I didn’t understand why Mrs. Maggie had left. I didn’t understand what I was watching weeks later when I saw men in strange, orange biohazard suits carry what I thought were black bags full of garbage out of her house, leaving the whole neighborhood blanketed in a faint but festering smell of decay. I still didn’t understand when they condemned the house and boarded it up.
But I understand now. I understand that I had simply gotten the warning wrong. I thought she had tried to alert me to go because my mom was home. But that was wasn’t it. I had heard what I’d been listening for, just as Mrs. Maggie had always seen what she was looking for. Had I been listening more attentively and less selfishly, had I had the capacity to recognize just how profound her confusion and loneliness really were, then maybe I would have heard the warning that she was really giving me — even though she didn’t realize that it was a warning. She never said “Mom’s home.” She had told me, with an explosion of misguided joy, what could only be meaningful to me now that I can’t do anything that would truly matter.
Those men weren’t carrying garbage in those bags. I am as certain of that as I am of what Mrs. Maggie said that night and who had really come home, regardless of what name she called him.
That night, she told me, “Tom’s home.”
Screens
At the end of the summer between kindergarten and first grade, I caught the stomach flu. The sickest I had ever been up to that point was the week in kindergarten that I had been stricken with a sore throat, but the stomach flu was an entirely different challenge. It has all of the components of the regular flu; however, with the stomach flu, you throw up into a bucket and not the toilet because you are sitting on it — the sickness gets purged from both ends. I stayed in bed for almost ten days, and just as it seemed that my body had fought the plague into submission, it was granted an extension, albeit in a different form.
One morning, just a day or two before school resumed, I woke up and began to panic, thinking for a moment that I had gone blind. My eyelids were so fused together by the dried mucus generated during the night that I couldn’t open them — I had to pry my eyelids apart with my fingers. I had pinkeye.
When I started first grade, it was with a kink in my neck, caused by more than a week of bed-rest, and two swollen, bloodshot eyes. Either of these things individually might have been manageable, but as I walked through the door and into the school, there was a noticeable quieting in my peers’ chatter as they looked at my infected eyes and awkward, hunched comportment.
Josh had been assigned to another Group, which I had known about for weeks, but eating schedules weren’t determined that far in advance. It wasn’t until my class was brought to the lunchroom that I discovered that Josh had also been assigned to a different eating period. So, due to my affliction and the absence of my tablemate, in a cafeteria bursting with two hundred kids, I still had a table all to myself.
It’s a bit poetic that it is so easy to take advantage of those who have no advantages to begin with. After the first several days of first grade, I started bringing spare food in my backpack that I would take into the bathroom to eat after lunch, since my school meals were usually confiscated by older kids who knew that I wouldn’t stand up to them since no one would stand with me.
This dynamic persisted even after my condition cleared up since no one wants to be friends with the kid who gets bullied, lest they have some of that aggression directed toward themselves. There’s an expression that says “you have to have money to make money,” and while friendship itself is surely priceless, making friends seems to operate by the same rules. The fact that I was relatively personable in class did little to counter the fact that most of my classmates recognized me as the kid who sat alone at lunch. I was unable to make friends in class because I was unable to make friends at lunch, and the opposite held true as well; this loop fed itself for weeks.
In kindergarten, most of my peers had grouped-off with several friends, rather than pairing-off with only one, like I had. This meant that in first grade it would have been difficult to insert myself into their fold, even if I hadn’t been a leper. With no friends, my ability to make any was jeopardized, and as the bullying grew more frequent, potential acquaintances grew more distant.
I came to dread going to school in the morning, to the point that there was more than one occasion where I cried when my alarm clock signaled the start of my day. My only reprieve was waiting for the school bus with Josh in the afternoon so that we could discuss our continued navigation of the tributary, but this simply wasn’t enough to make the rest of the days bearable. Finally, and unexpectedly, my situation was improved by the intervention of a kid named Alex.
Alex was in the third grade, though he was bigger than most of the other kids in any grade at my school. His greater size wasn’t just vertical — Alex was fairly overweight. His parents had attempted to hide their son’s mass by outfitting him with oversized shirts that buttoned up the front and didn’t cling to his body so easily or so tightly. However, when he sat down, the fabric would be stressed, and the openings between some of the buttons would purse, which would reveal the fat on his stomach that the baggy shirt was meant to cover. Of course, no one ever pointed this out to Alex.
Despite his intimidating size, Alex always seemed nice enough. I never saw him pick on another kid, and he didn’t seem to be self-conscious about anything — one of the benefits of not having to worry about being bullied. About five minutes into lunch, sometime during the third week of school, he walked up to my table with his tray and sat down. There were several times when it looked as if he was about to say something, but they were always false starts. He left when lunch was over, and the process began anew the next day.
I was curious as to why he had suddenly decided to sit next to me, but I was hesitant to bring it up; his company had put an immediate end to the shortage of my food supply, and I would be a fool to do anything to jeopardize this new relationship. Ignoring my curiosity, I tried to strike up a conversation with him several times, but he would only ever respond with enough effort to close whatever subject I had broached. I had never spoken with him at length, and so I was having difficulty determining whether he was distracted by something in his thoughts or if he was simply slow. He wasn’t being rude in his curt replies, but they left no room for an actual dialog to develop.
Against my better judgment, I confronted him on the third day he sat across from me silently eating his lunch. He seemed at a loss initially, not because he didn’t know the answer, but because he knew I would ask but had not yet thought of how he would respond. After fumbling and stammering for a moment, he simply blurted it out.
He had a crush on Josh’s sister, Veronica.
Veronica was in fourth grade and was probably the prettiest girl in the school. Even as a six-year-old who fully endorsed the notion that girls were disgusting, I still knew how pretty Veronica was. When she was in third grade, Josh told me, two boys had actually gotten into a physical fight because of her; it erupted out of an argument concerning the significance of the messages she had written in their yearbooks. One of the boys eventually hit the other in the forehead with the corner of one of the yearbooks, and the wound required stitches to close. While not one of those two boys, Alex, too, wanted her to like him and confessed that he knew that Josh and I were best friends.
Although he had difficulty articulating it, probably because it was an embarrassing request, I gathered that he had hoped that I would convey his ostensibly philanthropic deed to Veronica, and that she would presumably be so moved by his selflessness, that she’d take an interest in him. If I talked him up to Veronica, he would continue to sit with me for as long as I needed him to.