Damaged Read online

  Now one approached, its wheels slowing their spin, its door squealing open, welcoming him into the abyss.

  In order to catch it before it left him in the dust, he broke into a jog, head down, eyes forward, and shoes untied. The winter air brushed past him, all too cold.

  The freakish lazy-eyed girl and the mega-pig went on board, watching him, expecting him to foul-up. And as Adam looked up, the girls' forecast came true. Adam stepped on his untied shoelace, which was too long to begin with. The fall was so fast, he didn't know what hit him. His knees made a soft thud against the pavement, like a potato being crushed by a small brick. He held out his hands to protect himself and ended up scraping his palms off the rough concrete.

  The embarrassment was far worse than the injury. The two girls laughed loudly and for a long time. Adam could feel every single kid on that bus laughing as well, not giving two shit's less about his well being.

  He just sat there, asking God why it had to happen, why he had to take a spill in front of everybody.

  But God didn't answer. Adam took this as the answer—God did not love him. The Man Upstairs did not even like him.

  By the time he got himself together, he, more or less, woke up. Adam had had a mild panic attack. From the time it took the bus to get from Barb's Tanning Salon to its current location, Adam couldn't recall. It was the third attack he'd recently had, and as before, everyone and everything around him looked and sounded funny.

  The bus was parked aside him now, its door open, the driver, a decent-looking overweight gentleman with long blond hair who liked most kids, was laughing silently at him.

  Adam stood, dusted off his palms, and got onto the bus. The driver looked at him like he was a clown with a kick me sign taped to his back.

  "Hi," Adam said kindly.

  "Yeah," the driver said, shutting the door and shaking his head.

  Adam sauntered down the aisle, knowing what was coming. It did.

  "Have a nice trip?" one skinny redheaded boy in the second seat asked him.

  "It's winter," a very attractive brunette girl with braces in the third seat queried, "not fall!" She burst out laughing with her friend, a thick black girl who looked at Adam and said, "Don't look at me, retard."

  He went his way, very hurt, very angry.

  "Ever hear of Velcro?" one muscular kid wearing a Blake High School jacket said.

  Adam kept walking, passing more kids, who either laughed at him or mumbled something about him under their breath. He reached the back seat and sat alone, the only single seat on the bus. Nobody here cared about him, and he had done nothing wrong to anybody.

  ***

  Number 22 reached Blake High School at 7:45 A.M. Kids poured into the building. Adam did not want to leave the bus, but he knew he didn't have a choice.

  He was the last one to get out and the most reluctant one to enter through those glass doors.

  For him, entering the place was like being sucked dry of every decent emotion. True prison, physically, mentally, spiritually. Not the place to learn or make friends but a place to be beaten down by big kids with 4.0 grades and no real intelligence. In many ways, Adam thought it was worse than a high-security prison, save being stabbed and screwed up the ass by a three hundred pound queer. At least there you got sentenced for doing something wrong; here it was reversed. Being the frail one in this institution was its real crime.

  Many fish swam mindlessly around him. Some of the girls, attractive or not, flew in different directions, ignoring Adam as if he weren't even there. Oh, but they did know. They just didn't want him to be. They glanced at everyone else.

  Adam's face was always whiter when he entered, his mannerisms awkward and tense. He sometimes played with the lint or change in his pockets to ease the anxiety. His heart beat so quickly that he was afraid everyone else could hear it. He just stood there, the only stagnate one amongst them all, and watched them slowly dissipate.

  "Hey, queer!" one kid whispered in his ear from behind.

  As Adam went to turn, the kid, a dark-complected boy with curly black hair, shoved him. Adam's head, in mid-rotation, flew forward. The boy, Ralph Donaldson, the quarterback for the football team, burst out laughing with his jocular buddies. To them, he was nothing more than a punching bag they needed for football practice.

  Adam, knowing immediately who it was, took off down the hall, not exactly running, not exactly walking. Some of the girls pointed at him and laughed.

  Now they noticed him.

  He was completely invisible until they teased him; then he was the show.

  ***

  The bell rang a few moments later. The halls were empty within seconds. You could have cracked a whip and the teenagers disappeared. Adam entered his homeroom class just in time.

  The teacher, Mrs. Gavin, a short, skinny middle-aged woman, was writing something on the chalkboard. Now she is a nice one, Adam thought. She had given him A's when he really had failed, and she once even patted him on his shoulder while he was doing a test.

  For those grateful gestures, Adam would have given her the shirt off his back.

  She smiled and set down the chalk. "Hey, Adam."

  Adam took his seat—his favorite in the house—the last one in the back row. Not one teenager in class turned to acknowledge him, the ghost among the living.

  Students broke the silence and chatted amongst each other while they waited for the first-period bell to ring. Everybody knew at least somebody in here, all except for Adam. He had one best friend who he'd known since kindergarten and one pretty good friend who he'd known since seventh grade. That was it. And none were in this room.

  Adam missed Junior High. Somewhat. There, the harassment wasn't quite as bad. It was tolerable. He sorely missed primary school, back when he knew everybody, had a whole classroom full of friends, got excellent grades, and was once, in fourth grade, hoisted off the ground by his peers when he scored the winning point in kickball.

  He sat here with a tiny grin on his face, thinking about that time... when anxiety did not exist.

  The world's a cruel place, he realized presently. The grin was no more.

  Mrs. Gavin watched him from her desk as he sat there, his face void of emotion. She, like a mother, wanted to break the shell that surrounded him only too much. There was something very genuine about this beautiful young man, despite the box in which he was trapped.

  Then, work calling, pity diminishing, she looked back down at the students' test papers and began to grade them.

  Less than ten minutes passed when the bell rang again. As soon as the door opened, noise filled the building. Teenagers deafened the place with laughter, chattering, hollering.

  Adam stood, threw his book-bag over his shoulder, and left the room. The halls of Blake High made him dizzy. There were far too many kids and way too narrow a path. And if you accidentally bumped into the wrong person, you would usually get knocked to the ground with a bloody nose. In addition, he feared their germs. He did not trust where any of them had been before their stinky breath or infected skin got too close to his. He didn't trust anything about any of them.

  He walked down the hall, through a maze of young men and women, head lowered and eyes switching from ground to eye level. One boy, a freckle-faced behemoth, looked at him like he was going to break him in two. Then a stubble-faced girl with short, close-cropped hair, looked at him like he was infected with AIDS.

  Their dirty looks hurt him every time.

  "Hey, what's up, shitface?" one deep voice roared from behind. Adam thought his days were over. He thought the comment was directed straight at him, but when he turned, he realized it was Jason Corin, a rough, dirty redneck with an eighties mullet, joking around with one of his own buddies.

  Relieved, Adam turned and continued walking, headed for locker 108 to get his first round of school books. He was almost there and was trying to hurry before the bell rang again. He didn't want to be late like before, when Mrs. Steiner, his first-period English teacher, gave h
im a lecture about being tardy and ended up embarrassing him in front of the whole class.

  But his eyes focused on locker 108. He dropped his book-bag and grabbed the padlock, trying to remember the combination. He had trouble remembering things in public environments, where the fight or flight response generally took over. At home, he had a pretty good memory. He could recall ten digit phone numbers almost psychically. Here, in school, remembering three lame digits was like trying to memorize an encyclopedia.

  He got it right, luckily, and opened the door to a locker narrower than the pathway to Heaven. Adam knelt down and searched through his stack of books, looking for his English and Science texts. The English one, its cover bound in Kraft paper, displayed a very eerie pencil drawing of a fanged beast holding the severed head of a dead human.

  Or schoolmate.

  The science one had a drawing of a bleeding dagger with its blade piercing the top of a human skull.

  That's me, Mr. Creative.

  Before he could blink, he knew he was in danger. The sudden surge of fear struck him like a bolt of lightning. Somebody had sneaked up behind him and put him in a firm headlock.

  He couldn't breathe.

  "Hey, punk-assed bitch!"

  Adam gagged.

  "Who would win in a fight between me and you?" the voice said.

  Adam's face turned red. He knew a crowd was watching, for they grew very quiet.

  "Gah-" he groaned. Some kids started laughing. None came to his rescue.

  Adam thrashed about, struggling to get out before he passed out.

  "Yeah, that's what I thought, pussy." The kid released the sleeper hold and walked away.

  Adam coughed, face not only red from lack of oxygen but from embarrassment, too.

  He knew that voice.

  Pete North, redneck hillbilly. Adam's age, Adam's size, multitude meaner. He'd been giving Adam trouble since the eighth grade for no apparent reason. Pete just did not like him. He was another bully reject with three older brothers who could literally crush skulls.

  Adam sighed and grabbed his books while the kids around him spoke about him behind his back.

  "Weak."

  "Pussy from hell."

  "Couldn't fight if he had four arms."

  The bell rang, saving him from further accusation. He stumbled to his feet and ran down the hall, away from the laughing demons, and entered English class right before the shriek of the bell ended.

  ***

  "Almost late again, Mr. McNicols," the teacher said.

  “Sorry," he grunted, taking his least favorite seat: front seat, third row.

  The teacher, Mrs. Steiner, was a no-nonsense woman hell-bent on proper education. Just by counting the heavy wrinkles on her forehead, one could tell that she was knowledgeable. She could be crude and stubborn at times, and hated when students interrupted or asked dumb questions.

  Adam knew that she didn't like him, but at the end of class, he was determined to hand her over a story he wrote: 'The Dead World'. Set in the Dark Ages, it was about a warlock who controlled demonic forces. A real page-turner, Adam strongly believed. Not too bloody but pretty weird. His goal was to get her to proofread it and edit it and maybe even help him publish it in some respectable horror magazine.

  He just hoped like hell she would not criticize his work too seriously.

  Rejection sucks.

  "Okay, everybody, today we're going to read aloud a story, The Batter, a baseball story, from this book—" She reached into a box on her desk and pulled out a small, thin, paperback novella.

  Adam was already shaking. The hand with which he held his pencil resembled a trembling leaf.

  Talk... in front of other people!

  Back in eighth grade, he had to do the same exact thing: take a turn reading aloud. He read only one sentence before he began to stutter like a crazed deaf-mute. The kids busted a gut and the teacher had to hold back his own laughter. Thank God, Adam thought, he never had to do the impossible and actually stand up in front of class to do it.

  "We'll go row by row, each read about a page, and I'll ask you questions about the syntax of what you read."

  Adam's face turned pink. He knew he couldn't do this, and he knew that his every other peer could do it without thinking twice. To them, it was nothing more than eating potatoes; to Adam, it was worse than death.

  "Jim," the teacher said to the boy in the front row, nearest to the door, "will you start us?"

  Jim, a messily-combed nerd with thick-rimmed glasses who actually had a knack for dating attractive Sophomores, opened the book and read without a worry in the world: "It all started on the first day in June, when a young man named George Baashim set out to—"

  Adam looked around. There were twelve other kids lined up before him. That was not enough. She would eventually call his number.

  Only one and a half minutes later, Jim finished the first page. The teacher stopped him. "Okay, Jim, about the first opening paragraph—can you tell me the main phrase there?"

  "Um..." he said, scanning, "hit the ball?"

  "Yes," the teacher said, "usually, class, but not always, the first sentence of the paragraph is saying what we're in store for. It sums the paragraph up.

  “Okay, Cindy."

  Cindy started reading, and Adam's heart skipped a beat. With every proceeding person Mrs. Steiner called upon, the closer she got to him. He felt like he was walking the plank.

  And there was no way out.

  Ha, ha ha, he heard one of his demonic characters laugh in the back of his mind.

  You're doomed, child.

  Ten minutes passed. The kid sitting to Adam's left was reading page nine now. He was almost done, and Adam could see the teacher getting ready to pop a question. He could not stop swallowing. He licked his lips more times than a hungry bear. His hand, still holding the pencil, beat the eraser off the desk a thousand times a minute. His eyes were glued to the overhead clock. Still thirty minutes to go until the end of class.

  Would she skip him? Would he get lucky and the fire alarm go off? Or would he die from doing something so basic as reading one page in front of a class of people who all probably hated him? Die to death from a heart attack? So many things to go wrong and not one thing to go right.

  Mrs. Steiner asked Tammy, a pretty girl with big braces, some question nouns and pronouns. Tammy's high-pitched, chipmunk-like voice annoyed the hell out of Adam. He soon realized that the teacher was giving everyone progressively less reading time in response to her repetitive questions. He couldn't sit still. He shifted in his seat a dozen times, trying to dull the intense fear by daydreaming about one of his horror story adventures.

  It wasn't helping. He strove to find a way to escape—ask to use the bathroom? Run out of the room?

  Either were a no-go. They each would have embarrassed him just as much. He was fated to make a complete ass of himself.

  The blood really started to pump when Mrs. Steiner got to the second-to-last person in the second row. Adam cracked his knuckles, his neck, his feet, his back, waiting impatiently for the time to come just so he could get this dreadful deed over with.

  "Thank you, John," she said as she walked up an aisle, hands behind her back. "Any pronoun is a standin for a noun. They take the place of a regular noun. So, instead of saying George, you could say he. If this was first person, you'd say I. Or, if talking about someone else—you.

  “Okay, Mr. Silverly," she said to the last boy in the row, a tubby with bad acne.

  Still more accepted than Adam.

  Adam's heart went into overdrive. He closed his eyes, then reopened them, sorry he did. Every time he closed his eyes in public places and reopened them, he remembered he was not home in bed. It was a foolproof recipe for becoming lightheaded.

  He checked the clock seven times within a single moment. The tick of inevitability. What do I fucking do!?

  He looked at the door—his only way out. But if he took off, then came back, what would they think?

&n
bsp; Seconds ticked away, and John finished reading his page. Mrs. Steiner asked him a question about adverbs.

  Adam flipped through the book, bottom lip quivering, feet bouncing off the floor. He wondered if everyone else noticed his nervousness.

  I should have stayed home. Please, God, help me through this. I know I ask a lot, but just this once!

  "Adam," the teacher called on him, "will you read page fourteen for us?"

  For a long time he didn't know what to say or do. He almost forgot how to breathe. His groin burned from stress. He was not shaking or cracking his knuckles or moving around at all. And for a moment, he felt like he wasn't a part of his own physical body anymore but a spirit outside himself, observing himself.

  Some of the kids giggled as they waited for him to read, but the teacher shushed them and repeated, "Adam, please read page fourteen."

  They stared, some grinning, some shaking their heads, all wondering why this weirdo wasn't doing as he was told. Adam could feel their eyes. Everything was quickly becoming blurry, a mask of reality. His mind was going into overdrive.

  Then he opened his mouth, and words actually came out: "Second to... bat—bat—was, um, Billy Straight, uh, the lef—left hand—handed... kid with, with the um—" Not only was the stuttering bad, but his voice was tragically uneven.

  He tried and tried to read the words in the book, and even Tammy's distracting voice wasn't as high-pitched as Adam's.

  Definitely not his best moment.

  The teacher, however, seemed pleasant and patient enough. She stood by his side and looked down at him, confident he would get over his fear.

  "And—and—and—"

  The kids loved it. They were on the verge of turning the room into a barrel of laughs. They only kept quiet because they knew Mrs. Steiner was a tough old bitch.

  Quietly, anyway.

  To Adam, the words on the page bled together, then apart, scrambling before his eyes. On the tip of his mind, the exit door looked ever so tempting through which to pass.