Whitley Strieber - The Grays

Conner turned the transformer up a notch and the streetcar shot off the tracks, tumbled through the woods, and crashed to the floor. The roof broke off and half the figures came out. Conner leaped around the table, grabbed the remains of the car, and smashed it to pieces against the tiles.

“Hey. Hey! You’re killing the floor, here.” Dan went down to him, but he was up again and off across the room.

“I’ve gotta get rid of this whole kid setup,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’m an asshole, Dan. I’m a little boy . In fact, I’m the little boy.”

Dan went over to the bed where Conner had thrown himself. “Conner, your mom and I both felt you needed to skip grades. You were bored silly in third grade. You could do all the problems, you could read all the books.”

“I can still do all the problems and read all the books. Only the difference now is, I’m the class freak, Dan. The freak!”

“You’re not a freak. You just happen to be somewhat smarter than most people.”

“You know who I really relate to? I really relate to Junior Hamner. Do you know who that is?”

Dan thought that the Hamners had a little boy with Down syndrome. “He’s that mentally disabled child, isn’t he?”

“Exactly. Another freak. We should be joined at the hip.”

“Except that your mind—who knows what it might do one day? And Junior Hamner’s always gonna be eleven years old.”

“Actually, he’s four. Mental age.”

“Okay, let’s get down to it. What, exactly, happened to cause you to get ditched?”

“I told you, I’m a little boy. Little boys aren’t allowed.”

Dan had, to be honest, been one of the bullies. He’d had a childhood full of nightmares, so many and so intense that he now speculated that he might have been an abuse victim. He’d often been taken night fishing by an old man who lived down the block. Most of the time, his uncle Frank had been with them, and Frank was to this day as straight an arrow as had ever been carved, but there had been times when he and Mr. Ehmer had been out there alone all night, and he wondered what had transpired then.

He remembered strange violence. Screaming. Being swarmed by flies. And maybe those were screen memories for things Mr. Ehmer had done, that should not have been done.

Dan had been angry and big, so he used to push the little kids around—whip their butts, take their money, you name it. So he could understand the ugly frustrations of Paulie Warner and the other boys as well as he could his own boy’s hurt. He put his arm around Conner’s shoulders, gave him a friendly squeeze. “This was not like this a week ago. Two days ago.”

“Let me tell you what they’ve done. They have created a club called the Connerbusters. Clever name, do you get it? Everybody in the seventh grade is supposed to be a Connerbuster except me, of course—” He stopped, his voice cracking.

Dan looked over to see the young face twisted in pain. Agony.

“I’m sorry, Dan, here I go being a little boy.”

“Look, I was a class bully. I would’ve been a Connerbuster. For sure. But I cried, too. And you can be sure that Paulie Warner and the rest of them are just as vulnerable. You’re a little behind them physically, Conner, but mentally, you’re on another planet. In another universe.”

“Aye, and there’s the rub. So listen, my friend, and you shall hear, of the careful humiliation of Conner the queer.”

“You’re not gay?”

“I have no idea, I’m prepubescent. And incidentally, without hurting her, you have got to tell Mom to stop bragging about me to the other mothers.”

Now, that was a stunner. Katelyn was hardly your braggart mama. “That doesn’t sound like her, somehow.”

“She refers to me as a ‘genius.’ ‘My son is a genius,’ she says. And do you know that Mrs. Warner resents this? And Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. Fisk and probably every other faculty wife with a kid at B.A. Because they all want geniuses, Dan. This is a college! These are college people! And I really am a genius and they resent me. So you give a kid ammo like that—the parents can’t stand some classmate with an unfortunate disability like mine—and that poor cripple is fair game.”

Dan could certainly see, from Conner’s standpoint, why he might view his intelligence as a deformity. It was ugly, though, to see him driven to feel that way about a gift so rare.

The thing about Katelyn was, if you were going to love her and you were going to be her husband, you were going to have to accept that Conner was the center of the universe for her. He was, indeed, a professor’s dream child and she was, indeed, a professor. “She’s always bragged, Conner.”

“She’s really messing me up.”

At that moment, flashlights began appearing in their yard, swarming over from the Warners’. There were also voices making low howling sounds. “Great,” Conner muttered as he turned out his bedside light.

For a few more seconds, Dan hoped that this was something nice, but when he heard them calling Conner’s name, he knew that it was more cruelty, and he, perhaps unfortunately, got mad. He headed for the glass door that opened out onto the underdeck and the yard.

“Dan, please just go upstairs.”

“Conner, those kids don’t have any business in this yard.”

“Dan, please!”

Dan opened the door. Behind him, Conner pulled his bedspread over his head. Then Dan heard cracking sounds. He realized that somebody was hitting the aboveground pool with what sounded like a board or even a hammer.

“All right, that’s enough,” he shouted as he strode up to the shape that was hacking away at the pool. It was a kid he didn’t recognize, but when the boy saw him, he tried to run. Dan got him by the collar of his jacket.

The kid swung and managed to land a crooked blow on Dan’s thigh. And the rest of them didn’t run. He heard Paulie Warner say in an almost bored voice, “Let ’im go, Dan.”

Dan carried him across to the fence and dumped him over. “Get out of here, all of you.” He grabbed Paulie as he was leaving. “You oughta be ashamed of yourself.”

Paulie snorted—laughter. Only a miracle from above prevented Dan from smacking him. Instead, he brushed past him and strode across the Warners’ driveway. “Get off my property,” Paulie shouted from behind him.

He hammered on the front door. A couple of seconds later, Maggie opened it. He was so furious that for a moment he was at a loss for words, and the two of them just stared at each other. Finally, he spoke. “Keep those vandals out of my yard, Maggie, or I’m calling the cops.”

“Dan?”

“Paulie had his gang out there busting up our pool, damnit! It’s not on, Maggie. If I have to, I’ll see you guys in family court. Paulie might not like Conner anymore. That’s his privilege. But when he starts vandalizing our stuff—that I am not going to allow.”

She turned around, called into the house, “Paulie?” Then, “Paulie!”

He came, not looking afraid in the least, Dan noted. He was growing up, Paulie Warner was. The peach fuzz was getting dark, the eyes getting hard.

“Did you bust up their pool?”

“No.”

“Yeah, you did—or your friend did. I think they have a little gang, Maggie. What’s your little gang called, Paulie?”

“I don’t have a gang.”

Maggie shoved his shoulder. “Where’s Conner, Paulie?”

“He couldn’t come.”

“They cut him out and the gang is called the Connerbusters, and they invaded our yard with the intention of vandalizing us, and I’m not gonna stand for it, Maggie.”

“Okay! Hey!” Maggie called into the house. Boys began to appear, just young enough to be a bit wide-eyed with worry. “Party’s over, fellas. Call your parents and tell ’em to pick you up. You can wait on the front porch, I don’t want you in here anymore. I’ve already had a shelf busted in my fridge—”