Corey’s Gift
Written
by Dan Seliger,
712-225-0537
712-225-1288
(message/office)
stellarmail@ncn.net
© Copyright 2004, Dan Seliger
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without written permission from the author.
Prologue
Mrs.
Dankshell awoke at
A stab of pain shot through her arm as she reached
for the doorknob.
At that moment, she knew.
Her intuition, that special sense only mothers have,
violently spoke to her soul. She
wrenched the door open and entered, knowing what she’d find—but not wanting
to. Anger surged through her as the
garage door slammed behind her. The
anger was instantly replaced by a foreboding coldness as the center of her body
erupted in a massive convulsion. Her
life’s force evaporated as she glanced at the back seat of her car.
Falling helplessly, Mrs. Dankshell’s
cheek smashed onto the concrete floor, but she never felt the blow. A massive coronary spared her the pain.
PART I
– First Thursday in October
Chapter 1
The town of
As the new millennium made
its foothold however, Lunardi’s news worthiness
changed dramatically. For a brief moment
in time, the entire world knew all about this quaint little Midwestern town.
Situated in the center of
a sprawling valley about five miles wide as measured from the east to the west
and eight miles north to south, it was split neatly in two along its
north-south axis by a small meandering stream.
Lunardi currently claimed a population of 5,038, but many of the
residents were sure it was less than 5,000.
Founded by an Italian immigrant in the 1860’s of the same last name,
Ricardo Lunardi had seen an opportunity.
Numerous frontiersmen had preceded Ricardo to
this rather dry spot of western
But Ricardo saw gold. As a geologist, he immediately realized that
millions of tons of sand were covering topsoil so rich in nutrients, that any
crop or vegetable was sure to grow.
Steep hills edged the
western edge of the valley. Made from
alluvial particles and sediment; the Loess Hills were a unique formation in the
With
After the Golden Spike was
driven in
The Governor of Iowa
officially declared Lunardi a municipality in 1882, with lots of prodding from
the railroad czars. Once the railroad
depot was erected, a general store, a post office, a butcher, and a blacksmith;
all with their families, soon followed.
Ricardo never married, but
was accepted as a member of many families, frequently introduced as “Uncle
Ricardo”. He was most generous to his
neighbors; giving them vegetables from his large garden, corn from his fields
and an occasional chicken or two.
As the years passed,
Ricardo continued to amass significant savings—money he had no real for. His simple life revolved around his love for
geology. Many single women sought his
companionship as a potential suitor and ultimately, as a husband, but Uncle
Ricardo just smiled at their advances and went back to his reading as soon as
the advances wore out.
In 1898, Uncle Ricardo
passed away in his sleep. A neighbor had
found him resting peacefully in bed with a geology book on his chest. The townsfolk were quite curious about his
money and it was eventually discovered that he had duly recorded a will, with
legal witnesses, and he had deemed that all his properties were to be sold at
auction to the highest bidder. All
revenues were placed in a trust to be administered by the local school
authorities for the express purpose of immediately constructing a large,
well-inventoried schoolhouse on the top of the hill, about two miles west of
downtown.
Uncle Ricardo left a
lifelong legacy to the town he founded.
An education for all who wanted it at the school quaintly named after
him with the acronym: U-R-S, which
translated simply to “Uncle Ricardo’s School”.
Two large wings were added to the original structure in the 1920’s to
house more students and teachers, as Lunardi continued to enjoy prosperity and
the population grew.
Eventually, due budgetary
pressures, Ricardo’s school was abandoned.
Lunardi built an Elementary School, a Middle School, and a High School
as the population blossomed from a total of one, lone, never-to-be-married man
in the 1860’s, to over 8,000 residents in the 1960’s. All of the newer schools were built in town.
It took one hundred years
to build the population of Lunardi to over 8,000 folks, but high interest rates
in the eighties and the closing of the local beef packing plant over a union
contract dispute in the nineties—due to corporate greed everyone knowledgeably
said—nearly cut the population in half as the new millennium dawned.
Uncle Ricardo’s School,
the U.R.S. as it was nostalgically called by the town’s older residents, stood
alone and forlorn on the west hill. In
the winter, when the trees shed their leaves, a downtown shopper walking west
on main street just could make out the roof of the school. Shamefully, it was all that was left of Uncle
Ricardo’s legacy, but the school had a different use now: As a state owned prison surrounded by 15-foot
chain link fences topped with razor wire.
It had become a permanent center for previously convicted, yet to be
fully rehabilitated, sexual predators.
Ralph Dankshell’s
school year had been plagued by nightmares.
For the last six or seven weeks Ralph slept, when he was able, in the
fetal position, sweating profusely.
Snatching only an hour or two of uninterrupted sleep each night had worn
Ralph’s emotions raw. Demons seemed to
press incessantly on his skull from within.
Each
of Ralph’s dreams started easily with a kaleidoscope of warm, brilliant colors
swarming about in a random fashion.
Quickly, however, the colors digitized themselves into a jumble of black
numbers with jagged edges. The numbers
then changed into silhouettes of flying vultures with sharp beaks jabbing at
his head. Ralph tried to cover his head
with his hands and arms, and in his nightmarish sleep he unconsciously covered
his head with his pillow, but the pain within never ebbed. The vultures acted like daggers stabbing at
his gray matter from all angles. Relief
was impossible. The vultures pecked and
pecked—never stopping—gouging his body and wreaking havoc on his fragile
emotions.
Ralph
had read a library book about dreams and their interpretation, but the only
useful information he had gleaned from the book was that the numbers turning
into vultures might connote his problems with his math class, or his problems
at the bus stop. Nothing else in the
book had made any sense.
The
other nightmare was worse. Ralph was a
tiny cockroach that wanted to grow big and strong. No matter how quickly he scurried around the
room full of desks, chairs and deadly feet, he couldn’t survive. In this nightmare, he was always squished to
smithereens by a big shoe.
Ralph
had heard somewhere that a cockroach could live up to 10-days without its head
and this is how Ralph felt every waking moment at school. His brain was pulp, squished beyond
recognition without an ego, self-esteem or hope.
Ralph’s
nightmares made him sweat in his tormented sleep and at breakfast a couple of
weeks ago, his mother had complained about the damp, sweaty sheets. But before Ralph could pour his heart out,
and explain why he sweated every night, his new stepfather had ordered him to
handle his problems like a man.
That
was the morning Ralph had an epiphany about one of his nightmares. The bus stop was where some of the vultures
were! From that morning on, Ralph had
walked to school, being recorded as late almost every day, but no one had said
anything to him. Today, midterms would
arrive in the mailbox and his mother would discover his ‘F’ in math and his
chronic tardiness.
The
vultures were everywhere. Missing the
bus wasn’t the entire solution. The
vultures would find Ralph at lunch, in the hallways between classes, at his
locker and in the restrooms. When the
vultures weren’t pecking at him, their taunts were ringing in his ears like
echoes in a canyon, getting louder with each ricochet.
Ralph
had decided to get even with some of the vultures one day by packing his
backpack full of baseballs. When the
vultures had swarmed him in the hallway, he had attacked them like a maniac
swinging his backpack as hard as his scrawny 12-year-old body could. Life in school had gotten progressively worse
after that. Instead of feeling good
about defending himself from the vultures Ralph got in trouble for starting the
fight!
Labels were then placed
upon him, which he wore like permanent clothes: Aggressor, Psychopath, Obsessive, Compulsive,
Attention Deficit Disorder, Manic Depressive, and Maniac. Ralph didn’t understand what all the words
meant, but he sensed they weren’t good.
Math class was the worst
part of his day. Instead of feeling safe
from the vultures, the biggest vulture of them all abused him. Kicking him and calling him an “idiot” and a
“retard” in front of the entire class, the vulture with the biggest shoe in the
room stomped on his mind every day—shattering his fragile ego and plummeting his self-esteem into the bowels of nowhere. Ralph’s brain would turn to mush, with nearly
all electrical activity ceasing for the excruciating 50 minutes of sixth grade
math. Numbed into a catatonic state,
Ralph sometimes didn’t hear the bell signaling the end of his teacher-induced
purgatory.
Ralph awoke from his
latest nightmare at
Ralph slipped into the
garage. His step-dad’s car was at the
airport so he’d have to use his mother’s car.
His plan was moving swiftly now and a sense of calm enveloped him—keeping
the vultures and crushing shoes at bay.
The Judge’s internal clock
roused him at
The Judge, born James Octavio, was one of 500 men—nothing more than big boys
really—selected after boot camp for the underwater demolition team known as the
Navy SEALs.
Six months of brutal physical exercises began daily at
The Judge took his first
sip of decaf as he recalled the “lake” and that first little swim. The sun hadn’t risen in the east yet,
although the sky was beginning to brighten before dawn. The lake was really the
Swimming at night? the Judge had mused
at the time. The only time he had ever
swam at night was when he and some of his High School buddies had jumped the
fence at the Country Club’s pool to skinny dip—and got caught by the manager. Embarrassment was the first vow the Judge had
sworn to himself to avoid.
The Judge continued
sipping his decaf as he recalled his first, and last, skinny-dipping
escapade. Memories flooded his nimble
mind. The Judge inwardly wondered if he
was going senile. His morning routine of
sipping coffee and reviewing the day’s legal challenges was deteriorating to
musings of his past. Financially, the
Judge could easily retire at any time.
He wondered if this was what retired people did all day long: Relived their past? Did they always remember the funny things, he
wondered.
Many parts of his military
career hadn’t been funny, he realized with a grimace, and despite all the
swimming in various ponds, he hadn’t swam much in
The last one had come just
last month. “Yes, it’s clear,” the Judge
muttered into his coffee. He wondered
how his old colonel from that mission was getting along. Colonel Jack Schwartz. The Judge had heard he’d become a 3-star
general a few years ago, but hadn’t bothered to call him. He thought of the last Christmas card he had
received from him. It was sitting on his
desk in the study. He had read it and
saved it, as he did every year, but hadn’t called the phone number listed.
The Judge was now a board
member at the Country Club and he’d cleared his afternoon’s calendar for a
round of golf with Jeb Stewart, the owner of the
local newspaper, the Lunardi Bugle.
He frowned over the thought of the local paper. Jeb had claimed for
many years that subscription renewals were down because the population was
dwindling rapidly. Lunardi had over
eight thousand residents within its city limits in the sixties and seventies,
but only about 5,000 people resided there now, according to the latest
census. The Judge’s graduating class of
seventy-eight students had only three students left; himself, Jeb, and Brandon.
The Judge sipped the last
of his coffee as he pondered the date of his own retirement. He’d been married to the law for the past 29
years leaving no time for real dates. He
thought about the medals he’d been given, but the ones he hadn’t been given,
because of secrecy concerns, he had secretly wanted more, but complained to no
one.
The Judge’s nickname came
from his years on the bench as a hard, yet levelheaded judge who used words
that everyone could understand. Soon
after he had first ascended the bench, it became known that anyone committing a
crime against people, especially minors, could expect to receive the maximum
sentence allowed.
The Judge showered, shaved
and dressed in a light-gray suit for his short day on the bench, looking
forward to spending the afternoon with Jeb on the
golf course.
Mr. Yellirk poured some of the clear liquid he liked into his
coffee. He’d take it to school with him
along with a thermos of his expensive, fresh ground Kona
coffee. His head wasn’t pounding this
morning, so the coffee became more of a priority than aspirin, which was
unusual. He turned on the computer in
the den and carried his spiked coffee into the bathroom. He glanced at his thinning hair with a
frown. His youth was behind him, but his
senses felt sharp today. He dyed his
hair regularly now, to try to hide the gray at his temples. He opened his medicine cabinet and picked up
his toothbrush. The utensils he had used
several years ago to remove a persistent wart from his toe sat beside his
toothbrush unused. He hadn’t needed them
since he had had the persistent wart burned off.
Returning to the den, he logged onto the web and his
favorite service. Last night Tadpole69
had entertained him for several hours.
Tadpole69 was a handsome man who looked like a grown boy, actually, but
his cleft chin lent him a rugged appearance.
He was also rail thin with an effeminate demeanor. Yellirk was jealous
of Tadpole’s lack of a spare tire around his middle unlike his own stomach,
which had grown over the past few years.
He frowned. He never did anything
anymore, except use his home PC for these sessions.
He would have preferred to have a woman on the
screen, but since none had seemed to be willing to take him on last night, he
had settled for the handsome little tadpole.
As
a math teacher, Yellirk believed in numbers. He had been studying them all his life and he
had enjoyed twisting the tadpole’s probabilities into dangling possibilities of
more to come. Tadpole69 had taken the
bait, always trying to grab the carrot, but never getting more than a nibble.
Yellirk smiled at how well he had dominated last night’s
session. He entered an empty room on his
service and waited for a new session to begin.
It didn’t take long. Tannedbuns suddenly appeared on the screen with a brilliant
head of platinum blond hair. She wore a
light green turtle neck sweater and short denim skirt that exposed her long
slender legs. She sat on the chair
opposite him and crossed her legs at the knees in a subtle, yet provocative
manner.
“It’s
a gorgeous day, Tannedbuns.” Yellirk said with
glee, as he typed the words in the chat box.
“Let’s have some effing fun, shall we!”
Tannedbuns nodded her head.
Her thin lips creased into a slight smile. Her full brown eyes presented a hardness a
woman of the streets might have. Yellirk interpreted her look as a challenge. He glanced at her legs again, savoring their
beauty when he noticed some redness on each knee, just below the kneecaps. “Rug burns, Tannedbuns?” Yellirk asked the
room. “That won’t be your only problem
by the time I’m done with you!” Yellirk grabbed his mouse, unable to contain his
excitement. He glanced at his
watch. He could spare her about an hour
and a half before he had to go to work.
He typed on the screen. “Let the fun begin!”
Ricky Lombardo threw the
blankets off his bed, instantly alert.
His mind clicked through the things he had to do before school,
calculating the time needed against the current time. He booted up his PC. While he waited, he inventoried his homework
assignments due that day and began his regular, seventh-grade math class. He also had a Trigonometry assignment due,
but he had finished that yesterday afternoon, as soon as his tutor had given it
to him. A math prodigy, Ricky excelled
in all his classes, but math and computers were his favorites. He took some of the regular classes for a kid
his age, so that he might adjust normally—at least according to his parents and
teachers.
His fellow students had
groaned yesterday when the seventh-grade homework assignment was given: All the even problems on page 219. Ricky grunted. This was third grade stuff—at least for
him—because that’s when he’d learned it.
Only forty problems had to be done, but they were all long division—time
consuming tedium—since you had to show your work.
He
glanced at his PC. The video and ram
checks had already passed. Windows 98
Second Edition would load in the next 12 seconds. He tackled the first math problem of long
division. Two hundred eighty-nine
thousand one hundred and twenty-three divided by one thousand and
nineteen. Calculators weren’t
allowed. Windows loaded as he got the
answer, 283.73, rounded to the nearest hundredth.
He
got online. His first computer, a 486DX2
was long gone now, replaced by an IBM-compatible Pentium 4, 2.4MHZ with 512MB
RAM. While the modem made its weird,
handshaking buzzes, Ricky completed another math problem. Math was easy, but he wondered why the
teachers made the students do such inane exercises. Calculators were everywhere and Ricky had a
scientific calculator on his PC’s desktop to double-check his answers. Ricky shook his head in confusion. Once a person knew how to do long division,
subsequent problems, such as these forty in his homework assignment were simply
drudging.
Ricky
double clicked on notepad from his desktop and opened the file, ‘popkill.js’, from his javadocs
folder. The program was designed to kill
pop-up ads on the Internet, but it had some bugs in it. All the kids in his Middle School hated the popups because the ads had to be closed if a teacher came
by. It was easy to close one Internet
page quickly, but two or more Internet pages might not be closed fast
enough. Some of Ricky’s classmates were
getting caught. School policy dictated
that no students were allowed to be on the Internet during school hours for
personal use, but all the kids had yahoo or hotmail e-mail addresses and the
only way to check their e-mail was to get online. Ignoring school policy and the consequences
of not being allowed to go online for a full calendar month—the school’s
punishment for the first offense—the kids checked their e-mail and chatted
online, anyhow.
The worst popup was for a
mini-camera. Almost every site a student
visited had the advertisement for the X10 mini-camera pop up in a new window,
frustrating the kids immensely. Ricky’s
java program should solve the problem, but it might work only on the six IBM
compatibles in the PC lab. The bulk of
the computers in the lab were full of Apples and Macs. The kids hated them because no one had those
at home.
Ricky had seen an old
Apple IIE sitting in the corner of the lab one day and he had asked Stefan
Gale, a high school student who doubled as the lab’s part time network
administrator, what it was good for.
Ricky admired Stefan’s computer knowledge. An 11th grader who looked at
everybody the same way, Stefan always smiled with his lips twisted in a
lopsided grin and he had answered the question with his usual rapid fire
style. The Apple IIE was about 20 years
old, but it still worked. Only one
teacher used it anymore and Stefan had cautioned the teacher about its imminent
death. When it died, which might happen
next month, tomorrow, or in the next few minutes, no effort would be made to
save it and it would go straight into the garbage can, floppy disks and
all.
Stefan’s eyebrows always
rose above his glasses when he was done talking, as if to ask if what he’d said
was understood. Ricky had then asked why
the lab was full of Apples and Macs when all the kids were screaming for
Gateways or Dells. Stefan had explained
that a guy named Steve Jobs had created Apple Computer in his garage with
another guy about 20 years ago and they had sold millions of their PCs to
school systems around the country at discounted prices. They were the PC’s most of today’s teachers
grew up on, so that’s what was in the school’s labs.
Ricky’s 56k modem
connected and he quickly opened Internet Explorer, executed his javakill program and hit his bookmark for testing his
program—a site notorious for popup ads.
An error popped up on his screen:
‘Line 37 eol’.
Ricky smiled. ‘EOL,’ meant
end-of-line error and he quickly fixed the error by adding a double quote and a
right parenthesis to the end of line 37.
With only 43 lines of code in the program, there was a high probability
the program would run properly on his next try.
Holding the control key
down, Ricky clicked refresh. The popup
didn’t appear. “Success!” Ricky shouted at his screen. “Gotcha!”
Smiling, Ricky went to the
kitchen and filled a bowl with Marshmallow Mateys and
milk while he finished his math homework.
Finishing breakfast, he checked the time, placed his bowl in the sink,
grabbed his windbreaker and headed for the backdoor. He was running late.
Ricky flew through the
door, but stopped suddenly, as it slammed behind him. Eighth-Street ran in front of Ricky’s small,
two-bedroom house and an alley bordered the back. The bus stop was just a block away, but Ricky
never took it because of Matt Sonjie. Matt was the bully’s ringleader and the size
of an elephant. An 8th
grader, Matt was a foot taller than Ricky and two and one-half years
older. Rumor among all the kids in
school was that Matt had been held back in kindergarten. Ricky weighed 112 pounds completely clothed,
making Matt and Ricky perfect contrasts:
Ricky was slender with a large, bony nose, black hair, a narrow face and
wore glasses. Matt was built like an oak
tree with blond hair, a round face, and a pug nose with nostrils that flared
widely when he was mad or breathing hard.
Matt weighed 210 pounds and could bench press 300 pounds. If this was true, Ricky had calculated, the bully could probably toss him in a tree with one arm.
Matt was why Ricky had
stopped so suddenly. The bullies were
known to roam around the neighborhood before school looking for kids to torment
before going to the bus stop. Even on
the bus, kids were fair game for Matt and his gang. Ricky had seen so many bad things happen on
the bus, to him and to others, and especially to his friend Ralph,
that he had decided to walk to school instead. Ricky’s glasses had been broken five times in
the past 2 years by the bullies, and his parents were mad as hell each time.
Both of Ricky’s parents
worked at the local furniture plant, mass-producing chairs, couches and end
tables for retail stores throughout the
Ricky frowned over the
thought of his last three sets of broken glasses as he stood outside his back
door. He’d lied to his parents each time
because the first two times—when he’d told the truth—were disasters. The first pair had been broken at the bus
stop two years ago.
As Ricky had walked to the
bus stop on the first day of school two years previously, Matt had set his eyes
on him and there was nowhere to run.
Aaron Peete, one of Matt’s pals, had circled
behind Ricky when he wasn’t looking.
Matt had grabbed Ricky by his shirt and lifted him off the ground like a
feather. Ricky’s plastic pocket
protector, holding his mechanical pencils, pens, and markers was even with
Matt’s eyes as Ricky tearfully looked down at the bully.
“Whatcha
got new today, Nitch-scientist?” the bully had
growled up at Ricky, his feet now dangling 2 feet off the ground. Ricky remembered being frozen with fear,
saying nothing as his eyes darted up the street, hoping the bus would come.
“Can’t talk, Nitch?” the bully had hissed and then spat in Ricky’s
face. “That’s funny, you rat on everyone
else!”
Ricky had seen the bus
turning onto their street. Distracted by
the kids lining up for the bus, Matt had dropped Ricky to the ground. Aaron Peete had
been behind Ricky, on all fours, waiting for the moment when Matt would push,
or scare, Ricky backwards.
Matt had grabbed Ricky’s
favorite mechanical pencil from the pocket protector and said, “I’ll use this
today.”
Ricky saw it was his
favorite one. It had been a gift from
his uncle the previous Christmas. Not
thinking of the consequences, Ricky had grabbed the pencil out of Matt’s hand
and had boldly said, “My uncle gave this to me.
It’s not yours.”
The kids waiting in line
to board the bus had turned their heads when Ricky blurted that sentence
out. Ricky was much too small to give
Matt Sonjie any lip and nobody his size had ever
defended himself against Matt.
Matt’s face had turned a
deep red. Matt’s hand had grabbed
Ricky’s throat in a vise-like chokehold and with spit flying over Ricky’s face,
Matt had hissed, “You don’t never talk back to
me! Got it?”
Ricky had only enough
energy to nod as Matt had yanked his pocket protector out of his shirt pocket,
knocking Ricky’s glasses to the ground.
That’s when Matt had pushed him backwards, toppling over Aaron Peete’s back. Matt
had laughed loudly as Ricky had fallen in a heap on the ground.
Ricky had spied his
glasses at the edge of the sidewalk. As
he reached for them, Matt had put his left foot over them and had quietly said,
“Want your glasses, Nitch? You ever gimme any
lip again and I’ll squish you like a cockroach.
Like this.” Matt had then put all
his weight directly on Ricky’s glasses, crushing them into useless pieces of
plastic and shards of glass.
That was the first time Ricky’s glasses had
broken. When he’d told his parents, they
had agonized over what to do. Matt Sonjie’s father owned the furniture factory that employed
them. When no simple solution had
presented itself, Ricky’s father had stormed out of the house, no doubt to
drown away the sorrow of his son’s broken glasses at the local pub, where he
spent most of his time when he wasn’t working.
His mother had taken him to
the local optometrist after school that day and she had decided to tell Mr. Sonjie on her own, when she could catch him in a good mood
at the office. A couple of weeks had
passed, before she remembered to mention the incident to her boss. That had been a mistake.
It had become apparent
that Matt’s Dad, had spoken to his son about the
glasses when the bullies broke Ricky’s glasses the next morning. Aaron Peete, with
his weird, darting eyes had jumped on Ricky in the alley behind Ricky’s
house. Aaron had grabbed his glasses
right off Ricky’s face and tossed them to Matt a few feet away. Aaron’s lips had curled up in a sadistic grin
as Dutch Gibson, another one of the bullies, had laughed like a high-pitched,
stuttering hyena.
Matt had looked at Ricky, dropped
the glasses on the crushed rock of the alley and stepped on them. He had crushed them to smithereens just like
the last time. “Nitch,”
Matt had said. “Snitch again, and we’ll do this every day.” The bullies had left,
no doubt to torture someone else.
Ricky had been glad that
only his glasses were broken. A broken
arm would be a lot worse, he surmised.
Ricky had then walked downtown to get a new pair of glasses on his own. The optometrist promised to send a bill to
his folks.
At the end of the month,
the Lombardo household was in an uproar.
Ricky had forgotten to get the bill out of the mailbox before his
parents saw it. His Dad had come home
from the pub for dinner when he saw the bill.
Fortified with several beers in his system, he promptly picked up the
phone and called his boss at home. Mrs. Sonjie had answered at the other end, and Ricky’s Dad
slurred a tirade at Mrs. Sonjie. His mother had held Ricky as she cried
quietly, listening to her husband on the phone.
When his Dad had hung up
the phone, an odd look came over him. At
a loss for words, he simply hugged Ricky and said, “defend
yourself.” This had surprised
Ricky. He thought his dad would be mad,
but his dad then quietly walked out the door on his way to the pub. His mother held him more fiercely, trying to
rid her little boy of his hurt.
Ricky had looked up at his
mother’s soft cheek streaked with mascara from her tears. Ricky hated to see his mother crying and
vowed to do everything he could to prevent this in the future. He didn’t have a ready answer to the question
his Dad had prompted, so he asked his mother.
“How can I defend myself against three bullies at once?”
His mother had taken a
long time to answer. Finally, she had
said, “avoid them whenever you can until you can think of a way to fix them.”
The last three sets of
glasses were broken the same way. The
third set was broken the day after his dad had called Mrs. Sonjie. It had happened in the hallway at
school. Since Ricky had decided to walk
to and from school—avoiding the bus and the bus stop—the hallway in the school
was the quickest and easiest place to catch him.
Matt had grabbed him from
behind in a headlock with his powerful right arm, clamping his left hand over
Ricky’s mouth so he couldn’t shout for help.
Spittle had covered Ricky’s ear as Matt hissed, “you ever call my house agin, you’re dead meat. Like this.”
Matt’s bicep and forearm
had cut off the blood to Ricky’s brain from the carotid arteries. Ricky’s eyes had glazed over and his mind told
him it would be futile to fight. Where
were the teachers? Matt had then
released the headlock, grabbed his glasses and stomped on them in one smooth
motion. Another pair destroyed.
That afternoon, Ricky had
replaced his glasses at the optometrist, promising that his parents would pay
the bill. Each time thereafter, he had
scratched up enough money from fixing computers to pay the bill.
Ricky touched his glasses
as he glanced about his backyard, wary of the bullies. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, he ran to
the alley and looked both ways—not for cars—of course. Seeing no one, he trotted 2 blocks to the
railroad tracks which he began following to the Middle
School about 2 miles away. His friend,
Ralph, usually met him on the tracks because he had had trouble on the bus too,
but he didn’t see him anywhere, so Ricky continued on his way.
Ralph had started his
mother’s car in the tightly insulated garage and rolled down the windows a
couple of hours earlier. He had laid
down in the backseat with his eyes wide open in case the vultures returned.
Before his classmates were
awakened by their alarms for another day of school, Ralph’s eyes closed
briefly, against his will, as the carbon monoxide level in his blood reached 10
parts per million. When his eyes had
fluttered, he forced himself to take another gulp of the sour air. At 18 parts per million, the carbon monoxide
took over Ralph’s body, his eyes sealed open.
Twenty minutes later, at 24 parts per million, Ralph’s earthly nightmares
would never return—his brain a useless gray mass.
Ralph
forgot to leave a note about the bullies—and the worst tormentor of them
all—the biggest shoe in the class.
Mr.
Yellirk reluctantly logged off his computer and shut
it down. “Everything is a cycle,” he
told himself. He mused silently, “you’re
born, you grow up, and you die. Sine
waves have cycles, electricity has cycles.
Kids have bicycles and tricycles and motorcycles. I cycle kids through class day after day,
year after year. Even random number
computer programs have some kind of cycle, you just
have to figure them out.” He looked at
the blank monitor screen, smiling and speaking to it, “thanks, Tannedbuns! I’ll put
you through some more cycles this afternoon.
Your rug burns will be the last thing on your mind! You, too, Tadpole69.”
Yellirk got dressed, noticing his tightening belt. He checked his clothes and appearance in the
full length mirror in the hall. He was
only five feet four inches tall, but felt he was taller because he worked with
sixth graders every day. He frowned in
the mirror. He’d always wanted to be
taller, and bigger—everywhere. His
shoulders were narrow, his waist was large and he was short. He shook his head at himself in the
mirror. Maybe he should try to get back
into the gym on a regular basis.
He carried his thermos to
his car, with the special additive in a separate container. He almost made the mistake, once, of
pouring a batch of his potent brew to a fellow teacher, but he’d quickly made
an excuse and gotten away with it. Now,
he readily poured a cup from his thermos for anyone that asked, but never
offered anything from the separate container.
He
smiled as he exited his garage. “The
next cycle’s mine, babies!” He made the
10 minute to drive to his school with time to spare.
Just West of
Gary Gaskinal
paced the hallway, lost in the details of his imminent escape. His Addidas running
shoes made slight squeaks on the tiled floor with each step. The monotonous squeaks placated him. He liked routine. He liked knowing what was next. He didn’t like surprises. He had to be in control.
For the past several weeks
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
Satisfied,
His rheumy eyes watered at
the pleasure that was to be his. No more
homos to fight with in the shower. No
more reading psychiatric books in an attempt to trick the counselors
into believing that he was a whole, responsible human being who now saw the
error of his past ways and was ready to be a contributing member of
society. He’d done his time and he had
attended every damn group therapy session required, or even asked, of
him for the past 17 months, and he was just plain ready to go!
He looked between the bars
lining the outside of the window of his dorm cell. To the east, he could just make out the top
of Lunardi’s courthouse downtown, over the tips of
the firs, evergreens and oaks. Uncle
Ricardo’s School was now known as the URSO, the Unit for Reformed Sexual
Offenders. He rarely looked to the
north. There was nothing to see except
hills, sand, bushes, gullies and trees.
He focused on the view to the southeast and his goal—just a few hours
away now. A blacktopped road ran from
town past the URSO, with two gravel roads bisecting it in the foothills.
His errand would be done
on time. He felt confident. His heel pads were snug and in place. He felt like a giant. His eyes glistened with moistness as he
envisioned his ecstasy. She would be his
and no one could stop him.
“Dog-Man!”
“Yo-bro,
it’s cool to go,” Dog-Man answered, spittle flying from his lips, gasping at
every other word.
“Ya
need to yell like crazy,”
“Dog-Man,
cool, Daddy-O.” Dog-Man wheezed.
Beatnik was in on the
diversion and
“I’ll know if you smack
Beatnik.”
“What it is—“ Dog-Man gasped, “My man?”
“What?” Dog-Man wanted to
know about this new bonus. Thinking that
maybe hitting the crazy Beatnik would be worth it.
“You’ll like it. Lots,” Gary held back some more, getting the
desired effect of watching Dog-Man salivate even more. Christ,
“Don’t dig me no more, Jards.” Dog-Man used
the nickname
Dog-Man drooled as he
thought. “How I know the trusty’ll deliver?”
“What kind of pic?” Dog-Man was
hoping that the pic itself would outright bust the
trusty, who he didn’t like, no how.
“Three pics, Dog-Man, date-time stamped, last week. He was making
a shiv.”
Dog-Man groaned and
drooled like a baby teething.
“Deal dude.” Dog-Man managed to say, licking his
lips. “Gimme the pics.”
“Gotcha
your cover, man.” Dog-Man reached out and examined the digital pics printed in glorious color. “I’m in heaven!” Dog-Man instantly decided he’d deliver only
one of the pics to the trusty and the guard, keeping
the others for future blackmail.
Isabella Morales hurried
up the railroad tracks. She had never
been late to Middle School and she didn’t want to be late today. Her parents had literally sacrificed
everything they had for her, and she didn’t want to disappoint them.
Isabella had arrived in
Lunardi in July—after driving from
Ever since Isabella’s
mother was first pregnant with her, her parents had applied for a work visa in
the
The month-long drive
through northern
Her parents were extremely
excited about the move. They would live
in a house, (a real house, mind you), that had a roof. Flies would be non-existent in the house
because it had windows and the house would be warm in the winter because of the
furnace. No more hunting for wood! In the summer, when it got hot, the house
would be cool because of the aire condicionado (air conditioning) and most importantly;
it had hot and cold running water and plumbing!
Trips to the mountain stream for water would be a thing of the past.
When they had crossed the
border into
Her father had opened the
door for her mother, as he always did, and helped her out of the car. He brushed some of the road’s dust off his
clothes, tipped his hat at the wife he loved so dearly and made a deep, formal
bow.
Isabella glanced behind
her. Down the road, she could still see
the cars and crowds crossing the US-Mexico border. What were her parents doing?
As her mother remained
standing, her father again bowed deeply and in Spanish said, “Te amo con todo el amor de mi corazon.” Translating the idiomatic expression in her head as best as she
could, Isabella realized that her father was declaring his love for his mother
with all his heart. Isabella
thought it was touching, but not quite appropriate to do this outside of the
home, especially within sight of the international border with armed guards on
duty.
Her father then lowered
himself to his mother’s feet until he was on all fours and he kissed the
ground! Isabella was sure that her
parents were “loco”! Suddenly her mother was laughing, wiping dry
the tears from her face. Her father
stood and gave her mother a deep passionate, kiss! Isabella turned again to see how many of the
soldiers were on their way to arrest her loco
parents. She breathed a sigh of relief
to see none, as her parents ended their kiss and returned to their seats in the
car, holding hands and saying only, “Lo hicimos.”
What had they done,
Isabella wondered?
Isabella said nothing
until the car was back on the highway, traveling at normal speed. Speaking in Spanish, since her parents didn’t
understand English, she asked, “Why were you crying, Mama? And why did Papa kiss the ground? And what have you done?”
Her father had chuckled at
the questions and her mother just nodded with a smile as if to say to her
husband, “should you tell her, or should I”?
Her mother had explained
in Spanish: “When your father first asked
me for a date, my father was present, as it should be, to be sure that a boy’s
intentions are correct. My father was
not convinced of Ernesto’s true desires, so he had asked Ernesto if he would
worship me like his God and the ground He walks on. Ernesto said that he certainly adored me and
would worship me always. So, my father
let us go on our date, with my aunt as chaperone.”
Isabella’s father had
interrupted the story. “After the date,
and after having the opportunity to spend so much time with such a beautiful
woman, I was very happy and excited. I
immediately decided that I would marry your mother and that I would always
worship her as a God.”
“That’s when I caught him,
just outside our yard, kissing the ground we had just walked over.” Isabella’s mother interjected. “That’s when I knew that I would see him
again.”
Isabella thought that the
story was funny and romantic, but she would now dread the first time she would be asked for
a date. What would she say to the
boy? That he has to kiss the ground in
front of their house to prove to her Papa that he worships her? She wondered how many boys might do that as
they had continued driving north.
A dark, olive-skinned girl with naturally
curled hair, Isabella’s cheek bones were set high on the sides of her face,
like all her ancestors before her. Her
large brown eyes had a radiant sparkle that seemed to give her a perpetual
smile. She spoke English with a heavy accent
and quite literally; translating the Spanish words directly into English. Many of her classmates thought she was a
descendant of a Native American family, but that notion was a whole continent
off. Her parents were from a small
village just outside
These problems didn’t
bother her as much as the social pressures of school and 6th grade,
though. Isabella should have been in 7th
grade by now, but her English didn’t allow it—yet, especially in science
classes, where the terms were not only new to her, but in a foreign language as
well.
Her parents’ greatest desire
was that she excel in school and be involved in many activities, but they
didn’t understand what it was like to go to a school with so many
students. Her parents had attended
school only long enough to learn to read and write, before they had begun working
in the fields to help support their families.
The school they had attended in the mountains of
She followed the railroad
tracks and met Ricky. She evaluated him
for a moment. Frail, skinny and wearing
glasses, he looked harmless, but most importantly, his eyes showed no evil. Her mother always cautioned her to look at a
stranger’s eyes because they would often reveal their true intentions. She said, “Ello,”
forgetting to pronounce the letter h
in the English word, ‘hello’. Eager to
make new friends and to practice her English, she asked, with her heavy,
sing-song like, Spanish accent, “What eez you nombre?”
Ricky looked at Isabella
with a slight smile as they continued on their way up the tracks. He decided to take a stab at his rudimentary
Spanish. “May llamo, Ricky.”
“You walk to escuela all days
or you ride the boos some?”
Ricky laughed at her
pronunciation of bus, and quickly deduced that ‘escuela’
really meant school. Ricky saw that
Isabella’s hair was quite pretty and her face, although not beautiful like a
model’s, was very pleasing. He started
to feel a little shy talking with such a pretty girl, even though her English
needed a lot of work and she was a foreigner, which somehow made her more
appealing.
She reminded him of one of
the prettiest and most popular girls in school, Sofia, with her long, straight
blond hair and cute little nose set between sparkling blue eyes.
Ricky didn’t have strong
arms and a six-pack for abs—just a quick mind and a straight A
average—and who was interested in that?
Sofia and two of her friends, Gisella and
Sara, were cheerleaders for the wrestling team.
Ricky doubted that intelligence was the girls’ top requisite when they
were considering which boys to date.
Isabella interrupted his
thoughts of
Ricky realized that he had
been thinking again. It was a trait that
annoyed some of his friends because they never knew if he heard them. “I walk to school a lot because the bus isn’t
fun. There are a couple of bullies I
want to avoid, and walking to school solves that problem.”
“I have trouble too. With boolies. They have nombres,
Matt, Eron and Dootch. On boos last week Matt breaked
eggs in my hair. I hit Matt on face,
very hard, but he push me down on floor and Eron kick
me and call me, “wetback”, and Dootch spit on
me. No one give to me help. To me, I no want to ride on boos no more daz. I tell my Mama
and Papa, but they very worried about chief at the factory. My Papa work there. So they permit me to walk.”
Ricky was saddened to hear
about Isabella’s trouble. Something had
to be done about the bullies. Ricky
didn’t have the strength to stand up to them, but right now he thought he just
might be mad enough to try. Picking on
a helpless girl who didn’t speak English very well and throwing eggs in her
hair? How crude. But Ricky knew, first hand, that telling any
one of authority of the incident would just make life more miserable for the
person who told. Why was keeping quiet
about such awful acts always the best course of action? The unwritten code of conduct in the schools
was to never rat to adults about trouble with other students. After Ricky had read about the Columbine
massacre, he realized that it was really called a ‘Code of Silence’, but it
just wasn’t right. Ricky would have to
put his mind to it. Find some kind of a
solution. Unfortunately, he doubted the
solution would be as easy as his JavaScript popup killer.
Isabella continued with
her narration of last week’s event.
“They also make a mess of my lunch.
Step on it with their foots so I can not eat
it. I had nothing to eat. I had much hunger when I arrived home and my
Mama asked me why. I tell my Mama. She had much sadness and she cried. Then, she tell Papa and he want to kill boolies at very moment, but Papa remembered that Papa of
big boolie eez chief so he
do nothing. Yet today, Papa is very
mad. I walk now to the escuela so eez okay.”
Ricky was enraptured by
Isabella’s lilting voice and curious use of English. He caught himself staring at everything about
Isabella: Her shimmering hair, her
bright eyes, her dark ivory-like skin that seemed so pure, her hands and
brightly painted fingernails as they flicked through the air when she
talked. Ricky snapped back to reality as
he heard rapid footsteps crunching behind them on the tracks.
Some of the Middle School
wrestlers were out for their morning run, panting heavily from their
exertion. They slowed to a walk to catch
their breath joining Ricky and Isabella.
“Hey Nitch. Wazzup?” Jordan Keeb asked.
A chorus of ‘heys’ and nods followed from the other boys.
Ricky felt at ease with
these boys. They were into sports,
especially wrestling, and had never picked on him.
Isabella recognized Jordan
and Gordy from her math class and nodded a polite
“hello” at them.
“Hey. Whatcha doin’?” Ricky asked the boys, surprised that they had
decided to stop their run and walk along with them. Ricky purposely tried to use normal language
when talking with a group of kids from school.
Ricky had always sensed that he was different from other kids his own
age, but it wasn’t until he was in Mrs. Burred’s
second-grade class that the “difference” had become clear—it was his
intelligence.
When all of the kids in
Ricky’s second-grade class had been struggling with reading basic primers and
addition and subtraction, Ricky had been reading, The Hardy Boys;
stories written by Franklin Dixon about teenage detectives. It wasn’t unusual for Ricky to read one book
over a weekend. By the end of the first
half of second grade, Ricky had read every Hardy Boys book written. He had then read a few of the Nancy Drew books—about girl
detectives—but didn’t like them as much.
In second-grade math,
Ricky had excelled. Ricky was always the
first person to raise his hand for all math questions until Mrs. Burred had
asked him to stay after school one day so she could talk with him, privately. Ricky had thought he was in trouble and had
fretted about the after-school meeting the entire day. He was particularly frightened when he saw
his parents and the elementary principal hovering behind Mrs. Burred’s desk talking animatedly.
Mrs. Burred had worn her
blond hair parted in the middle around her high, wide cheekbones, but the deep
and loving blue eyes were what Ricky, and all her other students, adored. Ricky hadn’t realized it at the time, but he
had loved all his teachers in Elementary School, starting with Mrs. Ekdar in kindergarten.
Mrs. Burred had explained to his parents that Ricky was doing very well
in class, so well, in fact, that it was becoming a burden. Her suggestion was to have Ricky attend the
third and fourth grade math and reading classes so that she could devote all of
her energies to her other second grade students.
Initially, Ricky hadn’t
liked the idea because it meant that he’d see her less, but when Mrs. Burred
had explained that this would help her a lot, he had
reluctantly agreed. After all, he would
have done anything to help her. His
mother had loved the idea and had beamed with pride, but Ricky’s dad had
different thoughts on the subject of his son’s advanced intelligence. His dad had wanted him to just stay where he
was. Grow up like a normal kid, he had
said. His dad had been adamant about
being normal, but his mom, Mrs. Burred, and the principal, whom Ricky feared
more than any other adult, had insisted on the new process. His dad had relented when they had shown him
some graphs suggesting that Ricky was already reading at the 8th
grade level and with some assistance, his math would easily catch up.
“You
with us, Nitch?” Nate asked. Nate Campland was a
7th grader with a niceness about him that made him easy to talk
to. Ricky had never heard him say
anything derogatory about anyone. He
knew Ricky sometimes had a tendency to get lost in thought. Nate was the younger brother of Ricky’s
dream-girl,
Nate had been involved in
wrestling since preschool and was now one of the best wrestlers on the Middle
School’s team, but he never flaunted his accomplishments. Contrary to his
wrestling skills, it was rumored that he was a babysitter, and Ricky had seen
some of Nate’s friends tease him about it.
“Got any more girly jobs?” they’d ask.
It was true, Ricky had learned later, that Nate
did like to baby-sit his little cousin Jay for his aunt. When other moms had found out how good he was
with kids, he had begun earning a little extra spending money watching
toddlers.
Gordy Knockel was sweating
profusely, Ricky noticed. Gordy had just started wrestling this year and his pudgy,
pear-shaped body didn’t reflect the effort he was putting into the sport. Ricky felt sorry for him because Mr. Yellirk, the 6th grade math teacher, constantly
made derisive comments to him and Jordan.
Ricky had witnessed Mr. Yellirk’s crassness in
his class a couple of years ago. It was
a well-known fact among the Middle School students that if you were smart, Mr. Yellirk’s sixth grade math class would not be a
problem. The two or three smartest kids
would sit in the front row and would be Mr. Yellirk’s
pets.
“Could ya
help me with math again, Nitch?”
Isabella waited a moment
before replying. The English these boys
speak is too rapid and full of slang, she thought. But Isabella was delighted to be asked a
question. Too often, her lack of English
skills prevented her from being a part of a conversation, especially during
lunch when everybody was talking at once. Isabella wasn’t sure if
“Sure, I’ll help ya.” Ricky finally
answered Jordon, being careful to use improper
English. “How about this aft since we
get out early. K?”
“Did ya
hear the scoop on the baseballs in the backpack when Ralph walloped Aaron and
Matt? Why’d he do it?” Tanner asked no one in particular.
“They’re bullies,” Nate
answered easily. “They got no life and
they’ve been picking on Ralph for a long time now. I was surprised Ralph waited so long to get
at ‘em.”
Ricky was surprised at how
easily Nate called the biggest kid in Middle School a bully. It was true; Matt was a bully, but he was a
very large bully and if anyone called Matt that name,
or any derogatory name at all, Matt would probably stomp the life out of
him. “Doesn’t Matt scare you, Nate?”
Tanner, Jordan and Nate
chuckled as one. “Nope,” Nate answered
calmly.
“He’s huge!” Ricky stammered. “How can you not fear him?”
“You know that saying
about movin’ the world? How’s it go?” Nate asked.
“Give me a lever long enough
and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move
the world.” Ricky quoted. “Archimedes said it.”
Nate nodded his head in
approval as the other boys shook their heads.
Ricky was just way too brainy.
Isabella had only understood a couple of the words, and she was anxious
to see where this topic would go because she hated the bullies too.
“You got it, Dude.” Nate smiled easily, looking directly into
Ricky’s eyes. “I am the bar—and the
fulcrum.”
“Ten-four, buddy. Lights out!
First move’s a pin!” Tanner
laughed enthusiastically.
“Archimedes was referring
to inanimate objects.” Ricky stated
aloud. “Matt’s a live
monster. How does that help?”
Tanner chuckled. “You’re just too brainy, Nitch.”
Gordy was listening intently. Gordy wanted Nate’s
confidence, especially against the bullies and these were his primary
motivations in joining the wrestling team.
Plus he wanted to find out about the wrestler’s special gift called
‘NOO’. Gordy
knew he was getting stronger with each workout in the Barn, but it wasn’t
happening fast enough for him.
Ricky wished he had these boys’ courage,
instead of brains, which never helped him in a fight. “So where’s the lever and fulcrum come into
play?” he looked at Nate. “Matt’s about 75-pounds heavier than you and a foot taller.”
Nate shook his head. Ricky could quote verbatim some guy who had
been dead for eons, but didn’t have any logic.
“Dude, size isn’t always a good thing, ya
know. Sometimes the bigger they are—“
“The harder they
fall.” Ricky finished for him. Ricky smiled in understanding. “Now I get it. You know the way to take down someone bigger
than you!”
“I want to find out what
‘NOO’ is.” Gordy
blurted out, looking at Tanner.
Tanner answered. “I don’t know what it is and you know the
rule. Once you’ve got it, you can’t tell
anyone.”
“Your big brother, Peetey, has it.
Hasn’t he ever told you?” Gordy asked.
“No. And he probably never will. He doesn’t talk much. I did ask him once, and he just said it was
real important and special, but then he shrugged his shoulders and grimaced and
said he didn’t want to talk about it.”
Tanner said.
“What’s
it stand for? How do you spell
it?” Dillon asked, his long, red hair
hanging to his shoulders. He liked to
skate board and wore his hair long, like Tony Hawk.
“Don’t really know,”
Tanner said. “Peetey
never told me.”
“How do you get it?” Gordy asked.
“Don’t know that either,” Tanner
said. He was also curious about, ‘NOO’,
but had never asked his big brother again.
“All I do know is Peetey had won his
heavyweight match at State and about a week later a bunch of old men came to my
house and talked to my Dad, and then there was a meeting in the Barn and my Dad
gave it to him. My Mom cried that day,
but it was one of those weird, happy cries that Moms do sometimes. I was worried when I saw her crying and asked
her what was wrong, but she said she was happy.”
The boys digested this
information for a moment, perplexed at why girls might cry because they were
happy, but then Dillon asked, “So if you win a state wrestling tournament, you
can get it?”
“I don’t think it’s that
easy,” Tanner said.
“There’s nothing easy
about beating every wrestler in the whole state!” Gordy
exclaimed. “That must have been why he
got it.”
“No. The old men were sure about that. They said so.
Winning wasn’t enough to get it.
They talked about some money for the Barn, and a kid named Corey, but I
don’t remember him. I wasn’t even
wrestling when he was around.”
The group walked along the
tracks in silence, contemplating winning a state wrestling championship in
Ricky noticed
“Anybody can come,” Tanner
answered. “It was built with the promise
that anybody could use it. It’s not just
for guys on the team.”
“We usually go after
school,” Gordy told him. “But when wrestling begins next week, we’ll
go after supper.” Gordy
grunted, realizing his math grade might jeopardize his wrestling season,
too. “I need help with math, too. I’m in the same class as Jordan and Ralph and
Isabella. Could I join up with you
guys?”
“Sure,” Ricky said. Ricky successfully remembered to refrain from
sounding brainy. “I was gonna stay in the lab after school for a bit ‘cause I wanted to test my new popup killer on the PCs. How about my house about
three?”
“Yo,
dude, you gonna kill the X-10 popup and all the
others?” Nate asked enthusiastically,
familiar with the popup ads that came up unwanted by the user on some Internet
pages.
“That’s the plan,
man.” Ricky replied like a bard, instead
of answering like a nerd.
Isabella’s brow creased as
she tried to follow the boys’ conversation about computers, something she had
just begun using.
“What’s that stuff?” Gordy wanted to
know.
“PC stuff on the net,”
Nate chimed in. “The Nitch
writes code, dude, that makes PCs do things.”
“Yah, dude, I got
it!”
“What is P-O-C?” Ricky asked.
“Cake, Dude! It’ll be a piece of cake!”
“Any sweat in that,
Dude?” Nate asked, curious about whether
such a feat was actually do-able.
Isabella glanced at Nate with
his streaky-white blond hair blowing about slightly in the warm October
wind. The weather was like summer. The summer of the Indians, they called it. Her eyes roved across the boys’ faces and
settled again on the boy named, Nate, thinking how macho he was, but that
didn’t seem to be the right description.
A nice macho, she thought? She
shook her head, but smiled at the paradox.
Ricky thought about the
grade change concept for a moment. Since
he routinely helped Stefan with the school’s main servers and had a hack
program for passwords on a floppy that he carried with him at all times—and
also had available on the web in case he ever needed it—getting into the Middle
School’s grading system would be quite easy.
The problem was Mr. Yellirk. He was old-fashioned, and didn’t rely on
computers to keep track of his students’ grades. He wrote them all down in his grading book.
“Nope,
no sweat in that, Nate. I could change the grade, but it would be
like failing at Russian roulette.” Ricky
said, pausing to think about it some more.
“Russian
roulette? How do you figure,
dude?” Gordy wanted to know, since he hunted all the
time and was familiar with guns and the game of placing one bullet in a 6-shot
revolver and then pulling the trigger against your forehead as a suicide dare.
Ricky blurted his thoughts
before he realized he had said them.
“Changing a student’s grade would be a severe violation of the laws of
thermodynamics and if everyone did it, a thoroughly entropic
society would inevitably result. Not a
lofty goal.”
The boys looked at Ricky
for a moment, trying to comprehend the meaning of his statement. Isabella didn’t understand it, yet she
realized it must have been important to make the boys frown.
Ricky quickly explained
further, in an attempt to dispel his nerdiness, but
failed. “The first law of thermodynamics
says that energy can only be transformed.
New energy cannot be created. If
you turn on a light bulb by flipping the switch, the electricity necessary to
light the bulb is transformed into two new types of energy, light and
heat. The amount of energy in, is always greater than the amount of energy out, if you
exclude the by-product, heat. A
perpetual motion machine has yet to be invented because of thermodynamics.”
Ricky realized that he had
successfully lost everyone on this subject.
“The idea is that the amount of work you put into something should be
proportional to the work’s output, less some ancillary energy, like heat.”
Nate looked at Ricky with
curiosity. “Thermo-who? Hold the lectures, Dude! We just want
Ricky frowned. He realized he had went
overboard with the explanation. “I guess
what I’m trying to say is you can’t get extra for nothing. Mr. Yellirk keeps
his test and quiz scores in a handwritten book.
If we change his grade now and don’t get caught, we’ll have to do it
again for the next report card because math is like building a pyramid; you
have to have a solid base first. The
best way to get
“Like, no praw, man. I can
handle it,”
“Gotcha!” Ricky relied,
trying to get back into a normal guy routine.
“See ya
this aft, Nitch.”
“What nombre did those boys say you
have for a pet?” Isabella asked, as she
walked up the tracks with Ricky, unable to remember the English word for
nickname. She was glad to have someone to walk with on the way to school, and
happy that some of the most popular boys had stopped and walked with her for a
moment.
“They called me, Nitch.” Ricky
replied with amusement at her unusual phrasing of the question. The memory of how he got that nickname was
not a pleasant thought, but like some things in life, they just stuck to
you. “I don’t have a pet.” Ricky was also happy to have talked with the
wrestlers for a few moments. Nate,
Tanner and Jordan were definitely some of the most popular kids in school, but
they were nice, too. Something he hadn’t
expected. They had no pretensions about
people, or what group they did, or did not belong to, or how influential their
parents were. Ricky secretly wished that
Matt Sonjie, Aaron Peete
and Dutch Gibson, the infamous Middle School bullies, would act the same way,
but wishing and avoiding was all he could do in that arena.
“To me, I like you name, Reeky, more better,” Isabella said
with that soft, lilting voice Ricky liked.
Her voice reminded him of a trio of songbirds that he heard in his
backyard in the summer. “To me the
names, Matt and Eron, are malo.”
“Malo means bad?” Ricky asked.
“Si, I mean, yes. Malo means
bad.” Isabella was quite happy. She was walking to school with a boy on a
beautiful day.
Ricky wanted to keep the
conversation going with this pretty
“To me, it would be very
pleasing. But you have very busy helping
Jordan and Gordo.”
“Gordy.” Ricky corrected her. “What does gordo mean?”
“Peeg or fat.” Isabella was pleased that Ricky had already
taken an interest in her language. “Pero, like I say,
you have very busy helping Jordan and Gordy and
making things for the computadoras. You no have much time.”
“I can make the time. Helping Jordan and Gordy
will be about all the studying I’ll do today.”
Ricky slowed his pace a little as they neared the Middle School.
Isabella slowed down,
too. She was thinking that perhaps Ricky
wanted to say something to her. She
looked more closely at him, seeing his ironed shirt with the plastic thing in
his camisa
pocket full of a variety of pens, pencils, and markers. His glasses seemed a little steamy—the day
was hot, she thought. Unlike the boys
who had just left, he looked unfed.
“Skinny”, was the word that came to her mind. The words, very simpatico, and very inteligente also sprang to her. She was correct. Ricky did want to speak more.
“May I eat lunch with you
at school today?” Ricky asked her, wanting
to ask more, a lot more, but afraid of being rejected. He didn’t think he could handle the
negativity of asking her for a date and being told “no”, and having all the
other kids in school ribbing him about not even being able to get a date with a
foreigner.
“Si,” Isabella said brightly. “It would be pleasing to me.”
Ricky was elated. They left the railroad tracks and walked
through the school’s parking lot to their respective classes. “Did you bring your lunch or will you have a
hot lunch?”
“Todaz,
I eat hot lunch. For one daz for each week, my padres
let me buy lunch. I will look for you,
K?” Isabella eyes glimmered in the
sunlight. She had caught on to the
shortened form of the word for okay.
“K! I’ll look for you too. See ya!”