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  And since I wasn’t exactly the most humongous guy you’d ever seen, having a name like Eugene Smalls didn’t help. Shit, it was the kind of name that practically got down on its knees and begged kids to fuck with me. It wasn’t great for Neecey either, I suppose, whose real name was Eunice, although Neecey was a much better nickname than Genie, so she’d come out way ahead in that bargain. About our names, she used to say that first our parents screwed each other and then they screwed us, and that the old man had gone one better and didn’t just screw mom, but all of us by leaving.

  Neecey blamed the old man, I guess, but I didn’t. No matter what you wanted, if it wasn’t at the mall, then you wouldn’t find it here—nowhere New Jersey, close to the Shore, in a town that only existed so you could make a few purchases on your way to somewhere else—and I wasn’t mad at him for leaving, because I understood that. I understood it because I listened to a lot of Bruce Springsteen like everybody else, and just about every song the Boss ever wrote was either about leaving where he was from or how disappointing it was to stay, and that was just a couple of towns over.

  So I wasn’t having problems because of the old man or because of mom either. She broke her back to keep us afloat, and I knew that food and houses didn’t grow on trees and that it was better to have sneakers bought on blue-light special at Kmart than to have none at all, no matter what the other kids said. And I especially knew I shouldn’t pay any attention when my new classmates started calling me “Genie the Teeny Wienie,” or danced around me singing the theme song from I Dream of Jeannie, or dared me to do some magic, because they didn’t know dick, so it didn’t matter what they said.

  No, it didn’t matter, but it got to me anyway, and when I was called on in class and couldn’t answer, or kids kept riding me after school when it would’ve been much easier for them to leave me alone, I started to feel that mayhem hatching in my heart. I was lucky to get Thrash around then. He understood what I felt without much explanation. Then again, Thrash was an amphibian, and amphibians were cold-blooded, so all he wanted was revenge. He told me people had to be taught that they couldn’t fuck with me, but for people to learn anything, they had to get hurt, maimed, or disfigured in some way. That was the only way they’d remember what they’d done for the rest of their days.

  Sure, Thrash was pretty sick, but his schemes for revenge didn’t always work out like they were supposed to. That time Keith Montgomery was shooting spitballs at me in the cafeteria, I pretended to ignore him at first, then I circled behind him real casual, as if I were leaving, and then I swung my lunch tray with both hands and whacked him in the back of the head as hard as I could. But Keith’s head didn’t go flying off like Thrash had said it would; the lightweight plastic just made a loud thunk against his skull, and I got two weeks’ detention. When we took that field trip to see the lighthouse in Sandy Hook, I brought a roll of duct tape in my backpack, got a seat on the bus right behind Andrew Barnes (who’d thrown my Yankees cap down the sewer two days before), slapped a big piece of tape on the back of his neck, and ripped it off before he knew what was happening. It didn’t tear his skin off down to the bone like it was supposed to, though; it just pulled out a few of his neck hairs, made him scream, got me two weeks’ detention, and no more field trips for the rest of third grade. I didn’t get caught the time in fourth grade when I kicked the chair out from under Ricky Leland (who’d pegged me in the cheek with a rock after school one day), because I made it look like I’d tripped on the chair leg and that it’d come out from underneath him on accident. But his spine didn’t shatter when he hit the floor and paralyze him like Thrash promised it would; Ricky just bruised his butt-bone and got a week off from school. So, after a few misfires like that, I thought it might not be such a bad idea to actually think about what Thrash told me to do instead of just doing it, because if it was only gonna get me my own private Breakfast Club, I wanted it to be worth it.

  Of course, carrying Thrash everywhere and talking to him out loud like he was a person only added fuel to everyone else’s fire. But when I felt things unraveling, I could look over at him or whisper in his ear, and he’d come up with some kind of vicious payback that I’d have to consider, and that usually brought me back down pretty fast. When I finally went berserk in fifth-grade art class, it was partly because I’d been late for the bus that morning and left Thrash at home by accident, so there was nowhere for me to turn and nothing to hold me back.

  And it was all so fucking stupid really. Ms. Witherspoon obviously hadn’t planned anything for us to do, so she pulled out some macaroni, gave us some paper and glue, and told us to make a picture. That pissed me off. We were in fifth grade, not first grade or kindergarten, and she was treating us like babies because she hadn’t bothered to do something as simple as her fucking job. Plus, she gave us a kind of macaroni that looked exactly like the ready-mix packages of macaroni and cheese that Neecey made me for dinner when mom was at work, so I was pissed about having to make a picture out of my goddamn dinner, and there was everybody else, tossing the shit around the room, like it wasn’t food, like it was nothing. I tried to play along, though, because I didn’t want to be singled out again, not without Thrash. So I started pounding the macaroni into small pieces, using one of my big textbooks, not slamming it, but pushing it down to grind it, because the macaronis were small and hard to break. My plan was to make a picture of the beach, because I liked the beach (always had since I could remember), and I was gonna use the ground-up macaroni as sand. Something about the texture of it seemed right to me. But when Ms. Witherspoon saw what I was doing, she came over and started yelling at me for making a mess. I wasn’t making a mess, I was being really careful, and I tried to explain to her what I was doing, but she wasn’t having it. She said making a picture of the beach wasn’t the assignment, because it was December, and I was supposed to be making a holiday scene; and then, totally out of nowhere, she added, “You see, everyone, just because you’re a genius doesn’t make you an artist.” That was so out of the blue and so goddamn wrong that something inside me broke.

  First of all, I wasn’t a genius and never said I was. To be a genius you had to score 140 or better on the tests, and I scored 133, which was pretty good, but not genius. I didn’t play chess or any musical instruments, and although I kicked ass at math, I thought it was boring. So what was the point of calling me a genius if the tests said I wasn’t and I wasn’t a prodigy in anything, except not fitting in? Didn’t you have to do something to be a genius? I’d always thought so, and that’s why I’d always thought everybody was making a big deal out of nothing, especially my teachers. Not that that stopped them. They just kept after it, about how I was supposed to be so smart but didn’t show it, like I thought I was too good for everyone or had some kind of fiendish plan or whatever. The other kids hated me for all of it—for being complimented like that by our teachers (because they thought it was a compliment to be singled out for false praise), for spending most of my time huddled up with Thrash, and most of all because they couldn’t stand the idea that “Genie the Teeny Wienie” might be better than they were at anything, instead of just some total freakish loser. They’d been making my life hell for two years, all of them, and there was Ms. Witherspoon, ragging on me in front of everyone, having a nice big laugh about shit she didn’t know anything about, and she was supposed to be my goddamn art teacher.

  I lost it. I really lost it. I was so busted with rage that I don’t remember half of what happened, but I’d cleared that room out faster than the lunch bell and trashed most of it within a couple of minutes. I remembered hearing the screams of the other kids out in the hall, but that didn’t turn me back. Somewhere along the line, probably when that chair found its way through the window, Ms. Wither-spoon must have thought she should come back in and try to stop me, instead of just letting me run out of steam, which I was doing when she snuck up behind me and grabbed me by the shoulders. Big mistake. There was nothing left in the room to save ($573 worth of damage),
she hadn’t announced herself or warned me that she was coming, and I didn’t hear her, so she startled me, bad. I felt myself being grabbed, turned real fast, and before I could think of anything or stop myself, I threw a punch, blam, right into Ms. Witherspoon’s jaw. She went down, hard, and the next thing I knew, Mr. Randle was holding my wrists behind my back with one hand and pushing my face into the floor with the other, his knee wedged into the small of my back. The police came and took me to the station in one of those “scared straight” moves they loved to pull on kids, because kids were stupid enough to fall for it. I didn’t fall for it, but then again, I didn’t need it. I didn’t give a shit how badass you thought you were, when you knocked a teacher out cold as a fifth grader, you knew that you’d crossed a line, and beyond that line wasn’t freedom but danger, lots and lots of danger, and because you found yourself on one side of that line instead of the other, things were never gonna be the same for you again.

  Mom was crying when she came to get me, and the principal threatened to expel me. But mom couldn’t afford to send me to private school, so if they expelled me it would mean that we’d either have to move to another school district, which we also couldn’t afford, or my educational career would be over, and mom would have to deal with the law for that as well. So they struck a deal: they made her set up a payment plan to cover the damage and suspended me for three months, which led to me being left back, and when I came back to school they sent me to mandatory counseling during the period I was supposed to be in art class. And the bigger picture I’d realized as I was rotting away in fifth grade all over again was that the people running my school didn’t know what the hell they were doing, but that didn’t stop them from doing whatever the fuck they wanted, as long as they never had to admit they’d made a mistake. They couldn’t figure out what my problem was or how to help me, so they made me pay instead. Period. They pushed me up a grade and held me back, sent me to one counselor after another, jerked me around like a goddamn puppet, but always found a way to shift the blame to me, or my family, when things went wrong. They flunked me to show all the other kids who was really in charge, so everyone would know that being “special” didn’t mean a goddamn thing when it came to falling in line. Even though I hadn’t meant to do it, I’d taken aim at one of theirs, and they’d taken aim back, simple as that.

  After that incident, though, I wasn’t “special” anymore; I was “different,” which was a nice way of saying I was a problem. When I realized what was happening, I tried to tell my counselors I thought some of my problems were more institutional than familial (which were words they used), but they couldn’t or didn’t want to hear that. They were part of the institution, so they were the good guys. And I was just one of those kids who was fucking it up for everybody else. It was total bullshit, all of it, and, yeah, I lost interest in school after that.

  I glanced at the clock on my nightstand and saw Spider-Man’s hands forming what looked like a “greater than” symbol from math. It was after ten-thirty less than half an hour till lights-out in the summer, but I wasn’t gonna wait for it. I felt tired, spent. I looked down at my journal, saw nothing but blankness on the page before me, and realized I’d been too preoccupied with yesterday’s headlines to write anything more than the notes on my case. I closed my journal, put it back in the side drawer of my desk, locked the side drawer with the key, and then hid the key in the top drawer—under the ten-dollar bill that was beneath my box of Magic Markers—for safekeeping.

  Thrash looked spent, too. He’d been sitting in that hard wooden desk chair for the past couple of hours and it was starting to take its toll: his shoulders were slouched forward, his head was drooping a little, his tongue was hanging down, and although his eyes were as wide open as ever, it seemed like he was fighting to keep them that way. The sandman was mopping the floor with his ass, so I scooped him up, laid him on his side of the bed, took off my shorts and T-shirt, turned off the light, and slipped under the sheets.

  But as soon as my head hit the pillow, my mind started racing, and I wondered if Razor really had set me up for the plant job I’d gotten at tryouts, then what the hell was behind it? I wondered if it had something to do with my investigation, or the sign at grandma’s home getting tagged. It seemed like they might be connected because the MO’s were the same: they were both just forms of bullying, one of them aimed at me and the other aimed at old people, most of whom were really sick or practically out of their minds, like grandma; and as if waiting around for the big sleep weren’t torture enough, they had to get mocked by some idiot kids who couldn’t even spell retarded.

  That was bullshit, too, but I couldn’t let myself think about that now or my mind would just keep on going and I’d never get any rest. I rolled over onto my side and pictured Orlando moping around that cavernous bedroom of his, surrounded by books, being all depressive about what happened and feeling like total shit. Christ, sometimes I wished there was a switch I could throw to shut off my brain, make it all go quiet and dark. I rolled over the other way, pulled the pillow over my head, and tried to get some sleep.

  SIX

  You had to have guns if you wanted to go to war. So when my alarm clock woke me up the next morning, I made sure I wasn’t suffering any lingering damage from yesterday (which I wasn’t) and then jumped out of bed for my daily regimen of push-ups and sit-ups. I did fifty of each every morning, alternating every other day between push-ups and pull-ups, the latter of which I did in the doorway to my room on an extension bar that I kept in the closet. I used nothing but my own body weight for resistance, because that’s what Herschel Walker had done on the farm in Georgia when he was young, and it’d made him into the star running back for the New Jersey Generals. Okay, this wasn’t exactly a farm, and I’d never been as far south as Delaware, let alone Georgia. But if you didn’t switch exercises like that, you’d develop unevenly, and that just looked stupid, no matter where you lived.

  When I was done, I saw a note on my desk paper-clipped to an envelope. It was from mom. It said that grandma had come up short again and told me to take the money in the envelope over to the retirement home this morning, first thing.

  That figured. No matter how far the buck got passed, it always landed on me. Every two weeks grandma had to write a check for $275 to pay for the luxury and splendor of confinement in the retirement home. But along with a good portion of her memory and her grip on reality, she’d somehow lost the ability to distinguish between 20 and 70 and had been handing over checks for $225 instead of $275 at least once a month. Or maybe she was just screwing it up on purpose: I wouldn’t put it past her. Whatever. Pencil-necked Bryan did the books at the home, because he’d probably gotten a mail-order degree in penny-pinching or something, the twerp, so he’d gone to talk to her about it the first time it’d happened. I wished I’d been there, because grandma’d had one of her moments, not remembering or denying everything, but then Bryan showed her the check, and she accused him of altering it after cashing it and trying to swindle a defenseless old woman. She must have totally reamed him, because he was still shaken up when he’d talked to mom and told her what the problem was. Anyway, that’s what mom had told me, and that’s why he called us every time it’d happened since, so he didn’t have to deal with grandma anymore—because he couldn’t—but so he could still extort the difference from mom anyway. Fucking weasel.

  Well, at least I’d get to check out what Kathy wasn’t wearing and give my client an update on the case. I went into the bathroom, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and gelled up my hair. I wore it spiky on top and clipped on the sides and back, except for the rattail in the center of my neckline, about four inches long, braided and fastened with a rubber band. Neecey usually braided it for me, but every time she did, she told me it looked like trash, same as mom, and they were always squawking about how I should cut it off. Either that, or they teased me that I was the mailman’s son, because my hair was dirty blond and not dark like theirs.

  When I came
out of the bathroom, Neecey’s bedroom door was closed, so I knocked to see if she was there. No answer. I knocked again. More of the same. She must’ve spent the night at Cynthia’s. I still had questions for her, especially about Razor, but I was starting to wonder if she’d ever be here long enough for me to ask them. Shit, she’d been absent from the premises so often this summer you’d think she was the landlord instead of a tenant.

  I went into my room, pulled out a pair of knock-off Jams with orange and yellow flowers that mom had bought on sale at the Bradlees in Hazlet and a yellow T-shirt with HULKAMANIA across the front in bold red letters. I turned the T-shirt inside out before I put it on, though, because professional wrestling was so fucking fake that it made me sick to watch it. But the T-shirt matched my shorts, and that’s why I was wearing it. I skipped the socks, slipped on my white canvas sneakers, and checked myself in the mirror on the closet door. My clothes were cheaper than a toothless prostitute’s, but the bright colors brought out the tan I’d gotten at the beach on Sunday, and the tan brought out my eyes. They weren’t dark brown like mom’s and Neecey’s, but gray-blue—translucent, icy—and my face wasn’t rounded and soft like theirs either, but lean, even, and slanted slightly down in V’s from my eyebrows to my chin. Even my ears and smile were kind of V-shaped, so much so that while Marlowe had been my favorite from page one, I’d always thought I looked more like a young Sam Spade: I was a blond Satan just like he was. The only real difference was that I was a tanned, gutter-mouthed, bike-riding beach rat of a dirty-blond Satan who roamed and patrolled the pocket-lint streets of a shit town close to the Shore, instead of someplace cool like San Francisco. And every once in a while it made me think I must’ve been adopted.