Dexter the Tough (2 page)

Dexter just looked at her.

“It would really be better for you to write about a different topic,” she said, trying again. “Can you think of anything else you want to write about?”

Dexter knew what he was supposed to do. He was supposed to agree. He was supposed to crumple up his paper with the misspelled “t-u-f” and the guilty sentence, “This morning I beat up a kid.” He was supposed to start over again and write about something nice, like flowers or butterflies or how happy he was to be at his new school. Just like he was supposed to help Grandma and not be any trouble. Just like he was supposed to tell Mom or Dad on the phone every night that everything was going great and he didn't mind at all being sent away.

“No,” Dexter said.

The word didn't come out sounding t-u-f, or t-o-u-g-h. It just sounded sad. But the
teacher looked at him carefully, for a long time.

“Okay, then,” she finally said. “Let's think about revising. You need to give more information, to tell the whole story. Where did this fight happen? Why would you beat up this other boy—it is a boy, isn't it? What's his name? Everybody has a name. Names are very important. In a story you have to let your readers know who your characters are.”

She wrote her three questions on Dexter's paper, each of her letters perfectly shaped, each of her words perfectly spaced.

“That's what you can work on for tomorrow,” she said. She seemed to be trying to smile again, but her eyes didn't twinkle like they had before.

Dexter walked back to his seat, the paper clutched in his hand. His legs trembled like he'd been in another fight.

This time he didn't know if he'd won or lost.

I
t was true, of course. Dexter had beaten up a kid.

That morning, after he'd gotten mad at the school principal, and the school secretary, and the janitor, and the kids who laughed at him, Dexter had walked into the bathroom. A boy was standing at the sink. And Dexter punched him.

How am I supposed to know what his name was?
Dexter wondered, slumped in his desk again.
It's not like I asked him.

Dexter looked around the classroom, just in case the kid from the bathroom was in his class. All the other kids had their heads bent dutifully
over their books, reading silently. Just like they were supposed to. The boy in the bathroom had looked like the kind of kid who would do what he was supposed to. But none of Dexter's classmates looked like the kid Dexter had hit.

Later, at lunchtime, Dexter looked around the school cafeteria. He looked around the playground at the next recess.

What if I hurt that kid so bad he had to go home? What if he was gushing blood and they had to take him to the emergency room? What if he died?

Dexter started to get scared again. He started thinking about the police coming and arresting him. He started thinking about Mom and Dad and Grandma all crying as Dexter was led away in handcuffs. No—just Grandma, because Mom and Dad wouldn't be there. They were thousands of miles away, not even in Cincinnati anymore, not even on the same side of the country. Mom had shown him on a map. “Here's Cincinnati,
here's Bellgap, Kentucky, where Grandma lives, here's where we'll be at the hospital in Seattle. . . . ” But Dexter's eyes had blurred looking at the map, all the bright colors of the different states blending together. Even now, thinking about it, he started having to blink a lot because the wind was making his eyes water.

That was when he saw the boy he'd hit.

The boy was sitting by himself under a tree, far away from the kickball game, and the girls playing hopscotch, and the little kids on the swings and slides. He was picking blades of grass and peeling them apart and throwing them back on the ground. Was it really the right kid? The main thing Dexter remembered about the boy in the bathroom was the way he had such neat, careful comb tracks in his blond hair. The boy under the tree had blond hair, all right, but the wind was blowing it all around. It was a mess.

Dexter walked toward the boy. He stopped and leaned against the tree trunk.

“Hey,” Dexter said from behind.

The boy jumped a little, like he was surprised. Then he turned around and saw Dexter, and his face scrunched up in fear. He started to scramble to his feet, like he wanted to run away.

Like he was scared of Dexter.

“It's okay,” Dexter said. “I'm not going to hurt you. I promise. I just want to ask you a question.”

“What?” the boy whispered, still crouching, half-up, half-down.

“What's your name?”

“R—” The boy had to clear his throat. “Robin,” he said in a shaky voice.

Robin?
Dexter thought.
Robin?
He'd been thinking of this boy as someone who had a mom who took really, really good care of him. Because of the comb tracks. But what kind of mean, nasty parents would name their son after a bird?

“Go ahead and make fun of it,” Robin said bitterly. “Everyone else does. ‘Want to eat a
worm, Robin?' ‘Aren't you flying south for the winter, Robin?' ”

Back home, Dexter's friends sometimes made jokes about Dexter's name—“Where's your laboratory, Dexter?”—because of the TV show. Sometimes the jokes were even funny. But Dexter always thought his name was cool, because it was the same as his dad's middle name. It'd be awful to be named something like “Robin.”
He
wasn't going to make fun of it.

Dexter shrugged and started to turn away. Then he thought of something else.

“What's your last name?” he asked.

The way his teacher acted about writing, she'd probably insist on full names in Dexter's story.

“Bryce,” Robin said.

“That's a good name,” Dexter said, because he was starting to feel a little bit sorry that he'd beaten up Robin, if Robin already had people making fun of him all the time. And Robin was still half up and half down, looking
at Dexter like he still thought Dexter was going to hit him again, right in front of the playground monitor and everyone.

“If I was you,” Dexter offered, “I think I'd just have people call me by my last name. Just say, ‘Hi, I'm Bryce.' And then nobody would even know that your real name was Robin.”

“Everybody already knows me,” Robin said sulkily. But he sat back down a little, not so ready to run.

“
I
didn't,” Dexter said. “I'm new. You could have just told me to call you Bryce and I never would have known any different.”

Robin squinted up at Dexter.

“My middle name's William,” he finally said. “That's better, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” Dexter said. “You could be ‘Bill' or ‘Billy' or something like that.”

Robin stared off into the distance.

“No,” he said after a while. “I really like being Robin. I just don't like other kids making fun of it. Maybe . . . ” He looked sideways
at Dexter. “Maybe I could tell them you'll beat them up if they keep doing that?”

Dexter's stomach started feeling funny again.

“Beat them up yourself,” Dexter said.

“I'm not very good at fighting,” Robin said, shrugging helplessly. “You saw me this morning.”

Dexter had a flash of remembering his fist hitting Robin's jaw. He felt like he was going to throw up that weird tuna fish sandwich Grandma had packed for his lunch.

“Look,” Dexter said. “You're a lot bigger than me. Stand up.”

Obediently, Robin scrambled all the way up. Dexter's nose barely came up to the middle of Robin's chest.

“Let me see your muscles.”

Robin lifted his arm, and bent it at the elbow. Maybe he had more flab than muscle, but his arm was at least twice as thick as Dexter's.

“See, if you'd really tried, you could have
beaten
me
up,” Dexter said encouragingly. “If you'd gotten one good hit in, you would have knocked me out. You probably would have put me in the hospital.”

“Yeah?” Robin said excitedly.

“Oh, yeah,” Dexter said, nodding. “I'm sure of it. So just tell the other kids
that
.”

Robin let his arm fall to his side.

“My mom would kill me if she heard I was telling people stuff like that,” he said hopelessly. “Even if I said you would beat them up. She doesn't approve of fighting. She's really picky like that.”

Dexter felt his fists clench together. And if the playground monitor hadn't blown her whistle just then, ending recess, he might have beaten Robin up all over again.

No matter what he'd promised.

G
randma was waiting at the curb when Dexter got off the bus that afternoon. She had curly white old-lady hair, and sturdy brown old-lady shoes, and a stretchy red old-lady pantsuit. Dexter hoped nobody on the bus thought she was his mom.

“You don't have to come and get me,” he said, first thing, as soon as he stepped off the bus.

Grandma gave him a tired smile.

“I know,” she said. “I know you're a big boy. But I thought it might feel a little strange to you, coming home to a different house.” She pushed open the gate that separated
her yard from the sidewalk. “How was your first day of school?”

Dexter thought about how much he hated the principal, and the secretary, and the janitor, and his teacher, and the kids who had laughed at him. He thought about how he'd gotten in a fight—how he'd beaten up Robin Bryce.

Then he thought about how Mom and Dad had said he wasn't supposed to make any trouble for Grandma, how he wasn't supposed to worry her.

“It was okay,” he said. “The teacher sent home a list of supplies I need.” He pulled the sheet of paper out of his backpack and handed it to Grandma.

Grandma frowned.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Back when your mother and Uncle Ted were in school, kids just needed paper and something to write with. What's this—colored pencils? Fat markers and skinny ones, too?” She sighed. “Guess we'll have to run out to the store after dinner.”

“I have markers at home,” Dexter said. “I just forgot to bring them.”

Why hadn't Mom or Dad reminded him? Dexter felt mad again. He kicked at the step as he climbed toward Grandma's porch. But his kick missed and he lost his balance and fell over backward. He landed flat on the sidewalk. He thought he heard kids laughing as the bus pulled away.

Grandma squinted down at him.

Mom would have said, “Child, just
what
do you think you're doing?” And Dad would have said, “A swing—and a miss! Strike one! Can we see the instant replay? Bet you couldn't do that again if you tried!” But Grandma said in a scared voice, “Are you all right?” And somehow that made Dexter feel worse, like maybe there was something really, really wrong with him. Had Dad's problems started with him falling down?

“I'm fine,” Dexter told Grandma fiercely, as he jumped back up. His ankle hurt now, and he'd banged his elbow
hard. He tried not to limp across the porch.

Grandma still looked worried.

“I made you a snack,” she said, pushing open the front door. “I remember how your mom and Uncle Ted were always so hungry, getting home from school. Just come on into the kitchen.”

The snack was graham crackers and canned pears. Dexter looked down at the pears in their slimy syrup and felt his throat starting to close over again.

“Do you have any homework?” Grandma said, sliding into the chair across from him. “Anything you need help with?”

“Uh, no,” Dexter said. “I mean, yes, I have some homework. But I don't need help.”

Grandma just sat there.

“I can do it by myself,” Dexter repeated. He really, really, really didn't want Grandma to see the story he'd written, the one he had to rewrite.

“Okay,” Grandma said, inching her chair back. She clutched the table, and pulled herself
up. “I'll leave you to it, then. I'll be in the living room watching TV if you need me.” She began to hobble away.

Dexter waited until she was gone. He heard her heaving herself onto the living room couch. He listened for the TV to come on before he pulled his story out of his backpack. He smoothed it out on the table. He drew a big
X
through everything he'd written before. Then he put the point of his pencil down directly beneath his teacher's questions:

I'm the new kid,
he wrote. He started to write,
I am tuf
again, but it wasn't worth it if he had to spell the word “t-o-u-g-h.”

This morning I beat up Robin Bryce. In the bathroom. The one between the office and your classroom. With the blue tile on the wall.

He looked at the teacher's questions again. He'd answered everything except “Why did you get in a fight?” He took a
break and spooned one of the slimy pear slices up to his mouth. It slithered down his throat like some tiny animal, a fish or a toad or a lizard. It seemed to be fighting to come back up. Dexter swallowed hard. He chewed a graham cracker that tasted soggy and nasty and old. Maybe it came out of a box that Grandma had kept from when Mom and Uncle Ted were little. Maybe one of them had cried on it. It tasted like tears.

He pressed his pencil down hard against his paper.

I was mad
, he wrote.

D
exter put his story back in his backpack. He put the rest of the canned pears in the garbage. He put the box of graham crackers on the counter. He stood in the middle of the kitchen floor wondering what he was supposed to do next.

“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Someone on Grandma's TV show was laughing.

Dexter tiptoed into the living room. On the TV screen a little girl was standing in front of a whole classroom of other kids, and they were all laughing at her because her mother had used the wrong laundry detergent. Dexter
had seen this commercial before. He used to laugh at it himself. Now he looked over at the couch to see if Grandma was laughing too.