Crush

1

Go to hell, Jonathan Barnes thought, looking up at the round, sweaty face of his English teacher. Mr. Weaver hovered over him like an angry bear in a cheap blue sweater-vest, ready to take off his head.

“Answer the question,” Weaver said.

This sucked. When the teacher first asked his question, four kids had shot their hands up like Weaver was handing out cash. But did he call on Anni Moss or Derek Peterson or one of the geek twins, Matt and Pat? No. He jabbed his fat finger at Jonathan.

“Mr. Barnes?”

Jonathan shrugged.

“Am I supposed to decipher an answer from Maybe not, but Jonathan had a gesture the guy could decipher. It consisted of a single finger. Shouldn’t take the teacher long to break that code.

“I’ll ask you again,” Weaver said. “What was Iago’s motivation in turning Othello against Desdemona?”

“I guess he didn’t like him very much,” Jonathan said.

His classmates laughed. Mr. Weaver lowered his head and shook it slowly.

“Well, thank you, Mr. Barnes. I’m sure Shakespeare would appreciate your carefully thought-out response. When jotting down his little play, his greatest concern must have been conveying the notion that Iago didn’t like Othello very much. Rarely has a layered piece of classic literature been so brilliantly reduced to the obvious.” Weaver gave him a final look of disgust and turned away. “Can anyone else add to what Mr. Barnes has told us, or should we just accept his wisdom and move on?”

The same four hands shot up.

“Yes, Anni?”

Ass, Jonathan thought, bowing his head, pretending to take notes. Of all his teachers, Gary Weaver was the worst. The guy had loathed him on sight and did everything he could to bust Jonathan’s chops. Even when Jonathan answered questions correctly, Weaver made a wisecrack, like his hatred was an allergic reaction to Jonathan’s presence. He’d been through it before—with teachers, with classmates. After a while, you just got used to the crap and ignored it.

Jonathan looked up from his notes. Scanning the class, his eyes immediately caught sight of a girl in the second row on the far side of the room by the door. His heart raced a little as he gazed at her profile.

Sometimes he thought the only reason he came to class at all was to see Emma O’Neil. She had a beautiful heart-shaped face and short dark hair, almost black, that jutted away from her scalp in a perfectly calculated shrub of spikes. She was a popular girl, but not one of the stuck-up super-model wannabes most of the other privileged girls were. No, Emma was something else. She played piano for the jazz band and worked on the school paper. She didn’t seem interested in dance committees or cheerleading. Emma was too cool for that kind of thing, had too much depth. She even said hi to him sometimes. It was always in passing, always too brief, but Jonathan was grateful. It brought some light to the dark. She made school bearable.

“Are you getting this down, Mr. Barnes?” Weaver asked, shocking him out of his thoughts. “It will be on the test.”

Jonathan lowered his head and pretended to read over his notes. It wasn’t like Jonathan didn’t know the answer to Weaver’s question. He knew it, but he wasn’t going to go through another year as a “brain.” That would be like tattooing the word “victim” on his forehead. As it was, he figured he might as well set up appointments for the jocks so none of the “Roid Patrol” missed their chance to throw him against the lockers. Besides, class participation was a minor part of the grading system, and Jonathan always did well on tests. He kept the As to a minimum, for the same reason he didn’t volunteer answers in class, but his grade-point average was good enough to get him into a college far away from Westland High School.

On his notepad, he wrote: Iago was passed over for promotion; Iago was jealous of Othello because he wanted Desdemona for himself. These were the answers Anni Moss gave, and they seemed to satisfy Mr. Weaver. To these Jonathan added Iago believed his wife cheated on him by sleeping with Othello (that whole thing about “’twixt my sheets—Has done my office.”) And Iago grooves on evil—“If thou canst cuckold him, thou dost thyself a pleasure, me a sport.”

Jonathan appreciated that last line. He’d underlined it in his text, memorized it. It was kind of cold-blooded, but it totally made sense to him: Some people just got off on throwing a hurt. It didn’t matter who they were hurting. They just grooved on the humiliation they handed out. The Roid Patrol didn’t know him (not really), but that didn’t stop them from throwing him up against the lockers every chance they got. It was a sport, a thrill, a quick fix of happy-giggle-fun for a bunch of brain-dead muscle zombies. Same with Mr. Weaver.

Evil tastes like candy, he wrote.

He smiled at this. He cast another quick glance at Emma, then returned his attention to his teacher, who stood at the front of the class holding a tattered old copy of Othello in his hand. With the other hand, Weaver yanked down the hem of his blue sweater-vest. The teacher was talking about the result of Iago’s deceit, the end of the play.

In his mind, Jonathan pictured Weaver in a long white robe, his sweaty head like a pale pumpkin on top of a draped table. The teacher was stomping back and forth, pointing his finger at Anni Moss, the way he’d used it to pick out Jonathan to answer his question. He imagined Weaver screaming at Anni and lunging forward, grabbing her around the neck and strangling her like Othello did to his wife, Desdemona. Anni’s body fell to the linoleum floor, her blond hair fanning out from her lifeless face. Then Weaver pulled out a dagger and said, “I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee: no way but this/Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.” Then he plunged the knife into his chest. But instead of opening him up and drawing blood, the blade popped the plump teacher like a balloon, causing him to soar around the room making farting noises as he deflated.

Jonathan chuckled at the daydream, looked around to make sure no one was noticing, particularly Emma O’Neil. He’d freak if he saw her looking at him like he was a psych-ward reject. Fortunately, Emma was focused on her notes. But to his surprise and embarrassment, someone else was noticing.

She sat three rows ahead of him and to the left, by the window. Her name was Kirsty Sabine, and she was new at Westland High. She was a bland-looking girl with straight dirty-blond hair that fell to her shoulders like a rough cloth. Her face wasn’t ugly, but it wasn’t pretty, either. It was just plain. Jonathan quickly looked away when he noticed her looking at him. She was even smiling, like they shared the same joke, like she’d seen his thoughts and found the idea of their teacher farting through the room and growing smaller as funny as Jonathan did.

He looked at his notepad, and the first thing he saw was the line Evil tastes like candy. He took his pen and scribbled it out.

As expected, he made it halfway to his history class before the Roid Patrol locked their sights on him. He didn’t see them coming up from behind, but suddenly he was thrown off balance, his feet lifted off the ground. He hit the wall of lockers hard, causing the dangling combination locks to clatter like applause. His books slid along the floor, and he barely kept his face from joining them. But he’d learned to recover quickly from such attacks. He looked around at the smiling faces passing him in the hall, wondering how many people had seen this latest humiliation (Not Emma, he thought. Please not Emma). Then he stopped looking, realizing it didn’t matter if she was an eyewitness to the event. Everyone in school already knew Jonathan was the Roid Patrol’s tackling dummy.

“Nice!” Toby Skabich said with a throaty laugh. He whipped his hand in the air to high-five Merle Atkins (whom everybody called “Ox”). Next to them Cade Cason was doubled over with laughter. They celebrated tossing Jonathan against the lockers as if it were some brilliant football strategy, rather than a daily occurrence that took no more thought or skill than crushing an empty soda can.

Jonathan said nothing. What was the point? He couldn’t take them in a fight. No way. Even one on one, he probably couldn’t have done much more than land a lucky punch (maybe on Toby…no way on Ox or Cade).

Jonathan was built small. Not only was he shorter than most of the other juniors, he was slender. His arms were like twigs, and there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it. He’d spent an entire summer going to the YMCA to lift weights, and at home he chugged protein shakes—anything he thought might add some bulk to him—but he was still “Little Jonathan,” hardly any different than he’d been in junior high school. His mother told him it was the way God made him and he might as well get used to it. So he avoided confrontations with the Roid Patrol, kept his mouth shut. He might be able to get away with throwing lip at Mr. Weaver (because teachers couldn’t really do anything), but the Roid Patrol could hurt him, and they would if he gave them a reason to.

Still laughing and clapping each other on the back, Toby, Ox, and Cade turned into a classroom at the end of the hall. Jonathan knelt down to get his books as other kids pushed past him, eyeing him and smiling, knowing what had occurred whether they had seen it or not.

“Jerks,” Jonathan muttered, addressing all of the students, not just the Roid Patrol. Only a handful of kids at Westland High were even remotely cool to him. They nodded to him in the hall, exchanged smart-ass remarks with him in classes. Like the occasional greeting from Emma O’Neil, these interactions were too brief and led to no close friendships. Fact was, he was on his own. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t like any of the cliques handed out a checklist, telling you why they hated you. His friend David, who unfortunately had been transferred to the “gifted program” at Melling High last year, said it was because Jonathan didn’t “try” to fit in. So the kids didn’t know what to do with him.

“You’re not weird enough to be a geek. Not big enough to be a jock. You’re too smart to be a burner. With the way you dress, you’ll never join the FBI” (a David-created acronym standing for Fashion Before Intellect). “You are a unique beast among the herd, and they are bound to see you as a predator or prey.”

Great, Jonathan thought, standing up with his books clutched in his arms. Obviously the herd had decided on prey.

At least his humiliation was complete for the day. The Roid Patrol never struck twice, and his history teacher, Mrs. Locke, was cool—as boring to watch as a snail, but fine. Furthermore, it was Friday. That meant he had two full days to put Westland High out of his head, before he once again had to step into its dangerous halls.

Of course, that meant two days without seeing Emma O’Neil. That would suck, but at least his shoulder would have a chance to heal.

He couldn’t know that certain events would occur over the weekend—events that would change Westland High and his life forever.

Jonathan’s home was an apartment in a vast, flat complex north of town. The single-story buildings sat like a hedge maze on a rise above a rocky, nasty field of scrub grass. The white paint on the apartment’s walls was graying and glum. It had been that way since his father moved the family in four years ago. It needed a fresh coat of white. But the apartment complex management didn’t care, and his father didn’t believe in “putting money into other people’s property.” Truth was, his father didn’t believe in putting money much of anywhere that didn’t include a betting window or a bar. Jonathan gave up on any hope of an allowance when he was ten years old. Instead, he worked odd jobs in the summers until he turned sixteen; then he filled out an application and was hired by Bentley Books in the mall, working a couple of nights a week and Saturdays.

The job wasn’t going to make him rich or even raise his standard of living. He saved his money for the sole purpose of getting out of town once he graduated from Westland High. Oh, he might crack into his account if Emma agreed to go out on a date with him, but likely that would signal the apocalypse or something. Though his meager savings were not likely to pay for four full years of college, it was a start.

Jonathan walked into the apartment. The lights were off, and he wondered if his father forgot to pay the bill again, or if his mother just never got around to turning them on. He tested the light switch. The half-globe fixture in the middle of the living room came on, and he sighed with relief.

In his room he dropped his worn knapsack on the bed and went to his desk. He lifted the phone from its cradle and heard his mother’s voice, thin and distorted, skittering over the line. He could tell by how fast she was talking that his aunt, Judy, was on the other end. His mom was always on the phone with her. Every day. Of course, the length of the call depended on how pissed off with his father she was. When William Barnes did something epically stupid—about once a week these days—Jonathan’s mother could tie up the phone line for hours, which meant he could forget about checking his email or IM-ing with David.

“Splentastic,” he muttered, shaking his head.

Jonathan turned on his computer and waited for the old machine to boot up. The Dell was a hand-me-down. It was his brother Hugh’s computer, left behind when he took a job on a fishing boat in Alaska with a brand-new Mac laptop he’d won in an internet contest. The Dell wasn’t bad, and David had come over one afternoon to install about a thousand bucks’ worth of software. It wasn’t state of the art, but it would do.

Jonathan was used to making do.

From The Book of Adrian, Fri. Oct. 7:

It’s all about fear. Nothing is so frightening as being powerless. In order to feel control, they humiliate and abuse that which they perceive as different. They bolster their own fragile egos, their own worth, by humiliation and attack. It doesn’t matter if the target is as small as an ant, being fried by a magnifying glass, or as fragile as a butterfly whose wings they tear away with the glee of a child opening a gift. I own this, they think. I control this, and in those moments of petty destruction, they affirm their mastery over something, because deep down, way down where the fear of the dark lives, they know they control nothing.

But I do.

And now, I hold the magnifying glass. I grasp their fragile wings between my fingers.

Isn’t that right, Mr. Weaver?