Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Don’t say it .

“Oh!” Mondo fell back on his heels. “It’s Eric.”

“Oh.” I took a backward step.

Juan Carlos paused with one hand inside the doll’s back, still wearing a doctor’s distant, guileful expression.

“Who the fuck is Eric ?” Gus snarled.

“Don’t you assholes remember him?” Mondo was grinning at us like a Jeopardy! champ. He waved the doll’s wax hand at us. “Eric Mutis.”

Now we all remembered him: Eric Mutis. Eric Mutant, Eric Mucus, Eric the Mute. Paler than a cauliflower, a friendless kid who had once or twice had seizures in our class. “Eric Mutis is an epileptic,” our teacher had explained a little uncertainly, after Mutant got carried from the room by Coach Leyshon. Eric Mutis had joined our eighth-grade class in October the previous year, a transfer kid. The teacher never introduced him. Kids rarely moved to Anthem, New Jersey; generally the teachers made a New Boy or a New Girl parade their strangeness for us. Not Eric Mutis. Eric Mutis, who seemed genuinely otherworldly, even weirder than Tuku the Guatemalan New Boy, never had to stand and explain himself to us. He arrived in exile, sank like a stone to the bottom of our homeroom. One day, several weeks before the official end of our school term, he vanished, and I honestly had not spoken his name since. Nobody had.

In the school halls, Eric Mutis had been as familiar as air; at the same time we never thought about him. Not unless he was right in front of our noses. Then you couldn’t ignore him — there was something provocative about Eric Mutis’s ugliness, something about his wormy lips and lobes, his blond eyelashes and his worse-than-dumb expression, that filled your eyes and closed your throat. He could metamorphose Julie Lucio, the top of the cheer pyramid, a dog lover and the sweetest girl in our grade, into a true bitch. “What smells ?” she’d whisper, little unicorn-pendant Julie, thrilling us with her acid tone, and the Mute would blink his large eyes at her behind his glasses and say, “I don’t smell it, Julie,” in that voice like thin blue milk. Congenitally, he really did seem like a mutant, sightless, incapable of shame. Mutant floated among us, hideous, yet blank as a balloon — his calm was unrelenting. He was ugly, most definitely, but we might have forgiven him for that. It was his serenity that made the kid monstrous to us. His baffling lack of contrition — all that oblivion rolling in his blue eyes. Personally, I felt allergic to the kid. Peace like his must be a bully allergen. A teacher’s allergen, too — the poor get poorer, I guess, because many of our teachers were openly hostile to Eric Mutis; by December, Coach Leyshon was sneering, “Pick it up, Mutant!” on the courts.

At school, Camp Dark beat down kids as a foursome. We did this in an animal silence. We’d drag a hysterical kid behind the redbrick Science Building — usually a middle schooler, a sixth- or seventh-grader — and then we would hammer and piston our fists into his clawing, shrilling body until the kid went slack as rags. I heard those screams like they were coming out of my own throat and found I couldn’t relax until the kid did. I sensed there was some deep assembly-line logic to what we did: once we got a kid screaming, we were obliged to shut him up again. I thought of the process as what they call “a necessary evil.” We were like a team of factory guys, manufacturing a calm that was not available to us naturally anywhere in Anthem. We desperately needed this quiet that only our victims could produce for us, the silence that came after an attack; it was as essential to our friendship as breathing air. As blood is to a vampire. We’d kneel there, panting together, and let the good quiet bubble out of the snotty kid and into our lungs.

That year, Eric Mutis was one of our regulars. We stole the Mute’s Hoops sneakers and hung them from the flagpole; we smashed his gray Medicaid glasses three times before Christmas; and then he’d come to school in a new pair of the same invalid’s frames, the same nine-dollar Hoops. How many pairs of Hoops did we force him to buy that year — or, most likely, since Eric Mutis queued up with us for the free lunch program, to steal?

“Why are you so stubborn, Mutant?” I hissed at him once, when his face was inches away from mine, lying prone on the blacktop — closer to my face than any girl’s had ever been. Closer than I’d let my ma’s face get to me, now that I’d turned thirteen. I could smell his bubble gum and what we called the “Anthem cologne”—like my own clothes, Mutant’s rags stank of diesel, fried doughnut grease from the cafeteria.

“Why don’t you learn ?” And I Goliath-crushed the Medicaid glasses in my hand, feeling sick.

“Your palms, Larry.” Eric the Mute had shocked me that time, calling me by name. “They’re bleeding.”

“Are you retarded?” I marveled. “ You are the one bleeding! This is your blood!” It was both our blood actually, but his eyes made me furious. That blind light, steady as a dial tone.

“WAKE UP!” I backed away graciously, to give Gus space to deliver the encore kick.

“Listen, Mutant: DO … NOT … WEAR THAT UGLY SHIT TO SCHOOL!”

And Monday came, and guess what Mutant wore?

Was he wearing this stuff out of rebellion? A kind of nerd insurrection? I didn’t think so; that might have relieved us a little bit, if the kid had the spine and the mind to rebel. But Eric Mutis wore that stuff brainlessly, shamelessly. We couldn’t teach him how to be ashamed of it. (“Who did this? Who did this?” our upstairs neighbor, Miss Zeke from 3C, used to holler, grinding her cross-eyed dachshund’s nose into a lake of urine on the stairwell, while the dog, a true lost cause, jetted another weak stream onto the floor.) When we attacked him behind the redbrick Science Building, he never seemed to understand what his crime had been, or what was happening, or even — his blue eyes drifting, unplugged — that it was happening to him .

In fact, I think Eric Mutis would have been hard-pressed to identify himself in a police lineup. In the school bathroom he always avoided mirrors. Our bathroom floor had sloping blue tiles, which made the act of pissing into a bowl feel weirdly perilous, as if at any moment you might get plowed under by an Atlantic City wave. Teachers used a separate faculty john. I was famous for having nearly drowned a kid in the sink. Even the Mute knew this about me — that was the one lesson he took. “Well, hallo there, Mutant,” I’d whistle at him. More than once I watched him drop his dick and zip up and sprint past the bank of sinks when I entered the bathroom, his homely face pursuing him blurrily and hopelessly in the mirrors. This used to make me happy, when kids like Eric Mucus were afraid of me. (Really, I don’t know who I could have been then either.)

Now I wondered if the real Mutis would have recognized this doll. Would the Mute have known his own head on the scarecrow?

That night we spent another hour staring at the doll of Eric and debating what to do with him. The moon rose over Friendship Park. Everybody got jittery. Gus finished our beers. Mondo shot the glass eyes like marbles.

“Well,” Gus sighed, dragging down his dark earlobes, his baseball signal to us that he had lost all patience. “We could do an experiment, like. Seems pretty simple. One way to find out what old Eric Mutant here—”

“The scarecrow ,” Mondo hissed, as if he regretted ever naming it.

Gus rolled his eyes. “What the scarecrow is doing in the park? What it’s supposedly protecting us from? Would be to cut him down.”