Bullyville Read online

  Maybe I should have felt relieved. But I wasn’t relieved at all. I didn’t want to be there. I wished I’d had the nerve to tell them what I thought of their school and their money and their programs and their compassion. But for some reason my courage failed me, maybe because I was surrounded by grown-ups who seemed to believe that going to Bullywell was the luckiest thing that could ever happen to a human being. And that their new program would make it even better.

  So all I could do was repeat once more that, no matter what happened, I wasn’t going to be part of any program that involved my working side by side with Tyro.

  For a moment Tyro’s dad looked disappointed, as if that had been part of his plan. But then Tyro’s mom touched him on the arm, and he looked at her and smiled and nodded. It was amazing how much the Bergens communicated without having to say a word, and I thought maybe there was something else—something important in their lives—that couldn’t be mentioned or talked about, and so they’d gotten very good at silent conversation.

  “Brad’s probably right,” said Mr. Bergen.

  “Bart, dear,” said his wife.

  “I meant Bart,” said Mr. Bergen. He looked at Mom and said, “Sorry. Senior moment. You know how it is.”

  “Not really,” said Mom. She wasn’t having any of it. She forgot things all the time, but she wasn’t about to join Tyro’s dad in some kind of club based on how old and brain-damaged they both were.

  “Anyway, they can each start in different program areas,” he went on. “Tyro in the homeless shelter. And Bart in the hospital working with sick children.”

  “Doing what?” said Mom. “Catching pneumonia? Getting leprosy?”

  Everyone laughed, too loudly. Couldn’t they tell that Mom wasn’t joking?

  “Of course not,” said Mrs. Bergen. “We would never let him be exposed to anything contagious—”

  “Doing what?” Mom repeated.

  “Being with kids,” said Dr. Bratwurst. “Kids who are seriously ill, sometimes terminally so. We’d just want Bart to spend some time with them, to be there, to offer them companionship and support, something to distract them from the pain and the loneliness and the long hours when their relatives can’t visit and there’s nothing for them to do but watch TV.”

  We all got quiet again, thinking of how generous and heroic this sounded, I suppose. It sounded really depressing to me, but I didn’t feel I could say that.

  “And I swear to you, Mrs. Rangely,” Mr. Bergen continued, “on everything we hold sacred, that Bart will never be subjected to another bullying incident during all his time at Baileywell, even if I personally have to accompany him from one class to another.”

  “Yikes,” I said. The thought was so horrifying that the word just leaped out, and everyone smiled.

  “Mr. Bergen’s right,” said Dr. Bratwurst. “I give you my word, too. My word of honor. You do believe me, don’t you?” Neither Mom nor I could bring ourselves to say, No, sorry, we don’t, we’re not interested. No second chances. But when had we become the ones who could decide whether or not to give them second chances? I was the one who’d trashed a car.

  And that’s how I got suckered into another term at Bullywell.

  Christmas was pretty much like Thanksgiving, only with presents. More presents than usual, actually, more presents than ever before, because I guess everyone was trying to make it up to me for how much I had lost. It didn’t work. I missed my dad. I kept thinking that maybe he would have known what to do about Tyro and his gang.

  Christmas Eve dinner at Gran’s was fantastic, as usual, with course after course of all kinds of bizarre sea creatures that I used to hate as a little kid but that I loved now, especially the baked clams stuffed with bread crumbs and garlic.

  But I couldn’t really enjoy the dinner, and everyone noticed that I wasn’t eating much. They kept hugging me and pinching my cheeks and telling me I looked pale. I knew they thought the problem was that this was my first Christmas without Dad. And it was a problem, especially when it was added to the problem of looking forward to another semester at Bullyville, plus the additional problem of making up for damaging Tyro’s car by spending two afternoons a week with kids with oxygen masks and bald heads and tubes sticking out of their arms.

  The day before school started again, Mom drove me to Jersey Memorial for an orientation session with Mrs. Straus, the hospital social worker. Mom insisted on coming with me, because she wanted to be extra sure that I wouldn’t be exposed to pneumonia or cholera or bubonic plague or whatever she imagined.

  Fortunately, Mrs. Straus’s office was right near the hospital entrance, so—for now, at least—I didn’t have to walk through corridors lined with gurneys and wheelchairs and rooms into which I could peek at some poor kid drawing his last rattling breath.

  For some reason I expected someone ancient. But Mrs. Straus was young, tall, redheaded, sort of stylish: She looked like an actress who might play a tough but warmhearted district attorney on TV. She rose to shake my hand, then Mom’s, and I could tell right away that she knew everything about us: about Dad, about the Miracle Boy, about the bullying at Bullywell, about what I’d done to Tyro’s car, and about how I would never be here if the Bergens and Dr. Bratwurst hadn’t decided that I was in serious need of the good-deed, Good Samaritan equivalent of reform school. I felt I had to fight the impulse to turn to jelly and sit there and let her tell me everything I needed to know and everything I was going to have to do. So I decided to come out swinging.

  “So what do I have to do?” I asked. “Put on a clown nose like that stupid doctor Robin Williams played in that crappy movie, and go around seeing if some bald kid would like me to tell stupid jokes and pull rabbits out of a hat? That is, if you let people bring rabbits into the hospital, which I don’t think would be very sanitary. Or maybe I’m supposed to get a kazoo and get the kids to sing cheery songs about how they’re feeling better and better, stronger and stronger every day. Or maybe—”

  “Bart, please. Slow down,” said Mrs. Straus, very gently. “This is not Patch Adams. No one’s going to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. Why don’t you just calm down and relax and listen to what I’m suggesting?” I was relieved when Mrs. Straus made me stop talking and I could just sit back and listen.

  “You’ll come two afternoons a week,” she said. “From three till five. We’ll arrange to have you picked up at school.”

  Well, fine. That was okay with me. It meant I’d be saved from art club, where all last semester Kristin had supervised one “conceptual” project after another, so that at the end of each session we threw out everything we’d done.

  “You’ll be assigned from one to three of our kids,” Mrs. Straus was saying. “So, no, it won’t be like wandering the corridors in a clown nose. Basically, your job is just to hang out with them, keep them company, make them feel as if they haven’t completely lost contact with the outside world. Many of them have been in the hospital for quite a long time, so they might want to know about all the latest things kids are into—”

  “I don’t always know about that,” I said. I was thinking that if I’d spent months in the hospital, I’d pretty much lose interest in the latest cartoons and which edition of Doom kids were playing now.

  “It’s not a test,” said Mrs. Straus. “No one’s going to quiz you on whether you get it right. The important thing, as I said, is to be with them. To be present.”

  I said, “Wouldn’t they rather be with sick kids like themselves? Wouldn’t they have more in common?”

  “You might think so,” said Mrs. Straus. “But it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes they want to be reminded that there’s a world out there, a world that they’ll reenter when they get better.”

  “Are they going to get better?” asked Mom.

  There was silence after that. Then Mrs. Straus said, “Many of them will. We hope. That’s why they’re here.”

  “What about their families?” I said. “Don’t they come
visit?”

  “Their parents work,” said Mrs. Straus. “Their brothers and sisters go to school. The families are usually here on weekends and in the evenings. But we’ve found, from studies, that late afternoons—especially in the winter, when it gets dark early—are the loneliest and scariest times for our kids. And that’s where you come in.”

  I wanted to say that late afternoons were not exactly my favorite time of day, either. But I knew that I didn’t have a chance of winning any kind of discussion with Mrs. Social Worker District Attorney. I was healthy, I was free. These kids had no choice but to watch the sun set and the darkness gather outside their hospital-room windows. I was sorry for them, I really and truly was. But it wasn’t my problem.

  And then something happened. It was almost as if I was standing outside myself and watching a nicer, more compassionate version of me say, “All right. I think I can do that.”

  Mrs. Straus told me a few more things, such as not to ask the kids what was wrong with them, what diseases they had. I could let them talk about their illnesses if they wanted to, but I shouldn’t make that the focus of our conversations. My job was to find out what they were interested in, what they cared about, what might make them feel connected to the world outside the hospital. My job, said Mrs. Straus, was to be “the breath of fresh air that blows in when we open the door.”

  Right, I thought. Sure. Then I saw Mom looking at me, all proud and teary-eyed. And once again, as always that year, I found myself wanting to make Mom happy, because I imagined that her happiness would filter down and sprinkle, like some kind of magic dust, on me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  FAT FREDDIE, THE day-student bus driver, was assigned to drive me from school to the hospital. The prospect of riding alone in the bus, just me and Fat Freddie, gave me the serious creeps. I imagined Freddie kidnapping me and throwing me into a trench he had dug in his basement and telling the world he had no idea why I hadn’t shown up at the appointed spot when he’d come to pick me up at the hospital for the drive back home.

  But the Fat Freddie who drove me from the school to the hospital seemed like an entirely different person from the silent, crabby Fat Freddie who drove me and the other losers to and from school. It turned out that Fat Freddie had a nephew who’d been hit by a car that broke half the bones in his body. The nephew had gone to this very same hospital and spent six months there, and they’d completely fixed him up. Good as new, said Freddie. Now the only thing you could tell—and you really had to look hard—was that Fat Freddie’s nephew had a tiny limp and one of his arms was a few inches shorter than the other. Judging from the way that Fat Freddie treated me on the way to the hospital, you would have thought that I was the surgeon who’d operated on his nephew.

  Fat Freddie said I was doing God’s work, and when I got off the bus at the hospital, he said, “God bless you, son. See you right here in a couple of hours. Don’t worry if there’s traffic and I’m a few minutes late. Don’t worry, I’ll be right here, trust me.”

  That seemed like a good sign, as did the fact that I found Mrs. Straus’s office without getting lost and having to ask and be interrogated by the hospital security guards. This time, Mrs. Straus gave me a quick hug, as if we were old friends.

  As we left her office, Mrs. Straus put her arm around my shoulder, which was sort of nice and at the same time sort of worrisome, as if she thought I might need encouragement and support for what was coming next. This time, I knew, I wasn’t going to be spared the gurneys and the wheelchairs and the corridors lined with sick kids.

  I was glad that Mom wasn’t with me, because I didn’t want her to worry about what diseases I might catch. The doctors who passed us seemed to be in a hurry, or to have something serious on their minds, but every so often a nurse would smile at us in a way that reminded me of the gooey way people smiled at me when I was still the Miracle Boy who’d saved his mother. Whether I was here as a patient or a visitor or as punishment for trashing a kid’s SUV didn’t seem to matter. The mere presence of a kid in the hospital was reason enough for people to flash me that silly smile.

  We went up in an elevator that stopped on every floor. Doctors and nurses got on and off, along with visitors. The minute I looked at each visitor, I could more or less tell how sick the patient was whom that person was going to see. The happy ones got off at the maternity floor. Several carried shiny pink or blue smiley-face balloons. I imagined them standing at the glass windows through which they could see the newborn babies, holding the balloons. The grim passengers and the ones who seemed to have been crying got off at the higher floors, where people were, I imagined, recovering from surgery or suffering from illnesses from which they were probably not going to get better.

  Right from the start, I felt close to these people. I wanted to tell them that I knew what it was like, what it was like to be really scared and feel lost and have someone you love die. At the same time, I wanted to get as far away from them as possible. A couple of women—moms, I guessed—got off at the pediatric floor with me and Mrs. Straus. We pushed our way through a swinging door, and then I had to stop for a minute, because I felt a little dizzy, on the edge of being sick. Maybe it was the smell: disinfectant and soap and something sweet—to tell the truth, a little like baby shit—that I couldn’t identify, and didn’t want to.

  “Are you all right?” asked Mrs. Straus.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “It must have been something I ate for lunch—”

  Without a word, Mrs. Straus led me into a kind of waiting room, which was empty except for some chairs and a soda machine. She bought me a soda, and for a few minutes we sat in silence while I sipped from the can.

  “Feeling better?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  So off we went, down a corridor, and it was just as I’d pictured it. Maybe a little worse. Mostly I kept my eyes straight ahead, trying not to look on either side, but every so often I couldn’t help it and I let myself peek. Sure enough, there was some tiny head peering out from under the covers, or a bald kid staring at a TV blaring from a corner near the ceiling.

  Outside each door was the kind of whiteboard you could wipe clean, and on each board was a kid’s first name written in colored marker and decorated with flowers and balloons and more smiley faces. Without knowing where you were, you could tell—just from looking at the art—that you were in a doctor’s office or hospital, somewhere kids were sick, and where some fool imagined that a pack of bright markers and a drawing of a daisy or a clown was just what they needed to cheer them up. The signs were probably helpful for the nurses and the doctors who could never remember patients’ names. They could check outside the door and go sailing into the room, full of confidence, singing out, “Hi, Jimmy…Hi, Johnny…Hi, Jane.”

  In my case, it was going to be Hi, Ramón. That was the first room we stopped outside, and I could tell from the rubbed-off, smeary look of the whiteboard that Ramón hadn’t exactly gotten there yesterday.

  “Let’s visit Ramón,” said Mrs. Straus cheerily, as if she thought this was fun, as if she’d somehow forgotten that this was my punishment assignment. She was acting as if this were a friendly “visit” I’d decided to make on my own.

  In the bed a tiny kid with the covers pulled up to his neck was lying with his eyes closed. It was clear, at least to me, that Ramón was asleep or pretending to be asleep. He obviously didn’t want visitors, or if he did want one, I wasn’t the visitor he wanted.

  “Ramón,” said Mrs. Straus, “this is Bart. He’s come to hang out with you for a while.”

  Ramón’s eyes blinked open. Then he closed them again. Ramón’s joy at seeing me left me and Mrs. Straus pretty much stranded. What was our next move supposed to be?

  “Well,” said Mrs. Straus brightly. “Why don’t I leave Bart here for a few minutes so you two can get acquainted? Maybe you guys will have an easier time of it if I’m not here cramping your style.”

  I stared at her, goggle-eyed. I must h
ave looked panicky, because she held up both hands, fingers splayed. I understood. Ten minutes.

  I pulled the armchair up to Ramón’s bedside.

  “So, Ramón,” I said. “What’s up? How’s it going?”

  No answer.

  “How long have you been here?” I said.

  Nothing.

  “Where do you live?”

  Silence.

  “So, like, have you got any brothers and sisters?”

  Not a word.

  “You like to play sports or anything like that?” Even as it popped out, I knew that it was a completely idiotic question. And Ramón seemed to know it, too, because he rolled away from me and turned his face to the wall.

  Mrs. Straus had said that the only important thing was being here. Being with them. And she’d said this wasn’t a test. I was just paying for some damage I’d done to a bully’s SUV. It didn’t matter if Ramón liked me or not, or wanted me to be here or not, or whether I felt totally ridiculous or not. All that counted was that I put in my time, and then we could call it quits. Everyone could go home happy. Or anyway, I could.

  So I just sat there, watching the minutes pass. Who knows what Ramón was thinking. He probably just wanted me to go away. It seemed to me that Ramón needed some kind of help beyond whatever the doctors were giving him. Ramón needed a lot more than a visit from me. But most likely they knew that. No one could really believe that I was just the ticket to bring Ramón out of his depression or stupor or coma or whatever.

  After what seemed like a dozen years, Mrs. Straus reappeared. I was never happier to see anyone in my life.

  “Did you guys have a good visit?” she said.