From Wrath to Reason
Chapter 5 / 11
Chapter Five
‘That fucking bastard!’ Robert Homte yelled as he punched the door of one of the bathroom stalls. The punch was so strong that it left a small indentation in the fiberboard’s surface. The brawny fifteen-year-old’s rage had been caused by Mr. Adler, their math teacher, giving him an F on their last test, which was to decide whether he’d pass the year or not.
‘Relax, man,’ Tommy said, a short and slender peer of Robert’s who was offering him a cigarette. ‘You can always ask for a makeup test.’
‘Fuck that makeup test, you hear?’ Robert roared with eyes bulging. His square-shaped teeth were exposed and covered in his foamy saliva. ‘He told me he’d give me a chance and that son of a bitch fucking humiliated me in front of everybody!’
‘Don’t sweat it, man,’ another friend, Donny, said and sucked on his cigarette. ‘Maybe he just wanted to look important, you know. Show you who’s boss, that type of shit. But he’ll let you pass, eventually. Don’t worry.’
‘Easy for you to say!’ Robert retorted. The thick veins on his red temples looked as though they were about to pop. ‘You didn’t get an F like I did. You don’t know what it’s like. My old man’s gonna beat the living shit out of me. I’m gonna have to sit next to some fucking kids during class for the rest of my life.’ Robert shook his head. ‘No, no, no. This is not right. This bastard’s gonna pay. And he’s gonna pay good.’
‘Robert,’ Tommy said. ‘Hey, don’t try to do anything stupid, okay?’
But Robert, oblivious to his friends’ advice, walked away from them and was now standing in the doorway to exit the bathroom. ‘I’m not gonna do anything stupid, my man. Imma do some justice, all right.’
And thus Robert ran toward the second floor where they always had their math classes. He knew Mr. Adler stayed there after classes, for the man was also an accomplished poet, and he had once admitted to his students that he did so to focus on his new poems because there was always something going on at home and that didn’t allow him to concentrate enough to write something that would be at least acceptable, let alone good.
He thinks he’s the boss? Robert thought as he strode along the long corridor. I’m gonna show him who’s the fucking boss here. Fucking poet, faggot!
The door to the classroom was located immediately next to the staircase. Robert, panting with rage, stood more or less in the middle of the corridor and waited for Mr. Adler to lock the door. And just when the teacher turned toward the stairs, Robert sprinted with all the power the muscles in his legs allowed him to collect and threw himself onto Mr. Adler’s back. He then quickly clutched at the handrail and watched the middle-aged man fly over the steps.
It sounded as if someone dropped a hefty barbell at the gym, was Robert’s immediate thought.
The man was lying on the concrete landing, looking bright-eyed at his assailant, but apart from his eyes not one part of his body was willing to move. And that would, in fact, be the case for the next twenty years, until the teacher’s death.
Robert looked at Mr. Adler and knew immediately that he’d broken something in his spine, for the guy just lay there without even trying to move. But instead of feeling regret, remorse, or even the fear of the consequences of this egregiously violent act of his, Robert smiled. He smiled at Adler the way a father smiles when he witnesses his child taking its first steps.
‘Try to write a poem about this, asshole!’ the boy said, took his backpack, and stepped over his helplessly injured teacher, heading downstairs toward the school’s main exit.
On Saturday, when the sun was lazily hanging over the western horizon, Corey decided to do his homework at the dining table; his mother wasn’t home and there he had more space for all the notebooks and textbooks he needed. He wanted to be ready before the end of the day so that he’d have the whole next day free of any obligations and dedicate it to learning some new chords on Scott’s guitar. He already knew how to grab E minor, E major, A minor, and A major. Tomorrow he’d try to learn C major and D major; the little booklet he was learning from said these were the easiest to learn after the first four.
But for now, math. He was trying to solve some of the more complex mathematical equations containing fractions and square roots. They were not mandatory, but he hoped he could get a better grade for the effort and thus improve his situation, even if a bit, for his grades at school, especially concerning mathematics, hadn’t been the greatest lately.
In the middle of the second exercise, Corey suddenly jerked up as he heard the front door swing open. Claude, one of Scott’s friends, entered the house without bothering to ring the doorbell first, as was his custom. He was a rather tall young man with shoulder-length wavy hair of a light brown color, though sparse, and prominent, protruding front teeth, which gave him somewhat of a leporine aspect. Upon noticing his friend’s younger brother sitting a couple of feet away, he called the boy by the name he himself had invented for him, ‘Hey, look who it is! Jolly Johnny!’ He pointed at his black eye. ‘I like the makeup.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Corey murmured and went back to the tricky equation.
‘Hey, what are you growing your hair now, or something? Go see a barber, will ya?’ Claude said. When he didn’t receive any answer, he jerked his head back and tilted it ever so slightly. ‘Anyway, is Scott home?’
‘In his room, I guess,’ Corey answered without tearing his eyes off his notebook.
Claude blinked rapidly a few times and scoffed. Shaking his head, he mumbled, ‘Fuckin’ Jolly Johnny,’ before he tramped up the creaking wooden stairs in his combat boots.
Corey rested his head in his hand and sighed. That weirdo’s calling him names threw him completely off. He found it quite difficult to concentrate on the mathematical equations with his young blood boiling and running through his veins like a leopard chasing its prey.
Not two minutes had passed when the two friends came running downstairs, heading outside.
‘I know,’ Claude exclaimed. ‘Hey, you got a smoke?’
‘A smoke?’ Scott inquired with an incredulous look on his pale face. ‘That whole health politician said that smoking’s bad for you.’
‘And I say he can go fuck himself, how about that?’ Claude answered and the both of them burst out laughing. ‘Or suck my dick, what do I care,’ he added and slammed the door behind him.
Alarmed by the boisterously emphatic noise of the door’s meeting the frame, Murray, dressed in track pants and a basketball jersey, rushed from his room to the corridor, from where he saw Corey, and asked him, ‘Hey, what was that?’ His piercingly green eyes looked about frantically, as if trying to figure out the erratic path of an agitated fly.
Still focused on the math exercises, Corey only murmured, ‘Scott and Claude. They just went out.’
‘And what are you doing here anyway, huh?’ Murray asked with his hands spread and his head craned forward.
Five times seven, that’s thirty-five, he thought before answering, ‘It’s for school. Homework.’
‘Homework, huh?’ Murray asked, heading toward the adjacent kitchen.
‘Yup,’ Corey answered and continued scribbling in his notebook.
Murray took out an abundant ham sandwich and a can of Coke from the refrigerator and positioned himself behind Corey. The younger of the two could smell the musty odor of his brother’s sweaty armpit as Murray reached to put the can on the other side of the table, as gingerly as he could. Then, with no forewarning whatsoever, in one swift movement, swept all of Corey’s books from the table, throwing them – in consequence – onto the ground, as if he were wiping merely dust from the four-legged piece of furniture’s surface.
Corey straightened his back in the blink of an eye and gasped, his breath arrested in his lungs. He looked at the pile of books on the kitchen’s tiled floor and was heartbroken, for he felt as if he were watching his ambitions and hard work being trampled upon. So this was what all his efforts meant to his relatives.
‘Go to your fucking room!’ Murray yelled into his brother’s ear. ‘This ain’t the place to study! Collect your shit and get the fuck outta here! Now!’
Corey’s body stiffened, but he did as he was told, thankful that the situation had not escalated into something more painful.
‘Good,’ Murray said. He took a seat at the table while sinking his teeth into his meal and filling his mouth with the carbonated sugar bomb. ‘Fuckin’ nerd.’
Says the guy who dropped out of high school, thought Corey, but didn’t say, his ear still ringing. On his way out of the kitchen, however, he noticed the long knife his mother usually used to cut red meat resting on the dirty counter. And as he beheld the sharp and shiny object, though for a fraction of a second, he considered driving its edge into his own or Murray’s throat but lacked the courage to carry either one of the options out.
Monday. Rise and shine. Back to school. Corey had dreaded this day, for he didn’t know what evil machinations his schoolmates would have in store for him after that cursed day of his public humiliation. But what choice did he have? He was only eleven and no one cared about what you thought when you weren’t even old enough to buy yourself a beer or a pack of cigarettes; and even then it must be pretty hard to have any consideration from anyone, he was sure.
Corey’s route to school was fairly simple. He lived near the town’s main square but on his way to school he had to turn right onto Salt Street, where vendors from the neighboring towns and villages would arrive every Thursday to set up their stands and encourage the local residents to buy their home-grown fruit and vegetables. Then he had to walk straight ahead for the next ten minutes until he reached a three-way intersection where he would turn left onto Rail Street. Rail Street had been named after the old train station that used to operate there. The building was still standing but the local government always failed to find the money to renovate it, until it one day finally decided to close it down completely and sell it to someone who turned it into their house. The rails were still visible, pounded into and melted with the black asphalt, underneath them an old cobblestone road; one of the last surviving witnesses to the town’s equally layered history. On that particular day, as he crossed the rails, Corey stopped for a few seconds, hung his head, and let out a long sigh. Oh, how he wished that he could just hop on a random train and leave this hellhole once and for all, no matter where. But not even that was within his reach.
When he finally entered the school, Corey saw Stuart, surrounded by his friends, standing at their usual spot, by the window near the girls’ bathroom. That was not an unusual image, but what was different about Stuart was the way that boy looked; while his friends were all smiles and giggles, Stuart’s eyes were wide open, moving left and right, as if he were trapped in a jungle, expecting the attack of a stealthy and merciless tiger to occur any second now. His face was gaunt and anyone who took as much as a glance at him could see that his aspect resembled that of a haggard refugee from a far-away, war-torn country. The moment the dark brown eyes of Corey and those panic-filled of Stuart met, the latter pushed himself away from the windowsill and strode rapidly toward the girls’ bathroom where he locked himself in one of the stalls. This – what he thought of as unusually strange behavior, notwithstanding – caused Corey to merely shrug and head toward the classroom where, in a few minutes’ time, his first class would start. During this short time, Corey had grown accustomed to the fact that he sat alone. What a surprise it was when he saw Paul suddenly taking a seat next to him.
‘Hi,’ Paul said, taking his notebook and pen out of his backpack and dropping them carelessly onto the table. ‘You mind if I sit here? I just got a new pair of glasses and I need to sit a bit closer to the blackboard.’
‘Hi,’ Corey answered and added briskly, ‘sure.’
What struck him as particularly interesting was that suddenly no one in the classroom was looking angrily at him and whispering to their classmates while pointing their fingers at him or trying to hide a smirk. Nothing to complain about, he thought as he opened his own notebook.
‘Hey,’ Corey said, leaning closer to Paul, before the teacher started taking attendance. ‘What the heck happened to Stuart? He looked like he’d seen a ghost or something.’
Paul brought up his right shoulder and pressed his lips together. ‘Look, I don’t really know. I walked with him to school today but he wouldn’t tell me a lot when I asked. Only that his dad told him the whole satanic stuff is bullcrap and that people who spread those rumors could be charged with de-, uh, defamation or something freaky like that. Anyway, he got all weird and rushed the rest of the way to school alone and kept looking over his shoulder all the time. I think he lost it.’
‘Oh, okay,’ was Corey’s sole response before they both answered when the teacher called their surnames. His mind involuntarily wandered toward Randy Mitchells.
END OF CHAPTER FIVE
Randy messed Stuart up. Hehe. Stuart did deserve it, although Randy is definitely a creep, too. Murray is such a loser. Haha. I’m hoping for Corey to come up with some way of putting him in his place, but I hope he doesn’t go for the knife again. Corey is putting his head down and learning the guitar chords and getting his schoolwork done and getting by. Corey’s a survivor and Paul just might be pretty cool himself. Another great chapter, Chris. Thank you for sharing.
School is a mine field for Corey. So is home. He is at the mercy of every angry soul, it seems. But he keeps on keeping on. Your prologs to each chapter are horrific, Christopher. They make the rest seem peaceful by comparison. I'm glad to see Corey making his way through it all. A captivating story.