D Gillespie - The Toy Thief

Too terrified to take a single step from the bed, I dropped the camera to the floor, grabbed Memphis, and pulled him up next to me, clutching the terrified cat against my chest. He didn’t fight me like he often did when I tried to snuggle him, but he was still bristling, his back still curled. Every so often, he would growl a bit, and I would sink deeper into the covers. But within half an hour, the growls died away, replaced by contented purrs. At some point across that vast gulf of night, both of us slept, reasonably certain that our home was ours once more.

It was almost absurd how scared I was the first time Andy got suspended from school. We weren’t exactly the Brady Bunch, but we never really got into much trouble growing up, either. I think I was maybe six when he first got suspended. It was only for a day, but to me, it was a monumental moment – one of my earliest memories, to be honest. It meant that the boy who I looked up to, idolized even, wasn’t quite who I thought he was.

I knew, even by that age, what trouble looked like. There were kids, handfuls of them in our school, who never knew what it was like not to be in trouble. I remember this one girl, Angie Breyers, who nowadays would probably be diagnosed with half a dozen things, each with their own medication. In second grade, after an especially wild day, the teacher actually pulled out a roll of masking tape and taped her to her chair.

“If you get up, you will get a paddling from Mr. Kinney.”

My God, had there ever been such a threat? Our principal was a bear of a man with a gray beard and fingers as thick as Polish sausages. Word had it that he had an electric paddle that he could plug into the wall, which would shock you every time he hit you, multiplying the pain by an absolutely immeasurable amount. In those days, none of us ever doubted such irrefutable facts, so when I saw Angie start to pick away at her belt of tape with a pencil, I tried to stop her.

“Psst. Psst!”

I can still remember her face when she turned and looked at me, a face like a dog that has just been hit by a car. She seemed dazed, 24/7. Her brain in an eternal stupor. She wasn’t stupid. I’d seen too much of her to think that. It was just that her mind, her senses, her very makeup weren’t fit for the world she was born into. Could there have been a place for her where she could have been okay? If her parents had done a better job, would it have mattered? If she had known someone loved her, would it have made any difference at all?

“What?” she said with that stony, confused look in her eyes.

“Don’t,” I said. I was pleading, nearly on the verge of tears. I didn’t want her to get hurt. In those days, I never wanted anyone to get hurt.

“Mind your business,” she said, her eyebrows arching down like wasps. With one more flick of her wrist, she tore the tape away and slowly began to wad it into a tight little ball, which she promptly stuck on top of her desk. I half expected her to throw it at the teacher, but she never did, and the longer I watched, the more I realized there was no greater plan in that moment, no grand scheme. She just didn’t want to sit still. Maybe even couldn’t sit still. Within a few minutes, she had edged out of her seat and was picking at a scab on her knee with the end of a ruler.

The teacher finally did catch on, and Angie did indeed get escorted all the way down to Mr. Kinney’s office. I never knew what happened down that terrifying stretch of hallway, but I swore then and there never to end up in his office myself.

I’m not sure if Andy had any similar moments, but his eventual fall from the good graces of his teachers filled me with some kind of existential dread, a well of fear I hadn’t even known existed. The idea, the very thought, that my brother could be one of them , cast in with the likes of Angie Breyers, left me utterly despondent.

I found out, years later, the extent of that first indiscretion that got him banished from school. It was in the bathroom, a decidedly frightening place in grade school. I remember overhearing some of the older girls talk about the boys’ room, me listening in as they demonized it, turning it into something terrifying.

“The stalls don’t even have doors.”

“How are you supposed to poop?” I asked, eyes dropping.

“You don’t. Not unless you don’t have any choice at all.”

I still shudder at the thought. It sounded less like a school and more like an institution, a prison, the kind of place you might get shivved if you weren’t careful. I was thankful in that moment that I was born a girl.

His first infractions were, in hindsight, all small-potato type stuff. His first time was for nothing more frightening than writing the word ‘Fuck’ on the wall of one of the stalls with a Sharpie. A teacher happened to stroll in and that was that. Enjoy your day off, son. Now, that was how it got started, but it wasn’t until a few years later that Andy really took a step into the other side of the law.

That particular story, as told by my dad after banishing Andy to his room for the night, went something like this. One of the older kids – some boy named Patrick – had been picking on him. General, hazy details were all that really existed, but it had something to do with Andy’s teeth. This was the year before Dad’s insurance added orthodontic work, and my brother’s mouth was a mess by then. There was a gap in the front, which was bad, and one of his bottom teeth had turned sideways, which was worse. To hear my father tell it, which was no doubt the same way the principal told it, Andy had attacked the boy when his back was turned. They had to take him to the hospital.

There was, of course, more to the story. One of the girls in my class the following year – Mary or Marie, I forget – but her older brother had been there, and he saw the whole thing.

“Oh,” she said, choking a bit when she realized who I was. “You’re Andy’s sister.”

“Yeah?”

“I remember him,” she replied. “I mean, my brother told me about him.”

According to her brother, the bullying had gone on for the better part of the year. The boy in question, Patrick something, had started calling Andy ‘Snag,’ short for Snaggletooth. Andy had tried his best to avoid it, even going so far as walking out of his way to use a different bathroom. It didn’t matter. There was blood in the water, and the game of picking my brother apart, piece by piece, was just too delicious to give up. I’ve known the type my whole life, people like this Patrick, people so small inside, so pitifully devoid of anything at all approaching a sense of humor, a personality, a soul, that the only way they can connect with their fellow humans is to destroy someone different from them. They can sense people like Andy – quiet, naturally soft souls – and they hone in on them, tracking them, hunting them, and eventually eating them alive unless they push too far. Usually, they don’t get their comeuppance, but in this case, Patrick did.

Andy did attack him from behind, but the details were much more wonderful, gruesome, and poetic. After a particularly cruel round of bullying in the boys’ bathroom, Andy decided he’d had enough of being called Snag. He quietly left the bathroom, stopping in the hall to draw out the heaviest book in his backpack. Social studies, I imagine. Then, with a patience that only my brother could have, he waited for Patrick to emerge, to stroll down the hall, to dip his head to the water fountain for a drink. That’s when Andy swung the book like a sledgehammer into the back of his head.

I don’t tend to believe people who give stories about really stressful moments. I say this, quite simply, because I’ve been in enough awful moments to know that no one really remembers the details, not when the mad scramble of panic sets in. That said, when Mary/Marie told me that her brother swears up and down on a stack of Bibles that he heard Patrick’s teeth shatter, I believe it to be a true story. The metal guard of the water fountain sliced through his lips and broke four of his teeth. Andy never yelled, never screamed, never promised future retaliation over the prone body of his torturer. Instead, he tucked the book under his arm and went to his next class as the crowd grew and Patrick’s wails echoed through the halls.