen romances in that corner of the New Jersey suburbs, where the average alliance lasted just two or three weeks and two months of couplehood was the equivalent of a ten-year marriage, it was not unreasonable for Ferguson to hope that his opportunity would come before school let out for the summer.