Only Child(50)

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, Mommy is…She thinks that if things had been…different for Charles, for the…shooter, Charlie’s son, then maybe he wouldn’t have done what he did.”

“Different how?” I asked.

“Um, it’s complicated, Zach,” Daddy said.

I looked at Daddy and waited so he would say more about it.

“OK, so the shooter, Charles, was sick. He had…behavioral…problems. You know?” Daddy said.

“What kind of sickness did he have? Like what Andy had?”

“Oh, God no. One that made him very depressed,…sad, all the time. And I think he didn’t know what was reality, what was real. And what was right or wrong. I’m not sure exactly.”

“So that’s why he shot Andy and everyone else? Because he didn’t know it was wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know, buddy. Some people think that his family should have known that he was…dangerous to other people, that he could hurt someone. And that they should have made sure he was getting proper care. Maybe that could have stopped it from happening,” Daddy said.

“Do you think Charlie knew that? That his son was going to do that?” I picked up the ketchup bottle and squirted more ketchup on mine and Daddy’s plates.

“Thanks,” Daddy said, and dipped in a fry. “No. I don’t think he knew Charles was going to do what he did. But I do think he and his wife didn’t take care of him the way he needed to be taken care of. I think they were probably in denial. Know what I mean?”

“I don’t know what that means, denial,” I said.

“It means that they…they probably knew there was something very wrong with their son, but they didn’t want to admit it. Or didn’t know how to deal with it,” Daddy explained.

“So that wasn’t good that they did that.”

“No, that wasn’t good.”

“So Mommy is mad at them, right?”

“Yes.”

“And she wants them to get in trouble about it? Are the police going to put Charlie in jail?” I asked.

“No, that’s…I don’t think so, buddy,” Daddy said.

“Good, because that wouldn’t really be fair, I don’t think,” I told Daddy.

“No?”

“No,” I said. “I have the winner, by the way.” I held up my longest French fry from my plate. That’s a game me and Andy always play when we go somewhere where we eat something with French fries—who has the longest one.

“What? No way! OK, that one is very long,” Daddy said, and he started looking around his whole plate. “This one beats yours, though.” He held one up, but I saw right away he was cheating and he was holding two together with his hand to make one really long one. That used to be Andy’s trick. We laughed about that, and when I looked up I saw a lot of people in the diner were looking at us, and then laughing didn’t feel like a good thing to do anymore.





[ 30 ]


    The Hulk


THE THING ABOUT THE HULK is that he hates getting mad. I have a book about the Avengers, and the Hulk is part of the Avengers. I love the Avengers, they’re my favorite superheroes. They fight bad guys and save people. The Hulk’s real name is Bruce Banner, when he’s the real human person. He’s a scientist, and he made a bomb and the bomb went off by accident and he got caught in the blast, and that’s why he turned into the Hulk.

So then he’s like two people in one that are opposites, because when he’s the human scientist he’s quiet and a good person, but when he gets mad he turns into the big, loud Hulk—and he doesn’t want to, but he can’t control it. Then he yells, “HULK SMASH!” and goes crazy.

That’s like how it is for me now. One minute I’m the normal Zach Taylor and I’m acting good, and then something happens and I turn into a different version of Zach Taylor, the mad, mean version. I got mad before, like when I didn’t get to do stuff or when I was mad at Andy for being a jerk to me, but now it’s a whole other mad feeling.

It’s a surprise when it starts, like it sneaks up on me and then it jumps on me, and I don’t notice it until it already lands on me, and then it’s too late, because it changes my whole self. The first thing that happens is tears come out of my eyes, but not normal tears—they’re hot. Hot, mad tears. And then all of me gets hot and like tight, and the hot and tight feeling makes me yell and act bad.

Today the Zach Taylor Hulk came out two times so far. The first time was when I went downstairs in the morning and I was looking for Daddy to do our school drive, and Mommy said he had to leave early, so no school drive today. Mommy said, “What’s the difference, you don’t go in anyway,” and that was true, but I still got mad about it. I yelled at Mommy, and I lay on the floor and kicked. Mommy stood there and looked at me. She looked surprised and then she looked sad.

I acted bad and crazy for a long time, and my head started to hurt from all the crying and yelling. Mommy tried a couple times to talk to me, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying because of all of my yelling. I didn’t even want to hear it. Mommy tried to pick me up, but I didn’t let her. So then Mommy sat down on the stairs and she put her arms on her knees and her head on her arms. I thought she was crying because of how I acted, like she did a lot of times when Andy had his bad temper.