Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

A month passed, and the fall days chilled at their edges, warm only for a moment at noon. Each morning his mother would press the back of her lotioned hand to his cheek. “You seem peakish,” she’d say. “Why not stay home today — your immune system needs time to adapt.” Then she’d hurry off to Venice to fetch the thermometer. Yet despite her best efforts — she ordered once-illicit choke-prone foods like hot dogs and enticing films and art supplies, and even offered to get cable, including the movie channel — he never missed a day.

School itself was numbing, but not unpleasurably so. The building housed and sustained a great oceanic boredom, a boredom so vast it could be tasted. During the most tedious moments, he daydreamed of the freedoms he’d surrendered: languid afternoons of masterpiece painting in New York, his mother dropping a bowl of slow-cooked chicken stew beside his easel; later napping on the sun-warmed carpet in Cairo, the light pouring lava through his eyelids as she picked “The House of the Rising Sun” at the table in Paris. Still, he loved how school was something all children were subject to, a plague to endure together. There was freedom in this unity. It rescued him from the worry of what to do next that had constantly tortured him at home.

His mother had said schools make you a cog in the machine. “Another brick in the wohll ,” she’d slur in a low English accent for some reason. But he liked the idea of being a brick in a wohll. It sounded cozy. Better that than being a brick sitting down in Toronto all by itself.

He enjoyed his morning walk and the din of his classmates, though they seldom addressed him and always scampered off before he’d completed a question. Homework consisted of blanks to put words and numbers in, like writing checks for deliverymen, but easier because you didn’t lose money if you botched it. The tests kicked up tiny Black Lagoons that redlined his heart and flooded his mouth with the taste of sour aluminum. So far, As had evaded him because he couldn’t scrape all the correct morsels from his mind before Mr. Miller snatched their tests away as though he rightly owned them.

Overall, the Outside was utterly boring and utterly astonishing at once and often exceeded Will’s capacity to investigate it. At least once a week his heart bubbled over with beauty and fear, and he’d ask to go to the bathroom, where he’d weep mutely into wads of harsh, abrasive toilet paper. To mask his gaping deficits of understanding, Will’s policy was to feign knowledge, to play the part of a normal boy, and nobody seemed to notice otherwise. Still, at times he was hit with a plummet of terror when he remembered he wasn’t wearing a Helmet or that his classroom was neither New York nor San Francisco, but these instances diminished with each passing week, so he paid them less and less mind.

His mother was weathering his going to school better than he’d expected. Even so, he’d often return home to find her in Cairo staring blankly from the window out into the backyard, a full mug of forgotten tea steeping eternally beside her.

Marcus still hadn’t turned up, and Will continually checked the paper, as well as the woods on his walk home, but came up empty. One Friday after school, Will built the courage to knock on some doors on his street to ask about the stolen hoses. As weird smells wafted from their Insides, several neighbors said the theft occurred around the same time a firecracker exploded on their doorstep. A diversion tactic, Will ingeniously deduced, but what did it have to do with Marcus’s disappearance? Did he get caught? By who? Had he ignited himself with a match bomb? And what did such daring boys need with garden hoses anyway?

But Will made other discoveries and had to quell a thousand urges to report to his mother everything he learned. That the cleaning powder the janitors scoured onto their desks was called Comet, which for hours after emitted eye-stinging fumes and left other kids strangely unbothered. That the kids from Will’s side of the highway, Grandview Gardens, had full pencil cases, new backpacks, and bright clothes; and kids from County Park, where most Indian kids lived, had pilly sweat suits and markers that dried up in a few days, even if capped religiously. That, in general, teachers were warmer and more attentive to kids from Will’s side, though this warmth didn’t yet extend to him. That the many hockey players in his class were all named Tyler or Ryan or Chris, and they sat reeking lightly of sweat because of 6:00 a.m. practices. (Will had yet to detect his own odor, though his mother ordered him a deodorant spray that made him shudder when he tried it.) The hockey players walked stiff and upright, almost daintily, as though still wearing skates. They addressed everyone by last name exclusively and were forever administering a gauntlet of charley horses, punches to the triceps, and trips. They called a fight a “scrap” and punches “shots”—as though they were somehow medicinal.

Scraps happened in secret down near the culvert. It was the perfect place to bleed, Will figured, outside the Outside, because a kid’s blood was something that all adults, not only his mother, couldn’t bear. There after school Will witnessed his first real scrap when a blond hockey player named Tyler took a shot at Ritchie, the same boy who’d handed Will the match bomb by the creek. Even though none of the Indian kids at his school played hockey because the Kevlar pads cost a small fortune, both threw their mitts to the ground like on Hockey Night in Canada before grabbing collars and wailing. They were left red faced, gulping tears, mustached with blood, yet somehow they survived. After the fight, Will happened upon Ritchie in the school bathroom, spitting into the sink. “I think I swallowed some teeth,” he said. “How many?” Will said, amazed that Ritchie didn’t remember him, but too afraid to ask about Marcus. “You tell me,” Ritchie said and grinned his big, dripping space. “I don’t know,” Will said, leaning in, “maybe two? Three at the most.” “Oh,” said Ritchie tonguing the gap, stringy like a carved pumpkin, “that’s not too bad.”

Will had also learned that a gift was a trap, like the match bomb. That “Up there!” was mere precursor to a finger-thwack to the throat. After his first spritzing with Tahiti Treat offered by a popular hockey player, Will knew free sodas were definitely shaken. That to take bait demonstrated gullibility — the most childish, despicable sin there was.

Angela rallied with Will each morning at the base of the stairs. Since he’d turned over Jonah’s least interesting drawing, the one of the grid, she was his sole friend, at least while at school. Best of all, she never asked questions about his mother, questions he couldn’t answer without sounding freakish. Despite her low social perch, or perhaps because of it, Angela proved an invaluable informant. She identified the Twins he’d met by the creek as the Belcourt Twins, who were already in a special high school. “The one for kids who are probably graduating to Stony Mountain,” she said, which was a federal prison in Manitoba and not the mountain-dwarf fortress Will had invented when he was young.

“Why do you care so much about that kid?” she said when Will inquired again about Marcus. She squinted: “Are you a flamer?”

“No, I didn’t touch any of their matches, I swear,” Will said. “Look, we’re, like, friends.”

She scoffed and pushed her eyebrows up near her glossy hairline. “Doubt it,” she said, then leaned in and whispered: “But I asked my brother and he said your little friend has got himself mixed up with criminals, like adult ones? He pissed somebody off, bad .”