So Anthony didn’t ask any questions that day or for much of that first week of classes. He rarely raised his hand or made a comment. He felt invisible sometimes, but it didn’t bother him at all. It was like his teachers knew it, too, and agreed to play along. He did finish all of his homework, though, and turned most of it in on time. Brody, on the other hand, was having trouble. If he wasn’t somewhere getting high or kissing Venus, he was strumming his guitar and singing off-key. The only time he worked was during evening study hours, when teachers patrolled the dorms to make sure none of the kids were goofing off.
On one of those nights, Anthony and Brody sat at their desks, reading an assignment for Mr. Hawley’s English class. It was an old story about a black man in a segregated southern town, where he worked for a white family as a resident handyman. Although he was religious and often turned the other cheek, the man snapped one night and shot a lot of the people, black and white, young and old, he didn’t care who he killed. When he ran out of bullets, the man stopped by a river and waited for the advancing mob. They shot him to pieces and then displayed the riddled body in a store window. Near the end of the story, back inside the dead man’s modest room, it showed his Bible open to a passage about Judgment Day.
Anthony put down the book and looked at the words from a distance. They were as blurred as the man’s final gesture. He could have escaped but took his boots off instead. It was like the man had wanted to get caught. Anthony glared at Brody, who, by the shocked look on his face, had also finished the reading.
“Bummer,” Brody said, and flipped the book closed. Then he stared straight ahead and said nothing.
The next day, before English class, Anthony was apprehensive. Kids were abuzz over the reading and ready to talk about it. Mr. Hawley breezed in and dropped his briefcase on his desk, pulled the cap off a dry-erase marker, and wrote WHY? across the whiteboard.
Immediately a dozen hands flew up. And although they each expressed it in a dozen different ways, every kid agreed that racism had made the man kill.
“Interesting . . .” Mr. Hawley stopped behind Brody and put a hand on his shoulder. “Is that what you think, too?”
Brody shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”
Mr. Hawley glared. “You guess?”
“I mean, yes,” Brody said, straightening up. “If you think about the time period, the place of African Americans on the social ladder, the way the white people mistreated and disrespected him in the story, it makes perfect sense that he would get fed up and go postal.”
“Impressive,” Hawley said, and moved on. Anthony agreed and stared at his roommate, who sat in a sudden patch of sunlight that came in through the window.
“Anyone disagree?” Hawley asked. No one raised a hand.
“What about the Bible?” Hawley continued, and started moving again. This time he stopped directly behind Anthony. “Why did the author make the Bible so significant to the killer?”
The hands on his shoulders made Anthony jump. Hawley was looking down at him and benevolently smiling. “What about you, Mr. Jones? Anything to add?”
Everyone turned to look at him, and Anthony suddenly felt hot. “I don’t go to church,” he said, and stared at the table. Then he thought about something else from the story that had bothered him. It didn’t have anything to do with the Bible, but it did poke holes in everyone’s theory. Slowly, he raised his hand. “One thing,” Anthony said. “If he was mad at white people for mistreating him, then why did he kill black people, too?”
Trouble came to the freshman floor on Friday, in the form of a sopping kid named Chris. Upperclassmen had pushed him around and thrown him into a brook, leaving him soaked and smelling awful. It was the latest run-in with the kids from Welch that had Anthony concerned. So far, he had managed not to get in any fights, but he was afraid that someone would test him.
Later, after Mr. Hawley had checked them all in for the night, Anthony and a few other ninth graders snuck out of their bunks and to Chris’s room, to hear more about what had happened. “They called it Freshman Brook,” Chris explained, not looking at anyone. “Told me not to fight, that it’s sorta like school tradition to throw in the freshman boys . . . At least, that’s what they told me.”
One of the kids called it hazing, and a lot of them looked relieved. It was an acceptable and expected abuse, part of the prep-school world not mentioned in the catalogs. For Anthony and a few others, though, it didn’t make any sense. He could never just let somebody punk him.
“I don’t know about that one,” Anthony said, more to himself than anyone else. “Somebody put their hands on me . . . I don’t know.”
“Right?” Paul added. “That’s some craziness, son.”
One boy suggested that they go talk to Zach, but Chris shook his head. “Zach was there when it happened,” Chris said. “He didn’t throw me in, but he didn’t stop them, either.”
At first it was silent but then Nate hissed, “We should go upstairs and put shaving cream on Zach’s face!”
Brody laughed. “You guys gotta relax. . . . Take a chill pill, on the ill will, while you still . . . feel . . . Shit.” He laughed again, and everyone looked at him.
“Nate’s right, though,” said a kid named Alex. “We should retaliate, but how? They’re bigger than us, and they have us outnumbered. . . . We need a plan. . . .”
The boys looked at one another but didn’t speak. Brody broke the silence with a drumroll. “Outweighed and outnumbered . . . delaying our slumber . . . gotta figure a way, to make them all pay, for making Chris swim like a flounder . . .” Someone belched. “Thanks,” Brody continued. “I call that one ‘Ode to a Flying Freshman Fish.’”
“No offense,” Alex said, “but we’ve strayed off topic. Our mission is to devise a plan, not mock the bard.”
“The what?”
“That’s me,” Brody said, bowing humbly. “Brody the bard, at your service. Bringing music to a deeply troubled world.”
None of the talk made sense to Anthony. Just like in class, the way that he saw things seemed different from everyone else. No wonder he had never heard of hazing before. Back at home, it would get someone shot.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Wait for me,” Paul hollered from behind him. “You act like they’re gonna fire us.”
“They might,” Anthony said, not slowing down. “Either that, or they’re gon’ put us with maintenance. You feel like unclogging toilets on Saturdays?”
“Not me, son.” Paul picked up the pace.
Anthony and Paul had work-study as part of their financial-aid package. They washed dishes three mornings a week to help cover the cost of tuition. After gobbling breakfast, they walked through the swinging doors and into the kitchen, past the ovens, and into the dish room.
“Turn that down,” Paul groaned, already reaching for an apron. “Don’t wanna hear all that Spanish junk this early in the morning.”
Unperturbed, Hector turned up the music. “This is Dominican music, Papi. Not Spanish.”
“I don’t care what it is. You making me feel like I’m in the Bronx.”