After the trial, the situation at school quickly grew untenable. His mother cupped his face with her cool hands as she dropped him off his first day back late January and told him to expect things to be rough for a little while, that he was kind of a celebrity now and that if other kids teased him it only meant that they were jealous — to ignore them, or beat the shit out of them, whatever worked best. But he was unprepared for just how different things would be. He was a celebrity. Every head turned as he walked the halls, trying in his nervousness not to slip and fall on the glassy high-polished linoleum; every head turned as he traveled the stairwells with their too-loud echoes; every head turned as he entered his classroom to take his seat. A celebrity — but not celebrated. It was whispering at first. He would turn to see who was whispering to find two or three or four heads together, eyes fixed on him. Then it was the anonymous shout. Faggot! That was a common one. Cocksucka! That was another. Or Daddy’s Dick!? Shouted in the manner of a furious drill sergeant. Between classes or in the recess yard or at the large exit doors — a clarion call among the anonymous swell of the throng, a call that would focus attention on Will, sending through those crowded around him a shiver of malicious glee.
From anonymous shouting to out-and-out jeering. This took less than a week. Once the thrill of the tease was on, it was a tenacious pack of wild dogs, its sheer relentlessness making it difficult most days to breathe. There wasn’t a moment when he wasn’t being singled out or ridiculed. In the cafeteria, he’d pass row upon row of boys with bananas protruding from open flies. Touch it! They’d gleefully scream. Even girls did this. At recess they made up terrible rhymes to punctuate their jumping and skipping and bouncing of balls. Even in class, pranks were waiting for him — great glistening wads of gum on his seat or some terrible phrase scrawled on his desk or in his textbooks slips of paper that contained terrible pictures just waiting for him to discover. He had to sit up front every day and stare directly at the teacher. Turn his head in any other direction, and there was someone waiting to mouth some terrible, frightening word.
This was the good school, the one his parents brought him to after they moved into the new apartment, the one where the kids were supposed to be kinder, more like himself. There was nobody like him here.
His first assault happened in a toilet stall. Two older boys, impossibly tall. Take it, said one, brandishing a ripe banana at crotch level. Go on, you know you want it. When Will refused, the boy yanked him by his shirt collar down to his knees while the other one tittered. Gobble gobble! He shoved the banana into Will’s face, its slime smearing his cheeks and teeth and plugging up both nostrils. Other assaults followed. After a class that was filing out teacher first, Will brought up the rear to find several boys behind him. The one at Will’s side shoulder-checked him into the open coat closet, where he was smothered with down jackets and piled upon by knees and elbows until he could no longer breathe and passed out. After that, Will kept to the thick of a crowd or near an adult, honing his avoidance instinct, but somehow, no matter how hard he tried, he’d end up cornered in a stairwell or behind a door or in a hallway’s dead end. Not only the older ones but kids his own age, kids who before January he might have named among his friends.
So he fought back. He punched and kicked and clawed and bit down hard, putting the full force of his jaw into it, until he heard that sweet cry of agony, until he tasted blood. Crazy fuck! A boy in the stairwell, threatening Will with a stubby screwdriver: Will shoved the boy down the stairs, running after him, fists clenched. A trio outside school, encircling: Will throws himself full tilt at one, wrestles and straddles the surprised boy, and with a fistful of hair drives the boy’s head into the sidewalk. There was no more Fox Mulder, no more Nintendo or Jerky Boys or comic books. Those days — only weeks in the past — were long gone now, the myths of a sweet and simple golden age. Now it was Twisted Metal and Grand Theft Auto. Games wherein he was invited to drag people out of their cars at gunpoint and barrel through crowded intersections. For fun, he lumbered through an open-air café. Patrons leaped out of the way; the vehicle bumped and lurched over the crunch of bodies. Bloody tire tracks ribboned outward in the rearview. At the edge of a park, he got out of the car and walked purposely to the most peopled section he could find and, withdrawing his pistol — its beastly heft a little slippery in his palm — and fulfilling no particular goal, open-fired on as many innocent people as he could before the police surrounded him and shot him blissfully dead.
His father’s death did nothing to abate the onslaught at school. Yet now Will welcomed the blows, encouraged them even. He had killed his father, and now he was paying the price. And yet he still hated his father. His father was as much to blame for all of this as he. So, as Will was absorbing the blows meant to atone for his father’s death, Will was also striking out with his own fists against his attackers, and it was his father’s nose, his father’s lip, his father’s teeth, Will’s knuckles crunched against — his father’s groin his knee connected with.
Will’s mother packed them up and moved them down to Virginia, enrolled him at Annandale Middle School, her own alma mater. She told him he wouldn’t have to worry, nobody would know his father’s name — down here, kids didn’t read books. They played soccer and hung out behind strip-mall convenience stores to complain about how bored they were. But within months, they found him out, and Will was forced to endure a similar isolation. Less violent this time around, more insidious. While engaged in a class discussion, the teacher uttered the phrase a father’s love, and from the back of the room someone said, “Willy knows about a father’s love.” Several students laughed. Then someone else, “Tell us what a father’s love feels like, Willy.” The teacher, not in on the joke, stood there perplexed. Or copies of his father’s book would wind up in his backpack, or in his locker. These kids didn’t read. Ha! The enemy here was unseen — nowhere and everywhere — people he thought were friends would turn on a dime in front of others to offer a cutting remark at his expense. They would provoke Will into using his fists (and elbows and teeth) to fight back and then turn things around so that Will was the one in trouble. He was a caged animal at Annandale Middle School, snarling and snapping at cruel, ceaselessly prodding fingers.
This time, when Will’s mother packed up and moved them yet again, back to New York City, she enrolled him under her maiden name. Will would be Wright now. Will Wright. He liked the ring, its double-barreledness, much better than Morel, an edible mold that flourished in dark places.
It was at this point, during his first year of high school, that Will learned the art of keeping his mouth shut. He sat at the back of the class and never — not once in four years — raised his hand. No shortage of fellow freshmen those first weeks of school, wanting to strike up friendships with Will Wright, were turned away. When kids asked Will about himself, he answered vaguely or not at all or made stuff up. He was from Virginia and would be heading back there as soon as his father returned from fighting the Taliban. He was an exchange student, originally from northern Quebec; his parents came from a long line of trappers and only spoke French. By the end of the following semester, kids stopped caring who he was or wasn’t. And Will tried to keep it that way, permanent firewall turned on.