B.u.g. Big Ugly Guy (9781101593523) Read online

  “Connecticut.” And then Sammy added—which was another big mistake, since he was not only dissing James Lee, but where he lived—“It’s one of the earliest states in the USA, in case they don’t teach that here. One of the original colonies. More American than the Midwest. Those thirteen stars on the first American flag? Connecticut was one. I was born there. And my parents. Both of them. And my grandparents. We’re not the foreigners.” He pronounced it properly and with particular care and compounded the mistake by pointing at James Lee. “You are.”

  He didn’t add that since his birth, they’d moved six times, each time farther and farther away from Hartford so his potter father could find a big enough and cheap enough place to build his pottery. Though his dad sold pots to major stores all across America, room for an outsize studio and a stand-alone wood-fire kiln was hard to find in their budget which, as far as Sammy could tell, was one step above the poverty line. One small step.

  That time, James Lee had pushed Sammy down, stepped over him, and at the same time had laughed. “Furriner. Can’t fool me. Catch that name? Greenburg. BURG! Leave out the r and what do you have?”

  When his friends looked blank, he added, “BUG, that’s what. He’s a green bug. And you know what we do to them?”

  If anything, the blank stares got blanker.

  “We squash ’em!” And James Lee had laughed.

  Only then did his friends laugh with him. “BUG!” they shouted. And from then on, that was what they called Sammy. They’d been shouting it when they’d sent him swimming in the porcelain pool.

  “Sammy!” Ms. Holsten snapped, and Sammy realized he’d missed whatever she’d said next.

  “Oh, sorry, Ms. Holsten. What did you say?”

  “I said, since it’s you, no detention.” There were mutters from the back of the room. Sammy could just make out the words “teacher’s pet.”

  This day just keeps getting better.

  He sighed. “Thank you, Ms. Holsten.”

  She gave him a thin smile. “Don’t let it happen again.”

  At least, he thought, there would have been some dignity in detention. The cool kids seemed to get detention as a matter of course; they did whatever they wanted and their school day was just a half hour longer. Sammy could have sat in detention and hung out with them. Explained that he had nothing against them, and shown that he got in trouble, too.

  But he knew instinctively things would never happen that way. He just couldn’t resist talking back to the bullies. Cutting them down with his tongue. If he could only learn to suffer in silence, they’d probably get bored and turn on someone else.

  Being quiet’s just not in my DNA, he thought, all the while doubting that any of the boys who had dunked him had a clue as to what DNA was.

  Besides, he told himself, by missing detention I can get home before they get out. Because most of them are in detention every day. And that’s in their DNA.

  Then he had a darker thought. Better watch out at lunch.

  Lunch was a jostling, shoving scrum, where kidney punches could be delivered with no teacher the wiser. Besides, the food could be spit on, sneezed on, boogered, soiled. And there was the long, lonely walk while carrying a tray full of food back to his seat, dodging legs that suddenly shot out to trip him.

  Yes—lunch could turn out to be even worse than the trip home on the bus. At least there, the driver—a hairy man named Baer who looked like he really did have bears somewhere on his family tree—kept order by turning his head and growling at any misbehavers. Sammy had actually considered bringing him a jar of honey but had resisted the idea at the last moment. He wasn’t sure Mr. Baer’s sense of humor was any more advanced than the Boyz.

  A few hours later, when Sammy entered the cafeteria, he realized that today’s lunch was going to be different.

  Very different.

  Because his tormentors had found a new target.

  Skink.

  2.

  Lunch Is a Battlefield

  By Sammy’s estimation, Skink had made three rather large mistakes.

  Number one, he’d sat down at the center table. Everyone knew that table was reserved for James Lee Joliette and his ninth-grade crew. Even if Skink hadn’t known anything about them, he should have recognized their clubbiness by their leather jackets and combat boots and by their hair, cut as short as their tempers. Clubbiness might not be a real word, but Sammy thought it fit. They were the Toilet Dunkers Club.

  Number two, Skink hadn’t moved when Joliette and crew showed up. He might have been let alone if he’d admitted his mistake, being a new kid and all. If he’d laughed at their jokes about him, stood up and found another seat, preferably one on the other side of the room, close to the door. But Skink seemed to be content to sit and pick at his meal while James Lee loomed over him, yelling in his ear.

  He doesn’t even have the sense to look scared, Sammy thought.

  Third mistake—and, Sammy figured, probably the most important—Skink had been born black. A light black. Sort of a hot chocolate with lots of cream color. He had strange lozenge-shaped eyes. Sammy didn’t believe in aliens, and sometimes wasn’t entirely sure about God, either. However there was something wonderfully, comfortingly alien about Skink in the sea of pasty white faces in the lunchroom.

  But James Lee hated people who were different. James Lee’s father was well known in town for his drunken tirades about what “furriners” had done to this country, meaning anyone who hadn’t lived there, in Hicksville, for at least three generations. James Lee had obviously inherited his old man’s views.

  Sammy’s dad had smiled when he first heard this and said, “We’re in the middle of the Midwest. What immigrants is he worried about? Canadians?”

  Sammy’s mother had laid a hand on his shoulder. “Us,” she said.

  With Skink, the differences were all right out there on display. James Lee didn’t need a week to discover them.

  “You’re at my table, kid,” James Lee said. “You’re in my seat.”

  However, Skink didn’t look offended or upset or scared, all of which made sense to Sammy. He looks kind of . . . peaceful. Sammy gulped. He must not realize the danger he’s in.

  “Okay, listen—if you don’t get up on your own, I’m gonna have to make you.” James Lee’s voice cut like a knife across the lunchroom. Everyone heard it.

  The prospect of James Lee making Skink move seemed to cheer his crew and a few of them began to grin.

  “Up!” one of them added, and giggled. It was a surprisingly high giggle, and he was rewarded with an elbow in the side by one of his pals.

  “Shut up, Marv,” the elbower said.

  Now, Sammy knew that James Lee was a lot of things. Most of them bad. But Sammy had no reason to think of him as a liar. If he said he was going to make Skink move, then Skink was going to get moved.

  It’s simply a law of nature, like gravity, Sammy thought. Or tornadoes. They knew a lot about tornadoes in that part of the Midwest.

  If James Lee didn’t move Skink himself, his crew would. Individually, they were already the size of most of the seniors and already all on the football team, not just James Lee. Next year, James Lee, like his older brothers, was sure to be a starter. After all, his uncle Billy Jack Joliette was the secondary coach.

  “You’ve got till the count of three.”

  Skink moved his tray to one side.

  “One . . .”

  I’ve got to help him! Sammy thought. He’s got to get out of there!

  “Two . . .”

  Here goes nothing. . . . Sammy opened his mouth to shout, though he wasn’t quite sure what would come out. He was certain that after the shout—which was just to get everyone’s attention, like the old joke about hitting a mule on the head with a two-by-four—there would have to be some begging and then something amusing. Something very amusing. Oft
en Sammy could get out of the worst of things by making James Lee and his cronies laugh. As long as the joke is on somebody else. They had absolutely no sense of humor about themselves.

  Whatever he did, though, Sammy knew he had to do it soon. After all, Skink was someone who might become a friend, and Sammy didn’t want to see him hospitalized on his very first day.

  Sammy cleared his throat. It wasn’t quite a shout, but nonetheless it worked. For a second, James Lee turned toward him.

  “James Lee,” Sammy began, “Skink . . .”

  “Shut up, Bug,” James Lee suggested.

  Before Sammy could get anything else out, Skink looked over and shook his head.

  “I got it, Sammy,” he said. And stood up.

  James Lee smiled like a snake—all thin lips and no teeth. “Good choice. I’d hate to mess you up on your first day. Now move along.”

  But Skink didn’t move. Instead, he stood there, feet about shoulder-length apart, arms away from his sides. His eyes were no longer focused on Sammy, and they never went over to James Lee. Instead he seemed intent on a spot either directly behind Sammy or infinitely more distant.

  “Skink,” Sammy said again, a pleading note in his voice. Wondering if this was always going to be his role, putting his own body in place of someone else’s. Getting dunked for someone else. “Skink.”

  “Move it, kid!” James Lee sounded a bit exasperated. This may have been the longest time anyone hadn’t done what he told them to since first grade.

  And maybe, Sammy thought, James Lee was afraid of having someone defy him successfully. Because . . . because . . . Sammy almost had it, the key to James Lee’s personality.

  Before Sammy could finish that thought, Skink’s whole body tensed, and he inhaled loudly, causing James Lee to take an uncertain step backward. Then Skink’s right hand flashed high in the air, and he shouted a loud “Kee-eye!!” and plunged his hand down almost faster than Sammy could follow, punching right through the table.

  The Formica top shattered where he struck it, and the whole thing folded in on itself, collapsing to the floor with a horrible clatter.

  James Lee couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the broken table. Neither could anyone else in the suddenly graveyard-quiet lunchroom.

  “I don’t want to sit here anyway,” Skink said without smiling. “The table’s broken.”

  He walked away from James Lee and moved evenly toward Sammy, his shoulders squared back, head high, hands at his sides.

  The lunchroom went from deathly quiet to a standing riot in about twenty seconds, little Bobby Marstall leading the yells. Sammy didn’t know where to look—at Skink or James Lee or the seventh graders all of whom were clapping and high-fiving and grinning. But his attention was suddenly focused on Skink who was closing in on him.

  When he was close enough to speak, Skink said quietly, “I think I might have broken my hand.”

  Sammy glanced down at Skink’s right hand. It did look alarmingly swollen. “Let’s go to the nurse!” he hissed.

  Skink shook his head. “We’ll eat first.”

  “Okay.” It seemed the right thing to say. The only thing to say. Despite his obvious pain, Skink grinned. “You’ll have to share your lunch.” He waved his left hand at the heap that used to be a table. “Mine is somewhere under that.”

  Sammy chuckled uncertainly, and they walked to a table far away from the still-gawking James Lee and his crew of cretins. Walked away to a table by the door.

  3.

  Nurse, Hearse, and . . .

  There was only one other person at the table, a dark-haired eighth-grade girl with a long face and a deep dimple in her cheek. Sammy had never had the courage to speak to her. She was as much a loner as he, but it didn’t seem to trouble her. In fact, she wore that aloneness like a badge. Her name—he whispered it under his breath—was Julia Nathanson. It had a softness to it that he liked.

  He didn’t even dare ask if they could sit with her, but she nodded at them anyway, the tips of her straight hair coming together to veil her face, hiding the dimple.

  “This is good,” Skink said, his voice straining through the pain.

  They sat down and Sammy shared what was on his plate. They began to eat slowly, as if nothing was wrong or changed, though everything was wrong and at the same time changed beyond recognition.

  Several seventh graders—Bobby Marstall and another boy and a girl Sammy didn’t recognize at all—came over and tried to sit down with them, but Sammy waved them off.

  “Skink needs quiet after that karate chop,” he told them. “Julia stays because she was here already.” He was breathless having said her name, but she gave no sign that she had even heard him.

  The kids nodded, and Bobby spoke for all of them, saying, “Great karate chop, man!” Then they left, but not before Bobby whispered over his shoulder, “And thanks, Sammy.”

  Sammy grinned and was about to explain it to Skink, when Skink spoke first.

  “Not karate,” Skink said, his voice tight with pain. “It’s called Hwa Rang Do.”

  For a minute Sammy worried that Skink’s broken hand was making him feverish and that he was rambling. But then Julia repeated it.

  “Not karate. Hwa Rang Do,” she said to her tray. “The Way of a Flowering Knight. It’s a Korean martial art, eighteen hundred years old.” Then she took the tray and left the table, dumping what was left of her lunch into the proper bins.

  “She’s right,” Skink said. “How’d she know that?”

  “I have no idea,” Sammy said, hoping to stop thinking about Julia Nathanson, “Eighteen hundred years old?”

  Skink nodded.

  “Whereas,” Sammy used one of his favorite words, “whereas you and I are thirteen.”

  “Well, actually, I’m almost fifteen. Lost a grade with all that moving.”

  “Well, I skipped a grade so I’m not quite thirteen. In the spring. My mom tutored me.”

  “That’s quite a not quite,” Skink said.

  “We’ve moved a lot as well,” Sammy told him.

  “You, like, an army brat, too?”

  “Nah—a pottery brat.”

  Skink just nodded as if he understood. And maybe he did. Or maybe it made no difference to him, and he just accepted Sammy as he was.

  Julia returned and looked at them through her hair. “It’s none of my business, but I think your hand is swollen and you should do something . . .”

  “I’m fine,” Skink said.

  “He’s fine,” Sammy added.

  Julia shrugged. “Just saying.” She turned, walked a few steps away, then shook the hair away from her face. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure.” They said it together, Skink’s voice tight with pain and Sammy’s tight with . . . well, with what he wasn’t quite sure.

  Julia shrugged again. “Okay then.” Without saying a word more, she went straight out the door, not looking back.

  “Nice girl,” said Skink, his voice still controlled, like a clock too tightly wound.

  “Yeah,” Sammy said, trying to match that control and failing. His voice cracked as if the word had two syllables instead of one.

  They were silent for some time after that, sharing the food. Skink ate clumsily with his left hand, all the while cradling his right in his lap. This gave Sammy time to consider what they should do next. At last he said, “The nurse is down the hall from here.” He gestured out the cafeteria door. “I’ll hold your back.”

  “It’s my hand that hurts, not my back,” Skink said.

  “I’m not holding your hand,” Sammy said. “Life is tough enough here without . . .”

  “That’s a joke, Samson,” Skink said, and got to his feet without help. “I think I’ll skip the nurse and go straight home. My dad always says ‘Go to a Nurse, Send for the Hearse.’”

  “That’
s an odd saying.”

  “The major’s an odd man,” Skink replied, and walked into the hall.

  Sammy blinked at his back, then got up and quickly followed. “You call your dad ‘the major’?”

  “Not, like, to his face.”

  Sammy pulled a cell phone out of his backpack. “What’s your home number?”

  “Awesome,” said Skink. “My parents won’t let me have a cell.”

  Sammy shrugged. “My parents won’t let me go anywhere without one. Not since the day I came home from here with a black eye.”

  Skink looked at him under drooping eyelids. Sammy suspected that was because of the pain. “When was that?”

  “The second day of eighth grade. And now it’s nearly Thanksgiving break. Lots of fun’s been had by all in such a short time.” It came out much more bitterly than he meant.

  Skink gave him the number, and Sammy dialed, then handed the phone to his friend. Friend. The word seemed odd here in the halls of Madison Junior/Senior High School where friends had been pretty thin on the ground. Sammy rolled the word around in his mouth, which is what he liked to do with any word he especially liked. Friend.

  After speaking a few sentences in hushed, tight tones, Skink handed the phone back. “The major’s coming to get me.”

  “Does it hurt badly? Your hand?”

  Skink lifted his right hand up with his left. They both looked at it. It was clearly swollen and a bit bruised looking at the knuckles, though with Skink’s dark skin that was hard to tell. Skink wiggled his fingers tentatively. “Maybe not actually broken.”

  “That would be good.”

  “That would be, like, excellent.” Skink’s face lit up as if pain were only a memory. “I’m a guitar player. Well, actually, I’m learning to play.”

  Sammy started grinning like a manic Halloween pumpkin. “I play music, too.”

  “Guitar?”

  “No—clarinet.”

  “Get out.”

  “Only Madison has no school band.”

  “That’s all right. I wouldn’t want to play music with this bunch,” Skink said. “Imagine what James Lee would play.”