The Bully and Emily Dickinson

Miss Klapsinos scanned the class as she paced in front of the blackboard, her goodbye-and-good-luck speech hopefully about to be made. I shot a sideways glance at the clock over the classroom door. Five minutes to freedom.

“Class, in a few minutes you’ll leave school as seventh graders for the last time,” she said, her tone serious and suggesting she wasn’t quite done with us. She continued her slow walk toward the windows with their view of Marcus Whitman Junior High’s athletic fields and the woods beyond, where she’d always pause to gaze at the scene and think about how to form her words when she needed to get after us for some reason. Goodbyes weren’t on her mind yet. She was probably about to say something designed to make us think. That wasn’t a good sign at this crucial moment because, after she said it, she’d pick victims to question, making sure we understood her point. Summer break might be placed on hold if that was her plan. I heard the clock’s minute hand click. Four more of those little clicks and that blessed bell would ring and hopefully put an end to this stuff.

“Some of you will be going on vacation to fun places,” she finally continued. “I hope you’ll spend a little of that time reading, but I know the temptation to avoid thoughtful reflection will be strong.”

This was unbelievable. Miss Klapsinos was a great teacher and all, but why was she hitting us with a big dripping bag of philosophical garbage now, when summer vacation was so close? The clock’s red second hand slowly swept to within half a minute of clicking again.

“I’ve noticed a few, shall we say, behavioral tendencies in some of you that I’d like to address in what I’m about to recite, my final lesson for this year. There naturally won’t be an essay to write about these few words, but I hope you’ll keep them in your minds and hearts as you advance through this summer and into the eighth grade. In fact, I hope you’ll remember them always. You know, you’re not little children anymore. It’s time to begin letting go of childish things.”

She paused again and the room got quiet except for the clock, its announcement that only three minutes remained making several kids squirm. Then she cleared her throat and began, her recitation slow and deliberate:

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain. If I can ease one life the aching, or cool one pain, or help one fainting robin unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.”

Now the room was so quiet I could hear the electric hum of the clock as it crept toward the final bell of the school year’s final day.

“Does anyone know who wrote that piece?” she asked, surprising no one.

I lowered my gaze to my desktop, hoping I wouldn’t hear her say, “Dennis?” Out of the corner of my eye I saw several other kids’ heads also drop. It was the next best thing to becoming invisible. Meeting Miss Klapsinos’s gaze as she searched for a volunteer was not a good idea. Even my dog Frank knew the value of looking away. He’d once sat staring at the living room wall as Mom’s finger waved at his long nose to shame him for doing his business on the carpet. I don’t think he felt all that ashamed because he did it again the next day, but he knew how to pretend he wasn’t there when he needed to.

“Richard?” Miss Klapsinos said to the most nervous kid I’d ever known. “Please stand and tell the class your thoughts about who wrote those words and what you believe they mean.”

All eyes lifted to stare at slowly-rising Richard, which probably did him no good at all. His eyes were wide with panic and I was betting his situation was close to being as urgent as Frank’s had been.

“I—uh—I…”

“No ideas?” Miss Klapsinos said. “How about you, Natalie? Would you like to venture a guess?”

Natalie Frisch leaped to her feet and in her irritating voice loudly announced, “It’s a poem written by Emily Dickinson, Miss Klapsinos.”

“Very good, Natalie!” Miss Klapsinos said to the biggest suck-up English student ever, and the clock clicked into the sixty-second countdown. “Can you explain to the class what her poem means?”

“I—I think it means we should be nice,” Natalie said, and then she sat down quick and hard instead of rattling on to show how smart she was. Even Nattering Natalie wanted out of there.

Miss Klapsinos smiled. “Well, yes—sort of. What it means, class, is that our true purpose in life should be to improve the world through the things we say and do, rather than...” Again she paused, balancing thoughts and deciding to start over. When she did, her eyes looked a little wet. Her moistened eyes met mine for a second, and then she looked away. “Even the smallest things we do in kindness for others can not only help us feel better about ourselves, but make our world a little brighter. If each of you will do just one good thing for someone else this summer, your lives will have more meaning and fulfillment than any amount of…”

And then the bell rang. Miss Klapsinos’s voice was instantly buried in an explosion of scraping desk chairs and scrambling feet. She tried to holler her closing thoughts, but then Richard lunged for the door and pulled it open with great force before disappearing into a stampeding herd of laughing and shouting kids, the slamming of locker doors joining their clamor in a tidal wave of noise. A minute later I was standing at my own locker, twirling the combination wheel with excited fingers and missing the last number twice before getting the blasted thing open. It was empty. In my rush to leave, I forgot we’d turned in all our textbooks and that the warmth of summer had arrived; I’d left my jacket at home.

I slammed my locker shut and dodged through the throng as I ran toward the main exit. But just before I reached it, a thought happened and I turned down the hall that passed by the school office and rushed for the north exit instead. Summer vacation had begun and I could think of no better way to get the feel of it than to cut through Piper’s Canyon on the way home—Piper’s Canyon, with its trails through the tall trees, its vast acres smelling like evergreens instead of car exhaust and hot asphalt. The canyon was like a slice of the Cascade Mountains wedged between north Seattle neighborhoods, a place that spoke of the freedom and fun of summer. Even bears bored with their diets sometimes followed the railroad tracks that wound out of the mountains and skirted Puget Sound’s shoreline to get to Piper’s Canyon, where they raided the garbage cans of the rich people whose big houses nestled into the trees on the canyon’s steep upper slopes.

I wanted to escape the sights and bookish smells of school, but a big crowd of girls had blocked the hall ahead. Packed tight and full of squealing interest over someone in the middle of their cluster, they’d formed a mass of wriggling bodies that reached from wall to wall. I tried to push through them, but then I heard one of them gush, “Oh, Clint!” so I decided to shove my way into the middle of them to see what the fuss was about. It wasn’t much of a surprise to learn that Clinton Farrow was the pivot point for what had become a big wheel of girls, rotating like the solar system as they bulldozed each other to get a better view of their hero. Clint was Whitman’s official cool guy and trend setter. If he came to school with his shirt sleeves rolled halfway up his arms, it was a sure bet all the semi-cool guys would roll theirs up before the day was over. He’d even invented a new way of walking that wasn’t very efficient in getting around but got the girls all fluttery. Now nearly all the guys at Whitman did the Clint Shuffle. All the guys but me. I was too uncoordinated and had to give it up or risk injury.

The first thing I noticed when I finally reached Clint was his black eye.

“It happened yesterday,” he said to his adoring fans, white teeth shining with his always-perfect smile on his usually-perfect face. One of the girls closest to him reached up and gently touched the purple-black patch of skin, whispering in semi-dazed and worshipful admiration that Clint’s eye was swollen shut. “He got in a punch when I wasn’t looking, but I wasted him after that,” Clint explained.

A chorus of girls’ sighs echoed off the walls at this report of righteous victory, sounding like an eerie wind in a cave. The girl who’d touched him nearly fainted as she stared at the tips of her fingers where they’d made contact with Clint the God, probably vowing to herself to never wash her hand again.

“What’s he talking about?” I asked Marni Jacobs, a pretty redhead next to me who’d been in one of my classes. She turned and gave me one of those Oh—it’s you looks, displaying her disgust at having to deal with me in the presence of such coolness. But then she surrendered to the excitement of telling me. She had to tell someone, after all, and I was the only one there who didn’t already know.

“Clint caught Russell Folmer trying to take some kid’s lunch money, Dennis,” Marni said. Then she got all swimmy-eyed and a smile not meant for me formed on her candy-colored lips. “He had to fight Russell to stop him. Clint is just the bravest guy on earth.”

Shoot, that wasn’t news. People living in Guatemala’s jungle probably knew how brave Clint was. I started to thank Marni for filling me in, but she’d turned away, her focus back on Clint. After a brief struggle, I managed to free myself from the tangle of girls and finally escaped out the north door.

Minutes later, I was hiking down the trail that led into Piper’s Canyon when I saw something moving in the brush up ahead. Having the finely tuned instincts of an experienced wimp, I quickly ducked behind a huge fir tree.

Hiding was something I was good at. I’d learned that fact long ago when the tantrum I’d thrown over not getting a bicycle for my fifth birthday led to the kids at my party being sent home. Mom ordered them to take back the presents they’d brought before ushering me to my room for a little solitary confinement. I’d decided a man of my stature shouldn’t be treated like that by a mere woman, even if she was called Mom. So, I’d jammed a few sticks of gum and a comb into my jacket pocket, walked out of my prison cell, and told her I was running away. She saw me to the gate and waved goodbye as I left. I looked back over my shoulder when I reached the corner, but she’d gone back inside, playing the game of Whose Will is Strongest? Hours later—after the cops, Boy Scouts, and Seattle Search and Rescue had been called out to look for my remains—I’d decided I’d punished her enough, crawled out of the bush I was hiding in, and gone home. Mom nearly squeezed me to death when I walked in. She sobbed into my shirt for a few minutes, then gripped me at arms’ length and threatened me with restriction that might last until the sun burned out. The real lesson I learned from that incident, though, was that even the best search party couldn’t find me if I didn’t want to be found.

I peered around the tree’s trunk but still couldn’t see what was hiding in the brush up ahead. Whatever it was, it was too big to stay hidden for very long. Then the groans started, loud and miserable like maybe one of the canyon’s vagabond bears was learning that rich people’s garbage didn’t agree with him. I crept closer and crouched behind a small fir tree, quietly spreading its branches a couple of inches for a better look. Finding a bear in my path would have been good news compared to what I saw. It was Russell Folmer, the bully who threatened to beat kids up if they didn’t give him their lunch money, then beat them up anyway unless Clinton Farrow was there to stop him. Russell bent at the waist and let out another loud groan.

“Oh, man. He’s puking,” I whispered to myself as I watched a gigantic gusher spill into the dust. Cripe, I thought, how much did that guy eat? Then Russell groaned and chucked again, launching enough used food to power me for a week.

The shock of seeing Russell wore off quick, but then the question of what he was doing there at all bubbled up. For sure, puking in private was better than splattering the floor in Whitman’s main hall, which would cause pointing and laughter, and maybe even a gigantic puke-a-thon as other kids joined in. But there were other reasons for sneaking through the woods. Maybe Russell had planned to ambush me. After all, I wasn’t listed yet on his ledger of victims. Maybe a high victim count was a goal to pursue in his squirrely version of life. And now there he was, skulking in the brush beside the trail I’d been hiking down and spewing like an Italian fountain. Sick he might be, but he had to have had a sinister purpose for being there at all. Everything Russell did had a sinister purpose.

He must have seen me cutting up the hall instead of using the main exit, I thought, then sped ahead of me as I wrestled my way through Clint’s female fan club. It would be easy for him to figure out I was going home through the canyon. Twisted Fate had decided putting Russell in my school wasn’t enough torture, so it had moved him to Fourth Avenue, too, only two houses down from me. He knew I wasn’t going home the shortest way, and he knew no one would see him pounding me in the seclusion of the canyon.

I watched as Russell leaned on wobbly knees, hacking and sucking air. He’d always looked as if nothing could knock him down, so this was a strange sight. Clint must have really laid into the big oaf to make him hurl like that. But then Clint said the fight happened yesterday, didn’t he? Wow, I thought as those remembered words settled in. It must have been the pounding of the ages for Russell to still be chucking calories to the worms a whole day later.

Several minutes passed as Russell continued spitting and swaying unsteadily, like a limp rag in the wind. If he was that messed up, maybe even a wimp like me could walk past him and he wouldn’t do anything. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d be so upset that he was the one who’d been pounded, he’d pound me just to make himself feel better.

Over the distance between us, I thought I heard a sob. Jeez, I thought, maybe Clint had done Russell some serious damage. Maybe Russell had internal injuries and needed a doctor. But then maybe he’d just picked up a case of the flu. Or, even more likely, maybe his body was only throwing off another school lunch created by people practicing for jobs as prison cooks. If he’d been a different kid, I’d probably have felt bad for the oversized menace and checked to make sure he was all right. I might even have offered help.

But he wasn’t a different kid. He was Russell Folmer. I quietly crept back the way I’d come.

I’d just turned thirteen as the summer of 1960 began. But, as Miss Klapsinos had testified, I wasn’t a kid anymore. Now I was a Teenager, a title that apparently held a mysterious power that wasn’t there the day before my birthday. I’d overheard my parents visiting with the neighbors a few weeks earlier. Mom told them my birthday was coming up, shaky words uttered through quivering lips. I was growing up right before their eyes, Dad added. And then they both spouted at once that I’d be a Teenager, and the way they said that word sounded like a cry for help. The neighbors started laughing as though becoming a teenager was the same as winning an ugly dog contest. Then they really cranked up the hilarity as they tried to tell my parents, through guffaws that nearly gagged them, how I was about to enter a phase where kids became demons. My parents forced a few chuckles of their own, but they sounded nervous. That puzzled me at first. Then I met Jay Walters.

Jay’s family had just moved into the big brown house behind ours, which made him a Third Avenue kid. I had enough to deal with on my own street with Russell living so close, so even though I’d noticed Jay in his backyard a couple of times, I decided to avoid him. That would be easy enough to do. After all, even eight years later, that Search and Rescue episode still glowed bright on my list of achievements and I’d become pretty good at dodging Russell. But summer made dodging people harder to do. I knew I’d stumble into Russell sooner or later if I wasn’t careful, especially since he was obviously hunting me. So, it seemed like a good plan to stay home and spend my summer watching TV or messing around with my new hobby of building model airplanes. That’s what I was doing the day after school let out, that dramatic day when Jay Walters head-butted his way into my life and changed things forever.

I had no brothers or sisters—and that was fine with me—but being alone sometimes meant being bored. I’d already flipped through the TV’s channels several times when I realized the movie on Channel 11 was about the Wright Brothers and might be worth a look. The story took place when they were still experimenting with gliders, a year or so before they pumped up enough courage to slap an engine on one of them. But Orville had become a problem. He kept sneaking off to a garden where a blonde woman was waiting for him, and they’d get all snuggly and disgusting while some hidden guy sawed on a violin. The only interesting part was when Orville let go of the blonde long enough to help Wilbur with the glider.

I stared at the screen as the brothers’ creation of wood and cloth sailed over the gray hills of our old black-and-white RCA, wishing there was a way to crawl into the TV and join in the fun. Orville scattered a few panicked cows as he came in for a landing and Wilbur ran up to him, all grins and excitement over the successful flight. Orville grinned back as he brushed his suit off—they wore suits everywhere but to bed in those days—winked at Wilbur, and then scampered off to the garden again. Left to pack things up by himself, Wilbur stared after his brother with fire in his eyes. The cameraman decided to follow Orville to watch him and the blonde making out, a better deal than being anywhere near Wilbur at that point. When the movie collapsed into another screechy-violin smooch-fest, I turned the TV off and wandered into my room to check my supplies. If I had enough balsa and tissue, I figured I could build a model that would resemble the glider in that pathetic movie.

I was in the backyard with the plane I’d built three hours later, boiling with anger. I’d used every trick I knew to make the stupid thing fly, but no Wright Brother of blood and bone would have survived what my glider was doing. I grumbled quietly about that at first but got noisy when grumbling didn’t fix it. Jay heard me when my loud blastings over the lousy wood, useless glue, and spiteful air currents, matured into a string of insults for the Wright Brothers’ mother for having such useless sons. Suddenly he was draped over the back fence, grinning like a monkey eating peanut butter. He looked to be about my age and was even skinnier than I was. His short hair stuck straight up and his eyes flashed with some form of electrical devilment. Great, I thought. Even staying home hadn’t been enough to avoid this new kid.

“Hey, man,” he said, “you need help with that thing?”

Now, I’d just used my entire balsa supply to build a plane that flew like a bulldozer, so the last thing I needed was some nose-poky kid shoving his opinion into the mix. I fixed him with the best gunfighter glare a wimp like me could muster.

“I think I can handle it.”

“It doesn’t look like you’ve been handlin’ it too good so far,” he said. His sneakers bumped against the fence’s boards as he kicked himself higher. “I could have that goofy lookin’ thing airborne in a couple minutes.”

I decided to ignore him. Sometimes that worked, but the glint in his eye said he might be harder to get rid of than one of those big flies that buzz around your head too fast to swat.

“I’ve got tons of experience with model airplanes,” he blathered on. “I fly ’em all the time.” He slithered the rest of the way over the fence without an invitation and dropped into my yard, ignoring that I was ignoring him. A moment later he was kneeling next to me, staring at my last plane crash. “Shoot, man, I see your problem.”

“Yeah? What problem is that, Orville?”

“Orville? Who’s Orville?”

I rolled my eyes like people do when they want to make someone feel stupid. That failed to impress him.

“Okay, so I don’t know who Orville is. But I do know you need an engine.”

“An engine!” I said. “Are you nuts? Any idiot can see this is a glider.”

“A glider? Huh. Looks more like a shovel the way you’ve been usin’ it.” He made a grab for the plane but I beat him to it. His face fell for a second, but the irritating grin quickly returned. “Look, man, I can fix you up with an engine if that’s the problem.”

“It isn’t a problem, kid. I have plenty of engines.” That was a lie. I had one and it didn’t work. “Anyhow, this is a glider, like I said.”

He stood up and started back toward the fence. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’ve got an engine in my basement that’s perfect for your plane.”

Something was obviously wrong with him. He might be an escapee from a lab experiment gone bad, I thought. Caution was probably the best approach with someone like him—except I’d already shot my mouth off about bad balsa and the Wright Brothers’ horrible mother, so what difference could a few more nasty words make? I yelled after him that my plane was a GLID-E-E-R-R! and added that he was a knuckle-dragging idiot for not knowing it.

That was another mistake, and a big one. Mom spent a lot of time at the kitchen sink, washing dishes or chopping carrots while she stared out the window at her flowers. An unwelcome lecture she’d given me about the rotten attitude I was developing came to mind, but that memory arrived a little late. The squeak of the screen door’s hinges announced that I’d been caught being less than the person she wanted me to be, and that would have a price.

“Was that the new boy, Den?” she asked. Her usual tactic was to ask questions she already knew the answers to so she could trap me into conversations I didn’t want to have. She knew who that kid was.

“Yeah, that’s him all right,” I said. I left it at that, hoping it would satisfy her. It didn’t, of course.

“I was watching you boys from the window. He seems friendly—don’t you think?”

Sproing! went her trap. She’d string out a whole series of questions now in her effort to teach me something I didn’t want to learn. There had to be a way to deal with this. I needed time to think but I had to come up with a quick answer.

“Yeah, Mom, he’s friendly.”

“Do you know why he went home so soon?”

“No,” I shrugged. The best bet was to keep my answers short and to the point.

“You’re not going to tell me you’ve already had an argument with him, are you?”

“No.”

She thought for a second. “Meaning ‘no’, you didn’t have an argument, or ‘no’ you’re not going to tell me?”

Dang-blast it, she was getting too good at this! I decided to just shut up.

“All right, Den, what did he do that upset you?”

Shutting up wasn’t working, either. Maybe some unexpected honesty would throw her off. “He bothered me.”

“Oh-h-h, I see. He bothered you. From where I stood, it looked like he was trying to help.”

From where she stood? How could her standing anywhere on this planet mean anything where that dumb kid pestering me was concerned? She didn’t know how complex aeronautical engineering could be. She had no idea how a bunch of gabby crap from some pudding-brained kid would only make things worse. How could she know when all she did was cook, clean, and wash dishes?

“You know, Den, your manners need serious work. That boy just moved into our neighborhood a few short days ago. He probably doesn’t know anyone and I’ll bet he’s lonely. It wouldn’t hurt you to put yourself in his place…”

Oh, man, here it came, that worn out Walk-a-Mile-in-His-Shoes speech that had never made sense. Other people’s shoes wouldn’t fit and they’d make a guy’s feet sore.

“What if your father and I sold our house, moved you into another neighborhood, and then the kids there treated you like I just saw you treat the new boy?”

I sat on the ground and pretended to be busy with some mechanical problem with the plane. No point encouraging her, I thought.

“Just give him a chance, Den,” Mom finally concluded. “I’m sure he’ll make a good friend.”

“I doubt it,” I muttered, and a shiver of regret shot up my spine. I could usually fake learning my parents’ lessons, but knowing when to shut up had always been a problem. Trouble might go away by itself if I could just learn to keep my big yap sealed tight. But the words were out and it was too late to think of that now—now, with Mom’s hands clenched into tight little fists and planted like bridge supports on her hips. She took a few deep breaths to calm down.

“Young man, you are about this close to finding yourself on restriction.”

I refused to look up at the thumb and forefinger I knew were hanging over my head, about an inch apart.

“I had better see nothing but the best behavior from you if that boy ever comes back, although no one could blame him for staying away after the way you acted with him. It’s such a shame. He looked like a very nice young man.”

“He looks like a baboon,” I said. I really wasn’t stupid enough to think I’d get away with that one. I was just stubborn, and I was already in trouble anyway.

“All right, that’s enough! One more smart-mouthed word from you and you’ll spend the summer in your room—no television, no backpacking trips, no model airplanes! You seem to think turning thirteen means you can push your limits, but you’d best forget that. You won’t get adult freedom until you start behaving like an adult instead of a foul-tempered whelp. So keep it up, Den, and see what happens. It’ll just be you and the four gray walls until school starts again!”

“But Mom…,” I said, looking up.

“No buts! Not one more word, or—or…”

She stopped in mid-sentence, her pointing finger in mid-wag. The little furrows between her eyebrows looked more like parallel ditches. Suddenly she turned and stomped into the house, too angry to discuss it anymore.

Wow, I thought, the Four-Gray-Walls speech. I’d only heard it a couple of times before when I’d driven her to the edge. Those episodes hadn’t worked out well for me. This was a disaster. Russell Folmer had spoiled my hike through Piper’s Canyon the day before, and now the first full day of summer vacation had been ruined by that pushy toad of a new kid. School was actually starting to look good.

I shot a glance at the kitchen window. Mom’s eyes were down, her shoulders flexing furiously as she worked her anger off on a sink full of dishes. The pots and pans would gleam when she was done; the patterns on the plates would be a little more rubbed off. I’d have to be careful if that kid came back.

As if just thinking about him held some kind of ugly magic, I heard his sneakers bumping at the fence again. He plopped to the ground on my side a moment later and held out the biggest model airplane engine I’d ever seen.

“What the…? That thing could power a lawnmower,” I said.

“Darn near,” he answered. “It’ll sure add speed to that ugly thing you built.”

“Oh, yeah. It’ll be going really fast when it hits the ground and digs a hole big enough to bury my dog.”

“It won’t hit the ground if you know how to fly it. Come on, man, let’s pump some excitement into things. You’re in the airplane game for excitement, ain’t you?”

“ ‘Ain’t’ isn’t a word and I build planes because I like stuff that flies.”

“Great,” he said, “because the only chance that thing has of flyin’ is if we put my engine on it.”

My anger was rising again. I pictured a summer spent within Mom’s Four Gray Walls and wondered how it would compare to dealing with this guy. I forced myself to calm down. “Look, kid, this plane isn’t designed for an engine. There’s no place to mount one.”

“So, we’ll make a place.”

“You’ve got to be the dumbest…” I began, but stopped myself after glancing up at the kitchen window. Mom was still there. Her eyes met mine with a look of warning, like a guard dog waiting for the slightest wrong move. “This is a glider, get it?” I said in the most peaceful voice I could muster. “It isn’t supposed to go fast or do loops.” I shot another quick look at the kitchen window. Mom was focused on her dishes, so… “It—doesn’t—need—an—engine!” I poked him in the chest with each word to give it strength and meaning, and even though he was looking right at me when I said them, he responded with:

“It should be easy, man. We’ll use one-eighth-inch stringer stock to beef up the snout of this ridiculous lookin’ thing and three-sixteenths-inch plywood for the firewall.”

I looked deeper into his eyes and didn’t see the dull gaze I expected, indicating his head was full of mush. Instead, they were burning with blue fire and it suddenly dawned on me that he wasn’t some ordinary kid with brain damage. He was a tornado with ears. There was just too much going on behind those eyes to allow any room for listening.

“Look, man, I’ve got lots of extra wood,” he continued. “We can haul this contraption to my house and put the new nose on it in no time. Here, let me show you…”

He had a grip on my plane in a flash and I grabbed to get it back. I got half of it.

I stared at the crumple of wood and paper in my hand as dark and dangerous thoughts began to boil. I’d gut him. I’d tear his head off and kick it back over the fence like a football before pitching the rest of him over. His parents could clean up the mess, their punishment for thinking they needed a kid and settling for this evil being. Any thoughts I’d had about the dangers of the kitchen window disappeared like dry brush when a volcano pukes lava. I grabbed the front of his shirt and was cocking my arm to slug him when:

“Come and get it, boys!”

I froze. Mom was standing on the back porch holding a tray of cookies. The kid’s face nearly split in two as his idiotic grin got even bigger. He tossed the remains of my plane aside, pulled out of my grip, and launched toward the food.

“Are you the new boy from the house behind ours?” Mom needlessly asked. “What’s your name?”

His mouth was already packed so tight with cookies it was hard to understand his answer. “Jay Walters,” I thought he said as he sprayed cookie dust over the tray.

Mom smiled all pretty and peaceful, showing no sign of the prison warden hidden within. “Welcome to the neighborhood, Jay. I see you and Den have become friends.”

He stopped chewing. “Den?” he said around a huge gob. “What’s a Den?”

“It’s short for Dennis,” I said between clenched teeth.

“What’s your last name?”

“Fishel, if it’s any of your…” I caught Mom’s look and stopped myself just in time.

He grinned again, patches of cookie remains clinging to his teeth. He looked like a fiend. “We’re gonna have to build Den a new plane,” Jay rattled on as he resumed stuffing and chewing. “Den wrecked this one, but it sucked anyway. He’ll do a lot better with my help.”

I took a breath to fire something back at him, but Mom’s glare said I’d reached my daily limit of violations.

“So, you build model planes too, Jay?” she asked, and Jay nodded. “Well, isn’t that wonderful! Don’t you think that’s wonderful, Den?”

It was Mom’s question trick again. She was without mercy. “It’s just peachy,” I said.

“I’ve been buildin’ planes for years,” Jay bragged. “I’ve got a basement full of planes and engines, lots of balsa, and a bunch of kits I ain’t even touched yet. Den can come up tomorrow and we’ll get started.”

“Uh—I can’t,” I said, and then I scrambled for a reason. “I—uh—Dad said I have to mow the lawn.”

Mom was still smiling but a flash of anger brightened in her eyes for a second, like a demon in a horror movie. “Your father wanted you to do it yesterday when you got home from school. But, lucky you, he didn’t make a big deal out of it when you failed to comply and just mowed the lawn himself after a very long day at work.”

So she was going to mix shame into this discussion. I felt its sting but tried to dodge it. “Well—I can still rake it.”

She waved that idea away like a bothersome cloud of gnats. “We’ll discuss your chores later, Den. Just go over to Jay’s tomorrow and have fun. You’re already falling into old summertime habits and hanging around the house too much. It’ll do you good to have a little friend.”

But I liked hanging around the house, working on my projects and being where bad things like Russell Folmer didn’t exist. But Mom thought I was turning into a social misfit, her answer being to pair me up with this grinning hyena of a kid, this—this little friend. An assault on my freedom it might be, but the message that still glowed behind her smile was clear: I hadn’t reached a point on Life’s highway where I could turn around if I didn’t like how things looked up ahead. She was still driving and it would be years before I could wrestle the steering wheel away from her. I’d been sold out by my own mother.

Swallowing my anger was painful, but I figured I could store it away and use it later. For now, I had to at least look like I was giving in. Mom would gauge my expression when I came back from Jay’s to see if she needed to crank up the pressure, and she could read my face like my thoughts were printed on my forehead.

“Well, man, gotta go,” Jay said as he flashed one more chimp grin. “I’ll see you in the morning. Come up as soon as you get out of bed so’s we can get more done.”

“Right,” I answered as Mom stood watch.

Jay thumped to the ground on his side of the fence just as his mother stepped onto their elevated deck to holler that dinner was ready. She dodged out of the way as he charged up the stairs. Apparently Mom’s cookies had done nothing to fend off starvation. Mom waved at Mrs. Walters and Mrs. Walters waved back; and the faint pulse of hope that this friendship thing would go away throbbed once and died. Now they were going to be friends.

Mom was very pleased with herself. She giggled before strolling back into the house, but she didn’t gloat too much, leaving me space to grasp that turning thirteen only meant I’d need bigger clothes. Nothing else had changed.

I wondered how Miss Klapsinos could think it was time for me to give up childish things when I was still being treated like a little kid. I sat in the grass alone, my thoughts simmering in a soup of anger.

And then it dawned on me that opportunity might be hidden within this atrocity. At that very moment in the big brown house over the back fence, a powerful engine of teen-hood was refueling for another attack on the world. Jay’s parents probably tried putting limits on him, too, but there wasn’t any way limits could work on a kid like that. Maybe befriending him would provide a few pointers on how to deal with a parental dictator. Mom obviously thought Jay was the cat’s pajamas when any teenager could see he was as dangerous to peace as a herd of angry rhinos.

Then another thought sprang out of the first. If Jay and I did something Mom didn’t approve of, it would be her fault for forcing me into this “little friend” thing. I stored that idea away next to the anger I was planning to use on her later. Mom was going to regret what she’d done.

But Jay’s model airplane engine also had an influence. As much as he’d irritated me, he had to be a serious builder if he owned equipment like that. It couldn’t hurt to learn more.

So, I got up early the next morning and leaped the fence right after breakfast, dodging any chance I might run into Russell. I gave Mom the evil eye as I left, but she ignored its stinging effects, a vital part of her act when dealing with my act.

Of course, I didn’t plan for things to turn out as they did. That first day at Jay’s turned into a week of model-building marathons as Jay’s weirdness worked its magic on me. I guess I came home looking happy enough to suit Mom; she didn’t say anything else about my bad attitude or her gray walls. She even started paying me extra for doing chores so I’d have enough money for balsa, glue, engines; all the things I needed to expand my hobby. She was almost dancing a jig over the success of her project of dragging me from my safety zone and into the light.

But if she’d seen Jay through a teenager’s eyes instead of an adult’s, which were all fogged up with wisdom and stuff, her joy would have deflated like last week’s balloon. My days of hanging around the house were over, all right, just as she thought she’d wanted. But leaving the house can mean you’re going to the library, or that you’re headed for jail. If her knowledge-blinded eyes could have seen the future, she’d have locked me within her Four Gray Walls and turned the dog loose on Jay Walters.