Terminal Island Page 10

  On the other hand, they were not letting up, and there was no sign of any teacher or authority figure coming to intervene. Henry kept hoping they would tire and lose interest, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen soon enough to save him from a bad beating.

  It was getting more severe every second as they wore down his defenses. Sooner or later these creeps might seriously hurt him, whether they really meant to or not.

  Henry had no choice—he had to end this.

  He broke and ran.

  From behind came a collective scream of glee. But rather than mocking catcalls, there rose a sound of trampling feet as the girls eagerly pursued, obviously not content to let him get away, with or without his dignity.

  This wasn’t quite what Henry had expected. It was incredible to him that they would carry things so far as to actually give chase. Still, he was glad to be running, to be clear of that mob for a minute so he could think.

  The cooling sweat stung his scratches—they were vicious, man. He could taste blood from a split lip. Enough of that; he wasn’t about to let them lay hands on him again. Henry knew he could run fast when he had to, and he had a pretty good lead. They would give up long before he would.

  The question was, where to run? He could already see that they were trying to drive him toward the end of the playground, where there was no escape except the gate in the fence. If he fled out there, he would be leaving school grounds without permission—a heinous infraction that all the students had been warned against.

  The only other thing to do would be to enter the building. This also was frowned upon during playground time, but Henry could see no other way out. At least if he went to the office he could explain what was going on—they would have to understand. And no way would those brats follow him in there.

  That decided it. Knowing it was now or never, Henry made a dash for the open glass doors, bounding over the threshold as if crossing home plate.

  Safe!

  Slowing to a trot in the cool dimness of the hall, hoping to catch his breath, he turned around and got an unpleasant surprise:

  The girls were still coming, stampeding right in after him. Their ponytailed silhouettes blocked the daylight, their squeaking rubber soles filling the echo-chamber of the corridor.

  You can’t come in here! he thought wildly. But there was no time to think, only to run, and fast.

  The problem was he didn’t know where he was going. He had only been to the office one time, when his mother had brought him to register, and they had entered from the opposite side of the building.

  Hoping to lose the girls or find a teacher, a janitor, someone, anyone, Henry barreled past rows of open classroom doors. The whole place was deserted for recess, the teachers all probably smoking in some lounge somewhere.

  It was a curious old building, with a maze of randomly-branching hallways and stairs, and for a brief moment Henry managed to ditch the girls, using the opportunity to steal a fast gulp from the drinking fountain. But just as he wet his lips, there they were again, swarming up a stairwell and keening, “We found him! He’s here! He’s up here!”

  With the crazy girls right on his heels, he turned a corner and there was the office.

  Henry barged in, slamming headlong into a wooden counter. Recovering his wits, he gratefully realized there were adults in there, frozen like startled deer at the sight of him. One of them was the Vice Principal, Mr. Van Zand.

  “They’re after me, they’re after me!” Henry gasped.

  “Ouch. Are you all right?” asked the Vice Principal.

  “They’re after me!”

  The Vice Principal stuck his face out the door. Apparently there was nothing to see; he popped back in with a quizzical expression.

  The office was orderly and bright and smelled of freshly-brewed coffee. Henry never wanted to leave. Behind one desk there was a grandmotherly older lady in pearls and a flower-print dress—the school secretary. She stood up and came around the counter.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Van Zand,” she said. Then, to Henry: “Out.”

  “But there’s a bunch of kids chasing me!”

  “Out. Now.”

  Without another glance at Henry, the Vice Principal crossed behind the counter and went into the Principal’s office, shutting the door. The sign on the door read PRINCIPAL PAUL THADDEUS. Henry had never met the Principal, but just before the door closed he could see a man sitting in there—a red-haired, red-faced man in a plaid jacket. The man’s glaring eyes were fixed on his, causing Henry’s heart to plummet like an anchor.

  It was the Butcher!

  The school secretary advanced on Henry with her fat wrinkly hands, her long, pink-painted nails crabbed as if to grasp him and tear him to pieces. “Now you’ve done it,” she said. Her lipsticked mouth was the color of raw liver. Meat, he thought wildly. Raw meat.

  Henry turned and ran.

  He scanned the hall in both directions. There was no sign of anyone giving chase. All he wanted to do at this point was get away. Approaching the exit to the playground he slowed, staying close to the wall, moving as silently as possible. His thoughts were a hollow roar of sound.

  Peering out the glass doors, Henry was relieved to see that all the girls were outside again, mingling and talking in the sun as if nothing weird had just happened. Everything looked very normal out there.

  He had a wild surge of hope: Maybe it was all over. Maybe the girls were through with him and he could just finish out the day in peace.

  Clutching this hope like a threadbare teddy bear, Henry pushed open the doors and set foot outside.

  The girls had been waiting for this. At once he knew the game was still on. They saw him immediately, but didn’t move, following him with their eyes as he walked onto the playground.

  Henry could see why they were being careful: Now there was a playground monitor—Miss Graves, sitting at a picnic table on the sidelines.

  Without overtly running, Henry made a beeline for her, pretending to take no notice of the girls. As he walked, they leisurely drew together in his path, all of them moving in the most casual manner. Lisa planted herself in his way, a head taller and golden-haired in the sun. She was smiling in wait.

  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

  Henry’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.