Wicked Cruel

Kickers series

Losing Is Not an Option

One Good Punch

Perpetual Check

Shots on Goal

Sports Camp

Wrestling Sturbridge

A boy gets bullied for years before moving away. Rumors drift back to town that he died from a brain injury, caused by so many years of abuse. An urban legend? Maybe not.

Tragedy. A century ago, a team of horses drowned in a flooded brickyard, snuffed out at the height of their power. But sometimes, on dark, rainy nights, they summon all their vigor and run free.

The five children of a farming couple all died young—by accident or by murder. Over the years, the farmer built five barns on his property, burying a child beneath the floor of each and sealing the doors off with bricks. According to the legend, at least one of those children has not yet found eternal rest.

“Jordan!” my father calls. “You gotta see this.”

Dad’s online again, rediscovering his exciting past. Probably found a lost episode of
Seinfeld
. Ever since he stumbled on the Freewheeler website, he’s been finding all these “classics” and inflicting them on me.

So I clear my laptop, then walk down the attic steps to his office.

“Check this out,” he says, clicking the arrow to start a video.

I hear a piano solo, and I can tell immediately what song it is. “Another one?” I groan. “How many versions of that can you possibly watch?”

“This one’s hilarious,” he says, rubbing the three days’ stubble on his chin.

Last night he subjected me to six different versions of the “Way Back into Love” duet from the movie
Music and Lyrics
. These were Asian recordings—from Korea, Japan, China, and who knows where else. Dad said he was investigating why
the song never became a big hit in the U.S. “It’s a great tune, so I’m looking to see if anybody ever recorded it here except for the sound track of the movie,” he said. “Maybe we can do something with it.”

These videos are pretty much all the same: Some beautiful young woman is standing onstage in a concert hall, talking to the audience in Japanese or Mandarin or whatever. She starts the song and does the first stanza, and then you hear a guy’s voice singing from the shadows, and the crowd goes nuts with astonishment because he’s the pop-music king of Singapore or something.

They’re always singing in English, and it’s obvious that the women are fluent and know what they’re singing, but the men have just memorized the syllables.

The one we’re watching is from a concert in Tokyo. The guy who came onstage is dressed like a hard-core American grunge rocker.

“Wow, what street cred,” Dad says sarcastically. “You can tell
he’s
the real thing, huh?”

I roll my eyes. The camera scans the audience—hundreds of people mouthing the English lyrics. Then I see a face that couldn’t possibly be there.

Lorne Bainer.

“Stop!” I say as the camera returns to the singers. “Go back.” So Dad re-hits the arrow and the video starts over.

Lorne Bainer was this incredibly annoying kid who moved away from here a couple of years ago. What would he be doing at a concert in Japan? But who else could look like that? Pale, scrawny, a long head, and that expression on his face: part “screw you,” part “go ahead and hit me,” and part “I’ll tell the teacher if you lay a hand on me again.”

The video reaches the audience scan, but there’s no sign of Lorne or any other white people this time. I go, “Where is he?” and my father’s like, “Where’s who?” We play it again and there’s still no trace. I swear he was there. We must have linked to a different version of the song or something.

Lorne was right there. Glaring at me.

“What were you looking for?” Dad asks.

“Nothing, I guess. Just thought I saw somebody I knew.”

“In Japan?”

I stare at the computer screen. “In the video.”

It seemed like all the guys at Franklin Pierce Elementary School beat up on Lorne. He’d get singled out in gym class whenever we played dodgeball—four, five balls flying at him from every direction. Or he’d get shoved into the wall when somebody passed him in the hallway, or smacked in the back of the head when the teacher wasn’t looking. He lost way more than his share of fights after school, too.

The guys all figured he brought it on himself because of his constant whining and butting in on things. He was always defiant and stirring up trouble. I tried to leave him alone, but he was a pain to me sometimes, too.

His family moved away the summer after fifth grade. Nobody knew why, but I figured it was so he could start over with a clean slate. It wasn’t likely that anybody around here would have given him a chance.

And that was the end of it. Some guys at school still get picked on and pushed around, but it’s spread out more over several different kids. I’ve taken a bit of it myself. When Lorne was here, most of the abuse was focused on him.

I remember hoping that he would be able to start fresh somewhere else. Maybe he’d never have many friends, but
at least he wouldn’t be carrying this history with him. There wouldn’t be daily crap from guys like Eddie Scapes or Jimmy Callas from the minute he left his house till the minute he got home after school.

I hadn’t thought of him in a while, so seeing his face was jarring. He still looked the same.

He looked twisted and disturbed.

Dad shuts off the sound and some old Neil Young concert footage plays in silence. “So, you’re definitely cool with this, Jordan?” he asks me for the tenth time.

“Yeah, no problem.”

“This” is my parents’ sudden business trip to Europe. They fly out of Logan tomorrow morning for a week. Mom’s brother, David, is coming here to house-sit and keep an eye on me, since the trip was too short-notice for them to line up anyone better.

Dad is an unsuccessful “entrepreneur,” and Mom is an administrator at the hospital. He usually tries something related to music or film, but this time he has an idea for marketing environmentally safe cleaning products, and he managed to score some meetings in France and Austria. Mom’s going along for the ride.

The plan is that we drive to Boston tomorrow and pick up Uncle David. We’ll drop my parents at the airport, and he and I will drive back to New Hampshire.

David is a “freelance” musician, which, according to Mom, means that he makes no money and isn’t big on responsibility. Sort of like Dad, but even less credible.

Could be a fun week.

I get to skip school tomorrow for the ride into Boston, but we have to get up wicked early, so I head back upstairs to bed.

I sleep in the attic. This house is small, square, and old, and there are only two real bedrooms. Dad decided last month that he needed an office in the house, so he took over my second-floor bedroom and “renovated” the attic space for me. That amounted to sweeping the dust off the bare attic floorboards and replacing the broken pane of glass in the slit of a window that overlooks the street. He managed to squeeze a rickety bed frame and a mattress up the narrow stairs for me, and drilled a hole in the floor so he could run an extension cord from a power strip downstairs. I can pick up the Internet from here, so I’m set. Mom insists that I keep about a hundred blankets on my bed, but this space is actually pretty warm.

I stare at the bare beams that reach a triangular peak about three feet above my bed, then get up and look out the window for a few minutes. There’s a thin layer of snow on the grass, but the streets and the sidewalk are bare. The snow’s left over from Halloween, two weeks ago. It’s not even winter yet.

I can’t sleep, so I go over to my desk and check for messages. There’s an IM on the screen from my friend Gary, just asking
wazzup jordan?
I click on it to reply, but he’s already offline.

I find the Freewheeler site, type in Dad’s password, and look for that video again. There are dozens of versions of the song, mostly Asian. But I can’t find the one we looked at earlier. You click on one and get a list of “related videos,” which either narrows the search or takes you further away. I spend an hour looking, but by then I can’t keep my eyes open and I flop back into bed.

Sometime after midnight I wake up. There’s a glow coming from somewhere, and I shake my head and glance at the
computer screen. It’s back on Freewheeler. The sound is off, but I recognize the video. It’s reached the part where they scan the audience.

And there he is. Lorne Bainer. Squinting, looking smug and sour. And for a fraction of a second it seems like he’s staring right at me, as if he can see me.

I turn off the power, but the screen doesn’t go blank right away. It fades very slowly. Then everything goes dark.

It’s a lot more relaxed in the house with my parents on their way to Europe. Uncle David has Mozart playing and he’s chopping onions on a cutting board.

My friend Gary leans back in a kitchen chair and raises his eyebrows. “He died, you know.”

“Bainer?”

“Yeah.” Gary nods. He starts fidgeting with his Red Sox cap, pulling on the brim. “About a year after he moved away. He had a brain hemorrhage. From all those beatings.”

“He died?”

“Yeah. One too many punches to the head.”

“Get out.”

Gary is even smaller than I am, but I can remember him taking a few shots at Lorne back in fifth grade. Just a shove here and there, maybe some knuckles to the jaw. The thing about Lorne is that he never fought back much, so even smaller guys knew they could pick on him. Lorne’s tactic was stealthy—jab you in the arm with a pen or something, then
run. He’d get caught, though, either right away or a day or two later. He always paid for his obnoxiousness.