building where she works. What if they tracked it and found her in a bar, or in a casino, or in a restaurant with a man? Would she go to jail?
She’d shaken her head and said very gently, “No, honey, I’d just lose my job. And I’d never do that, because it would be stupid.” Because it would be like what Dad did, she meant. “Don’t worry.”
When I got up on Monday morning, my stomach hurt already. I hadn’t been able to sleep very well, because I kept thinking about Bobo buried in the snow. I kept wondering about what I hadn’t been able to see, worrying that maybe there’d been some way to save him and I hadn’t figured it out.
I couldn’t stand the idea of going to school. I couldn’t stand facing Johnny and Leon; I couldn’t stand the idea of going through all that and not being able to come home and have Bobo comfort me, curling up on my stomach the way he always did to get warm. I’d always been able to tell Bobo everything I couldn’t talk about to anybody else, and now he was gone.
But I had to go to school, so I wouldn’t upset Mom.
I had an algebra test first period. I knew the material; I could have done all the problems, but I couldn’t make my hands move. I just sat there and stared at the paper, and when Mrs. Ogilvy called time, I handed it in blank.
She looked at it, and both her eyebrows went up. “Michael?”
“I didn’t feel like it,” I said.
“You didn’t-Michael, are you sick? Do you want to go to the nurse?”
“No,” I said, and walked away, out into the hall, to my next class, which was English. We were talking about Julius Caesar. I sat against the back wall and fell asleep, and when the bell rang I got up and went to Biology, where we were dissecting frogs. Biology was always bad, because Johnny and Leon were in there. They grabbed the lab station next to mine, and whenever they thought they could get away with it they whispered, “Hey, Mike, know what we’re gonna do after school? Hey, Mike-we’re gonna drive down to Carson. We’re gonna drive down to Carsonand fuck your mother! ”
Donna Mauro, my lab partner, said, “They aresuch jerks.”
“Yeah,” I said, but I couldn’t even look at Donna, because I was too ashamed. I knew that everybody in school knew what my mother did, but that didn’t mean I liked it when Johnny and Leon reminded them. I wondered if one of Donna’s parents worked for the BLM and had talked to Letty, but it could have been just about anybody.
I stared down at the frog. We were supposed to be looking for the heart. I pretended it was Johnny instead, and sliced off a leg. Then I pretended it was Leon, and sliced off the other leg.
Donna just watched me. “Um, Mike? What are you doing?”
“I thought I’d have frog legs for lunch,” I said. My voice sounded weird to me, tinny. “Want one?”
“Um-Mike, that’s cool, but we have to find the heart now.”
I handed her the scalpel. “Here. You find the heart.”
And then I turned and walked away.
It was really easy, actually. I just walked out of the room, like I had to go to the bathroom but had forgotten to ask permission. Behind me I could hear Mr. Favaro, our teacher, saying something, and Donna answering, but the voices didn’t really reach me. I felt like I was inside a bubble: I could see outside, but everything was muffled, and no one could get inside. They’d just bounce off.
It was wonderful.
I walked along the hall, and Mr. Favaro ran up behind me, gabbling something. I had to listen really carefully to make out what he was saying. It sounded like he was on the moon. “Mike? Michael? Is there something you need to tell me?”
I considered this. “No,” I said. If I’d been Leon or Johnny or one of the bad kids, Mr. Favaro probably would have yelled at me and told me to get back inside the room,now, but he was spooked because it was me acting this way. So he gabbled some more, and I ignored him, and finally he ran away in the other direction, toward the principal’s office.
I just walked out the door. My jacket was back in my locker, but it was pretty warm out, at least in the sun, and I wasn’t cold. The bubble kept me warm. I started walking down a gully that angled down past the football field. I could hear voices behind me; I didn’t stop to try to figure out what they were saying.
But then a van pulled up alongside the gully, and people got out, and the voices started again. “Michael.
Michael Michael Michael Michael Michael.”
“What?” I said. Ms. Dellafield was there, the principal, and Mr. Ambrose, the school nurse, and two guidance counselors whose names I could never remember. They all looked really scared. I blinked at them. “I just wanted to take a walk,” I said, but they were in a semicircle around me, pushing at the edges of the bubble, herding me toward the van. “You don’t have to do this,” I told them. “Really. I’m fine. I was just taking a walk.”
They didn’t listen. They kept herding me toward the van, and then I was inside it, and the door was closing.
They drove me back to school, and then they herded me into Mr. Ambrose’s office, and then Ms.
Dellafield went to call Mom while Mr. Ambrose and the two guidance counselors stood there and watched me, like they were going to tackle me if I tried to move. “Why are you doing this?” I kept asking them. “I was just going for a walk.” It didn’t make any sense. I’d seen other kids walk out of classes: they’d never gotten this kind of attention. “I’ll go back to biology, okay? I’ll dissect my frog. You don’t have to call my mother!”
And at the same time I thought, thank God Mom’s home today. Thank god she’s not down in Carson, so that Ms. Dellafield doesn’t have to hear them say whatever they say when they answer the phone there, not that there’s any chance that Ms. Dellafield doesn’t know where Mom works, since everybody else knows it. But even all that didn’t bother me as much as usual, because the bubble was still basically holding. Mr. Ambrose and the guidance counselors kept asking me how I was, and I kept telling them I was fine, thank you, and how are all of you today? And they kept looking more and more worried, as if I’d answered them in another language, one where “fine” meant “my eyeballs are about to explode.” So I sat there feeling fine, if a little far away, and thinking, these people are really weird.
And finally, after about half an hour, I heard voices outside Mr. Ambrose’s office, and then the door opened and Mom came in. She was leaning on David. David had his arm around her, and he was really pale. It was the same way he’d looked after he pulled me away from the rattlesnake.
I squinted at him and said, “What areyou doing here? What happened?”
“She called me,” David said. He sounded like he was choking. “At work. When they called her. So we could come over here together.”
I looked at Mom. She was crying, and then I got really scared. “What’s going on?” I said. “Mom, what’s wrong? Are you okay? Did something happen to Letty?” Maybe Mom had called Ms. Dellafield and said something had happened and they had to find me. But that wouldn’t explain the van and the guidance counselors, would it? If something had happened to Letty, wouldn’t Mom have driven over here to tell me herself?
Everybody just stared at me. Mom stopped crying, and wiped her eyes, and said very quietly, “Michael, the question is, areyou okay?”
“I’mfine! Why does everybody keep asking me that? I was just going for a walk! Why doesn’t anybody believe me?”
And Mom started crying again and David shook his head and said, “Oh, you stupid-”
“David.” Ms. Dellafield sounded very tired. “Don’t.”
I felt like I was going crazy. “Would somebody please tell me what’s going on? I was just-”
“Michael,” Mom said, “that’s what your father said, too.”
I blinked. The room had gotten impossibly quiet, as if nobody else was even breathing. Mom said, “He said he was just going for a walk, and then he went out into the yard. Don’t you remember?”
I looked away from all of them, out the window. I didn’t remember that. I didn’t remember anything that had happened that day, before the shot. It didn’t matter: everyone else at school knew the story, and they’d remembered it for me. “I really was just going for a walk,” I said, and then, “I don’t even have a gun.”
Ms. Dellafield said I should take the rest of the day off, so Mom and David and I drove home together, in David’s jeep. When Ms. Dellafield called Mom at home, Mom had been too upset even to drive, so she’d called David and he’d left work and picked her up and driven her to school. He drove us all home, too. He drove really carefully. Once a squirrel ran into the road and David slowed down until it got out of his way. I’d never seen him drive like that before. And when we were walking into the house, Mom tripped, and David reached out to steady
