Terminal Island (13 page)

Henry tried ducking past her, and she slammed against him, hissing, “Don’t
touch
me!”

As if by this signal, the other girls started furtively hitting and shoving and trying to trip him up. The attack was much more covert and organized than before, a pummeling gauntlet of secret blows, but Henry kept moving as calmly as he could, refusing to show pain. And all the time they kept smiling like angels.

He almost went down once or twice, barely managing to recover before finally making it to the picnic table, bruised and shaky. The assault ceased like turning off a faucet as Miss Graves turned her attention to the group.

“Well hello,” she said. “Join the party. We were just talking a little bit about the Mad Hatter’s tea party—have any of you read
Alice in Wonderland
?”

There was a space on the bench right next to her, the only seat left, and Henry grabbed it. He was acutely aware of the girls pressing into him from behind.

With a sunny expression, Lisa said, “Why don’t you tell us about it, Miss Graves?”

As the teacher started to describe the story, Henry felt knees ramming him in the kidneys and feet stomping him under the table. Fingers were tweaking his ears and yanking the back of his hair. He blocked as best he could, but it was impossible to fend them all off, from all sides at once. He couldn’t believe what was happening.

The worst thing about it was that it must be so
obvious
that something was going on. How could Miss Graves not see it? But she was totally oblivious, rambling about the March Hare and talking cakes and a lot of other nonsense that had nothing to do with the fact that someone was being beaten to a pulp right next to her.

Still, Henry couldn’t bring himself to speak—after the way she had treated him, he had to let this situation play out, put her to the test. Find out once and for all if anyone here could be trusted. Because if they couldn’t, then all the rules went out the window. Henry would have no choice but to do something of last resort.

They were creaming him, Lisa worst of all. She played dirty, and knew exactly how to hurt him, gouging the same sore spot again and again and again. The others were learning from her as they went, refining their methods to elicit maximum agony without showing outward effects. It was like a secret torture class.

Henry writhed in place, feeling himself start to cry. Still Miss Graves did nothing. Henry was becoming impatient with her, deeply resentful. He hated her more than he hated the girls, because they were just stupid bullies, but she had a responsibility! And if she didn’t have to live up to her responsibilities, then how could anyone expect him to? It was the law of the jungle.

Henry snapped.

He abruptly stood up from the bench and turned to face Lisa. She was smirking, face to face, blithely confident of her unassailable beauty and power.

Henry slugged her.

It was not the hardest punch he could have thrown—he pulled it at the last second, losing his nerve at the thought of hitting a girl—but she was caught totally unprepared, taking the blow dead-center to her perfect Bambi nose. She reeled back, clutching her face.

Shocked silence fell over the table with the force of a thunderclap.

Henry did not wait to see what would happen next, but used the stunned moment to bolt into the clear.

“You
better
run,” someone said.

They didn’t have to tell him. Henry ran as fast as he could, exiting the gate to the street and still continuing to run, only casting a quick backward glance to see if anyone was following. No, no one had left the vicinity of the picnic table—they weren’t even looking his way.

It was a frieze Henry would vividly remember for the rest of his life: Miss Graves standing up and tenderly examining Lisa’s nose as the other kids watched with deep concern. The whole scene exuded an air of tragedy and saintly forbearance. Lisa’s Martyrdom. It was exactly what Henry would have expected.

He kept running all the way home.

Chapter Fifteen

PIG

H
enry’s mother listened with baffled sympathy as everything came out of him in a torrent; the whole ugly incident as well as his absolute refusal to go back to school, ever. When he was through, he waited for the total support and understanding he felt he was due.

“Gee, honey,” she said hesitantly, trying to be sympathetic, “I don’t think they’ll let me keep you out of school forever…”

“Gaagh!” Henry threw himself face-down on the bed and sobbed, “Did you even hear what I
said
? I can’t go back there! Ever!”

“All right, all right. Gosh.” She stroked his shuddering back. “But first things first: I’ll go right to that school and talk to them. I’d like to know what kind of place they’re running down there! Gee whiz, you’re all banged up.”

“No, don’t
talk
to them! Please! I told you what happened: They’re gonna make out like it was all my fault!”

Henry didn’t trust her. In her loneliness she was so vulnerable to any kind of authority figure, so eager to conform, so willing to be smooth-talked and manipulated and charmed—he had done it to her himself, many times. When he thought of the people in that office, Henry could easily imagine his mother eating out of their hand, being persuaded that he was exaggerating and that the school was perfectly safe. That the best thing for him to do was to “get back on the horse.”

She said now, “Well, I can’t just keep you home without telling them. It’s against the law.”

“No, Mom, please.” Henry realized he had to back off the larger demand if he didn’t want her meddling in. “Look, I didn’t mean what I said about staying out forever. I will go back, but just not right now, okay? Just let me stay home the rest of the week so things at school have a chance to settle down.” He could finagle more time later.

“The rest of the week! Gee, Henry, I don’t know…”

Annoyed by her reaction to his compromise, Henry blurted, “Jeez, it’s only two days, come on! I’ve been out longer than that before!”

“Yes, when you were sick, though.”

“Sick? Look at me—I’m a total wreck!”

Checking him over, she reluctantly agreed to let him stay out the rest of the day, and then to think about what they would do in the morning. Henry jumped at the deal, confident he could wheedle her on a case-by-case basis.

Thursday morning, he moaned and groaned about feeling ill until she let him off the hook, and Friday followed suit. Just as he had counted on, she was too preoccupied with her own problems to trouble much with his—once home, the inertia favored staying there; it was just easier.

As his mother attended to her various errands, Henry lounged around the apartment in his bathrobe, reading and re-reading comic books until they were sucked dry, then plumbing the lurid gossip magazines and paperback romances his mom loved so much—stories of bold, beautiful women struggling against overwhelming odds to find love and personal fulfillment. In the margins she had scribbled notations like
YES!!!
and
SO TRUE!!!

Henry already felt a million times better. He was not someone who craved the company of others, and was most comfortable alone with his own thoughts. His ideal entertainment was lying propped up in bed, with something good to read in one hand and something good to eat in the other. The trauma of the school already seemed far, far away.

On Friday, someone came to visit. It was the Vice Principal, Mr. Van Zand. The unassuming-looking man clumped up onto their porch in his brown suit, knocking on the sliding door and shading his eyes to peer in.

Don’t answer it!
Henry wanted to say, but his mother was already doing it, flipping the latch and peeling the door open. The man was inside before Henry even had time to jump out of bed.

“Hi, Henry,” Mr. Van Zand said amiably, coming right up to the bunk to shake Henry’s hand. “Say, I like your apartment—it’s cozy.”

“It’s small,” said Henry’s mother, “but big enough for two. I like to pretend we’re living in a little cabin in the woods.”

“By golly, that’s right; now that you mention it, it
is
kind of like a cabin, isn’t it?” He nodded slowly as if savoring the apt description, then turned back to Henry. “I just came by to see how old Henry here is doing. We’ve missed him at school. Not feeling well?”

“He’s had a touch of the flu,” she said apologetically.

“That’s too bad. Gee, he looks all right to me.” The man reached out and cupped his hand over Henry’s forehead. The palm was dry and hot. “Doesn’t feel feverish. Are you sure he’s sick? I was afraid it might have something to do with the little incident that happened on Wednesday.”

“Not really,” Henry said. “I’m just not feeling well.”

“Are you sure? Because from what I’ve heard, things kind of went a little haywire. Some of the girls feel pretty bad about it. They wanted me to tell you they’re embarrassed about what happened, and that it was really just a misunderstanding.”

“It was?” Henry asked, thinking,
I bet
.

“Well, you know, girls at this age…” The man confidentially leaned in, lowering his voice. Henry could count the individual bristles of his thin mustache. “They’re all going through
puberty
, and you know what that means.”

Henry nodded, both wary and flattered by this man-to-man stuff.

Mr. Van Zand said, “It’s a rough time of life. They’re irritable and high-strung. Anything can set them off. Especially a good-lookin’ guy like you.”

“Come on.”

“No, really! They feel unattractive and awkward and mixed-up, they don’t know how to express all these strange new feelings they’re having. It’s gotta be very difficult, and us guys don’t make it any easier for them: We expect them to act like fairy princesses all the time and get offended if they don’t. You know, the line between attraction and repulsion is very thin—it doesn’t take much to cross over. All it takes is for a cute guy to look at them the wrong way, and
bam!
—their whole self-esteem collapses and it’s World War Three.”

“Jeez,” Henry said.

“That’s what I tried to tell him,” Henry’s mom explained to the man. “But kids think everything is the end of the world.”

“
Mom,
” Henry protested. To the Vice Principal, he asked, “Am I in trouble for hitting Lisa?”

“Not at all. She understands it was something that happened in the heat of the moment.”

“I didn’t want to hurt her. I held back my punch.”

“Nobody’s blaming you. It’s all over.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s fine—just a little pop in the nose, that’s all. She was more surprised than anything.” Chucking Henry in the shoulder, the man joshed, “I wouldn’t want to see what would happen if you weren’t holding back. That’s a heck of a right hook you got there.”

“Nah,” Henry said shyly.

“Oh yeah—you’re one tough hombre. I don’t think anybody’s gonna be messing with
you
.” The two adults laughed. “So, what do you say? Are we gonna see you on Monday morning?”

“Uh…” Henry squirmed.

“Come on, get back on the horse,” the man said. “You’ll see, it’ll be like nothing ever happened. A fresh start.”

Henry looked at his mother. She looked back, eyebrows raised with hopeful anticipation, leaving the decision to him.

“All right,” he said.

That night, Henry dreamed he was back at school. The girls were after him, and he was running down the dark hallway looking for a place to hide. The corridor was much bigger and darker than it should have been, with rotten carpeting on the floor instead of tile. He spotted an open door and ducked inside, finding himself not in a classroom but in a glass-bottom boat. It was dim inside, like a grotto, with watery blue light coming from the big window to the sea. Henry looked down at the dark kelp forest below, its long fronds swaying in the depths. It was hypnotizing.

Suddenly a great cloud of red billowed down through the water, filled with pink and white bits of flesh. Huge black rays swooped in to suck up the chum. The bloody plume continued to grow, turning the sea from blue to red and filling the cabin of the boat with the same rich color. Henry fled, running upstairs to the open deck. There was no escape; the very sky was stained red, and in that gruesome light he saw that people were falling from the end of the pier into a big black funnel on the boat’s stern—there were thousands of them lined up all the way down the pier around the waterfront to the Casino. The Butcher was in the boat’s cockpit, wearing a fancy captain’s hat with gold trim. Every few seconds he pulsed the engine, sucking people through the propeller and clearing the chute for more. The sound of it was the most horrible thing Henry had ever heard.

There was nowhere to run, nowhere for him to jump except into that sea of blood—Henry struggled to scream and could not. The Butcher leaned down and hoisted Henry into the cockpit, putting the captain’s hat on his head. Pointing to a big black button, he said,
C’mon, Skipper. Why don’t you give it a try?

The weekend passed too quickly, and as Sunday evening came on Henry was confronted by the dual realization that a) he was expected to return to school in the morning, and b) he could never in a million years do so. He just couldn’t—it was a dead certainty. Nothing in the world could make him go back there.

Working up to the sickening knowledge that he had to break this news to his mother, he barely tasted his dinner—and she had cooked one of his favorite dishes: lamb stew with cabbage and potatoes. He had to rush to the toilet soon after to throw it up.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he gasped as she stood over him, watching with concern.

“Oh no—that’s all right, baby. The food didn’t agree with you, that’s all.”

“No, it’s not the food.” Henry looked up at her, his face leached of color, droplets of toilet water in his forelock. “I want to get out of here.”

“What?”

“I want to leave. I want to go back to the mainland.”

“Oh, honey, why? Is it because of the school?”

“It’s everything. I don’t like it here. You said you don’t either—let’s just leave.”

He had hoped she would jump at the chance, or at least go along with it, but she seemed to be dragging her feet: “Well, maybe at the end of the month, if this job doesn’t come through…”