Mr. Bates, the sixth-grade teacher, has a dyed mustache, a blazing, godlike temper, and zero interest in his students wearing ear defenders during class. Every morning, to start the day, he switches on his This-Is-Very-Expensive-So-You-Kids-Better-Not-Touch-It ViewSonic projector and shows videos of current events on the whiteboard. The class sits, uncombed and yawning, while at the front of the room landslides smash Kashmiri villages.
Every day Patti Goss-Simpson brings four fish sticks to school in her Titan Deep Freeze lunch box and every day at 11:52 a.m., because the cafeteria is being remodeled, Patti puts her terrible fish sticks in the terrible microwave at the back of Mr. Bates’s room and presses the terrible beepy buttons and the smell that pours out feels to Seymour like he’s being pressed face-first into a swamp.
He sits as far from Patti as he can, plugs his nose and ears, and tries to daydream Trustyfriend’s forest back into existence: lichen hanging from branches, snow slipping from bough to bough, the teeming settlements of the NeedleMen. But one morning in late September, Patti Goss-Simpson tells Mr. Bates that Seymour’s behavior toward her at lunch hurts her feelings, so Mr. Bates mandates that Seymour eat beside her at the center table, right beside the projector stand.
11:52 a.m. arrives. In go the fish sticks. Beep boop beep.
Even with his eyes closed Seymour can hear the fish sticks rotating, can hear Patti snap open the microwave door, can hear the fish flesh sizzling on her little plate as she sits back down. Mr. Bates sits behind his desk chomping baby carrots and watching mixed martial arts highlights on his smartphone. Seymour hunches over his lunch box trying to plug his nose and cover his ears at the same time. Not worth eating today.
He is counting to one hundred in his head, eyes closed, when Patti Goss-Simpson reaches and taps him with a fish stick on his left ear. He jerks backward; Patti grins; Mr. Bates misses the whole thing. Patti squints her left eye and points the fish stick at him like a gun.
“Pow,” she says. “Pow. Pow.”
Somewhere inside Seymour a final defense crumbles. The roar, which has chewed at the edges of every waking minute since he found Trustyfriend’s wing, blitzkriegs the school. It swarms over the ridge above the football field, mashing everything in its path.
Mr. Bates dips a carrot into hummus. David Best belches; Wesley Ohman cracks up; the roar explodes across the parking lot. Locusts hornets chain saws grenades fighter jets screaming screeching fury rage. Patti bites off the barrel of her fish stick gun as the walls of the school splinter. The door of Mr. Bates’s room flies away. Seymour puts both hands on the projector cart and pushes.
A radio in the waiting room says, Nothing tastes better than a fresh-picked Idaho apple. The crinkling of the paper on the examination table borders on the untenable.
The doctor taps a keyboard. Bunny is wearing her Aspen Leaf smock with the two pockets in front. Into her flip phone she whispers, “I’ll work a double on Saturday, Suzette, I promise.”
The doctor shines a penlight in each of Seymour’s eyes. She says, “Your mother says you talked to an owl in the woods?”
A magazine on the wall says, Be a Better You in Fifteen Minutes a Day.
“What kinds of things would you tell the owl, Seymour?”
Don’t answer. It’s a trap.
The doctor says, “Why did you smash the classroom projector, Seymour?”
Not a word.
At checkout Bunny’s arm spelunks in the cavern of her purse. “Is there any chance,” she says, “you could just bill me?”
In a basket on the way out are coloring books with sailing ships in them. Seymour takes six. In his room he draws spirals around all the boats. Cornu spirals, logarithmic spirals, Fibonacci spirals: sixty different maelstroms swallow sixty different ships.
Night. He gazes out the sliding door, past the backyard, to where moonlight spills across the vacant lots of Eden’s Gate. A single carpenter’s lamp glows inside a half-finished townhome, illuminating an upstairs window. An apparition of Trustyfriend floats past.
Bunny lays a 1.69-ounce package of plain M&M’s on the table. Beside that she sets an orange bottle with a white cap. “The doctor said they won’t make you dumb. They’ll just make things easier. Calmer.”
Seymour grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes. The ghost of Trustyfriend hops to the sliding door. His tail feathers are gone; one wing is missing; his left eye is damaged. His beak is a dash of yellow in a radar dish of smoke-colored feathers. Into Seymour’s head he says, I thought we were doing this together. I thought we were a team.
“One in the morning,” Bunny says, “and one at night. Sometimes, kid, we all need a little help shoveling the shit.”