Principals and Other Schoolyard Bullies Read online

  “My name is Adrian Bretarski,” he began and stopped short, uncertain what else he might be expected to say.

  “Adrian the Retard!” a voice called out, supported by a wave of giggles and snickering that Ms Camlet’s stern voice cut short.

  “Can you tell us a little about yourself, Adrian,” said Ms Camlet, trying bravely to salvage the moment. “What school were you in before coming here?” she continued, offering as safe and innocuous a question as she could imagine. She was surprised that her new pupil hesitated as he did before replying and even more surprised—a surprise mixed with outrage—at the short but brutish burst of laughter that came from one corner of the classroom.

  Without his teacher’s prompting or permission, Adrian sat down after that, feeling as much hurt as confused. It was several minutes before he raised his head again, and quite some time after that before he began to steal glances around the room to try to make sense of this strange new world in which he found himself.

  When the recess bell rang, releasing the class into the hallway and onto the playground, he hung back, studiously watchful and a little wary. He was conscious of the fact that in some way or other he didn’t fit in with those around him, but he couldn’t understand why. Yet, he was not without the instinct that made him wish to belong. Standing alone, he observed, trying to decide whom he might try to approach, and how best to do it. But by the time he had selected a pair of boys in his class who seemed, if not perfectly safe at least noticeably less dangerous, the bell rang and it was time to form a single file.

  Mindful of what had happened earlier that morning he took his time lining up and kept well away from the girl with red-streaked hair. He also took note of who was behind him. He filed in dutifully with the others and reached his locker feeling a sense of accomplishment, for the shove or push he had anticipated had not come.

  But when he opened his locker, his heart fell. His school bag, which had been zipped shut, was open, as was his lunch bag, and the food his aunt had prepared was spilled on the locker floor. He looked around, half expecting to see someone smirking at him, but there was no one looking at him, nor paying the least attention.

  Adrian’s food had been carefully wrapped and packaged, so even though it had been spilled, he had been able to eat everything. Yet, lunch in the cafeteria had been far from pleasant. The cafeteria was impossibly noisy and crowded. He had found a place to squeeze himself in, but neither of the two people beside him, nor the few sitting across from him, seemed interested in speaking to him. Worse, twice he was hit by someone passing behind him. The first time he got a knee in the small of his back. The second time, someone clipped him behind the ear with the hard plastic corner of a cafeteria tray. It was a sharp, crisp blow and, even though Adrian managed to stifle the cry which came unbidden to his lips, he could not prevent his eyes from momentarily tearing up.

  The two boys whom Adrian had thought of approaching at recess were nowhere to be seen after lunch. He found himself being stared at by the boy who had hit him with the cafeteria tray, one of the group of boys in his class who had laughed at him in the morning. Adrian drifted away, determined to search out someone with whom he might try to strike up a conversation, if not a friendship. He was looking for someone else who seemed alone, or for a small group of two or three.

  When they lined up to go in after lunch, he was again jostled from behind by unseen hands.

  Then, towards the end of the afternoon, when the class was supposedly doing an art activity and there was a certain amount of coming and going, Adrian found himself at the wrong end of a pencil.

  He was concentrated on his artwork, feeling pleased for the first time that day because two of his classmates, walking by, had glanced at his work and spoken to him, to say his drawing was nice. Ms Camlet had also come by and had fussed a little over his work, telling him he had a talent for art. Then, sensing someone else over his shoulder, he had looked up to find Steven, the boy with the tray, standing over him.

  “Is that supposed to be a donkey or an ass?”

  “What?”

  “That!” And Steven bent forward towards the paper on Adrian’s desk and with a quick, violent motion, slashed a dark line across the drawing, tearing the paper.

  “Hey!” Adrian jumped to his feet to confront the bigger boy, knocking over his chair.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “What’s going on?” Ms Camlet was making her way quickly across the room.

  “It was an accident, Retard.”

  The words, so blatantly false, the tone, the mocking smirk, the tension which had been building all day caused something to boil over, and Adrian, with an anger he’d never before experienced, pushed the class bully.

  Steven, who was big and strong and quick, who had been in lots of schoolyard fights, and who had prepared for this conflict with the tactical precision of a chess master, swung back, still holding his pencil, and as the sharp, graphite tip slashed Adrian’s cheek, it broke and remained deep in the soft flesh.

  Ms Camlet was there, no more than a second or two too late. Frustrated and angry, but also impotent in the face of Steven’s protests of innocence, “It was an accident. He pushed me first,” she put a protective arm around Adrian, and brought him quickly to the classroom door.

  “I know it hurts,” she said to Adrian, “but it’s not bleeding very much and you’ll be ok. I’ll have someone bring you down to Miss Thibault and she’ll patch you up. And Adrian? I know it’s been a hard day for you, but tomorrow will be better. Thing’s will go well tomorrow.”

  “Alison,” she called, “bring Adrian down to see Miss Thibault, will you please?”

  The Sour Taste of Revenge

  I recognized him right away. He limped in and I knew, instantly and with absolute certainty, it was Billy, even though I hadn’t seen him in almost twenty years.

  He didn’t look very good, but that is true of many of the people who come through the doors and to my reception desk. It’s especially true at night, and it was only half an hour before the end of my shift when he came in. He was noticeably favouring his right leg and his left arm was crossed over his chest. His right hand was supporting his left elbow. My first guess was a broken collar bone. To look at his face, I guessed that he’d been in a fight. The skin was blotchy. There was dried blood and noticeable swelling near his left eye. He was alone.

  I watched him painfully take the dozen steps that separate the entrance from the desk. He had the same dark, wavy hair he’d had as a child, and the olive skin. He hadn’t grown to more than average height and he was slim. He had one of those tough, wiry bodies. As I watched him it came to me that he had his mother’s build. He moved with his shoulders slumped forward, keeping his head half down. He raised it twice, once to locate the desk and again to check that he was moving towards it. His dark eyes were half-hooded, as if his eyelids were too heavy to fully open. His chin was small and his mouth was the same thin, straight, mean gash I remembered.

  When he was just a step or two away from me, I turned away from him and back to the screen on my desk. I pretended to be unaware of his presence.

  “I have to see a doctor,” was the first thing he said. I continued typing on my keyboard and studied my screen for a long minute before turning to him.

  “I’ll need your health card,” I replied, “and, if you’ve been here before, your clinic card as well. It’s burgundy in colour.” I looked straight at him as I spoke, challenging his eyes to recognize who I was. Perhaps under different circumstances, he might have. Pain can short-circuit a lot of the brain’s activity.

  “You can sit down if you want,” I added, pointing to the chair beside him. This wasn’t politeness or concern. I said it knowing that any change in position would bring with it a fresh wave of pain.

  He looked at the chair for a long minute but stayed standing. He released his grip on his left elbow and reached slowly and gingerly towards his back pocket. He had to shift his shoulders and when he did his face tw
isted with pain. His right hand went quickly back to his left elbow and he took in a gasp of air. His eyes came up to meet mine. Behind the half-hooded lids, they were red-rimmed and bloodshot, brimming with supplication.

  “It’s in my back pocket. I can’t reach it.”

  “I need your health card and your clinic card, if you have one,” I repeated, as if I hadn’t heard a word he had said. I was surprised at how easy it was to ignore the begging note in his voice, the pleading in his dark eyes. Still, I didn’t trust myself. I turned back to my screen. I gave myself the task of verifying a schedule I’d looked at only minutes before.

  We were living in the middle of three apartments which had been carved out of an old wood-frame house on Laurier Street. Looking back, I think the apartment was probably a real dump. Laurier Street, like most of the neighbourhood that used to be known as Cartierville, has been extensively gentrified. But twenty years ago, the north end of the street especially, was on the wrong side of the proverbial tracks. The house itself is no longer there. It was torn down at some point and replaced by an attractive eight-unit apartment block. Much of the yard we played in—and where this all happened—is now parking spaces or someone’s kitchen. Ironically, I think it was the large, fenced-in yard that had decided my parents to take the apartment.

  Upstairs from us lived a nice old man we knew as Mr. Argent. He was almost always home, but we never heard him. In the summer, we might see him on his balcony, working away at something. We’d been told that he was an artist of some kind but we never saw him drawing or painting. He always smiled and waved at us if we called hello, then he’d turn back to his work. I think children made him shy. He never gave out candy at Hallowe’en. He kept his door shut and his lights off to discourage any trick or treaters. But he’d come downstairs, well before dark, and give us homemade cookies. “There’s no sugar in these,” he’d tell us, his voice implying they were especially good because of this. We, as children, didn’t share his enthusiasm for sugar-free foods and we would leave them in a drawer to petrify. Mr. Argent had lived upstairs long before we moved in, and as far as I know, continued to live there long after we left.

  Downstairs was different. In the three years we lived on Laurier Street, there were always new tenants in the downstairs apartment, the last of whom was Billy; that is, Billy and his parents were the last tenants we knew. It was because of Billy or, more accurately, because of Billy’s parents, that we left.

  Almost from the moment I met Billy, I disliked and feared him.

  We’d watched the previous neighbours move out and, when a truck appeared later the same day bringing the new tenants, I was excited to see that they had a child, a boy, who seemed to be about our age. I would have preferred a girl, but a boy was better than nothing. I would have, I thought, someone other than just my brother, Marhan, to play with. I dragged Marhan outside with me and we parked ourselves noticeably in the middle of the yard and kicked our old soccer ball back and forth. It was the longest time before our new neighbour came outside.

  At first, I thought he might be like us because, under his black hair, his face seemed dark. He was a little bigger than Marhan, but he was smaller than me. He crossed part of the way towards us, but when I said hi to him he stopped and turned his back to us. I ignored him for a minute and when he looked at us again I tried a second time. This time, he stared at us in silence, his head slightly lowered so that he glowered from under his scowling eyebrows. I felt disappointed. This wasn’t going to be a new friend to play with. I turned back to Marhan, but I had lost much of my enthusiasm for kicking our old soccer ball.

  A moment later, Marhan’s errant kick sent the ball into the space between me and the new boy. I ran towards the ball to kick it back. All of a sudden, the new boy was in front of me, slamming into me and knocking me to the ground. He grabbed the ball in both hands, turned and ran towards the back fence. I remained on the ground for a minute, probably more surprised than hurt, but in tears just the same. Then Marhan was running by me, following the new boy, yelling for the ball. The new boy stopped, looked at Marhan, then kicked the ball, not back to Marhan, but away from us, over the fence that separated the large back yard from the ravine that led down to the brook below.

  “That’s our ball!”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “How are we going to get it back?”

  The new boy said nothing. He stared at us with a smile I had never seen before, a smile of smug self-satisfaction, of defiance and challenge. He was immensely pleased with what he had done. We stared at him, beyond words, puzzled and confused.

  The next moment his mother was at her back door. She had short dark hair and angular features. She was very thin and her shoulders were slightly stooped. She had a cigarette in one hand and a candy bar in the other.

  “Come here, Billy,” she called.

  Billy turned his head to look at her but he didn’t move.

  “Billy, come here!” she called again in a voice that was already noticeably more strident.

  Billy continued to stare at her, his head slightly lowered, his mouth set in a thin line. Marhan and I stood, probably with our mouths hanging open. If kicking the ball into the ravine had surprised us, what we were watching now was beyond the scope of our imaginations.

  “Come here!” she yelled again, the anger now unmistakable in her voice. Then, a fraction of a second later, her voice changed completely. It became gently and cloyingly sweet. “Look, Billy! Look what Mommy has for her sweet, little boy. Come and get it.”

  Billy stood still for a fraction of a second longer but we could see him wavering as his mother waved the chocolate bar in the air. Without so much as a glance at us, Billy ran to his mother.

  “You’re a good boy, Billy,” she said to him. “Mommy wants you to stay away from those bad children.” She said this, raising her eyes and looking at us. She didn’t so much give Billy the chocolate bar as he grabbed it from her hand. She ushered Billy through the door. Billy was totally absorbed in ripping the wrapper off the bar with short, violent movements. Billy’s mom continued glaring at us over her shoulder until the door slammed shut behind her.

  I don’t remember how we got our ball back, or even if we did. I do remember that our subsequent encounters with Billy were no more pleasant than the first. He was a greedy, aggressive, spiteful child who, despite his size, was a terror both in the neighbourhood and on the school playground. Marhan and I did our best to keep our distance.

  The incident occurred not many months after Billy arrived. It was summer when he moved in. The day we moved out was cold and damp and the maple in the yard had lost the last of its leaves.

  A week or two before the incident, our maternal grandfather, our Panpan, had come to stay with us. He had last seen me as an infant and he had never seen Marhan. I was now eight and Marhan five. Panpan was a small, stooped man with white hair and strange-looking, wire-framed glasses. His English was heavily accented and communication wasn’t easy for us because, even though our parents still spoke Khasi between themselves, English had become the lingua franca of our household.

  It was a Saturday evening. For the first time since they’d become parents, our mother and father were going out together, unencumbered by offspring. Unlike most children, we had never had a babysitter. Either our dad or our mom was always at home with us. It was the arrival of Panpan that had created this opportunity for them to have a child-free evening.

  It was dusk, the end of a warm fall day. Marhan and I had gone outside after supper, determined to ignore the rapidly cooling air and the fading light because the longer we managed to stay outside the longer we would defer our bedtime. We had bargained with Panpan to stay out as long as there was light. For a while he had also been outside, on the balcony, reading, until he had called to us, “A few more minutes, yes?”

  Marhan and I had been on the verge of going in when we heard a car arrive. We stayed behind the maple tree, listening. We heard a car door slam shut, then a second
and a third. We heard Billy’s mom calling him and, a long moment later, their apartment door slamming shut.

  Pleased to have squeezed the last bit of lingering light out of the sky, and relieved that the coast was clear, we rose to cross the yard and go into the house. We hadn’t taken more than ten steps when Billy suddenly appeared in front of us. I think I might have gasped or screamed. I know, because this is such a visceral memory, I know that my stomach knotted up, that I felt fear, that I felt a premonition that something bad was about to happen.

  “I want to play,” he said to us. “Do you want to play?”

  “No,” said Marhan.

  “We have to go in,” I said, older, desperate to sound authoritative.

  “Why don’t you play? I want to play.”

  “No.”

  “We have to go in.”

  “Come on. You can play with me.”

  “I don’t want to play with you.”

  “We have to go in. Come along, Marhan.”

  I brushed by my brother to the left so that Marhan was between Billy and me. I tried to keep my head up. As I went by Marhan, I took his left hand to pull him along.

  “Play with me!” Billy screamed, his voice angry.

  I pressed ahead, pulling on Marhan. Suddenly, Marhan cried out and my right arm was straight out behind me. Billy had grabbed Marhan’s other arm. He was holding it with both hands and pulling. His face was an angry, hateful, spiteful grimace.

  “I want to play!” he screamed at me.

  “Oww! Let go!”

  “Let my brother go!”

  Marhan and I were both screaming. Stupidly, I held on to Marhan for a long few seconds, not knowing what else to do.

  When I let go, Billy fell backwards and Marhan on top of him. I didn’t stop to look. I let go and turned to run for Panpan. Amazingly, he was there, two steps away.

  Then he was past me and when I turned he was bent over, pulling Billy off Marhan. Billy’s arms never seemed to stop swinging the whole time and, as Panpan pulled Billy away, Panpan’s wire-framed glasses flew off his face and onto the lawn.