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  Because I’d grown so fast, I no longer had the ability to walk with a normal gait, so I lasciviously scuffled along, my feet rarely leaving the ground. It seemed like my eyeballs were made too big for their actual eyelids, creating the impression that my eyes were never fully opened but simply slits, like some big doped up snake. My mouth suffered some of the same circumstances. It was too small, the teeth shoved in there with demented abstract abandon—what the mother called a “crowded mouth.” My canines hung down way past all the other teeth and if I tried to actually shut my mouth to where my lips met I looked like someone trying to form a horribly pompous face. Nevertheless, I kept my mouth fully closed most of the time and this may have generated more hostility toward me. My ears were like giant masts. If I slithered fast enough I could actually hear them slicing the wind.

  Both years since I started failing, I had to go through a readjustment period and try not to let anyone in my class figure out that I was two or three years older than they were. It was hard enough to remain anonymous, being a hideous beast. And it never lasted very long. Inevitably, some other failure would point me out. “Well, that kid, he’s failed twice.”

  After that happened, the stares and whispers would noticeably increase. I figured some of the parents told the kids to stay away from me. I guess they were afraid my ample helping of stupid would rub off on their children.

  I always hated recess because I’ve never really liked having what the other kids considered fun. Playing stupid games and running around aimlessly and that kind of fuckall. So mostly I just wandered around the big rusty fence separating the playground from the factory and thought my own thoughts, which mostly involved ways of getting out of Milltown without much of an education and by doing as little work as possible. Recess was always a bad time anyway because it was one of the only times when being completely alone seemed abnormal. When it finally got out that I was Wallace Black, the dumb boy who couldn’t pass the eighth grade, recess was when the bullies started laying into me.

  That year, the Year of Bucky Swarth’s Reign, I’d been pretty okay. That is, I’d avoided being beaten severely by him. I’d never been the subject of more than a few names, threats, or pushes. I think, initially, even though I wasn’t particularly hard to notice, they were kind of intimidated by my age and I had to do something to really piss them off before they decided to let me have it. But on that chilly spring day, he finally came around and, looking back on it, it was probably my own damn stupid fault.

  It was a Thursday morning, the year more than half gone, when he finally laid into me.

  Chapter Two

  Drifter Ken

  and

  The Sucker of Doom

  That morning, on my walk to school, Drifter Ken had given me a big green sucker. Drifter Ken was this magnificent old guy who hung around the park between my house and the school. He was real suspicious but nobody ever caught him doing anything so they couldn’t do much about it, like having him locked up or some fuckness like that. Besides, he never panhandled and he was never in the park at night. I just thought Drifter Ken liked kids or that being nice to the kids that came through the park gave him something to do with his day. The mother always said to stay away from Drifter Ken because he really liked kids, but she wore a wig and I found her hard to trust.

  If I ever got home late from school, she would accuse me of hanging out with that “trashy, trashy man,” her stroke-induced mumbling giving the words a lusty cant. The way she strumbled on about Drifter Ken made it sound like he was the type of man she’d like to bring home.

  “You like what he does to you?” she asked me one time.

  I had a pretty good idea of what she was talking about and knew Drifter Ken sure didn’t do that. I mean, it wouldn’t really surprise me if he had managed to nail a couple of the high school girls but it wasn’t abnormal to see the high schoolers dating 35 to 40-year- old men. So what if Drifter Ken was closer to 60? In a town like Milltown, the general philosophy seemed to be that you had to snag them young, before pregnancy, drugs, alcoholism, and bad fashion used them up.

  “You like the way that trashy, trashy man touches you?” It disgusted me, the throatiness of her voice.

  “He’s not like that.”

  “Not yet.”

  At that point, I grabbed a heavy glass and threw it across the room. The motion was strained and dramatic but I had trouble expressing myself vocally, so I had a tendency to throw and break things. Then I stormed into my room. It was pointless to argue with the mother.

  It was the father’s theory that Drifter Ken sold crack to the kids but, as I’ve already mentioned, the father was crippled and also untrustworthy. I’m guessing the father thought an adult would have to be high to get along with children.

  Anyway, that morning I walked through the park as I always did. Some mornings Drifter Ken wasn’t there. On the mornings he was in the park we always exchanged a few words, even if it was to just say “Hi.” It was like we both understood each other. You can make contact with people all day but it only seems fulfilling when it’s with someone you truly enjoy.

  Drifter Ken was of near giant proportions. I was a little over six feet tall and had to look way up at Drifter Ken. His thick hands were the size of baseball mitts. He had flashy hair, all stiff and gray and piled up on top of his head in wild curls. That made him seem even taller. I thought about Racecar, pathetically sitting in his wheelchair and growling and I thought dads should always be taller than their children, if only by an inch or two. Drifter Ken would have been the perfect father for me. He always sucked on these unfiltered Camels that drew attention to his magnificent teeth. I say his teeth were magnificent because they had character. Teeth can really make or break a person. Drifter Ken’s teeth were powerful, like giant evenly spaced blocks, the area between them defining them even further, making them blockier and more magnificent. I complimented him on his teeth one time, mainly so I could tell him about Mrs. Pearlbottom’s, and he said hers probably got that way from chewing kids’ asses. I laughed. I laughed at a lot of what Drifter Ken said. Drifter Ken was a funny man.

  That morning, Drifter Ken had a surprise for me. I was passing through the park kind of quickly because I was already running a little late and I just raised my hand in a wave and nodded to him when he came rushing over to me.

  “Hey there, Wally, whaddya say?” Most of our encounters were horribly repetitive but there was a deep sense of comfort to this repetition.

  “Oh, not much, Drifter Ken.” I used to call him “Mister,” but he insisted I call him “Ken.” It felt weird calling a grownup by his first name. And never mind that, at sixteen, I was almost a grownup myself. Since I was in the eighth grade, I still considered myself a child. And since I was well on my way to failing eighth grade again I considered myself even more of a child than the other eighth graders. I was downright feeble-minded. What the fuck did it matter what I called him, anyway? Names are ridiculous and the only thing more ridiculous than a name is a title.

  “Hey Wally, I gotcha a little somethin.”

  “Oh yeah? Thanks.” I didn’t have any idea what it would be. I sure hoped it wasn’t crack.

  It wasn’t. It was a giant green sucker.

  It wasn’t that I was ungrateful or anything. I guess I just expected something different. It seemed kind of hokey at first, like something you’d give to a baby. But a sucker was a sucker and I didn’t really think you ever got too old for candy.

  “Now you hide that from the teachers at that school. Tell you what to do… you save it til you go to recess, then you find some place nice and quiet and you enjoy that there lollipop.”

  I took the sucker and held it, feeling its heft. I nodded to Drifter Ken.

  “Listen here now... you enjoy the hell out of that lollipop.”

  “I sure will,” I said.

  “Hey, say Wally, you got any good jokes for me?”

  “I have to get to school.”

  “Run on then. A good joke
gets better with time.”

  I usually tried to tell Drifter Ken all the jokes I’d heard. Sometimes they were horribly lame but it gave us something to talk about. I hated having to leave Drifter Ken’s company so I could go to that miserable fuckhouse of a school.

  So, anyway, I got to school that Thursday only a few minutes late. All I could think about was that big, bulgy green sucker in the right front pocket of my pants and I couldn’t wait until recess. I didn’t think I’d be able to eat all of it and I’d have to save the wrapper so I could store the rest of it until after school. That way I could enjoy the hell out of it on my way home, too. Drifter Ken, if he was still in the park, which he almost always was after school, would be happy to see me enjoying the hell out of that sucker. And the thing kind of kept me behaved, too. A lot of times I’d have to skip recess and stay inside with the surly Miss Pearlbottom, who was one of the biggest blobs I’d ever seen.

  There was this one time when I had a fantastic vision about fat old Pearlbottom. In the vision, she wore one of those hideous floral-patterned dresses. It hung flappingly from her giant buttocks. Her ass was so huge it looked like she had children stuck in there. For no reason whatsoever, there was this cow in the hall of the school. Pearlbottom, with a grace I’d never seen her obtain before was on this creature in a heartbeat, driving it to the ground with her girth. After wrestling it down to the floor, she began to rapidly devour it, poking her fingers into its flesh, moving pieces of it around with her pudgy little fingers in search of the choicest bites. The entire cow was gone in minutes. In my dream, I looked on, horrified, like it had been a brash act of cannibalism or something. Finishing her meal she looked up at me, wiping the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand and picking some of the cow’s coarse hide out of her teeth, looking as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Needless to say, I was shaken upon awakening.

  Most days, I’d have to stay in from recess for doing something real stupid like sitting back in my little desk and flipping my head back and forth on my shoulders while singing some stupid shit like, “Da doo doo doo,” or some fuckall like that.

  Pearlbottom reminded me of someone who should be working at a truck stop, not in a school. She’d tell me to stop acting out. Sometimes she would tell me that I was way off task, like I was supposed to know what the hell that meant.

  It didn’t matter. I’d keep flicking my head and making the sounds. Mainly, I kept doing this because of the real soft but sort of mean way she had of telling me to stop, like I needed to be reminded of what I was doing. I knew exactly what I was doing and figured it was disruptive as hell, but I just didn’t care. I was more entertained by the way my hair would briefly raise up off my scalp as I snapped my head and I would try to snap it quicker and quicker every time. I tried to make the sounds loud and clear, yet distinctly my own, by adding occasional flourishes to it. Like sometimes I’d see what it sounded like with a lot of spit in my throat or with a bunch of paper in my mouth. And Miss Pearlbottom, she just kept shoveling on the fuckness.

  My desk was in the back of the classroom, which had two doors—one in front and one in back. I knew I was intentionally sat by the back door so that when I started in with something like the head snapping and sounds, Pearlbottom could open up that back door and pull my desk out so I was sitting real lonely and all in the hallway. She was a very burly woman and she didn’t have to extend a lot of effort to do this.

  Simplified, the breakdown went something like this: I would be immersed in my own little world, managing to have a decent time because I didn’t want to be at school to begin with. She would yank me out into the hall for having a relatively good time when nobody else was. Then her brashness would make me cry. I’d felt like that for about the past three years, always on the verge of crying. I always felt so sad and sorry for myself that it didn’t take much to send me on a crying jag. Then, Miss Pearlbottom would take away my recess for crying. Having my recess taken away wasn’t even that much of a punishment. But when that happened I had to stay in the lunchroom with one of the monitors while they stared at me. There I would sit, pitifully looking down at my half-eaten tray of food.

  “You’ve really done it now,” Pearlbottom would say, leaning down so close to me I could see the pores on her face, close to gaping, cheap and shiny make-up slathered over top of them. And this snide blob had the worst breath I’d ever smelled. She chewed cinnamon-flavored gum and drank coffee all day and this combination created an amazingly shit-like type of halitosis. Her teeth were all decayed so they looked like little Tic Tacs, the green kind, hanging from her gums. “Some people just never learn. You see if you’re still in here at the end of the year, Wally.”

  Sometimes it seemed like all people did was threaten me and that smegma drenched cunthole was probably right. I wouldn’t be there at the end of the year. At least, I didn’t want to be there at the end of the year. And, even more, I didn’t want to have to come back to the middle school the next year, either.

  That sucker of Drifter Ken’s got me through the day. Or, at least, the first part of the day. When recess came, it was the sucker that finally got me into trouble. By the time recess did finally come, I was practically salivating over that damn thing. My hand rested on the bulge in my pants. With the sweaty tips of my twitching fingers, I could practically taste that sucker through the denim of my pants and its thin plastic wrapper. I had to be careful not to twitch too much though, so Blob Pearlbottom wouldn’t think I was playing with myself, which is apparently a very serious offense in school. The last time it happened, I didn’t even get the hallway. I was sent straight to the office where Mr. Rheingold, another blob, suspended me for the rest of the week.

  I didn’t see what the big fuss was. It wasn’t like I had it out or anything. Wasn’t school a place for exploration? No one even noticed except Pearlbottom. If it hadn’t been for Becky Trawlers’ ass crack hanging out the back of her pants, it wouldn’t have happened anyway. To me, it seemed more indecent to have your ass exposed than it did to have your hand discreetly shoved down the front of your pants. The kids called me "Whack Off Wally” for the rest of that year, the Year of Lottie Simpson’s Reign.

  The bell finally rang for recess and I was the first one out of the classroom, one of the conveniences of being in my hall-yanking position. Then I burst through those double doors, their long horizontal steel levers and the wire in the glass of the windows the only thing separating me from outside. I beat hell out to the playground and the fence. It was raining a little bit. Nothing more than a mist really but, without a coat, I should have been freezing. It didn’t really bother me though. My desire for that sucker kept me hot.

  I pulled the green knob out of my pocket and unwrapped it with shaky, sugar-starved hands when I heard a soft voice behind me, freezing me.

  “Whatcha got there?” At first I thought it might be Pearlbottom.

  I turned around and saw that it was Mary Lou Dover, the hottest girl in my class. She was already fully developed and she had on a tight shirt that ended above her bellybutton, despite the cold. I guess that was so everyone could see how flat and tan her stomach was. A soot smear sat, birthmarkishly, beside her navel. I knew she was as vacant as the rest of the blobs but her beauty or, perhaps at that moment, her militantly erect nipples, kept me from really noticing this blobbishness. It would come out later, as soon as the beauty faded. I guessed that would be like in her mid-twenties, when those legs and that stomach started bulging, after she’d been fucked and beat senseless by every huge-dicked football player that looked at her. Maybe she would take another route and marry a cockwrinkle of a lawyer who would twist her words like soft metal until she was voiceless.

  Mary Lou, the trophy wife.

  Mary Lou, a big fuckable future blob.

  What did I have there?

  “Nothin.” I answered her quickly, hiding the sucker behind my back. I thought she might tell on me. She was that type of person. Mary Lou was very mean. She had the two twi
ns on either side of her, Cathy and Denise Something-or-the-other, looking as though they’d had their spirits stolen by Mary Lou.

  “I know you got somethin. I seen it. It’s a sucker, ain’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Yer lyin. Wallace Black is a liar.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “And a... molester.”

  I don’t know where she got that from. I’d never even kissed a girl, of any age. The only girls I’d even seen with their clothes off were on the television. I had a few fuzzy memories of seeing the mother naked as a small child but that seemed more appropriate for vomition rather than anything else, really.

  “No I’m not.”

  “I bet you are.”

  “I bet I’m not.”

  “I want that sucker.”

  “You can’t have it. It was a present.”

  “From who?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  “I want that sucker.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll let you kiss me if you give me that sucker.”