Fangboy

Nathan shook his head.

“I said, show the others!”

The other boys began a chant. “Show us! Show us! Show us!”

Nathan covered his mouth with both hands now, and desperately tried to keep himself from crying. His face burned so hot that he thought it might disintegrate into ashes.

“Show us! Show us! Show us!”

“What the blazes is going on in here?” asked Steamspell, peeking his head into the large (but not really large enough for fifty-four boys) bedroom.

“He has weird teeth and he won’t show us!”

Steamspell chuckled. “What are you trying to hide, boy? Think you can keep those choppers covered forever? You might as well get it over with.”

Nathan didn’t want to get it over with. He was pretty sure he could keep his teeth covered forever, if necessary. But instead, he pulled back his lips and tried to give the other kids a pleasant smile.

They gasped. All of them.

One of them said a word that Nathan didn’t remember having heard before but which he thought might be one of the bad words that his parents had told him never to say. “He does have fangs! He’s a fangboy!”

“Fangboy!” several of the others shouted. “Fangboy! Fangboy! Fangboy!”

Nathan turned and ran. One of the kids on the edge of the crowd tripped him, and he fell to the floor, landing hard on his elbow.

“Freak show!” one of them yelled.

“Creepy mouth!” yelled another.

For a moment, Nathan thought they might hoist him above their shoulders and take him to be tarred and feathered (which had actually sounded kind of fun when his mother read to him about it, but sounded much less fun now). They did not. Instead, they just kept laughing at him and shouting new names until finally Steamspell angrily told them all to get back to their chores. Nathan very much doubted that this was done to salvage his dignity.

He lay there on the floor for a while, until Steamspell harshly suggested that he quit doing that.

FOUR

If you excluded the beatings, the bad food, the ridicule, the stolen personal items, the lack of privacy, the noise, the toilet that never quite flushed properly, the drinking water with colorful specks in it, the scary shadows that danced across the ceiling at night, the drab decor, and the overall mood of desperation and misery, the orphanage was still a rotten place to live.

At least the other kids—most of them, anyway—weren’t truly mean. Once the novelty of Nathan’s appearance wore off they—again, most of them—treated him as one of their own. Which is to say that they included him in their daily discussions of how awful it was to be stuck in such a place.

Nathan’s first beating happened on his second day, when Nathan failed to pull the weeds in the backyard garden to Steamspell’s satisfaction. Nathan protested the punishment on the grounds that Steamspell had not actually bothered to look at the garden before picking up his paddle, and also because if Nathan were to pluck all of the weeds, the garden would have no actual contents.

Steamspell did not appreciate either of these explanations.

Nathan’s mother and father had believed in the value of a good spanking, so he was not a stranger to receiving this sort of discipline. He was not, however, used to the level of cruelty and sheer exuberance on display. The spanking from Steamspell hurt, and went on for a good five minutes beyond what seemed necessary to send any message beyond “Bernard Steamspell is a sadist.”

Nathan’s second, third, and fourth beatings happened on his third, fourth, and fifth days at the orphanage. Then Steamspell’s attention was captured by a new boy named Thomas who was on crutches, and Nathan’s beating schedule switched to an every-other-day basis.

“I hate him,” said Reggie, an eight-year-old whose mattress was on the floor next to Nathan’s. They lay in the dark. “I wish he would plop right onto the ground, dead.”

“Shhhhh!” said another boy, Jeremy. “He’ll hear you!”

“I think he’ll beat us even if he’s dead!” said a boy named Malcolm. “He’d find a way!”

Nathan was certainly in favor of the idea of Steamspell dropping dead, but he said nothing.

“He wouldn’t be able to beat us if we buried his body,” said Reggie.

“He’d dig his way out,” said Malcolm. “Even if we filled the hole with rocks he’d dig his way out.”

“If we cut him up he wouldn’t,” said Reggie. “If each boy was responsible for burying his own piece, we could be sure he would stay in the ground. Maybe an arm or two would find its way out, but he couldn’t beat us if he were nothing but an arm.”

Nathan cringed. This wasn’t the sort of conversation he ever had at home with his mother and father.

“How could we do it?” asked Malcolm.

“We’d cut off his head first. Once his head was gone, I can’t imagine the rest of him would cause us that much trouble.”

“What would we use?”

“A knife from the kitchen.”

“We don’t have any that are big enough.”

Reggie considered that. “You’re right. But we have tape. And two knives taped together would be more than long enough. We’d draw straws for who got to do it, and that person would sneak in while he was sleeping—”

“Somebody would have to hold him down,” Malcolm said.

“We’d draw straws for that, too. And so the lucky boys would sneak in there, and they’d saw, saw, saw away until the job was done.”

“That’s horrible,” said Nathan. He slapped a hand over his mouth. He hadn’t meant to say that out loud.

“Horrible?” Reggie asked. “Horrible? I’ve heard the way you yelp when he goes at you with the paddle. What would you have us do, throw parties in his honor? Make statues? Bake Steamspell- shaped biscuits? I’ll tell you what, if you’re so in love with him, why don’t you take the beatings for all of us?”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Nathan, pulling his blanket more tightly around him. “I just…does it have to be so messy?”

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s not messy enough!” Reggie narrowed his eyes (or, at least, spoke in such a tone that Nathan thought he narrowed his eyes in the dark). “Maybe there’s a way that you could be useful, Fangboy.”

“There isn’t,” said Nathan. “I’m not useful to anybody.”

“Don’t worry,” said Jeremy, the boy who’d shushed them. “They talk about killing Steamspell all the time. They won’t really do it.”

“The hell we won’t! Maybe we won’t really tape two knives together, but we have a boy here with the sharpest teeth I’ve ever seen. He wouldn’t even have to press them together very hard to rip out Steamspell’s throat.”

“Like a vampire!” said Malcolm with great excitement.

Reggie shook his head. “No, vampires don’t rip anything away after they bite. They just use their teeth to poke. I don’t want Steamspell to have an inconvenient neck wound, I want a large piece of his throat in Fangboy’s mouth!”

“That’s disgusting,” said Jeremy.

“Is it? Is it?” Reggie nodded. “Yes, I suppose it is. But disgusting in a fine way. That tyrant must die, and I believe that Fangboy here is the one who can make it happen.”

“But not tonight, right?” asked Nathan in a pleading voice.

“No, not tonight. There’s a lot of planning left to do. But soon.”

* * *

Thursday was Adoption Day at the orphanage. The orphans would line up outside, using their best posture, and potential parents would file through, hoping to find a child to call their very own. The Bernard Steamspell Home