And also he hated new students.
In the middle of the hallway he uncrossed an arm, raised a water bottle, and spat a jet of dip into it.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
Brad Stone straight up asked me that. Though it’s a question I often asked myself, in this context I didn’t know what to say. To be fair, I’d never found a satisfactory answer.
He repeated the question.
Shit, this day.
“Are you asking me for money?” I said. “It would be easier if you just named your price, if that’s the case. Then we could start negotiations.”
“Negatory. We’ve got trouble.” Brad tongued his dip from the left side of his mouth to the right. “We’ve got trouble in North Homer. Weakness. Psychological-type weakness. Weakness that is ripe for exploitation by outside forces. And what do you know? The American way to vanquish weakness and reclaim civic strength is to kick ass. The ass of outsiders who show up where they don’t belong.”
He spoke slowly and carefully, emphasizing every word. His breath smelled like bacon, Gatorade, and Skoal, like composting violence.
I took stock: an empty hallway, and a bully with deep-state hate and WWE muscles. I’d have to handle this delicately.
“Are you an asshole?” I asked.
Brad whipped a shoulder forward, and I jengaed right to the ground. I picked myself up.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Dan,” I answered.
“Dan what?”
“Gleeballs.”
“Dan Gleeballs?”
“If it’s not too cold.”
Where Brad Stone’s neck should have been, had he ordered one at the body-parts store, went bright red. He swung his shoulder out again.
“You’re missing the point, newb,” he said. “Do I have to explain it all over?”
“Please,” I said, picking myself up again, buying time. “If you don’t mind.”
Normally, being a dick took bullies, so used to obsequious supplications (obsequious supplications!), by surprise. Then I’d make my exit, to their sputtering confusion. Unfortunately, being a dick doesn’t work when there’s a bigger dick right in your face. Not a situation I’d been in before, in any way, to be clear.
I’ll spare you the lecture I received here, expanding on the role of faltering masculinity in the breakdown of societal order and the decline of American exceptionalism. It was somewhat repetitive. I zoned out. I’d never met a bully like this, a hate site crossbred with a thesaurus and biceps the size of cantaloupes. My own arms tended more toward overcooked pasta. Fruit, noodles…Lunch had been unsatisfying. I was still hungry.
When I zoned back in, Brad was talking again about weakness taking over the school.
Wait a second—was that the hysterics?
“Do the weak, like, become sick?” I interrupted.
“Are you listening?” Brad snarled. “Weakness is the illness. Strength is the cure.”
“So, they are hysterical?”
“They’re sick!”
“Right. But what’s the sickness look like?”
“Weakness!”
“I got that! That’s not helpful!”
Brad raised up his fists, put a knuckle to his nose, and cleared it against a locker. “Let’s do this.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
Shoot, there were some troubled people in this school. Something was deeply off. Megan Rose was right—in twenty-two states, I hadn’t seen anything like this before. At the moment, I was getting more than a little frustrated by it.
“For the record, you’re wrong,” I said to Brad. “Society’s not based on strength and weakness. Society runs on one thing.”
“What’s that, newb?”
“Pain.”
Brad wasn’t expecting the punch, and it actually tagged his jaw pretty hard, judging by the jolt down my arm and into my spine—though maybe it wasn’t all that impressive. My defeat was swift and total and included, free of charge, more brute-force philosophizing. Damn. I was going to have to handle Brad very carefully. But how? I closed my eyes and pondered it. Pondered Megan Rose, too—what she’d said about trees and the way her breath had felt on my ear when she said it (fluttering, pepperminty, damp). Pondered the fact that students were getting sick and nobody seemed to know what was happening to them. Pondered—might as well, Brad had stamina— the Siberian permafrost, the glacier melt in Greenland, and the president of Brazil trading the southern half of the Amazon jungle for a bright red Ferrari.
Just got to town and I had a lot to think about.
FOUR
THE NORTH HOMER High School principal’s office was like the private sanctum of a Mafia boss. You passed through an outer office and then an inner office, and the principal was sequestered in another office past that. Assassins would have a hard time getting a clean shot, for sure. I had spent all morning in the outer office with the mean-eyed secretaries while they made up my schedule. They displayed no surprise at my quick return and responded to my greetings as if I had thrown them from a bucket of rotting vegetables.
Brad Stone was already parked a few seats down when I arrived, his giant frame spilling out of his chair. He gave me the finger without looking up from his phone. Still without a power cord to replace the one I’d left in Kentucky, I had nothing to do but picture ripping that finger off.
Which is how I spent the rest of the afternoon. Didn’t make it to a single class, actually, but that was okay—I was grateful for the English teacher who had happened upon our hallway discussion, broken it up, and brought us here.
From time to time I could feel Brad Stone glaring at me.
“What?” I said.
“Understand, this is a temporary stay of the inevitable by an overly involved, overly redistributive authority.”
He flexed his arms as he said this.
“You’ve got to have a small penis,” I said.
“Your mom didn’t think so.”
I stared into the distance and listened to the capillaries in my temples exploding.
The office was busy all afternoon with phone calls, students coming in and out, teachers checking mailboxes, and UPS deliverymen in shorts waiting for signatures. When the last bell finally rang, the school emptied out in seconds and a fat man with a flattop and a whistle around his neck stuck his head in the door and said: “Stone, what the fuck-all you doing here?” And Brad Stone said, “He started it.” And the coach said, “I don’t care. Get your pads on. Now.”