cue, sure, ruse, seer, user, us, cure, curse, reuse, secure
BY THE SECOND week of January, I was back into my correspondence-school routine and bored out of my mind. The initial excitement had worn off. I had no one to talk to all day except my mom, and a cyber-teacher once a week. At nights, when she went to work, I felt lonely in our apartment, but I was under strict orders not to go to the Economopouloses’.
Just before two o’clock on Thursday, my mom and I walked over to Cypress Elementary so I could ‘talk’ to my cyber-teacher on the lab computer. My life had become so dull that this was now the highlight of my week. I wore a big sweater that used to belong to my dad, with a T-shirt underneath so the wool wouldn’t itch my skin.
When we walked into the school, the hallways were mercifully deserted. I breathed deeply and took in the smell of books and B.O. and other kid-smells, and as weird as it sounds, I felt a longing – not to be picked on again, but to be part of something bigger than just me.
Mr Acheson came by the lab to say hi and ask about our Christmas holiday, which I found kind of weird because the guy never said two words to me the entire time I was at his school, and now he made a point of dropping by to chat every time I showed up.
‘How are things going, Ambrose?’
‘Fine.’ He was wearing his Homer Simpson tie today, and the way he stood over me, I could see his nose hairs. Lots of them.
‘So far so good with the correspondence schooling?’
‘I guess.’
‘Irene, is it working out alright for you?’
I waited for my mom to tell him to call her Mrs Bukowski, but instead she just said, ‘Yes, Bob, it’s going well so far. Thanks for asking.’
Bob?
‘I found some materials about correspondence schooling on the Web that I printed out for you,’ he said to her, as I logged on to the computer. ‘Do you have a moment to come to my office?’
I glanced up at Mom, whose face had, for some reason, gone blotchy and red. ‘Sure. Ambrose, you’ll be OK in here?’
‘Unless the other computers decide to launch an attack, I should be fine,’ I said, and I was kind of disappointed that neither of them laughed at my joke.
She and ‘Bob’ left, and I got down to work. It was warm in the lab, so I took off my sweater. I had a lot of questions today, and my cyber-teacher had some comments on an essay I’d handed in the week before on Mesopotamia. By the time I was done, I realized it was almost dismissal time. My mom still hadn’t returned. I jogged quickly down the hall to Mr Acheson’s office, but the door was open and they weren’t inside.
Then the bell rang. And that’s when I realized I’d forgotten my sweater in the lab. It’s also when I realized that one of my mom’s T-shirts must have wound up in my drawer and that I hadn’t even looked at it when I pulled it on because it said NUMBER ONE MOM in huge letters on the front.
I could not be seen. I ran out the front doors of the school and sprinted across the soccer field. But even my Ikes couldn’t turn me into a good runner and, within moments, I heard footsteps behind me and they were getting closer. Then a hand grabbed my shoulder and spun me around.
It was Troy.
‘Well, if it isn’t Spambrose,’ he said, dropping the soccer ball he’d been holding and taking a few steps toward me.
‘Hey, Troy. How’s it hanging?’
‘Why is it that words that sound normal in someone else’s mouth sound so retarded in yours?’ said Troy, just as Mike and Josh appeared, flanking him on either side.
‘Look at his T-shirt,’ Mike said, and they all cracked up.
‘You really are a fag,’ Josh said, then he made his wrist go limp and pranced around like he figured a homosexual would do.
‘I should let you start your game,’ I said. I tried to step around them, but the three of them blocked my path.
‘I was grounded for a month, thanks to you,’ said Josh.
‘I couldn’t use my Wii for three weeks,’ added Troy.
‘Well, you guys did almost kill me—’
‘It was your fault. If you hadn’t been such a frigging liar,’ Mike said, then he shoved me so hard, I fell to the ground. When I tried to stand up, Troy kicked me and I fell again.
‘C’mon, guys, can’t we let bygones be bygones?’
‘Shut up,’ said Josh, kicking me hard in the stomach, and even though he was only wearing sneakers, it really hurt. Mike bent down and pulled the Ikes right off my feet and threw them into a garbage can on the edge of the field. Then all three of them were kicking me and it hurt like hell and I started to cry because nothing like this had ever happened to me before … well … only twice before … once in Regina and once in Kelowna, but never this bad. So I tried to curl up in a ball and protect my head, and there was this weird screeching sound, which I realized only later was probably me.
And then suddenly, like the voice of an angel (only not, because it was a harsh, mean voice full of swears), I heard, ‘Get the f— away from him, you f—ing punks!’ And the kicking stopped and I peered up from the ground to see Cosmo striding toward us with his fists at the ready. He looked really scary, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so because Troy, Mike, and Josh took off in the other direction as fast as their legs would carry them.
Cosmo helped me up. I was shivering, partly because I was wearing nothing but a T-shirt on a drizzly January day and partly because I was still freaking out.
‘You saved my life.’
‘That would be an exaggeration.’
I felt my face and my body. I didn’t appear to be bleeding, but I was sore all over, especially in the stomach.
‘What’d you do to them?’
I shrugged. ‘They hate me.’
Cosmo nodded like this made sense. ‘You do have a knack for bringing out the worst in people.’ Then he glanced at my T-shirt. ‘Aw Jesus, kid …’
‘It was an accident,’ I said. ‘I didn’t see what it said, I just grabbed it.’
I could tell he was trying not to laugh, but a laugh came out anyway. ‘Where are your shoes?’
I walked over to the garbage can and fished them out.
‘Can you get home OK?’ he asked, as I put them back on.
I nodded, and then suddenly I was crying again, blubbering and feeling like a giant baby. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It just really hurt.’
To my surprise, Cosmo stopped laughing. ‘I bet it did.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘C’mon, I’ll walk you home.’
We took the alley so we wouldn’t run into my mom. But as we walked through the back gate I saw her, entering our apartment. ‘Oh, no,’ I moaned. ‘I can’t let her see me like this. She’ll freak.’
Cosmo didn’t say a word. He just let me into his place. Mr and Mrs E weren’t home, so I went into their bathroom and cleaned up, washing off the grime from my scraped-up elbows and my face. Cosmo even went back to the school and grabbed my sweater, when I told him it was missing, so I could put it back on over the T-shirt and my mom would never know the difference. I didn’t tell him it had belonged to my dad and that if I’d lost it, I would have hated myself for the rest of my life.
When I came out of the bathroom, Cosmo was in the living room, watching TSN. ‘Thanks again,’ I told him.
He stared at the TV. ‘You should learn how to protect yourself.’
I didn’t know what to say. How was I supposed to learn how to protect myself? It wasn’t like Mom could afford to give me karate lessons, or boxing lessons, or any lessons at all, and even if she could, she’d never let me anyway for fear I’d get hurt, which, I guess you could say, was kind of ironic.
But all I said to Cosmo was, ‘Yeah.’
I got down to our place just in time to say bye to my mom before she left for the university. She’d been getting worried about me. I told her I’d gone looking for her and she told me she’d gone looking for me, and we agreed we must’ve just missed each other.
It wasn’t till later that I realized I hadn’t felt scared of Cosmo at all. I didn’t for a moment think he was going to kill me while I was alone with him upstairs, and he hadn’t tried to do any of the yucky things my mom had warned me about over the years, like a) touch my penis or b) get me to touch his.
In fact, for a criminal, he didn’t seem like a bad guy at all.