time I passed her station on my rounds, she was dozing.
Fine by me. No small talk.
The first night at Blue Ridge was like the first night in my new house. Getting used to the sounds and the silence. I welcomed the solitude and the guarantee I wouldn’t have to interact with anyone. I roamed the halls like a ghost, conscious of my feet on the linoleum and the sound of my breath.
Don’t get stuck on the mountain.
Made yourself at home, did you?
I’d bounced around the foster care system my whole life. The concept of home or family didn’t have any meaning for me. Grandpa Jack once said, “Make the best out of what you got.”
So that’s what I did.
After my night shifts, I had a full day off to recover before going back on the day shift. I spent it sleeping and messing around on my guitar. Grandpa Jack had gotten me a second-hand acoustic for my eleventh birthday. Doris wouldn’t allow “noise” in the house, so I took it to the yard and plucked out songs I’d heard on the radio. I couldn’t read music but turned out I had a good ear.
In my house in Boones Mill, I set it on my lap to try a Mumford and Sons song I’d heard the other day. A couple of lines from “Sweet Child O’ Mine” came out instead. I slammed my hand on the strings.
“Fucking stop. Leave her alone.”
I read a little, trying to stay awake and get back on a normal schedule. By four in the afternoon, I was stretched out on the little couch in my living room, watching Die Hard on a local channel. The movie was interrupted by commercials every three minutes and the swearing was dubbed over.
Bruce Willis, barefoot and bloody, stormed into a room. “Yippie kai yay, mother-flipper.”
My eyes drooped. My thoughts broke apart. Sleep dragged me away from the noise of the movie…
The chain-link fence at the rear yard of Webster High School made a distinctive noise when a body was shoved against it. A scraping, metal-against-metal song. Most days I remembered to come around the front of the school, but I was running late today. The gap in the fence was close to the little house I shared with Doris. I squeezed through.
Toby Carmichael was waiting.
He gave me a rough shove and the fence gave a rattling twang as I bounced off it, the hard wire diamonds stabbing my shoulder blades.
“Why don’t you go to the special-ed school with all the other losers?” Toby said. “Everyone knows you’re r-r-retarded.”
The three friends he brought along cheered and laughed, egging him on.
Toby shoved me again. “Say something, Wee-Wee-Whelan.”
Don’t say anything, I told myself. Don’t give him ammo.
I was a freshman with a slight, undernourished body. Toby was a husky junior, fed on a steady diet of buffalo wings and bacon cheeseburgers at Mill’s Place, where all the kids hung out after school.
All the kids except me.
His shove bounced me against the fence and it sang its song, like a metallic cricket rubbing its legs together. I fucking hated that sound.
“I said, say something.”
Toby lunged at me again and I dodged, my hands balled into fists. “F-F-Fuck off.”
All four guys stopped, stared, and then erupted into laughter, mimicking me. “Fuh-Fuh-Fuck off.”
Toby gripped me by the collar of my second-hand windbreaker jacket. “If I see you looking at Tina Halloran one more time, I’m going to break your stupid fuh-fuh-fucking face.”
I struggled to remember who Tina Halloran was. She must’ve been the pretty girl who smiled at me while I was putting my stuff away in my locker yesterday. A short moment of sun in a perpetually gray sky.
“Hi, Jim,” she’d said, wagging the tips of her fingers at me in a little wave.
I’d never talked to her. Of course not. I never spoke, not in class and certainly not in a crowded hallway full of students. Never to pretty girls with friendly smiles. Someone must’ve put her up to it. Maybe Toby…
“She doesn’t want anything to do with a retard like you,” he bellowed, bringing me back to the present. “You got me?”
Rage burned hot in me. Rage at the unfairness, the taunting, the goddamn stutter that caused me so much misery. My hands balled into fists and I drove one into Toby’s stomach.
He gasped, sucking in air, but didn’t let go of my jacket. His eyes widened with murderous anger. “You are so dead.”
Hit me, I thought. Fucking hit me. Beat the stutter