Christopher Hacker - The Morels

His first assault happened in a toilet stall. Two older boys, impossibly tall. Take it , said one, brandishing a ripe banana at crotch level. Go on, you know you want it . When Will refused, the boy yanked him by his shirt collar down to his knees while the other one tittered. Gobble gobble! He shoved the banana into Will’s face, its slime smearing his cheeks and teeth and plugging up both nostrils. Other assaults followed. After a class that was filing out teacher first, Will brought up the rear to find several boys behind him. The one at Will’s side shoulder-checked him into the open coat closet, where he was smothered with down jackets and piled upon by knees and elbows until he could no longer breathe and passed out. After that, Will kept to the thick of a crowd or near an adult, honing his avoidance instinct, but somehow, no matter how hard he tried, he’d end up cornered in a stairwell or behind a door or in a hallway’s dead end. Not only the older ones but kids his own age, kids who before January he might have named among his friends.

So he fought back. He punched and kicked and clawed and bit down hard, putting the full force of his jaw into it, until he heard that sweet cry of agony, until he tasted blood. Crazy fuck! A boy in the stairwell, threatening Will with a stubby screwdriver: Will shoved the boy down the stairs, running after him, fists clenched. A trio outside school, encircling: Will throws himself full tilt at one, wrestles and straddles the surprised boy, and with a fistful of hair drives the boy’s head into the sidewalk. There was no more Fox Mulder, no more Nintendo or Jerky Boys or comic books. Those days — only weeks in the past — were long gone now, the myths of a sweet and simple golden age. Now it was Twisted Metal and Grand Theft Auto. Games wherein he was invited to drag people out of their cars at gunpoint and barrel through crowded intersections. For fun, he lumbered through an open-air café. Patrons leaped out of the way; the vehicle bumped and lurched over the crunch of bodies. Bloody tire tracks ribboned outward in the rearview. At the edge of a park, he got out of the car and walked purposely to the most peopled section he could find and, withdrawing his pistol — its beastly heft a little slippery in his palm — and fulfilling no particular goal, open-fired on as many innocent people as he could before the police surrounded him and shot him blissfully dead.

His father’s death did nothing to abate the onslaught at school. Yet now Will welcomed the blows, encouraged them even. He had killed his father, and now he was paying the price. And yet he still hated his father. His father was as much to blame for all of this as he. So, as Will was absorbing the blows meant to atone for his father’s death, Will was also striking out with his own fists against his attackers, and it was his father’s nose, his father’s lip, his father’s teeth, Will’s knuckles crunched against — his father’s groin his knee connected with.

Will’s mother packed them up and moved them down to Virginia, enrolled him at Annandale Middle School, her own alma mater. She told him he wouldn’t have to worry, nobody would know his father’s name — down here, kids didn’t read books. They played soccer and hung out behind strip-mall convenience stores to complain about how bored they were. But within months, they found him out, and Will was forced to endure a similar isolation. Less violent this time around, more insidious. While engaged in a class discussion, the teacher uttered the phrase a father’s love , and from the back of the room someone said, “Willy knows about a father’s love.” Several students laughed. Then someone else, “Tell us what a father’s love feels like, Willy.” The teacher, not in on the joke, stood there perplexed. Or copies of his father’s book would wind up in his backpack, or in his locker. These kids didn’t read . Ha! The enemy here was unseen — nowhere and everywhere — people he thought were friends would turn on a dime in front of others to offer a cutting remark at his expense. They would provoke Will into using his fists (and elbows and teeth) to fight back and then turn things around so that Will was the one in trouble. He was a caged animal at Annandale Middle School, snarling and snapping at cruel, ceaselessly prodding fingers.

This time, when Will’s mother packed up and moved them yet again, back to New York City, she enrolled him under her maiden name. Will would be Wright now. Will Wright. He liked the ring, its double-barreledness, much better than Morel, an edible mold that flourished in dark places.

It was at this point, during his first year of high school, that Will learned the art of keeping his mouth shut. He sat at the back of the class and never — not once in four years — raised his hand. No shortage of fellow freshmen those first weeks of school, wanting to strike up friendships with Will Wright, were turned away. When kids asked Will about himself, he answered vaguely or not at all or made stuff up. He was from Virginia and would be heading back there as soon as his father returned from fighting the Taliban. He was an exchange student, originally from northern Quebec; his parents came from a long line of trappers and only spoke French. By the end of the following semester, kids stopped caring who he was or wasn’t. And Will tried to keep it that way, permanent firewall turned on.

Yet his fists still couldn’t seem to help themselves. They continued fighting a war that was over. An off-the-cuff remark, even in the most innocuous context, uttered sweetly even, were it to contain a certain key word— jerkoff , for instance, or faggot or sometimes the word daddy —and the fists would let fly. He was no longer in control of them. His body would leap out ahead of him to connect with that word, to beat it from existence. No matter the size or gender of the speaker. His fists were especially sensitive to the word morel , on whichever syllable the accent fell. All friendships in high school were tenuous, provisional — and as soon as they got a load of Will’s fists, bonds were severed for good. By junior year he’d been labeled by most as certifiably loco and given a wide berth.

Teachers, however, adored Will. Whereas other students sleepwalked through assignments — scrawled onto a sheet of loose-leaf paper in the hallway ten minutes before class — and bloated their essays to bursting with filler phrases, letting platitudes and clichés do their thinking for them, a generation of texters uninterested in the distinction between their and they’re, its and it’s, whose and who’s , Will was different. He was an earnest and thoughtful student. He was impressively well read — as a loner and an only child Will was an avid reader of books — and had a knack with words. Will’s homework assignments were little jewels laser printed on high-quality paper stock — focused, packed with vivid examples, little jolts of unusual vocabulary, fresh turns of phrase, language well-mastered. Other students spent their time before and after class begging for extensions on late work or arguing over a grade. Will did neither. Always on the day it was due, never a word of complaint. Other students, after glancing at the circled grade at the top of the page, tossed the returned assignments into the trash bin as they exited class; Will pored over his graded papers at his desk, carefully considering each red mark, frowning and nodding, the last to leave the room.

Women teachers were especially fond of Will. It was the black hair, the black eyes, and the way those eyes burned when he was called on to speak. The rough hands that turned in and accepted back assignments, the boxer’s broken nose, the broad shoulders hunched at his desk — a man already, at the age of sixteen. They knew who his father was, who he was. In break rooms, over burned coffee, they swooned over his furious soul, but to him they said nothing. They were the keepers of his talent. They shepherded him through the college application process, test preparations, and personal statements and transcripts and interviews. They celebrated those that accepted him and cursed those that didn’t. They hugged him tearfully at graduation and sent him on his way.