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  Sarah Kervick had leapt over the armrest and smashed her fist into Marvin Howerton’s nose. Blood was everywhere. Ms. Linski was screaming. Pandemonium broke loose.

  Princess pulled over to the side of the road and tossed Ms. Linski a rag to press against Marvin’s bloody face. Sarah had retreated to her seat, her arms folded across her chest. I saw with horror that she had Marvin’s blood on the back of her fist and she didn’t even seem to notice or care. Just moments ago, that very same blood was traveling around somewhere inside Marvin Howerton’s nose.

  “She broke it, Ms. Linski,” Marvin howled. “She broke my nose.”

  Only it sounded more like “She bok by dobe” because Marvin’s face was all folded up inside the oily rag.

  “Now, Marvin, lean your head back,” said Ms. Linski. “Sarah Kervick, is this the kind of girl you are?” she asked, shooting a look over her shoulder at Sarah. For the first time it seemed to dawn on our teacher that, probably, yes, girls who looked like Sarah Kervick were capable of committing bodily harm.

  “I don’t take crap from anybody,” Sarah Kervick replied. “We might as well get that straight right now.”

  Needless to say, I did not escort Sarah Kervick around Happy Cattle Dairy Farm.

  She remained on the bus while I was forced to slog through the melting snow and cow pies on my own, since everyone else had already been paired off. I was so preoccupied by thoughts of what had happened that I let a cow lick my palm!

  When I asked about the facilities so I could wash my hands, Ms. Linski pointed to one of those mobile metal waste containment units, otherwise known as a Porta-John. I held my hand away from the rest of my body until we were back at school. I had quite a cramp by the time we reached Pelican View Elementary.

  The bus was strangely quiet on the way back. Ms. Linski sat with her lips pressed together. Sarah Kervick leaned forward in her seat, staring at a piece of petrified gum on the floor of the bus. Marvin, who was beginning to bruise beneath both eyes, moaned a little now and then and shot threatening looks at me!

  What had I done but try not to escalate tensions?

  Then it occurred to me that Sarah Kervick had punched Marvin in the nose, at least partly, on my account. I got a strange feeling then. No one had ever stuck up for Franklin Delano Donuthead before.

  Not that I blamed them. I would never attempt to come between a bully and his victim. To do so would put me at a disproportionately high risk of injuring my cranio-facial muscles.

  In fact, it is a strong evolutionary trait to want to avoid people like Marvin Howerton. Take those nature programs on TV—the ones where the lioness goes off to find dinner—and you’ll know what I mean. She slinks along, tracking a herd of innocent gazelles who are just minding their own business on the Serengeti Plain. Crouching, she finds a victim: a baby or a weakling or maybe just a highly intelligent yet slightly handicapped gazelle. And off she goes.

  What do this poor gazelle’s lifelong companions do? Do they rally the troops? Do they shout “Safety in numbers!” and smother that lioness before she can harm one of their own? Of course they don’t. They run just as fast as they can away from the scene of the crime, not even pausing to nod a fond farewell.

  After all, they don’t want to be dessert. And that’s the way it is at school.

  I looked up and down the rows of kids jiggling in their bus seats, searching for one person who might brave a darkened corner of the playground to save my life from Marvin Howerton. Not one came to mind. They’d run, just like the gazelles.

  That’s nature for you.

  Sarah Kervick stole a look at me just as Princess hopped the curb as she turned into Pelican View Elementary School.

  “What’s the matter, kid? How come your arm’s stickin’ out like that?”

  “A cow licked my palm.” “You’re joking, right?”

  I nodded my head soberly. “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s what Frankin Delano Roosevelt said when he took office during the Depression.”

  Sarah Kervick laughed, revealing a couple of brown teeth. “

  That where you get your information? Dead presidents?”

  At least it was a real laugh and not one of those hee-hee girl giggles that means a girl’s really making fun of you. I believe she actually thought I was funny.

  It was also a laugh that could not come out of any sane person who saw the trouble that lay ahead.

  “Marvin, Sarah, come with me. The rest of you may return to class and start your journals.”

  I was first off the bus after Marvin and Sarah, and I watched them as long as I could. She went first. I wanted, somehow, to tell her never, ever offer your back to Marvin Howerton. But she didn’t seem to care.

  I was so busy thinking about all this that I walked right by the boys’ bathroom and straight to class. That meant I’d be forced to infect my pencil with mad cow germs until Ms. Linski gave me a hall pass. How long could they possibly live in the arid environment of a number 2B pencil?

  To calm myself, I began to hum the tune to the “Happy Birthday” song, an exercise I repeated three times while lathering whenever I washed my hands. Just as I reached my last “to you,” however, my thoughts bounced back to bony old Sarah Kervick.

  Had that girl ever been introduced to a comb? What kind of a mother would let her child leave the house in such a condition? Was she really laughing at what I said? Or was she just laughing at me?

  Was this what Gloria had in mind when she told me to think more about girls?

  CHAPTER THREE

  The “Out Back” Beauty School

  Two days later, I sat at the kitchen table eating my bowl of Bran Buds and editing my mother’s grocery list, which she had tried to conceal under yesterday’s newspaper. I had already crossed off some questionable choices as well as added a few items of my own when she arrived on the scene and rudely grabbed the paper away from me.

  “How’d you get ahold of that?” she asked, attaching her Cable Country name badge between the second and third buttons on her blouse. My mother lays cable for a company whose motto is “Get wired!”

  “For your information, Franklin, millions of people eat these things every day. What could possibly be wrong with … jellybeans?”

  “The connection between artificial dyes and children’s behavior is currently being studied by public health officials.”

  “So don’t eat any. Hot dogs? Oreos?”

  “Nitrates and hydrogenated vegetable oil. Do you really want to feed your only son, the one you hope to care for you in old age, a diet full of known cancer-causing agents?”

  “Let me think about that one,” she said, putting the list on the counter and scooping handfuls of beans into the coffee grinder.

  “Pepper spray? You mean the kind …” She perused the rest of the list, folded it, and put it into her pocket.

  “Mace? Funeral plots? Franklin?”

  “I think it’s only right that you should know,” I told her, my eyelids twitching. “Things are really heating up at school.”

  “All this because you got licked by a cow?”

  I wish.

  No, the cow contamination incident was the furthest thing from my mind. For you see, something far stranger and more perilous happened the day after our visit to Happy Cattle Dairy Farm.

  Ms. Linski decided, for some reason fathomable only to high priestesses in India, that I would be a stabilizing influence on Sarah Kervick.

  “Sarah will sit next to you, Franklin. And if she needs help, you will provide her with it. Quietly.”

  Mentally, I calculated the effects of Ms. Linski’s words on my health. “Quietly” meant whispering. Whispering meant closeness. Closeness meant contamination range. Every time I thought of Sarah Kervick’s mouth and hair coming into contact with my breathing space, my blood pressure inched toward the ceiling.

  But it seemed that Sarah Kervick did not wan
t to ask me anything. She spent most of the morning leaning back in her seat with her hands pushed up under her armpits as if she were unbearably cold. When Ms. Linski asked Sarah to open her math book, she simply raised one eyebrow and flipped the book over.

  Something told me Sarah Kervick was not National Merit Scholar material.

  After lunch, I came back to find a note on my desk. It said, “Met me tomorow after scool. Owt bak.”

  I glanced over at Sarah Kervick. A torn sheet of paper and a pencil had replaced the overturned math book.

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible,” I said, keeping my voice low. “I’m having my left hamstring professionally stretched tomorrow. You see, one of my legs—”

  “You be there,” she returned, in what could be interpreted as a growl.

  “These appointments are very hard to get,” I told her, searching my mind for the made-up name of an impressive-sounding doctor.

  “Because I’m gonna wrap your tongue around your neck and choke you with it if you don’t come.”

  “I see. Well.” There didn’t seem to be any more to say on the subject.

  “Could you add psychological counseling to that list?” I now asked my mother as she filled a quart-size thermos with coffee.

  “I can’t afford counseling for you! If anybody needs counseling around here, it’s me! I go to work every day and run errands on my lunch hour. Try to go to the grocery store and live in the same house with a kid like you! The produce is covered with pesticides, the cookies are filled with oxygenated vegetable oil—”

  “That’s hydrogenated.” “… the hot dogs are poison, the jellybeans are diseased—”

  “I never said they were diseased!”

  “Funeral plots!”

  “Well, if you must know, I’ve been invited to meet the most fearsome student in Ms. Rita Linski’s fifth-grade class after school behind the school,” I shouted back in defense. “This is not where the buses pick up, Mother. They do not mow this part of the property! There are glass shards, cigarette butts, possibly even human remains back there!”

  My mother walked over and cupped my chin, turning my head this way and that. “I think Grandma was right,” she said, finally. “You need something to distract you from all these crazy fantasies about shrinking and contamination and violence.”

  She went over to the counter, picked up a knife, and stabbed it into a tub of room-temperature margarine.

  As she slathered her toast, she said, “You need what every red-blooded American boy needs, Franklin, and that is baseball.”

  A nerve beneath my left eye began pulsing wildly.

  “How you can mention blood and baseball in the same sentence while I am attempting to ward off an anxiety attack about a far more immediate issue of danger is beyond me,” I managed to choke out.

  “Marvin Howerton, then,” my mother said, snapping on her tool belt. “Is that what this is about? Marvin Howerton?”

  I simply looked at her with tear-filled eyes. I was letting her imagination do the rest. The name Sarah Kervick could not possibly have conjured up the same horrible image as the one of her son flat on his back with Marvin Howerton’s beefy fists dangling over him.

  My mother stared at me. Then she shoved a triangle of toast into her mouth.

  “Remember to lead with your long arm,” she said, and she was gone.

  How I have survived to this day, I cannot tell you.

  At school, I experienced a feeling close to rapture when I realized that Sarah Kervick was absent! I gazed lovingly at the empty seat of her desk until the thought occurred to me that she might be at home twisting rope into a coil or lifting weights in anticipation of our after-school meeting.

  Never has a school day gone by so fast. Never have I felt so sentimental about multiplying fractions or westward expansion or even Ms. Linski’s cereal box premium collection.

  I was so distracted I forgot to check the surface of my seat upon returning from the pencil sharpener. I sat directly on a piece of gum that had been masticated by none other than Marvin Howerton. Though I immediately applied liquid Goo Gone from the travel bottle I keep in my desk, it made me feel slightly nauseated for the rest of the day to think that Marvin Howerton’s saliva had made contact with my clothes.

  At 3:15, I tried to engage Ms. Linski in a long discussion on the merits of decoder rings over, say, two-way wristband radios. But she was not interested.

  “It’s time to pack up, Franklin,” she said, flinging our carefully researched papers into her schoolbag and dismissing me without a backward look.

  This roller coaster of emotion was definitely not good for my health. I decided to take my blood pressure with the sphygmomanometer my grandparents had given me for Christmas as soon as I got home.

  As I collected my things, I reasoned that it was entirely possible that Sarah Kervick had fallen victim to some tragic domestic accident and would be unable to make our meeting. Most accidental deaths occur within five miles of one’s home.

  What was I thinking? I was less than five miles from home myself. As Ms. Linski waited, clucking in the doorway, I weighed my options. Break for home was the odds-on favorite, but it didn’t look so good as a long-range plan. I had a feeling that a make-up session with Sarah Kervick would be even more dangerous than what was in store for me today. So, I decided to simply peek around the corner on my way to the safety-assisted crosswalk to assure myself that the meeting was, indeed, off.

  This being March, there was no tall grass to keep me from seeing her, hunkered down on the sidewalk, waiting for me at the opposite end of the basketball courts. Her bony knees stuck out from her dress like two flamingo legs. When Sarah Kervick saw me, she motioned me over with her thumb.

  Hobbling across the pavement toward her, I felt a growing numbness in my legs. As I gazed at the naked trees, the basketball hoops, the four square on the asphalt, it all seemed unbearably beautiful.

  “O Precious World,” I cried, and sank to my knees.

  Within seconds, Sarah Kervick was hauling me up by my jacket lapels and dragging me bodily to a deserted corner of the schoolyard. Judging by the amount of discarded cigarette packs and candy bar wrappers, I realized that what I’d told my mother was true. Even the janitor, Mr. Shorevitz, never came back here.

  Now I understood how doomed mobsters felt when being “taken for a drive.”

  Sarah Kervick stood me on my feet and raised her arm. I noticed something in her right hand, glinting in the sun. I stared at it, transfixed, waiting for life to end. It took me a moment to realize this was not high-carbon stainless steel. This was … plastic. Tortoiseshell, to be exact. This was a comb.

  “Comb it,” she growled.

  “Comb it,” I repeated, frozen to the spot.

  “And if I ever hear you told, I’ll use this comb to brush your teeth and make you gargle with chlorine bleach.”

  She slapped the comb in my palm, turned around, and folded her arms.

  Despite myself, I almost blurted it out: Why me? Do I look like a kid who would know something about this kind of female activity?

  But a life has to be lived on principle. I would not be swayed from my principles, even in the heat of the moment. And the most important principle was, Do not escalate tensions!

  I pinched a mass of dirty, matted hair between my fingers and felt like the miller’s daughter, the one who was supposed to spin straw into gold. Now that my life did not seem in immediate danger, I began to calculate the probability of contracting head lice from this exercise.

  “Go on. Pull hard! You can’t hurt me.” Sarah Kervick took all the ratty, stringy hairs from underneath her sweater and flattened them down against her back.

  For a second time I was tempted to incite her to violence by asking why she didn’t just do the job herself. I had barely begun when the answer revealed itself. Her hair was so knotted that there was no way to separate one side from the other. She’d have to be a contortionist to complete the project by herself. I began by
applying the comb to the most promising section of hair, the bottom half inch. Instantly, I met resistance. I tugged. I believe I saw her wince. Was it possible that Sarah Kervick felt pain? And where was my anti-bacterial, sanitizing hand wash—the kind you use without water—when I needed it?

  I worked until I lost all feeling in my toes from the cold. Picturing the blackened lumps inside my shoes, I almost got up the courage to ask her if we could at least go back to my house, where yes! we enjoyed the modern convenience of an efficient gas heater with a dust and mold filter.

  But then I had to weigh losing a few toes against the knowledge that Sarah Kervick knew where I lived.

  “Franklin?”

  A shadowy figure in the distance caught my eye and began to take form. Never had I been so happy, so utterly delighted, to see my mother! And she was wearing her tool belt, which clanked as she walked toward us and made her look rather menacing, I can tell you.

  “Who are you?” Sarah Kervick asked.

  I waited for my mother to dress her down. Show me a woman who could stand up to Sarah Kervick and I’ll show you my mother, I thought. I swear the national anthem started playing in my head.

  “I’m Franklin’s mother,” she said, more surprised than angry. “And I came here to pick up the pieces of my son I imagined were strewn all over the playground.”

  “Huh,” Sarah Kervick huffed. “Some imagination.”

  Mother took it all in: the knotted tangles of Sarah Kervick’s hair, the comb in my hand. Gently, she took Sarah by the shoulders and turned her around.

  “For this, you will need a detangler, dear.”

  Dear!

  “I think I’ve got some at home. Do you want to try it?” Sarah pulled a hunk of hair off her shoulder and examined it. She looked at me, disgusted. Then she shrugged her shoulders.

  “Why not?” she said. And she followed my mother—a complete stranger to her!—right into the van.

  They left me standing on the playground with my mouth open, comb in hand.