“I thought college would be easier,” Miney says on Tuesday morning. She is sitting in our breakfast nook, digging into a pile of pancakes. My dad is manning the stove with his headphones on, the same pair I have, though instead of listening to music, he prefers audiobooks. He claims it allows for efficient multitasking, but it has the unintended perk of allowing Miney and my mom to talk without him hearing. I’m just beyond the door, eavesdropping. I realize I don’t actually have the power of invisibility, but I come pretty close. “Like it would just be an extension of high school. But then I got there, and I had to make all new friends. And no one seemed to like me.”
“Laur, of course people like you.” My mom leans forward and squeezes Miney’s hand. Miney is being ridiculous. Everyone likes her. That is one of life’s constants, like the chemical makeup of water.
“It’s not just that. As you know, rush was a disaster. My classes are seriously hard. And there was this guy….”
“And?” my mom asks.
“And nothing. Well, not quite nothing. I really liked him, Mom, and I thought he was interested too. And so I saw him out one night and I, like, basically threw myself at him in front of everyone and he made it superclear he wasn’t at all into me. It was beyond embarrassing. Plus I don’t really have any friends. Not real ones yet, anyway. It just feels like college is one rejection after another. Maybe I picked the wrong school. Or maybe I’m just a big loser.”
“Who are you and what have you done with my daughter? One guy doesn’t like you and you come running home?” my mom asks. “He’s obviously an idiot.”
“He’s actually supersmart, Mom. He was my physics tutor. I was the idiot.” Miney puts her head down on the table and my mother strokes her hair like she’s a small child. I think she might be crying, but I can’t tell from here.
“That’s why you’ve been moping all this time?”
“Little D, you scared the crap out of me. Stop lurking!” Miney screams when she notices me. Darn new clothes and their crinkly sounds. My khakis were much more inconspicuous.
“I wasn’t lurking. I was eavesdropping,” I say, and step into the kitchen.
“Stop it,” Miney and my mom say at the exact same time, so I have no choice but to say, “Jinx, a Coke,” though I don’t drink caffeine.
“Maybe we should talk about this later,” my mom says, and Miney nods. I wonder what my dad will say when he finds out that Miney needed a physics tutor. Since last summer, he has been putting a lot of pressure on her about college. He’s adamant that she major in something useful, like math or biology. Before she left that’s all he could talk about: how Miney needed to understand how much school was going to cost my parents, that she better finally figure out what she was good at, that she should stop wasting time putting on makeup and instead apply herself in the sciences, like I did.
“Anyone can be prom queen, but not everyone has the opportunity or the capability to learn from Nobel Prize–winning geophysicists,” he would say, and Miney would look him straight in the eye and say: “I was homecoming queen, actually, and some parents would be proud of that.” I stayed out of it, though it’s not quite true that anyone can be homecoming queen or king. I certainly can’t. Miney might not be the best person to talk to about quantum theory, but she’s a genius in her own way.
“I just want to say I love you guys and I’m so lucky to have the two bravest kids in the world, and sure you both make mistakes, but please don’t let anyone or anything ever make you feel small, okay? Either one of you,” my mom says, and stands up and kisses both me and Miney on the tops of our heads as she makes her way to the sink. My mom likes pep talks. It’s kind of her thing.
“Statistically speaking, it’s unlikely we are the two bravest kids in the whole world,” I say.
“Just say I love you too, Mom,” my mom calls over her shoulder.
“And I have no idea how one can feel small. I assume I feel exactly proportional to my size.” Miney kicks me under the breakfast table. I look up and she’s glaring at me.
“I love you too, Mom,” I say.
I pull my car into my parking space at exactly 7:57 a.m., which gives me one minute to gather my backpack and head toward the school entrance. I’m back on schedule, which I realize in the aftermath of slipping over the edge last week is even more important than usual. I need to stay focused, follow my routine, find my peace in its rhythms and repetition. My playlist is ready to go and so I slip on my headphones, as I always do when I exit the car. Which is why I don’t see them at first. The football team lined up in the parking lot. A wall of solid meat.
Could be a coincidence, I tell myself. They might not be waiting for me. But I free-ear it just in case I need all my sensory abilities.
“Drucker!” Joe Mangino says. Or is it Sammy Metz? I can’t tell them apart without my notebook. To me they both look like the hanging slabs of an unidentifiable animal you’d find in an old-school butcher shop. Cold and pasty white where the fat is. This guy is more rodentlike than porcine. “We wanted to chat with you. Say hi.”
“Hi,” I say, and then instantly regret it. A stupid reflex.
“So it’s no secret that we want to beat the shit out of you,” Meat Boy—that’s the perfect name for him, Meat Boy—says, and I find myself nodding along, because he’s right, it is no secret. Though I thought they wanted to do worse. I thought they wanted to kill me. “Don’t worry. We’re not going to do it here or right now. Just wanted to remind you. In case you had forgotten. Keep you on your toes.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” I say, and look up and spy Kit coming out of her car one row over. I wish she had been a few minutes early or late, which is something I’ve never before wished, since I like watching her walk into school each morning. Not strictly a necessity for my routine, because she’s only on time about three out of five days, but like the lunch lady remembering to wear her hairnet or when my phone switches to track two when I round the corner to my locker, it means good things.
I keep walking, but Meat Boy stops me with a bump to my shoulder. There’s a crowd now. Justin and Gabriel are here too, just behind the throng of football players, all in the middle of the parking lot.
“Hold on a second,” Meat Boy says, and the crowd moves around him to form a semicircle. I don’t know how they do it. No one says, Gather round or You stand here. It just happens organically. Like they can smell something is about to happen and want front-row seats. “You haven’t been excused.”
“Do we really have to do this?” I ask, annoyed, because it is 7:59 and I haven’t allotted for this pit stop. I will be late. I don’t like being late. I will also have to find a way to walk through this crowd, and I hate crowds. They feel like putting on a turtleneck or a shirt with a collar, both of which are barbaric inventions.
“Say it. Say: ‘May I be excused?’ ” I look up at him, confused. Why should I ask to be excused? I don’t need a hall pass to go inside the school. He is not a teacher. We are of equal authority here.
Oh. The feeling comes before the understanding. Something sneaks its way into my body, weaves its way around my intestines. I recognize this cold ache. This is what all of middle school felt like.
I want nothing more than to put on my headphones, walk inside, and get back on track. Forget this delay. Wipe this encounter away with an eraser.
And then I see Kit and her two friends, whose names I always forget and who I think of as Cinched and Hippie. They join the crowd, curious to see what’s going on.
“Hey, ’tard. Say, ‘May I be excused?’ Come on, now. You can do it.”
“Leave him alone,” Kit says, and my stomach clenches. A sharp cramp that feels like someone kicked me in the gut.
“Sweet. Sticking up for your boyfriend,” Meat Boy says, which gives me a quick frisson of pleasure. He referred to me as Kit’s boyfriend. Her boyfriend! But then I see Kit’s face, which has closed, like that day I told her she was a good driver, and now I want to kill Meat Boy. Kit looks happier with her face open.
“Get out of my way,” I say.
“Your girlfriend is a fine piece of ass, huh?” I know from Miney that calling a girl a fine piece of ass is not respectful, maybe because it falls under the subcategory of the no-talking-about-a-girl’s-weight rule? I look over to Kit, but of course I can’t read her expression. Is she telling me to fight for her? To run?
“Stop it now. This is your first warning,” I say, just like I learned from the kung fu video. I am giving my opponent a fair chance to walk away. Peaceful resolution is always preferable to fighting.
My body is humming. I could hurt them if I wanted to.
And then, suddenly, I want to.
Meat Boy is laughing. The whole line of them are laughing. At me. I flash back to seventh grade, being stuck in a locker with my hair full of toilet water and feeling the cold drops slip down my back in slimy chunks. That smell. I think about all those texts. How I’ve been treated as less than for as long as I can remember. Why is being like them the baseline?
“Last chance,” I warn, and take a step forward, hoping that they will break apart and make room for me to pass. They don’t.
Today I will veer from my routine. Break out of my comfort zone, as Miney likes to say. I will do what needs to be done. Take one for the team, as the expression goes. There will be no getting back on track, though for just a second, before it all starts, I close my eyes and picture myself in school, rounding the corner of the hallway just as Mozart hits D minor.
And then, as I hear that perfect note in my mind, I open my eyes and step forward one more time.
I drop-kick Meat Boy.
I sit in the principal’s office with a bag of ice on my face that smells like cafeteria food. Not one food in particular, but instead a sickening amalgamation of all the food that they serve in there: chicken nuggets and french fries and boiled broccoli. An undertone of meat loaf. My nose is bruised, but other than that I am fine. I can’t say the same about the football team.
“What are we going to do with you?” Principal Hoch says. The dread that had lifted with that very first kick and with that very first crack, as if that single noise and that single motion themselves had caused all the heaviness to evaporate, now resettles on my shoulders. For about seven minutes, I was a warrior. A hero. A defender of girls. Or one girl. The only girl who matters.
I was not David Drucker. Class loser.
Both of my parents are here, which means this is serious. Usually it’s just my mom who comes, who hears these What are we going to do with you? speeches. Usually they end with me promising to try harder, though I never really know what I’m promising to try harder to do.
Be normal, I think.
Be like the neurotypical, which is another way of saying “everyone else.”
Be less like me.
I no longer want to be less like me.
“I don’t think ‘we’ need to do anything,” I say, and as I speak I realize my tongue is swollen. Someone must have snuck a punch to my mouth. I don’t remember the specifics of the fight. It was all action and reaction, autopilot, no thinking. A clean, quiet brain. Later I will take the time to reenact it in my head, figure out all the sequencing. Savor it a little.
Immediately afterward, when my thoughts came rushing back, I smelled blood and heard shouting and all I wanted was to take a shower. To be free of other people’s bodily fluids.
“I was merely acting in self-defense. I even gave Meat Boy a first warning, which I thought was incredibly generous.”
“Meat Boy?” Principal Hoch asks. I shrug. I have a fifty-fifty chance of getting his name right. He’s either Joe Mangino or Sammy Metz. Not that it matters. Both got hit eventually.
“The first guy I kicked,” I say.
“We have a record of death threats,” my mother says. “On David’s cell phone. This was obviously self-defense.”
“Three of our students had to go to the hospital,” Principal Hoch says. “That sounds like more than self-defense.”
“With minor fractures,” my dad chimes in. “Minor.”
“I can’t condone this sort of violence,” Principal Hoch says, and I don’t know where to look. I hadn’t expected my dad to speak up or to defend me. He usually lets my mom do the talking. But then again, he’s the one who taught me self-defense.
“Tell me: What was my son supposed to do? The entire football team was lined up waiting for him. They’ve previously accosted him in the cafeteria. Do you need me to read you the texts?” my mom asks, and grabs my phone from my backpack.
“I don’t think that’s necess—”
“ ‘You little shithead. I’m gonna kill you,’ ” my mom reads in a flat tone. “ ‘Die, retard. Do us all a favor and die.’ ”
“She can keep going. There are plenty more,” my dad says, like my mother is reading a grocery list. Eggs, bacon, strawberries. Die, die, die. I need her to stop.
I want to slip on my headphones. I want to flap my hands. I do neither.
I try to appear as normal as I can while holding a bag of foul-smelling ice to a blue throbbing nose while I think about Kit, who smells nice and whose nose is perfect. Not too big and not too small, just right. She’s a Goldilocks of a person.
I don’t remember seeing her after that first kick. Did she like it? Me defending her?
“Please, Mrs. Drucker, we’ve discussed in the past the possibility that this school just might not be the right fit for David. That there may be somewhere else better suited to his needs.” This is the first time I’ve heard this, and the insinuation that I might be transferred hurts even more than her use of the word needs. I don’t look at Principal Hoch. I am folding in on myself, smaller and tighter and smaller and tighter still, until I disappear. I want to be something that can’t be seen at the molecular level.
I cannot transfer schools. Not now. Not after Kit.
Since I can’t put my headphones on, I force myself to imagine what they feel like. I play pretend. Feel the weight of them. The quick vacuum seal when they first envelop my ears. The rush of white noise on the “Relax, Little D” playlist that Miney made for me before she left for college. The slow filling up of my body by the neutral sounds.
“Principal Hoch, shall I start reading again? Because I think if you take a step back and look at the situation reasonably, my son is the target here. He’s not the one who has acted inappropriately. Your beloved football team ganged up on him.” My mom is practically spitting. She’s angry. I know this because she has a vein three millimeters to the left of the middle of her forehead that throbs when she’s mad. Miney taught me that trick, and it has proven a both helpful and reliable guide to my mother’s moods.
“No doubt those texts are inappropriate, and we have a zero tolerance policy to bullying at this school. But we do need to put this all in a larger context. There was provocation—”
“Are you kidding me?” My mom explodes. Her entire body is shaking, and my dad puts an arm around her to keep her from spinning right out of the room. “That notebook was private. It was stolen, for God’s sake! I don’t understand what’s going on here! It’s your job to protect my son!”
“But don’t you see? I am trying to protect him. It’s not just the football team. Obviously a lot of the kids have trouble with David. I want to keep him safe.” Principal Hoch’s voice is misleadingly calm. I want to float away on it, but I know I can’t. I need to be here. If I don’t focus, I will find myself at that school for kids with special needs, where they don’t know what to do with someone who takes a course load of five AP classes. How will I explain in my applications that I was forced to transfer mid–junior year? I will not get into college. I will never escape Mapleview. I will be the loser everyone here expects me to be. No. “Maybe he’d be better off—happier, even—in an environment where he’d make actual friends.”
“Last time we spoke, just a month ago, you said he needed to get involved in the school community,” my father interjects. “He’s joined the Academic League. And he’s doing a guitar showcase in a few weeks. He has a social skills tutor. His grades are stellar.”
For a moment I almost object, since I have no intention of doing a guitar showcase and I’m not sure if I’m still part of the decathlon, since I missed the meeting last week due to my being incapacitated and therefore unable to attend, but then I get caught on the first part of what my father said. Last time we spoke. My parents talk to Principal Hoch on a semiregular basis? Also, what social skills tutor?
“I appreciate that, I do, and there is no doubt David is doing phenomenally well when it comes to academics. That doesn’t change the fact that I now have three kids in the hospital.”
“Who put themselves there,” my mother replies. I keep my mouth shut. Use all my willpower not to say it out loud, to claim what is mine: No, I put them there.
“Kids who are socially isolated do scary things,” Principal Hoch says, and for maybe the first time in my life I understand the implication. She is suggesting I’m one of those crazy people who could end up committing a mass shooting. I hate guns.
“You misunderstand me, Principal Hoch, and the very essence of my personhood. I don’t believe in violence, unless it’s for self-defense purposes. In this case, I was provoked. I gave a first warning. I followed all the rules of fair combat. I was left no choice but to protect myself. I could have died otherwise. And, I’d like you to know, I am not socially isolated, which is one of the indicators for that sort of antisocial, sociopathic behavior. I am now friends with Kit Lowell.”
“Excuse me?”
“Kit Lowell is my friend. We sit together at lunch every day,” I say, and maybe there is a little too much pride in my voice. I don’t care. It feels as good to say this sentence out loud as it did to kick Meat Boy in the face. “If the concern is I don’t have friends, well I do. Kit. And maybe José too, though I find the fluorescent rubber bands on his braces to be a confusing choice.”
“You’re friends with Kit Lowell?” Principal Hoch asks, and even I can detect the disbelief in her voice.
“Yes, I am,” I say. “And she’s friends with me too.”