Nothing was different afterward except for my fresh loser eyes, noticing it all. People steering clear. Not touching me in gym, not even cheering if I sank a shot. Holding up their plate to my face in the lunchroom, like I’d eat off it like a dog. I wanted no sun shining on me now. I erased myself like a chalkboard. In my outgrown high-water jeans and the old-man shoes Mr. Peg had loaned me at Christmas, I joined the tribe of way-back country kids with no indoor plumbing and the Pentecostals that think any style clothes invented since Bible times is a sin. My specialty, acid holes. Who was going to take me shopping for new clothes? Hair over my collar, and who’s going to cut it? Miss Barks had noticed I was getting ratty, and kept reminding Mrs. McCobb how the monthly check from DSS should more than cover those things. And Mrs. McCobb kept saying she meant to get around to it, but just so busy with her kids.
I’d been thinking about Emmy moving here in a few months, the walks we were going to take. Hand-holding. Now I just hoped she and June would move to some far-distant part of the county where she’d be in a different school and never find out what I was.
It happened after one of these shit-most days of school, and more of the same on my shitpile job, that I kind of blacked out and threw some punches at the dash of Mrs. McCobb’s car. Scaring the living piss out of her. All she’d done was ask if I had a nice day. I don’t know why that set me off, but I landed my punches and she got quiet. Finally she said she was worried about me. I said maybe she should worry a hell of a lot more. It was dark, and I couldn’t see her face, which helped. “You’re so scared of Haillie and Brayley getting tormented at school,” I said.
She said “Yeah.” Sounding scared. Like she knew what was up.
“Well, take a look at me.” I let her have it then, told her about the slam books, the getting shunned, all of it. Kids pretending to sniff around me, asking did somebody shit himself. “And guess what,” I said. “They know who I’m living with. It’s getting around.”
I felt her going stiff over there behind the wheel, the McCobb family name going down.
On Sunday she took me to Walmart. I got new jeans, T-shirts, belt, shoes, and also a new toothbrush, which I hadn’t had in a while, ever since Brayley launched mine into the toilet on accident. Those kids loved to goof around in the downstairs bathroom. I thanked her, and she told me not to tell Mr. McCobb we’d spent almost everything I earned at Golly’s that month.
But at school the next day in my new clothes I still felt horrible. Not even proud. Embarrassed honestly, because nothing would change. Now they’d all think I was just that much more pitiful, because of trying. Loser is a cliff. Once you’ve gone over, you’re over.
What few friends I had now were some high school guys on the bus I rode out to Golly’s. “Friends,” meaning they let me sit with them and didn’t run me off. Redneck guys that everybody knew to leave the two back rows of seats open for, no discussion. Mostly they talked about girls: which ones were skanks and whores, which to stay away from because of hep C or the clap. Also drugs, who had what and for how much. They didn’t say a lot to me personally other than “Hey, how’s it going” whenever we got on the bus. But I kept my mouth shut and got educated. They did ask some few things, like what grade was I. Thinking they wouldn’t want a fifth grader in on those types of conversations, I said eighth. They asked was I doing JV football and again I lied, saying yes, and I was going out for varsity next year at Lee High. I told them I was friends with Fast Forward, and they were just amazed by that. These guys were on the team. Not first string, but still. They said they would be glad to have me on the Generals because I looked like I would make a good tackle or tight end. I remember which one of them said that, and the day. Due to that being the one nice thing anybody said to me that year.
Most days passed without a word coming out of my mouth. If I talked, it was to Swap-Out and Mr. Golly. Or Haillie, if she came in my room to play with my markers. I let her, even though they were all I had, so I was scared of them running out of ink. She wanted me to draw a cartoon of her, so I invented the Howliiie Fairy that left Oreos under your pillow. If bad guys showed up, she screamed them off the planet. So that’s what I had to work with: some gangbangers, a second grader, a foreign hundred-year-old man, and a guy with scrambled eggs for brains. Miss Barks mainly now just hounded me about school, why my grades had slipped. No big secret, I said. I hated school. I told her how ruthless the kids were. She said to hang in there, in middle school the kids would be nicer. I did not for one minute believe her.