“Because he says that his holy water makes you death-free, and my Mum Mum is old and always falling over from drinking Dewar’s with Bill Clinton and I don’t want her to get hurt. But I don’t know if she has a mortgage. The black African-Americans are always using the holy water to be dead-free and get rid of their mortgage. So if I can use some of your holy water, it will keep her dead-free and I’ll make sure she shouts ‘Hallelujah!’ after so it works.”
“Jesus…”
“He helps Mr. Cleaver too.”
“Alright, boys, if you want more pizza I can get it for you later. Go downstairs and have fun.”
We crashed back down into the basement with a resonating mirth that only emits from a band of twelve first-graders stuffed with pizza and with a night of loose supervision ahead of them.
I was afraid Pierce Stone was going to clobber me when I wasn’t looking, like an ambush or blitz—I needed armor, not a weapon—and was constantly against a wall so he couldn’t sneak up from behind. I wished Karl were there. Karl would always fight with me in battle; it didn’t matter if we were fighting a dragon or orcs or Pierce Stone. I could outrun Pierce Stone easily—I could outrun some of the fifth-graders, even—but that didn’t much help in a basement stuffed with couches and beanbag chairs and foosball tables.
“Did you guys know,” started Paxton, “that if you cough, sneeze, burp, hiccup, yawn, and fart all at the same time you explode?”
Uproar.
“Is that true?” I asked Kader, who was spinning his row of red foosball players in perpetual aimless backflips.
“It’s unlikely.”
“Okay, thanks, Kader. Hey, how come Louis wasn’t invited?”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“Hey Silas, how come Louis Martino wasn’t invited?”
But before Silas could answer, Pierce Stone popped up from the couch like a soldier in a trench and shouted, “Because he’d eat all of the pizza!”
Uproar.
“I don’t think you’re a typical guinea, Ferraro. Most guineas actually know how to eat pizza.”
“Guinea?” I remembered seeing that term come up on the maps in my father’s atlas when I was searching for islands in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean. There was a Guinea near Indonesia (I liked that one because it was an island, too) and different types of Guineas in Africa.
“Look at him, he doesn’t even know when I’m making fun of him.”
“I’m a guinea?”
“Yes…”
“So am I an African-American?!” I got excited because my favorite football players were African-American, like Jerry Rice and Deion Sanders.
“No, dammit, Ferraro!”
“Oh.”
“‘Guinea’ is a bad word for an Italian,” said Kader, leaning across the foosball table.
I was confused: Why would anyone have a bad word for an Italian? My dad said that Italians gave the world civilization and that the Romans were the most powerful empire to ever exist. He said Italians made the greatest artists and scientists and inventors, and we even had this framed list of “Prominent Italians” hanging above the wet bar in the basement: “Da Vinci, Alighieri, Fibonacci, Fellini, Ferrari, Verrazano, Galileo, Donatello, Vespucci, Polo, Garibaldi, Vivaldi, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Botticelli, Modigliani, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Pavarotti, Raphael, Caravaggio, Puccini, Marconi, Aquinas, Bernini, Titian, Columbus, and Ferraro. No other people can make this statement.”
I finished my foosball match with Kader and snuck over to the VCR to replay Jurassic Park; I guess I had overcome my dissatisfaction for the chronologically incorrect title. When I turned around, Pierce Stone was standing right behind me. He didn’t hit me or anything and I realized I didn’t need armor, because Pierce Stone wasn’t a typical bully like in those movies Britney watched, the kind of bully that’s always a big doofus who hurts people. No, Pierce Stone was a Short Hills bully, and that meant he clobbered you with words about things you couldn’t control—like your arm hair or your lunchbox. Sometimes I wished he would just hit me instead; at least those bruises went away.
It got so hot in that basement that I sought refuge outside in the biting February frost. Lenny and Andrius came out with me and we pretended to smoke cigarettes, putting our two fingers together, dragging in the cold air, and exhaling the warmed breath like it was a contest.
“Hey Andrius, you didn’t have to do that, ya know?” said Lenny.
“No?”
“Did they confuse you? Did you understand them?”
I had no idea what they were talking about and was busy molding snow into perfect spheres just in case they wanted to throw snowballs at cars.
“Hey Vic, did you see what they were doing in there?”
“No. Who? I was watching Jurassic Park. Did you know that Tyrannosaurus Rex didn’t even live during the Jurassic period? And they say that Brontosaurus is really just Apatosaurus, but I don’t believe them.”
“Vic, Paxton and Pierce made Andrius show them his penis.”
“His pisciali?” (Translation: penis, dick, wiener.)
“His what? They made him show his penis. They were laughing at him.”
“What’s funny about a pisciali?”
“They say it have the turtle-neck.”
“Turtle-neck?” Lenny and I said simultaneously.
Mr. Badenhorst slid open the glass door with a steaming slice of ameriganz in hand. “Hey, you boys, what are you doin’ outside? It’s cold, yeah?”
“We’re okay, Mr. B. We were just talking about Andrius’s pisciali.”
“Pisciali? Okay, just come in soon.”
Back in the basement, Kader was asleep on a beanbag chair and the Barriston brothers were pounding on each other with inflatable boxing gloves. Behind the stacks of boxes that had rommel written in Sharpie on the sides, I could see Paxton, Matt Dershowitz, Jeremy Finklestein, Maine Ogden, and Pierce Stone gathered around Silas—the birthday boy—laughing and jeering and telling him to “tuck it back.”
“You see? You see? Now they’re doing it to Silas.” Lenny pointed.
I marched behind the stacks of boxes like I was an authority on the subject and saw Silas pulling back a layer of skin on his pisciali and tucking it behind the mushroom cap head.
“Hey Silas, what is that?” I asked.
“Whoa! Vic, we didn’t see you there,” said Paxton.
“I thought everyone’s looks like this?” Silas said, looking
