Chuck Carter

The world was beginning to flower into wounds.

—J. G. Ballard

Chuck Carter lived in dozens of different places every day. Sometimes he lived in a house with dark green carpets. Sometimes he lived in a school that smelled like milk. He lived in a run-down car with his parents sometimes. They drove it everywhere, his mom and his pretend dad. The door was spotted with giant pumpkins of orange rust. The seat belt slanted across his chest like a sash. Chuck’s whole body vibrated with the engine, even his bones. He liked to watch the power lines swooping past outside. They rose and fell in a beautiful, slow, hypnotizing way. It looked like they were taking turns bouncing on trampolines.

One time, Chuck rode in an elevator with glass walls. This was the single best place he had ever lived. He remembered sailing into the enormous blue sky like Superman. Below him, all the people had turned into moving dots. He felt tall and brave and powerful, nothing like himself. The ride lasted three minutes, and then it was over. He still dreamed about it once or twice a week. It was the best and happiest of all his dreams. His other favorite place to live was under the clotheslines. There were two of them, twins, stretching across his backyard. He liked to live between them while the sheets dried. It felt like camping out in an airy white tent. Sometimes he wished he could stay there and never leave.

Mostly, though, Chuck lived either at home or at school. It took him a while to learn the exact rules. Rules were extremely important, and the more exact the better. Rules kept the world from turning into a vicious trap. There were dangers everywhere, a thousand tripwires in the grass. People had to watch their step, even in the sunlight. When he was little, Chuck had rehearsed the rules tirelessly. The house was where he lived when it got dark. He also lived there on weekends, plus during snowy weather. He lived in the school for eight hours a day. He wasn’t allowed to sleep there, only in the house. The school had three separate times: class-, lunch-, and recess-. The house had five: chore-, play-, meal-, bath-, and bed-. Both the school and the house were two stories tall. Both had time-out corners, and both had magnolias around them. They were different from each other in one big way. The school had kids who shouted and knocked Chuck over. In the house there was only him and his parents.

To Chuck, the house resembled a stack of yellow rectangles. The rectangles were bricks, and they glistened after it rained. Though they looked delicious, he wasn’t supposed to taste them. That was another rule, but a hard one to remember. He was a crazy little retard, always licking the house. What was wrong with him that he was so stupid? How many times did he have to be told “no”? Those were the questions his pretend dad hissed at him. There were real dads, and then there were pretend dads. It was only pretend dads who called their kids retards. Chuck’s hair curled softly at the nape of his neck. No real dad would grab a handful and twist it. No real dad would laugh and say, “Indian torture ritual. Go ahead, run and tell your mom, you little twerp.” A real dad would never, ever do such a thing. It seemed obvious as soon as you thought about it.

——

It was easy for Chuck to recognize other people’s pain. When you hit people, or pushed them, something terrible happened. Their bodies changed underneath the skin, straining, tightening like ropes. Cats and dogs and horses reacted exactly the same way. It looked like something inside them was trying to escape. It looked like a ghost wanted out of their bones. The difference was real and physical, not in Chuck’s imagination. He had seen it happen at least a million times. Over the years, he had almost gotten used to it. People confused him usually, but not people who were hurting. So when the light came, he wasn’t surprised one bit. Suddenly, everywhere he looked, people began glowing from their wounds.

This time he wasn’t the only one who noticed it. His teacher saw it, his mom, even his pretend dad. He and his parents were watching TV when it started. There was a gymnastics competition happening on the sports channel. Girls in leotards were tucking and whirling like amazing machines. They hopped lightly, toe by toe, along a balance beam. They ran leaping onto a springboard and flipped over backwards. Then one of them broke her leg doing a cartwheel. She fell down, and a gasp spread through the audience. Her shinbone glittered like a mirror full of camera flashes. The couch springs creaked noisily as Chuck’s parents leaned forward. At that moment, he realized they could see it, too.

Later, he watched his mom bite one of her hangnails loose. Right away, her cuticle began to sparkle along the curve. (That was the white horseshoe around her fingernail: a cuticle.) His pretend dad nicked himself shaving, and the cut shimmered. And when Chuck pinched himself, a test, it worked perfectly. A cloud of light danced and quivered over his skin.

On Monday, his teacher, Mr. Kaczmarek, was late to school. Rushing inside, he accidentally banged his hand on the door. The whole class watched it flicker like a slow fire. Later, at recess, Mr. Kaczmarek divided them into Bombardment teams. Todd Rosenthal stalked Chuck with one of the red balls. He said, “Let’s see you dodge this, you dumb bastard.” The ball hit Chuck hard and square on the forehead. The other kids gathered around, watching the light spread open. Every single one of them reacted exactly the same way. They began running and hurling their dodgeballs at one another. When the recess bell rang, they all filed back inside. Everyone’s skin was printed with glowing white plates of light. It took almost the whole day for them to disappear. The last one winked out just before the buses arrived.

As usual, Chuck sat at his desk and never spoke. Technically, a “dumb” person was just someone who stayed quiet. Chuck was dumb, and everybody knew it, including Mr. Kaczmarek. But he gave Todd Rosenthal two checkmarks for saying “bastard.”


A week passed, and still nothing had returned to normal. The president appeared on the news to give a speech. He used words like no obvious harm and further study. An awful bright silver cavity kept flashing from his mouth.

Chuck got bored and wandered outside while he was talking. A black sports car was tilted forward onto the street. The car’s front tire had gotten wedged inside a manhole. It was lodged underground, smoking and wailing as it spun. The driver was punching the window and screaming curse words. His nose was leaking blood, shining onto his upper lip. Some of Chuck’s neighbors stood on their lawns watching him. A man in gray sweatpants shouted, “Put it in reverse!” Someone else said, “Want me to go get my winch?” The car’s engine just kept howling like a wounded animal.

There were similar accidents, similar horrible scenes, all the time. Chuck saw stories about them on the TV at night. A bus might tip over speeding around a steep curve. The passengers would stumble from the wreck like gleaming torches. A chef might slice her hand open carving a turkey. The wound would cast a bright light over the counter. A model in high heels might fall on the runway. Her face would come up glittering from the wooden floor. Light kept pouring out of people whenever they hurt themselves.

At first, all the grown-ups were upset by these accidents. Car crashes and mistakes with kitchen knives were nothing new. The strange glow—that was what bothered them so much. Nobody knew what to call the thing that was happening. Soon, though, within days, people began talking about “the Illumination.” The name was everywhere suddenly, a kind of secret agreement. It made the changes in the world seem less frightening.

Chuck heard two strangers gossiping about it in the supermarket. They were old men with thick glasses and rubbery earlobes. He liked the way their teeth clacked in their mouths.

“That war injury of mine’s lit up like Independence Day.”

“You should’ve seen my Emmy with the arth-a-ritis this morning.”

“And look at my trick knee shining—the damnedest thing.”

“She can’t hardly make the coffee her hands clench so.”

“It’s this Illumination is what it is, don’t you know.”

One of them picked up a jar of peanut butter. “Five big ones!” he complained, and slammed it back down. Nobody but Chuck seemed to notice the way it glowed. Even objects felt pain if you struck or ignored them. Jars of peanut butter could be hurt just like people. Dirt bikes, toys, shopping carts, cereal boxes: they all could. Chuck knew—and had always known—that it was true.

Once, at age five, he had kicked his toy train. He remembered how it hit the wall and flipped over. The chimney, made of plastic, broke off with a crack. The train looked like a hand with a missing finger. It looked like an empty shack standing in brown dirt. Chuck sat down and tried his best to repair it. The face on the front stared up at him sadly. The very worst part was the way it kept smiling. Chuck could tell that it had not stopped trusting him. It still liked him and wanted to be his friend. He had to pat its head and say, “There, there.” His mom found him crying and jamming the pieces together. How could he explain the horrible thing he had done?

That was the day he began treating everything so gently. He never threw his toys or knocked them together anymore. He made sure that both his shoes were always tied. (The right one was a boy, the left a girl.) Once a week, he washed and dried his rock collection. He used all sixty-four crayons when it was coloring time. The trees he drew might be blue, black, or yellow. It didn’t matter, as long as every color was happy. Chuck had eight stuffed animals—mostly bears, plus one elephant. At night, he arranged them all carefully on his bedspread. He stroked the animals softly and smoothly on their backs. Then he slipped his body delicately into place beneath them. He wished them eight separate goodnights before closing his eyes.

Wherever he looked, he could see the light in things. Everything looked silver when you saw it in a mirror. Everything was helpless and needed to be saved from harm. There was the big plastic upside-down water jug at school. There was the stone birdbath in his next-door neighbor’s yard. There were metal coins and the chrome handlebars on motorcycles. Trees gleamed with sap, and rocks sparkled with hidden crystals. Some tennis balls glowed bright green in the ordinary sunlight. Lamps, clocks, and televisions all shone with an inner light. Was it impossible that what they shone from was pain?

Chuck’s duty, he believed, was to watch over it all. He was big, strong, noble—the Superman of lifeless objects. Objects did not understand how dangerous the world could be. They were simple, childlike, and they could not protect themselves. He hated to see them hurt, hated it beyond words. And that was why he had to steal the book.


It belonged to the man who lived down the street. According to Chuck’s parents, he had undergone a terrible accident. One rainy day his car had slid into a pillar. He survived the crash, barely, but his wife did not. Afterward, he spent a whole month recovering in the hospital. He came home oozing light from his knees and stomach. He was like a thin white skeleton on his crutches. “The poor son of a bitch,” Chuck’s pretend dad said.

One night Chuck noticed the man carrying a book inside. The book ached with the hard light of something broken. Chuck could see its unhappiness melting straight through the covers. It was like a little sun shining across the street. The man walked past a window into his living room. Then he stopped and sat down and the light vanished. The next day, Chuck decided to get a closer look. He waited until his parents were arguing and went outside. The sky was the watery blue of a robin’s egg. A dragonfly landed on the rim of a Coke bottle. The bottle captured the sunlight, firing it into the air. It was an afternoon for coasting downhill on a bicycle.

Chuck looked both ways, paused, and ran across the street. He followed the stepping-stones through the man’s front yard. He slipped sideways through the bendy twigs of his bushes. Then he pressed his forehead to the wide cool window. He spotted the book right away, sitting on a table. Its pages were a thick stack of brilliantly glowing squares. The whole house shimmered, but the book was something special. Chuck wished he could tell what was wrong with it.

Later, at home, he could not stop thinking about it. His curiosity grew stronger and stronger as the day passed. Eventually, he returned to the window to look at it. The next day, and the next, he went there again. He began living behind the bushes as often as possible. He lived there secretly, usually in ten- or fifteen-minute stretches. Week by week, the book shone with its secret pain. Chuck was amazed it didn’t set the table on fire. Every so often, the man drifted past like a sailboat. Twice he caught Chuck standing outside peeking in at him. The first time, Chuck didn’t think he was even home. Suddenly he just appeared, walked over, and touched the glass. His fingers landed with a rat-a-tat-tat, and Chuck ran away.

The second time was a warm, dark, breezy midsummer night. Chuck watched the man shout at a group of teenagers. One of them, a girl, was living with the man. Chuck was almost completely sure she was not his daughter. She had glinting cigarette burns on her arms and legs. They looked like the holes in Swiss cheese, but silver. Once, outside walking, she had called Chuck her “main man.” She had mussed his hair and given him a Whatchamacallit. “Chin up, little guy,” she’d said, blowing him a kiss. That was a whole month before, minus a few days. Now the teenagers, the whole skinny crowd, left the house. The girl was the last of them to step outside. Afterward, the man sat on the couch, motionless, breathing hard. He was clutching the book shakily in his slender hands. When he spotted Chuck, he hurled it at the window. Light came whipping out of it in long white ribbons. As Chuck took flight, the bush’s twigs scraped his face.

That night, he lay in bed watching the scratches flicker. He kept picturing the book twisting wildly through the air. He wondered what it thought as its pages skittered open. Whether it imagined it was being punished for its mistakes. How it felt without a good solid table underneath it. If it believed the world would always be so frightening. Right then and there, he decided he would rescue it.


Another month went by before the chance came his way. He knew the man’s habits, and knew the girl’s, too. He had spent the summer watching them like a detective. They both left the house for several hours every afternoon. At night they usually ordered a pizza and watched TV. They slept late most mornings and ate leftovers for breakfast. The man took pictures of the girl with his camera. The girl posed with her arms crossed over her head. Occasionally she rubbed the man’s back through his polo shirt. She taught him how to use a knife against himself. Their bodies were both marked with hundreds of narrow cuts. The wounds covered their skin, every inch, in glittering ladders.

One day, shortly after two-thirty, Chuck snuck across the street. He was feeling courageous, invincible (which meant unbeatable, not see-through). He crept into place and waited behind the tall bushes. Around three, the sun turned the window into a mirror. The sight of Chuck’s eyes staring into themselves surprised him. He was blinking the image away when the man exited. The girl came with him and off they walked together. Neither of them noticed Chuck standing against the bricks, fortunately. After their footsteps faded away, he crept out of hiding. He took the spare key from beneath the fake rock. He opened the door—first one lock, then the other. The house smelled like bread dough mixed with tennis shoes. The floor was a glossy white with scattered black knots. Chuck made it a rule to tiptoe between the lines. He passed a table with a wooden clock on it. He turned a corner and went into the living room. The book was sandwiched between some magazines by the couch. The pages were buckled, the cover scuffed, the letters faded. When Chuck gripped it, his bones showed through his fingers.

Chuck bumped the table in the hallway as he left. The clock teetered and fell with an awful splintering noise. Immediately, it lit up inside, its pieces throbbing with pain. He wanted to hold it to his forehead and cry. But he was scared of getting caught there, scared crazy. He held the book to his chest and ran home. No matter how Chuck tried, he just kept hurting things. That was how the world worked—he couldn’t change it.

His mom was mixing cookies and burning a plain candle. A wax-and-sugar smell like birthday cakes hung in the air. Big important things always happened to Chuck on his birthday. On his second birthday, for instance, he finally started walking. On his seventh birthday, he got sick with chicken pox. He used to have a cat named Alley Cat Abra. On his fifth birthday, she was killed by a car. On his ninth birthday, Chuck decided he would stop talking. He never said anything right, so what was the use? He hadn’t spoken since, and it wasn’t—wasn’t—a phase. On his fifth birthday, he went to Chuck E. Cheese’s. Chuck E. Cheese shared Chuck’s name, which made them alike. Chuck decided he was his friend, his smiling buck-toothed friend. One was Chuck the Boy, the other Chuck the Mouse. Chuck the Mouse handed Chuck the Boy some gold tokens. Chuck the Boy followed Chuck the Mouse into the kitchen. Chuck the Mouse carried him back outside by the armpits. His giant head bobbed around like something inflated with helium. Later, Chuck the Boy got trapped inside the crawling tubes. His pretend dad yelled, “Climb the hell out!” at him. He coaxed him slowly through the maze, pointing and shouting. “To the car!” he demanded, and Chuck’s birthday was over.

Now he was ten: ten years and seven months old. His last birthday party was already a whole half-year ago. He thought about the presents his parents had given him. His favorite was the picture box with the multicolored pegs. His second favorite was the tic-tac-toe game with the beanbags. His least favorite was the robot with missiles for arms. He remembered kneeling on the dark green living room carpet. He remembered clapping his hands during “Happy Birthday to You.” Then his mom set down a cake with burning candles. “How does it feel to be another year old, Chuckie?”

His pretend dad touched the softest part of his neck. “Your mom and me paid serious money for this cake. That means no throwing up this time, you hear me?” He turned and smacked Chuck’s mom playfully on the butt. “Things sure were different ten years ago—weren’t they, honey? We had a lot more money before that little accident.”

“Frank!” she said and gave Chuck a little nervous glance. She looked away, and after that everything came in tens. There were ten flames that disappeared in threads of smoke. There were ten fingers squeezing Chuck’s shoulder as he swallowed. There were ten pictures on the wall in the hallway. There were ten steps between his bed and his dresser. There were ten birdcalls from the trees, then another ten. There were ten houses on each side of the street. There were ten boys in his class, and ten girls. There were ten checkmarks by his name on the chalkboard. There were ten words in every sentence—yet another rule. There were ten soft beats in every moment of time.

——

Chuck took the book and hid it in his dresser. That night, he leafed through it quietly in his bedroom. It seemed to be a diary of miniature love notes. Each one was a single sentence written in blue ink. They all began with the same two words: I love. I love the smell of your perfume on my shirts. I love the way you curl up against my body. I love watching the sunset from the roof with you. I love seeing your number appear on my cell phone. The notes stopped suddenly in the middle of a page. The blue ink threw a glare up from the paper. It danced on the ceiling like sunbeams reflecting from water. The man must have been writing to someone very special. Were they for the girl with all the cigarette burns? The one who had been teaching him to cut himself? No, no, they were for his wife, his dead wife. The one who had passed away in the car accident. The one who went away and left him all alone. Who turned him into a poor son of a bitch. The answer was obvious once Chuck gave it some thought.

All summer long, he read the book bit by bit. After a while, he felt like he knew the man. The night he finished, he started again from the beginning. He got a Magic Marker and highlighted his favorite sentences. I love the poems you wrote in junior high school. I love how you fumble for words when you’re angry. I love holding you tight when you ask me to. I love knowing exactly how crazy I am about you. I love sensing you beside me on long road trips. I love the idea of growing old and forgetful together. I love how skillfully you use a pair of scissors. I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you. I love your “Cousin Cephus and his pet raccoon Shirley.” I love the mess I made of braiding your hair. I love your ten fingers and love your ten toes.

Chuck liked the sound of the words in his head. Not every sentence made good sense, or not right away. Some of them were bizarre or mysterious, some downright baffling. It was fun trying to figure out what they meant.

I love your terrible puns: “Miró, Miró, on the wall.” What was a “Miró,” Chuck wondered, or a “Miró, Miró”? Were there really supposed to be two on the wall? Or were they like tom toms or yo-yos or BBs? Were they a single thing that had a double name?

I love the “carpet angels” you make after I vacuum. Chuck decided that carpet angels must be like snow angels. He tried to make one with his arms and legs. He lay down, scissored them open, then stood back up. The carpet looked just the same—green, without any angels. Maybe the trick only worked right after someone had vacuumed.

I love that little outfit you wore on my birthday. Chuck pictured a cowboy outfit: hat, gun, bandana, and all. Once, in kindergarten, Todd Rosenthal had worn one to school. He kept pretending to fire his gun at Mariellen Chase. Finally, Ms. Derryberry had to send him to the office.

There were many other strange, confusing sentences in the book. Yet it seemed gentle to Chuck, not sad or angry. He wished he could understand why it shone so brightly.

At the beginning of September, he started the fifth grade. He went to the normal school, not the special one. Both his psychiatrists had 100 percent agreed: Chuck was normal. He was normal, not special, and definitely not a retard. His pretend dad was just plain wrong about some things. Chuck was five when he began seeing his first psychiatrist. His name was Dr. Diehl, and he called Chuck “Charles.” Chuck liked him anyway because of his glass octopus bowl. Inside it he kept lollipops with gum in the middle. He always let Chuck take one before they began talking. Chuck would suck the lollipop, rolling it over his tongue. The hard globe of candy would become thin and pitted. Sometimes it would taste like strawberry, sometimes like root beer. Eventually, he would crunch through it with his back teeth. Then came the part where he would chew the gum. Sandlike grains of candy would crack open in his mouth. A sweet powder would coat the insides of his cheeks. Eating the lollipop was the best part of Wednesday afternoons. He truly missed it when he stopped visiting Dr. Diehl.

Chuck started seeing his second psychiatrist after he quit talking. They still met once a week, every Monday after school. He was a tall, skinny, gray-haired man called Dr. Finkelstein. Dr. Finkelstein, whose name was almost the same as Frankenstein. Dr. Finkelstein, whose forehead had a triangle of red sunspots. Dr. Finkelstein, with his pencil jar and stack of note cards.

He might ask Chuck, “Care to use your voice today?”

Chuck would take one of the note cards from the stack. No, sorry, I don’t feel like talking aloud right now.

“Why do you think that is?” Dr. Finkelstein would say.

Chuck would tap the pencil against his knuckles awhile. Did you know New Mexico’s state bird is the roadrunner?

Dr. Finkelstein would read the card and ask, “Beep, beep?”

Chuck didn’t know why the doctor said such strange things. He would lean forward, smiling, waiting for Chuck to respond. Chuck would gesture at him to return the note card. He would shade in all the a’s, o’s, and e’s. Then he would move on to the b’s and d’s. He would fill the rest of the hour drawing roadrunners. Chuck was good with eyes but terrible—hopeless—with bodies. His roadrunners looked like feather dusters attached to gardening rakes.

——

Chuck’s fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Mount, was nicer than Mr. Kaczmarek. She was teaching them about the states and their birds. That was how Chuck knew about New Mexico and roadrunners. The state bird of Delaware was the blue hen chicken. The state bird of New Hampshire was the purple finch. The state bird of South Dakota was the ring-necked pheasant. “Why would Della wear a blue chicken on her head? That new ham you brought me sure is purple, Finchie. Dakota, I’m going to wring your neck,” she would say. This was her way of helping them remember the facts. The circle of her hands tightened around an imaginary neck. She made a choking noise and stuck out her tongue. A sore glistened on the tip like a white crater.

The routine made Chuck laugh with a great big “Ha!” All the other kids turned around to stare at him. First, he was weird, and second, he never said anything. Those were the thoughts he could see on their faces.

That was the morning Todd Rosenthal pushed Chuck during recess. Chuck was waiting in the seesaw line when it happened. He fell forward, landing on the rubbery green Nerf-like foam. Todd hoisted him back onto his feet by the elbow. He said, “I’m going to wring your neck, Chuckie boy.”

Todd Rosenthal had been bossing Chuck around ever since kindergarten. Kicking his desk chair and snapping his pencils in two. Firing spit wads at him with a flat popping noise. At lunch, he would sit across the table from Chuck. Chuck never quite knew how he was going to behave. Sometimes he would just eat his Doritos, ignoring Chuck completely. Sometimes he would crush Chuck’s sandwich inside its Ziploc bag. Chuck felt bad for his crushed sandwiches—horrible, in fact. They became swirling oil slicks of peanut butter and jelly. They were marked with the dents of Todd Rosenthal’s fingers. He wished he knew how to put them back together. Todd usually stood behind Chuck in the recess line, too. He liked to bump into him while they filed outside. Or step on his ankle so his shoe came loose. Or whisper, “Will you be my gay boyfriend, Chuck Carter?” But why would Todd Rosenthal want to wring his neck? Chuck had never understood him, not for a single minute. Chuck was weaker than Todd, smaller, a lot less threatening. He kept waiting for all his little meannesses to end.

That day on the playground was like every other day. After Todd said “Chuckie boy,” he said, “Count on it.” He said, “I’ll wring that scrawny neck like a chicken’s.” He said, “When you least expect it, there I’ll be.” Then he slapped Chuck, softly, like a gangster, and left.

For the rest of the day, Chuck’s elbow felt tight. He kept stretching his arm, hoping the joint would pop. The skin rippled slightly where Todd Rosenthal had grabbed him. It was nearly impossible for him to scratch his back.

That afternoon it rained and then gave way to sunlight. The parking lot reflected the sky from a thousand puddles. The basketball hoops dripped onto the pavement like shining halos. At three-thirty, Chuck’s mom picked him up in the car. She took the fast way home, speeding along the highway. The road was drenched with sheets of blue and white. At fifty miles per hour, the seats began to shake. Chuck’s teeth chattered in his mouth like a wind-up toy. His mom honked and shouted “Moron!” at the other drivers. Her voice shivered as she sang along with the radio. They stopped for gas, then groceries, then finished the drive. The rain had washed the dust out of the gutters. The bricks of Chuck’s house were dyed dark with water. They were stacked together like crispy double vanilla sugar wafers. He had not been caught licking them in several months. That was back in February, before the Illumination began. His pretend dad had come storming across the yard, furious. He had promised to whip Chuck, hard, unless he stopped. He couldn’t keep sticking crap like that in his mouth. Seriously, was he that messed up in the goddamned head? He needed to grow the hell up and quit it. Chuck knew the rule by heart: no tasting the bricks. But sometimes, rule or no rule, he still wanted to. It was one more problem he could not figure out.

Chuck left his mom alone to unpack the grocery bags. He dropped his backpack on the floor of his bedroom. A bullfrog mirror hung on the back of his door. Chuck saw himself staring out from inside its shining mouth. The finger-shaped bruises on his elbow were purple and silver. There were five of them—one, two, three, four, five. Five times two was ten, so everything still fit together. He sat at his desk and took out his notebook. The stories he had heard about fifth grade were true. He had lots of homework—too much, in his opinion. Nearly every day he had some new assignment to complete. One night he might have to draw a plant cell. The next he might have to answer questions about Ethiopia. Or color and label the four chambers of the heart. Or fill out the tiny squares of the multiplication table. Or write a paragraph about Benjamin Franklin flying a kite. Today it was time to study for his vocabulary quiz. He would have to spell the words, then define them. Evaporate, illiteracy, physician, membrane, diminutive, fragile, majestic, chandelier, sabotage, approximately. They were longer than most of the words he knew. He practiced using them in a sentence to memorize them.

As soon as the sun rises, the water will evaporate.

I was sick, so I went to see the physician.

There is nothing good about illiteracy, so learn to read.

Fridays and Saturdays were like a diminutive summer or Christmas. For approximately two days, Chuck could do whatever he wanted. His parents usually let him stay up late with them. They sat side by side in the fragile TV light. They slurped beer and whispered and flirted with each other. They let their fingers walk quietly up each other’s legs. Meanwhile, Chuck colored pictures, ate honey-roasted peanuts, and drank soda. A membrane of Cherry Coke trembled above the glass’s rim.

One Friday, he decided he would draw a majestic rainbow. An actor was on TV accepting a lifetime achievement award. His lungs shone with cancer through his tuxedo like chandeliers. Chuck looked down and tried to concentrate on his drawing. One by one, he used all sixty-four of his crayons. He was getting ready to shade in the last section. He took his favorite color, cornflower blue, from the box. But his pretend dad snatched the sheet of paper away. He waved it in the air like an American flag. He said, “Bedtime for Bonzo!” and made a chimpanzee noise.

There was that feeling of miniature needles in Chuck’s eyes. He hated crying so easily, but he couldn’t help it. His rainbow was only one curve short of being finished. His pretend dad had ruined the drawing with his sabotage. Now, like always, he was angry at Chuck for crying. Underneath his breath, he said, “For the love of God.”

Chuck tried to stop sniffling, but it did no good. His bears and his elephant were waiting on their bench. They were frightened and lonely and wondering where he was. He ran to his bedroom in his socks and pajamas. After he shut the door, he heard his parents whispering. His pretend dad said, “What’s the use in me trying? I could be Mr. Perfect, and it still wouldn’t matter.”

He said, “Face it, we’ve raised one Grade A brat.”

He said, “You try to make a single monkey joke—”

Chuck’s mom sighed and cleared her throat to interrupt him. “If you really attempted to figure him out, you could. It’s not like you have to be Sherlock-frigging-Holmes. You want to know how to put him to bed? There are three different ways to do it,” she said. Chuck pictured her extending her fingers as she listed them. “ ‘Chuck Carter, Chuck Carter, it’s time to sleep till morning.’ ‘Your stuffed animals are waiting for you to say goodnight.’ And then, if he absolutely won’t listen, there’s another one. ‘I want your head on that pillow in five minutes.’ ”

His pretend dad smacked the table and asked, “But why?”

“I can’t explain why, honey—I just know it works.”

“You’re saying he’ll cry whenever he doesn’t get his way.”

“I’m saying what harm does it do to humor him?”

“The world will eat him alive when he grows up.”

“That doesn’t mean that we should eat him alive, too.”

Chuck put himself to bed and listened to them argue. He lay there for a long time before falling asleep. He dreamed he was riding the glass elevator into space. The Earth disappeared beneath the clouds and a billion stars. He was either Superman or Batman or the Green Lantern.


The diary Chuck took still shone like a wounded animal. Sometimes he liked to sleep with it under his pillow. The light was sad and bright and comforting to him. In the morning, he would wake up inside its glow. Some of the book’s pages were bent into a wave. Chuck tried everything he could imagine to press them flat. He took his shoes off and stood on the cover. He put it beneath the leg of his dresser overnight. He piled all his other books on top of it. He even ran it under the heat of an iron. He thought he felt the curve loosening beneath the weight. Then his nose prickled with the smell of something burning. A fishing line of black smoke lifted into the air. An orange spark crawled over the paper like a ladybug. When he blew, it turned into a dozen smaller sparks. They smoked and vanished, leaving brown pinholes in the page. Chuck was worried that he had only made things worse. The book was still kinked, even after all his work. He had stepped on it, scorched it, weighted it down. What if it believed he was angry—was punishing it? He picked it up and hugged it to his chest. He thought, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it. The light was as bright as it had ever been.

It was a cool, cloudless day in October: jacket weather. The sheets drying in the backyard were rippling and swaying. Some cardinals were chasing each other through the magnolia’s branches. Shortly after lunch, Chuck took the diary outside with him. The sheets were like a narrow room without a ceiling. He lay there thinking and teasing the grass into threads. He could see a gray squirrel twitching its bushy tail. He could see airplanes drawing white chalk-lines in the sky.

He kept remembering something about his kindergarten teacher, Ms. Derryberry. Ms. Derryberry had kept an unusual toy on her desk. It was a row of metal balls on V-shaped threads. The balls worked like a grandfather clock or a teeter-totter. She would let the first one swing into the others. The ball at the end of the row would jump. When it fell back, the first ball would jump again. Then the last ball would jump, then the first again. Those two balls, the first and last, took turns swinging. Each would land back where it started with a clack. The five or six in the middle stayed perfectly still. After a while, the toy would run out of energy. The noise would stop, and everyone would return to work.

Like Chuck, Ms. Derryberry had believed in having many rules. There were rules about talking and playing and sitting down. There were rules about gum-chewing and lining up for recess. There was even a rule about going to the bathroom. It was rule number seven on the list: Restroom Privileges.

ONE BOY, ONE GIRL, YOU MUST TAKE THE HALL PASS!!


She gave gold stars to everyone who followed the rules. Twenty gold stars were enough to earn you a reward. The reward might be a piece of hard cinnamon candy. It might be the chance to lead the recess line. Sometimes Ms. Derryberry let you hand out the art supplies. And sometimes she invited you to sit at her desk. You got to climb like a king into her chair. She let you play with the little swinging silver balls. It didn’t matter how hard you slung the first one. Soon they slowed down and began tapping against one another. They quickly found their rhythm, going clack clack clack clack. They were like circus acrobats doing graceful tricks in midair. They rocked and tilted, side to side, back and forth. Each collision was a little quieter than the one before. (That was the word for things knocking together: a collision.) Finally a ball would fall so softly that it stopped. All of them would sway slightly on their V-shaped threads. And you would get up and return to your seat.

Just thinking about the desk toy could calm Chuck down. The clacking sound, those seesawing silver globes—they were wonderful. It was true then, and it was still true now.

On hard days, he would remember watching the toy operate. He imagined another toy just like it inside his head. His heart seemed to thump along with the clacking noise. He had the peculiar feeling of being suspended by strings. It gave him a soothing sort of rocking chair sensation.

The sheets billowed in the wind, and Chuck sat up. He had no idea how long he had been outside. He opened the diary to a page in the middle. The man across the street loved his wife’s morning ritual. He loved the way she saved the comics for last. He loved how the smoke followed her around a fire. The walls of the room suddenly began to fall away. Chuck’s mom was taking the sheets down from their clothespins. “Well, hello there, Buster,” she said when she spotted him. “Don’t forget we’re getting that hair of yours cut today.” Chuck leaped up and ran back inside with the diary.


That afternoon, his pretend dad stayed home cleaning the garage. It was just Chuck and his mom in the car. Chuck sat in the front seat, behind the rustiest door. Metal flakes drizzled to the ground when he slammed it. His whole life, he had loved riding in the car. He loved how the tires floated sideways on wet roads. He loved the soft fabric that sagged from the ceiling. He used to laugh whenever his parents honked the horn. It sounded like that Sesame Street monster bopping its nose. That was years and years ago, when Chuck was little. Back then, he sat in an egglike cushioned plastic seat. His mom would buckle him in and shut the door. It would open, like magic, in a completely different place. The grocery store, the park, the church—he never knew. He would’ve stayed there all the time if he could.

At the barbershop, Chuck sat between two big silver mirrors. One was in front of him, the other behind him. The mirrors kept reflecting each other across the open floor. Their frames became smaller and smaller, shrinking into the distance. He could see thousands of Chucks inside the long tunnel. Every time he moved sideways, so did all the others. He nodded so that the barber could trim his neck. The other Chucks nodded, too, at exactly the same time. He shook the hair from his gown—so did they. He stretched his arms out like wings—so did they. The barber told Chuck, “No more squirming around, young man. You don’t want me lopping off one of your ears.”

Chuck pictured his ear hitting the floor like heavy fruit.

The barber paused and said, “Whoa there, no crying now.” He gave Chuck a reassuring little pat on the shoulder. “You have my word, your ears are safe with me.”

Slowly and carefully, he clipped the hair behind Chuck’s ears. His scissoring hand glowed white from every joint and muscle. Chuck stopped sniffling as he watched it open and close. It was like looking at an X-ray of a hand. Behind him a skeleton was sawing and fluttering its fingers. It was making chopping gestures—a strange dance of bones. And then, before Chuck knew it, his haircut was finished.

The barber cleaned his neck, dusting it with baby powder. He unsnapped Chuck’s gown, and hair sprinkled to the floor. Chuck’s chair sank onto its pole with a hissing noise. He got up and followed his mom to the counter. Not until then did he catch sight of Todd Rosenthal. The other barber was shaving his hair down to bristles. He was saying words like head lice and nasty buggers. He lectured Todd’s parents: his mom and his real dad. “Really it’s gotta be your best option with these things.” He mowed a stripe in Todd’s hair with the clippers. “You can comb or you can cut is about it. I had one guy tried to drown them with gasoline. Now that works, but you’d better not light any matches. You’ll have yourself a bonfire is what you’ll have yourself. No, when the lice get this bad, it’s shaving time.”

A thousand Todd Rosenthals glared at Chuck from the mirror. “Say one word and you’re dead,” they mouthed to him.


On Monday, at school, Todd came in wearing a hat. Ms. Mount told him he would have to remove it. He handed her a note, and she read it silently. She nodded okay, he had permission to wear his hat. Todd kicked Chuck’s chair as he walked to his desk. Then he sat by the window, which rippled with rain. A car slid past, and the water separated its headlights. The red dots of its brakes shone from the glass. Then they vanished, and the rain was just rain again. Todd gripped his cap by the edges, tugging it down. Chuck noticed how snugly it fit, but didn’t say anything.

Everyone began trading whispers—everyone but Chuck, that is. One by one they turned to peek at Todd Rosenthal. They all spent the morning wondering the exact same thing. Why in the world was he wearing that stupid thing? What was he hiding that he refused to show them? Someone wrote Todd a note during the American history lesson. Chuck glanced at it before passing it to Nathan Chowdhury. It read, “Do you have cancer (check yes or no)?”

Todd returned it with an extra box checked SCREW YOU. He sat high in his seat like a long-necked bird. He stared straight ahead at the writing on the chalkboard.

At lunch, Matthew Berry revealed the answer to the mystery. He crossed behind Todd Rosenthal and flipped his cap loose. A field of tiny lice marks shone from Todd’s scalp. They looked like stars on the dome of a planetarium. A party noise rose up from the fifth grade table. The lunchroom became loud with the overlapping bubbles of conversations.

“Did you see I think spots yeah must be bugs.”

And, “Man can you totally Todd-Rosenthal-believe head lice.”

And, “Hat-on-comb gag me contagious is this kindergarten?”

Matthew Berry gave a shudder and said, “Dude, that’s nasty.” Todd middle-fingered him, jamming his hat back on his head. He saw Chuck watching him quietly from a faraway seat. “What the hell are you looking at, Chuckles?” he growled. “You’ve got maybe three seconds to wipe that face off—”

The lunch monitor shouted, “Fifth grade table, quiet down immediately!”

There was a brief silence before the whispering began again. Todd Rosenthal filled eight minutes flicking French fries at Chuck. The fries blossomed with light as they broke into pieces. Food fights were against the rules, but Todd didn’t care. When the bell rang, everyone filed back to the classroom.

That afternoon, the rain cleared, and they had recess outside. The sun shone through the limbs of the big magnolias. Chuck looked for a spot where he could play alone. The green foam that carpeted the playground was still damp. He imagined his footsteps leaving dry peanut shapes behind him. Instead, they filled with water, then slowly emptied back out. Chuck stopped by the wooden tower and watched them disappear. He noticed Todd Rosenthal glancing over his shoulder at him. Todd turned and said something to Craig and Oscar Poissant. The two Poissant brothers were sixth-graders—twins, but not identical. The three of them were standing on the steep hillside. Their own footprints were pressed like stitches into the grass.

Chuck was living beneath the slide when they came over. Craig Poissant let his meaty arm rest on Chuck’s shoulder. “We were over there talking and had this crazy idea. We thought it would be fun to kick your ass.”

“Doesn’t that sound like fun to you?” Todd Rosenthal asked. “If it doesn’t, you only have to tell us so.”

“We only beat kids up if they really want it.”

“Yep, we’re nice that way, us three,” Todd Rosenthal said. “So what’s it going to be—ass-kicking or no ass-kicking?”

At first Chuck thought they were kidding around with him. They showed him their teeth, and he showed them his. They were four friends sharing a joke on the playground. Chuck didn’t get the joke, but he almost never did. Then the other Poissant brother, Oscar, said, “Kid’s not talking.”

“No, he doesn’t have a word to say for himself.”

“That must mean he wants us to beat him up.”

“Well, if that’s what he really wants,” Craig Poissant said.

Todd Rosenthal brought his palms out to push Chuck down. He leaned in so that Chuck could smell his breath. Chuck ducked and ran away as fast as he could. He could hear Todd and both the Poissants chasing him. He went tearing through the crowd of kids playing basketball. Some of them stopped and stared, some just kept shooting. Chuck curved away, sprinting behind a row of parked cars. Oscar Poissant dashed around the side to cut him off. Chuck avoided him by sliding between a pair of SUVs. He wriggled under the chunky mirrors and past the bumpers. Before he knew it, he was back on the playground. He crossed in front of the swings, dodging someone’s feet. Then he darted beneath the tower and the monkey bars. Suddenly he came face-to-face with the wooden fence.

He heard the drumbeat of sneakers landing on the foam. He barely had time to turn around before it happened. Todd lunged at him, landing a punch on his stomach. The second hit his neck, and the third his chest. The boards rattled as Todd shoved Chuck against the fence. A hard kick swept his legs out from under him. He found himself lying facedown, Todd squatting on his back. Todd didn’t say anything, just kept punching Chuck, smacking him.

The teachers came running with their strong arms and whistles.

Someone shouted, “Get off of Chuck Carter right this instant!”

Someone else shouted, “All right, break it up, you two!”

Todd Rosenthal’s cap slipped off as the teachers grabbed him. His scalp looked like a firework that had burst open. He said, “There, punk,” and gripped Chuck with his knees. “There it goes, and what do you think of that?”

Then Chuck felt himself losing a hundred pounds of weight. He was too shaken to stand up on his own. A green-shelled bug was crawling toward him, twitching its feelers. Its face was like a face from some other planet. Chuck wondered how long it would remember staring at him.


That afternoon, when he got home, he ached all over. He went to his room and took his clothes off. His bruises shone in the mouth of the bullfrog mirror. There were bunches of them, so sore that they glittered. A bruise below his ear and another on his shoulder. A bruise the size of an apple on his back. A row of small knuckle-shaped bruises above his belly button. Where he didn’t have bruises, he had cuts and scratches. He twisted his neck and listened to the joints pop. He wiggled one of his front teeth with his tongue. Falling down, he had scraped a patch from his chin. There was a crust of dried blood around the edges. The school nurse had put a Scooby-Doo Band-Aid on it. When he peeled it loose, it tugged at his skin. For a few seconds, the light poured out like water. It hurt just a little too much to be beautiful.

His body felt uncomfortable and strange, like someone else’s clothing. It seemed too small around him, or maybe too big. He collapsed in bed with his elephant and his bears. On TV, cops and detectives didn’t mind getting beaten up. They just brushed themselves off and began smoking a cigarette. In real life, getting punched made you tired and queasy. Chuck only wanted to lie there staring at the ceiling. Unfortunately, he had chores to do and homework to finish. His mom made him get dressed and sweep the driveway. The concrete was still wet from the hard morning rain. The water foamed and bubbled beneath the broom like soda. After he finished sweeping, he threw away the soggy leaves. He hauled the big green trash can to the curb. Then he went to his desk and did math problems. He read chapter nineteen from The Story of America. He studied the next ten words for his vocabulary quiz. Exasperation, paradise, fraying, infected, temporary, candid, camouflage, indignant, animated, cuticle. He knew the last word already, but not its spelling. The quizzes were actually working, he thought, improving his vocabulary. He wouldn’t have guessed they would work, but they did.

That evening, after dinner, his pretend dad called him outside. “What’s this I hear about you and the Rosenthal boy?”

Chuck bowed his head and looked down at his knees.

His pretend dad sighed and took hold of his chin. “It’s high time I taught you how to fight, son. Every man’s gotta know how to defend himself,” he insisted. “Now put up your fists,” and he thumped Chuck’s forehead. “You have one job: to keep me from doing that. Understand?” he asked, and though Chuck’s head hurt, he nodded.

Chuck moved his hands around in front of his face. He imagined that he was the Flash and had super-speed. He imagined that he was a robot with steel hands. It didn’t matter—his pretend dad kept thumping his forehead. He was a lot faster than Chuck, a lot stronger. Sometimes he came from the left, sometimes from the right. He used his index finger and also his middle finger. “Show some muscle,” he told Chuck, and, “Stop jellyfishing around.” “Come on,” he said, and, “What’s the matter with you?” “Dodge and parry!” he shouted, but what did that mean?

After a while, Chuck quit believing he could stop him. This was just what the world was like, he thought. This was how the rest of his life would be. He was the boy who couldn’t learn to defend himself. The boy who stood outside waving his tiny fists around. The boy whose pretend dad would not stop poking him. The wind was moving across the yard, swirling, then resting. The leaves on the grass were all glossy and speckled. They kept lifting onto their edges, then slowly toppling over. It happened thirty or fifty times, too many to count. He was reminded of waves rolling gently onto a beach.

Eventually he realized that the poking and shouting had stopped. His pretend dad was gone, and he was alone again. His forehead hurt with the sting of a hundred taps. His bruises were glowing, beating like hearts through his clothing.

The sun vanished in a pool of thick red light. He went back inside, and he slipped into his bedroom. The diary he had taken was lying on his dresser. He sat down and opened the cover and began reading.

I love the way chocolate makes your eyes light up.

I love hearing you try to defend Hall and Oates.

I love your compassionate heart—your big, sloppy, sentimental heart.

The pages looked just as sensitive as they always had. They were like a giant mosquito bite, infected from scratching. Chuck closed the diary and tucked it under his pillow. He lay down, patting the sad square lump it made. He wanted to heal the book, to make it better. If he tried hard enough, maybe he could do it.


In the morning, when he woke, his muscles were sore. The light of his wounds had spread across his body. His bruised places were dimmer and hurt a little less. The rest of him was what hurt a little more. He had a hard time waking up and getting dressed. His mom had to yell his name three different times. His pretend dad had to throw a shoe at him. The shoe thunked against the wall, leaving a black scuff.

Chuck decided to take the diary to school with him. He spent the day petting its cover under his desk. He massaged the wave, smoothing it down with his hand. Maybe he was imagining things, but it seemed to help. The pages still shone, but not as brightly, he thought. Not as brightly and not with the same awful pain. The book rested a little more comfortably in his hands. He began carrying it around with him wherever he went. People whispered about it for a while and then stopped. It was one of the many weird things Chuck did. He never said anything, and he laughed at stupid jokes. He couldn’t reach the basket when he threw the basketball. Now he liked to stroke a book under his desk. No surprise, and who cared, and what else was new?

Todd Rosenthal had been suspended from school for the week. On Monday, when he returned, he avoided looking at Chuck. He stomped past his chair without even kicking the legs. His hair had grown up in a soft-looking brown fuzz. He kept rubbing it with the palm of his hand. Chuck bet it would feel the way a peach felt. Or slightly fuzzy, but also firm, like a tennis ball. Or prickly like Velcro, the side with the plastic bristles. He wanted to run his fingers over it but didn’t. Some things were so obvious that they weren’t even rules.

For the next two weeks, everything was good for Chuck. School was a paradise where no one noticed he existed. His bruises went away, and his scabs began to peel. Todd Rosenthal ignored him, sitting quietly next to the window. He did not step on Chuck’s shoes in the recess line. He did not ask him to be his gay boyfriend.

Then one morning Ms. Mount stayed home with a cold. They found a substitute—a man—sitting at her desk. He was Mr. Brady, he said, “but call me Felix.” He was skinny like Chuck, and short, and wore glasses. He forgot to collect their homework after he took roll. He didn’t understand what the bell meant when it rang. Worse, he began allowing the class to vote on everything. “Who votes we line up by height today?” he asked. “Who votes that we read out loud from the textbook?” “What would you like to study next: science or history?”

At the noon bell, Mariellen Chase asked him a question. “Is it okay if we eat lunch in class today?”

“Let’s put it to a vote,” Mr. Brady—Felix—said. “All in favor of eating in class, raise your hands.”

Fifteen hands shot up immediately, and only five stayed down.

“Okay, then,” he said, dropping his fist like a hammer. “By a count of fifteen to five, eating here wins.”

He spent the next half hour working on a crossword puzzle. He kept rolling a cough drop around in his mouth. Now and then he looked up, saying, “Quiet down, guys.” But everybody was too busy talking, and no one listened.

Chuck finished his bologna sandwich and his pack of Twinkies. He put his lunch box away and took out the diary. He stroked the cover, trying to brush its pain away. He pretended it was a cat, purring in his lap. He wished that he could feed it a cat treat.

Lunchtime was nearly over when Nathan Chowdhury grabbed the book. He caressed it and kissed it, murmuring, “Oh, baby, baby.”

Todd Rosenthal said to him, “Nathan, man, chuck it here.” Chuck’s heart beat faster at the sound of his name. (It wasn’t really his name—he knew that—but still …) He watched the diary’s pages flutter apart in the air. Todd caught it, smiled at Chuck, and cracked it open. Right away, without a thought, he tore a page out. The light was terrible and made Chuck’s stomach go tight. His mouth tasted bitter, and his hands began to sweat. To see all that love and sadness destroyed was agonizing. Todd Rosenthal noticed his reaction, laughed, and tore another page. The whole class turned around to watch what was happening. The sound of ripping paper was louder than their conversations. They looked at Chuck, at Todd, then at Chuck again. They wanted to see if he had started crying yet.

“Hey, what’s going on back there?” the substitute teacher asked. Suddenly he crossed the room, stopping next to Todd Rosenthal. “That’s enough monkey business,” he said, and took the diary. He handed it back to Chuck, torn pages and all. Then he brought him the Scotch tape from his desk. “It could be worse, right?” he said, squeezing Chuck’s shoulder. “Tape it back together and it’ll be good as new.”

Apparently, Mr. Brady didn’t know that he should punish Todd. He didn’t seem to understand how the check system worked.

Carefully, Chuck repaired the book, ignoring the whispers he heard. He slid the loose pages into place, squaring their edges. He fastened them together with long strips of invisible tape. He made sure all the broken words lined up correctly. When he was finished, he let the book fall shut.

It wasn’t as good as new—it was nowhere close. It shone like a man whose bones had been broken.

The rest of the afternoon passed slowly for Chuck, hazily. At recess, he spotted Todd Rosenthal climbing the wooden tower. It was freezing cold, and everyone had a sore throat. A few kids were playing soccer in the parking lot. A pale light flickered over their tongues as they shouted. Chuck saw the light but did not hear the words. He approached the tower and went up the ladder. It seemed that he was riding the glass elevator again. He felt tall and powerful and nothing whatsoever like himself. He rose quietly into the clear blue sky like Superman. Far below him, the kids turned into little moving dots.

He found Todd Rosenthal standing at the platform’s open edge. He was dangling a cord of spit from his mouth. Chuck shoved him and watched his body hit the ground.


In seconds, everything was over, and the teachers came running. The fall had wrenched Todd’s shoulder out of its socket. His arm had snapped with a sound like breaking chalk. His teeth had pierced the flesh of his lower lip. Blood, thick and shining, was already spilling from the wound.

The teachers bent down over him, trying to soothe him.

“Don’t worry,” they said, and, “Cry it all out, honey.”

“Mr. Kaczmarek is calling the doctor for you right now.”

“Your mom and dad will meet you at the hospital.”

Todd rolled onto his back and twisted his eyes shut. He moaned, “Why does this shit always happen to me?” No one said anything to him about the curse word.

The teachers were trying hard not to look at Chuck. They seemed embarrassed by him—even the substitute, Mr. Brady. He marched Chuck inside, leaving him in the secretary’s office. Chuck sat on the couch listening to the clock tick. After a while, the principal summoned him to her desk. He could see the ambulance pulling away through the window. Its flashing red lights dipped like fish across the wall. The principal kept snapping her fingers and saying, “Pay attention.” And, “I must say your behavior surprises me, Mr. Carter.” And, “You realize this will go on your permanent record.” Her lipstick had leaked into the cracks between her teeth. Finally, she shook her head and turned away from him. She picked up the phone to call his pretend dad. And then it was Chuck’s turn to be in trouble.

The school punished him with two full weeks of suspension. His parents punished him by taking away his stuffed animals. “Plus no Cokes, TV, or comic books,” his mom said. His pretend dad even got her permission to spank him. He gave Chuck ten whacks with a wooden cutting board. Afterward, Chuck noticed him smothering the expression on his face. He looked like he did after he mowed the lawn. He was satisfied with the hard work he had done.

“This was for your own good now,” he told Chuck. “It’s a lesson I can just about guarantee you’ll remember.”

“This family doesn’t even believe in spanking,” his mom added. “You have no idea how disappointed I am in you. I always said I would never hit my child: ever. But this—oh, Chuckie, you broke that poor boy’s arm.”

She was standing at the kitchen counter tapping her feet. The heels of her shoes stabbed the floor like knives.

The days of Chuck’s suspension passed like a long dream. Because both his parents had jobs, he stayed home alone. He imagined he was an orphan without the sad parts. Over and over again, he walked through the empty house. He made little teepees—dominoes—out of his playing cards. He spent a while tossing beanbags at his tic-tac-toe game. (The spotted beanbags were his, the solid ones Todd Rosenthal’s.) He stood at the window looking out over the yard. Cars and trucks and bicycles drifted slowly down the street. Squirrels crossed the grass, their tails jerking on invisible wires. He could see the yellow bricks that lined the porch. As usual, they looked like something he would enjoy tasting. If he was a retard, then he was a retard. He had become too old to do anything about it.

Chuck began visiting Dr. Finkelstein on both Mondays and Thursdays. His mom said she was having concerns about his psychology. (That was a big word for his personality: his psychology.) The doctor kept rubbing his forehead, his three red sunspots. He wondered what Todd Rosenthal could have done to Chuck. Why had Chuck gotten angry enough to break his leg?

Chuck took out a note card and wrote his answer down. Who told you I broke his leg, because I didn’t.

“But why did you push the boy off the tower?”

He did something bad, Chuck began, then crossed it out. He tore something of mine apart and hurt its feelings.

“But only people have feelings,” Dr. Finkelstein said, “not objects.”

This was the most ridiculous thing Chuck had ever heard. Objects were quieter than people, maybe, but no less sensitive. The one big difference was that objects could not move. They weren’t able to fake their feelings or hide them. It was people who could lie, people who could pretend. People could laugh like friends and then beat you up. People could say they were your dad and hit you. Sometimes the faces of people seemed unreal to Chuck, inhuman. They were like masks they wore over their real faces. Masks to show how old or how young they were. Masks to show how healthy or how sick they were. People could cry out of sadness or happiness or anger. But then they could smile for the exact same reasons. The strangeness of people went on and on and on. Objects, on the other hand, were mostly simple and good. Chuck was always kind to them—it was a rule. They needed his help to make it in the world. They had no one else to look out for them. That was why he was so upset about the book. He had tried fixing it and had let it down. It gave off more light now than it had before. Why, then, had he taken it at all, he wondered? He was no more than a thief and a kidnapper. The book would be better off with anyone but him. He might as well give it away to a stranger.

A week into his suspension, someone knocked on the door. Chuck was not supposed to answer it, but he did. A tall man in church clothes stood on the porch. He stooped over the way that grown-ups without kids do. “Why, hello there,” he said, his hands on his knees. “Can you tell me if your parents are at home?”

Chuck shook his head no and began shutting the door.

“Wait,” the man said, and reached into his leather satchel. “Will you give them this flyer when you see them?” He passed Chuck a slip of paper, yellow like butter. The paper read, “For the Lord God will illumine them.” Beneath that was the name and address of a church. And beneath that was a cross surrounded by tiny lines. And beneath that were Chuck’s fingers reaching from his hand. And beneath that was his hand sticking from his sleeve. He was reading the flyer when he had an idea. He held up his palms to say, Wait right here. Then he went to his bedroom and got the diary. He came running back across the living room with it. He turned it over to the man in the suit.

Aloud, the man wondered, “What’s this you have for me?” He looked slightly confused, but fanned through the book’s pages. He tried to return it, smiling encouragingly, his hand outstretched. Chuck backed away, and the man’s smile tightened in confusion. He was about to speak when Chuck shut the door.

The man wasted a few minutes knocking and shouting hello. The doorbell rang nine times, though Chuck imagined a tenth. Finally the noise fell away, and he looked outside again. There was only the empty porch and a fraying spiderweb. The man must have moved on to the next house. Chuck had been worried he would leave the book behind. But, his worries aside, it was no longer there. It wasn’t on the doormat, wasn’t poking from the mailbox. It wasn’t leaning against the stairs or the brick wall. Obviously, he had given up and taken it with him. Chuck hoped that he would give it a loving home.


It was a Thursday, which meant one thing: Dr. Finkelstein. Chuck’s appointment was supposed to last from four to five. His pretend dad had to drive him to the office. “I’m missing two hours’ pay for this crap,” he complained. “That’s two hours of food coming straight from our refrigerator. Two hours of working lights, two hours of running water. Two hours of goddamned gasoline for the goddamned Plymouth Reliant.” He kept honking the horn and shouting “Jerk!” at people.

The doctor was still in another session when they arrived. They lived in the waiting room for a few minutes. Both of them sat down, Chuck and his pretend dad. Chuck skimmed a news magazine he found on the table. Someone, a Chinese soldier, had been shot in the head. Light was gushing from his temple in a sideways fountain. Some children were starving, their stomachs glimmering like crystal balls. Their pain had made them simple, honest, candid, like objects. Chuck had seen it happen many times in his life.

A patient came out, and Dr. Finkelstein called Chuck’s name. He asked Chuck to join him in his office, please. A surprise was waiting on top of the doctor’s desk. He had gotten one of those clacking metal desk toys. It looked exactly like the one Ms. Derryberry had owned.

The doctor set it in motion, and Chuck immediately relaxed. The V-shaped threads rocked back and forth, back and forth. Again and again the silver balls fell tapping into place. The sound filled Chuck with a gentle, swaying, hammocky feeling. “A neat little gadget, this, isn’t it?” Dr. Finkelstein said. He cracked his knuckles and continued. “So let’s get started. On Monday we were talking about your chores at home. Will you write down your least favorite chore for me?”

The only one I really hate is cleaning the tub.

“The tub!” Dr. Finkelstein said, rolling his eyes in exasperation. “Yes, there’s nothing worse than having to clean the tub. Is there anything else you dislike about living at home?”

When my pretend dad yells at me or my mom.

The doctor’s face became animated as he read the note. He was interested, but he tried to pretend he wasn’t. Unless he was only pretending to be pretending he wasn’t. Sometimes people played elaborate games to hide their true feelings. The doctor jotted something down on his pad of paper. “Your pretend dad?” he prompted, reaching for the desk toy. He pinched hold of one of the hanging metal balls. When he let it go, the toy rediscovered its rhythm.

Chuck explained the difference between real dads and pretend dads. He wrote down some of the clues he had uncovered. How real dads never filled the house with their shouting. How they didn’t twist the hair on their sons’ necks. How they ate dinner without flicking their food at anyone. How they didn’t secretly wish that their sons were dead. Or not dead, exactly, but that they’d never been born. Chuck filled card after card explaining things to Dr. Finkelstein. Most dads were real dads, but Chuck’s dad was pretend. The clues, though small, all came together to prove it. The doctor kept reaching for the toy and restarting it. Before Chuck knew it, he’d used up the whole hour.

“We’ll have to stop now, I’m afraid,” Dr. Finkelstein said. “Can you send your mom in alone for a minute? I need to discuss something with her, something having to—”

Chuck finished his note while the doctor was still speaking. My mom couldn’t take time off from work this afternoon.

“Oh, then your dad—your pretend dad—then he’s here? That’s fine, just fine,” the doctor said, twisting his shoulders. There was a popping noise and a button of light. The light flashed open where his spine joined his neck. “Ask him to step inside for a second, would you?”

Chuck left the office and sat down on the couch. He waited while his pretend dad talked to Dr. Finkelstein. The door, a bulky oak, let hardly any sound through. Chuck heard his pretend dad shouting two words: “completely ridiculous.”

He came out brushing the doctor’s hand from his arm. His teeth were set so firmly his jaw was shaking. “Move,” he said, stomping past, and Chuck followed him outside.

They sped home in a thick smell of burning gasoline. His pretend dad left the car slanting across the driveway. The engine continued to run after he removed the key. It rattled and coughed and then sputtered to a halt. He said, “So I understand I’m not your real dad. Imagine my surprise,” and he pulled the car’s emergency brake. “I guess that means you’re not my real son, either.”

He yanked Chuck across the bench seat by his elbow. With long, angry strides, he hauled him toward the house. He was as indignant as Chuck had ever seen him. Chuck tried to keep up, but it was too hard. His shoes kept leaving scars of dirt in the grass. The scars didn’t glow, which meant the grass wasn’t hurt. A root made Chuck stumble, and he tripped and fell. He became a plant, dirt, a fish in a puddle. There were bits of leaves stuck to his blue jeans. He had grass in his hair and between his lips. His pretend dad lifted him to his feet, armpits first. Chuck was sure—pretty sure—he intended to kill him. He realized it was something he had always seen coming. He wanted to have one last Coke, one last cookie. He wanted to hug his elephant and all his bears. He wanted to say good-bye to everything that loved him.

His pretend dad opened the door and shoved him inside. There was his mom, standing wide-eyed and gaping at them. She was opening the mail with a miniature wooden sword. Someone must have given her a ride home from work. “What’s all the ruckus, you guys?” she said to them. “Good lord, Chuck, you’re covered head to toe in dirt! That’s it, into the tub with you right now—chop-chop!”

Reluctantly, his pretend dad’s fingers loosened their grip on him. Chuck had little doubt his mom had saved his life. He felt like he was waking from a bad dream. Miles of jagged rocks had been rushing up at him. The wind was beating like a flag in his ears. The ground was going to separate him from his skeleton. Then he was lying in bed, eyes open, wide awake.

He went to the bathroom and took off his clothes. The chafed skin of his armpits shone in the mirror. He filled the tub with water and heaps of bubbles. He could hear his parents arguing, that awful tumbling noise. The running water made it impossible to recognize the words.

In the tub, the bubbles shifted every time Chuck moved. They were like clouds changing their shape in the sky. A little rhinoceros rose up inside them, then knelt over. It seemed to lift its horn before it was overwhelmed. Its life was short, temporary, just a few seconds long. There were flies that hatched and died in a day. Chuck had seen a program about them on TV once. He turned the faucet off and heard his parents shouting. His pretend dad was saying, “Don’t give me that business. He gets it into his head to push some kid—”

“Who was picking on him, don’t forget,” his mom interrupted.

“And we get stuck with a thousand-dollar hospital bill.”

“Which means you get to knock him around why again?”

There was a pause while his pretend dad punched something. “You cannot—cannot—ask me to justify myself to you.”

Chuck turned the faucet back on to muffle their argument. It was just him and the water and the bubbles. Blowing on the bubbles made a cave appear inside them. Waving his feet made the heat roll through the tub. Eventually, his parents’ voices grew too loud to be camouflaged. His mom’s came first, sharp and full, like a siren. “If that’s the way you feel, why don’t you leave?”

Then he heard his pretend dad saying, “Maybe I will!”

Finally the door slammed shut like a paper bag exploding.

Chuck stayed in the warm water for a long time. The bubbles slowly swallowed one another, sinking and spreading open. Eventually, they were just a few islands of white film.

After the heat vanished, he climbed out of the tub. The house was so still he heard the air conditioner ticking. The silence seemed too big, too eerie, and he shivered. He wasn’t sure he wanted to open the bathroom door. The thought of what he might find made him afraid. He pictured his mom lying in a pool of light. A pool of white light, a pool of red blood. He imagined his pretend dad speeding away in the car. Chuck would be an orphan with the sad parts included.

He ran to his bedroom and crawled under the covers. He wished his mom had given his stuffed animals back. At last, though he wasn’t sure when, he fell asleep.

He woke much later, in the darkness of early morning. It was 5:52, according to the clock, and then 5:53. He got up and walked quietly into the living room. Both his parents were there, lying senseless on the couch. They were hugging, their bodies curled together like two tadpoles. His pretend dad must’ve come home while Chuck was sleeping. He must have kissed his mom and apologized to her. How had Chuck ever convinced himself that anything would change? He tiptoed back to his room, but he wasn’t sleepy. He lay on his side, his hand beneath the pillow. Soon, bit by bit, the dawn began filling the curtains. He thought that his heart would stop beating from sadness. There it was, the sun, coming up just like always.

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