The Nix(38)
The cashier, a sensitive-looking thirtysomething assistant-manager guy with a ponytail, did not act like this was an odd question but rather looked through the cassettes dutifully and then, with an air of authority that made Samuel trust him, picked one and shook it and said, “This one. No one ever buys this one.”
Samuel put down his ten dollars and the cashier wrapped the cassette in a bag.
“This is really modern stuff,” the cashier said. “Really out there.”
“Good,” Samuel said.
“It’s the same piece recorded ten different times. Like, really weird stuff. You like this?”
“Very much.”
“Okay,” he said. He gave him his change and Samuel still had about four bucks left. He ran to the candy store. The perfect gift swung wildly in its bag and battered the back of his legs and his mouth puckered in anticipation of the jawbreaker he was going to buy and his head bounced to the mall’s music and his eyes fluttered with daydreams where he made the right choice every time and all his adventures had the very best and happiest endings.
7
BISHOP FALL WAS A BULLY, but not an obvious bully. He did not prey on the weak. He left them alone, the skinny boys, the awkward girls. He wanted nothing easy. It was the strong and confident and self-possessed and powerful who drew his attention.
During the school year’s first pep rally, Bishop took an interest in Andy Berg, resident champion of all things brutal, only member of the sixth-grade class to achieve dark growths of leg and underarm hair, local terrorizer of the small and shrill. It was the gym teacher who first started calling him “Iceberg.” Or, sometimes, just “the Berg.” Because of his size (colossal), speed (slow), and the way he moved (unstoppably). The Berg was your typical grade-school bully: vastly bigger and stronger than anyone else in class, and transparently externalizing some raging inner demons about his stunted mental abilities, which were the only things stunted about him. The rest of his body was on some kind of genetic sprint to adulthood. He was now, in sixth grade, taller than the female teachers. Heavier, too. His body was not one of those destined for athletic greatness. He was simply going to be thick. A torso shaped like a beer keg. Arms like beef flanks.
The pep rally began as it usually did, with grades one through six sitting in the bleachers of the odd-smelling rubber-floored gymnasium, watching assistant principal Terry Fluster (who, by the way, was dressed as a six-foot-tall red-and-white eagle, the school’s mascot) lead them through a series of cheers, beginning, as always, with: Eagles! Don’t do drugs!
Then Principal Large shushed them and gave his typical inaugural spiel about his expectations for behavior and his zero-tolerance, no-shit-taking teaching philosophy, during which the students stopped paying attention and stared narcoleptically at their shoes, save for the first graders, who were hearing this for the first time and were, naturally, terrified.
The pep rally concluded with Mr. Fluster’s usual: Let’s go, Eagles! Let’s go, Eagles!
And the students yelled and clapped along with him at a level that was roughly one-quarter of the assistant principal’s enthusiasm, still loud enough to mask Andy Berg’s individual cheer, which was audible only to the several people standing around him, Samuel and Bishop included: Kim’s a faggot! Kim’s a faggot!
Directed of course at poor Kim Wigley, standing two paces to the Berg’s left, by all accounts the easiest boy to make fun of in the entire sixth-grade class, one of those kids suffering through every prepubescent disaster there was: thick snowy dandruff, aggressive braces, chronic impetigo, extreme nearsightedness, severe allergies to nuts and pollen, destabilizing ear infections, facial eczema, bimonthly pinkeye, warts, asthma, even an occurrence of head lice in the second grade that no one ever let him forget. Plus he was all of about forty pounds soaking wet. Plus he had a girl’s first name.
In these moments, Samuel knew the “right” thing to do would be to defend Kim and stop the bullying and stand up to the giant Andy Berg because bullies back down when they encounter resistance according to the brochures they were given in health class once a year. This was, everyone knew, a big fat lie. Because last year Brand Beaumonde actually did stand up to the Berg for the constant scorn directed toward Brand’s bulletproof-thick eyeglasses, stood up to him right in the middle of the lunchroom and said “Shut up your big mouth you big jerk!” in a spasm of nervous agitation. And the Berg did indeed back down and left him alone the rest of the school day and everyone who witnessed it was jubilant because maybe they were safe now and maybe the pamphlets were right and this great sense of optimism pervaded the school and Brand was a minor hero until the Berg found him on his way home that day and beat him up so savagely that the police actually got involved and interviewed Brand’s friends who, by now, had learned an important lesson: to keep their f*cking mouths shut. Bullies do not back down.
The big rumor about the Berg this year—one propagated by the Berg himself—was that he was, by all accounts, the first member of the sixth-grade class to have sex. With a girl. With, he said, a former babysitter who, quote, can’t get enough of my dick. This of course was unverifiable. Either the high-school girl in question or her interest in the Berg’s anatomy, unverifiable but also unchallenged. Nobody in the locker room within earshot of the Berg’s boasting was willing to risk personal injury by stating the obvious: There was no way a high-school girl would be interested in a sixth grader unless she was mentally disturbed, wicked ugly, or emotionally broken. Or all three of these things. There was just no way.