Boys Life

ma’am,” I said. Behind me the Demon laughed gleefully, sensing a new assault in the war on Mrs. Harper.
    “Get. Up. Here. This. Minute!” Leatherlungs’ face bloomed red.
    I shook my head. “No.”
    She was on me. She moved a lot faster than I ever would’ve thought. She grabbed two handfuls of my sweater and wrenched me up out of my desk so hard my knee hit and sent a shiver of pain through my leg, and by the time that pain got to my head it was sheer white-hot anger.
    With Davy Ray and darkness and a meaningless word called faith lodged in my mind like thorns, I swung at her.
    I hit her right in the face. I couldn’t have aimed any better. Her glasses flew off, and she gave a croaking cry of surprise. The anger fled from me just that fast, but Leatherlungs hollered, “Don’t you hit me, don’t you dare!” and she grabbed my hair and started jerking my head. The rest of my classmates sat in stunned amazement; this was too much, even for them. I had stepped into a mythic realm, though I didn’t know it yet. Leatherlungs slung me, I crashed into Sally Meachum’s desk and about knocked her over, and then Leatherlungs was hauling me out the door on the way to the principal’s office, raging every step.
    Inevitably, the phone call brought both Mom and Dad. They were, to say the least, appalled at my behavior. I was suspended from school for three days, and the principal-a small, birdlike man named, fittingly, Mr. Cardinale-said that before I could return to class, I would have to write an apology to Mrs. Harper and have both my parents sign it.
    I looked at him, with my parents right there in his office, and I told him I could be suspended for three months for all I cared. I told him I wasn’t writing her any apology, that I was tired of being called a blockhead, and I was sick of math and sick of everybody.
    Dad came up off his chair. “Cory!” he said. “What’s wrong with you?”
    “Never in the history of this school has a student struck a teacher!” Mr. Cardinale piped up. “Never! This boy needs a whippin’ to remember, is what I think.”
    “I’m sorry to have to say it,” Dad told him, “but I agree with you.”
    I tried to explain to them on the way home, but they wouldn’t hear it. Dad said there was no excuse for what I’d done, and Mom said she’d never been so ashamed. So I just stopped trying, and I sat sullenly in the pickup with Rocket riding in the truckbed. The whipping was delivered by my father’s hand. It was swift, but it was painful. I did not know that the day before, Dad had been ragged by his boss at Big Paul’s Pantry about messing up the count on boxes of Christmas candy. I did not know that Dad’s boss was eight years younger than he, that he drove a red Thunderbird, and that he called my father Tommy.
    I bore the whipping in silence, but in my room I pressed my face into the pillow.
    Mom came in. She said she couldn’t understand the way I was acting. She said she knew I was still torn up about Davy Ray, but that Davy Ray was in heaven and life was for the living. She said I would have to write the apology whether I wanted to or not, and the sooner I did it the better. I lifted my face from the pillow, and I told her Dad could whip me every day from now until kingdom come, but I wasn’t writing any apology.
    “Then I believe you’d better stay in here and think about it, young man,” she said. “I believe you’ll think better on an empty stomach, too.”
    I didn’t answer. There was no need. Mom left, and I heard my folks talking about me, what was wrong with me and why I was being so disrespectful. I heard the clatter of dinner plates and I smelled chicken frying. I just turned over and went to sleep.
    A dream of the four black girls, the flash of light, and a soundless blast awakened me. I had knocked my alarm clock off the bedside table again, but this time my parents didn’t come in. The clock was still working; it was almost two in the morning. I got up and looked out the window. A crescent moon appeared sharp enough to hang a hat on. Beyond the window’s cold glass the night was still and the stars blazing. I wasn’t going to write any apology; maybe this was the Jaybird showing up in me, but I was damned if I’d give the satisfaction to Leatherlungs.
    I needed to talk to somebody who understood me. Somebody like Davy Ray.
    My fleece-lined jacket hung in the closet near the front door. I didn’t want to go out that way, because Dad might