Armadillo Middle wasn’t bad at first. I got in all the right classes without having a screwed-up schedule, and all my teachers seemed OK. Even Mrs. Goldwyn stopped me in the hall the first day, asked how my parents were doing, and how I liked the school.
I’m not the kind of person who makes friends easily. I’m quiet and don’t like to hang out in large groups. So the guys, though friendly, didn’t have much in common with me, and most of them had little to say other than “hello.”
Dani Carter, however, was in all my classes except PE. After a couple of weeks, we found ourselves sharing notes, pairing up for first-quarter projects, and forming an unspoken understanding that whoever entered the classroom or cafeteria first would save a seat for the other.
At first I told myself that even though Dani was a girl, she was better than no friend at all. She wasn’t interested in most of the things my old friends and I used to talk about at school, but I soon realized I liked it that way. Before the first half of the grading period was up, I didn’t care if I had guy friends or not. Being with Dani, even if we did nothing else but sit together in class, was more fun than pretending I enjoyed discussing pro-wrestling or the latest music CD. Dani liked a lot of the same subjects I did: biology, pre-algebra, and history. But she was a better reader than me, and sometimes it was hard to get her attention if she was into her latest book.
My new-school success didn’t last long. When Chuck Stiller showed up for his first day back, I knew he would give me trouble the rest of the year.
Chuck Stiller was smart (smart-mouthed, that is), short (shorter than me, anyway), and he walked with a swagger like Barney Fife in the old Andy Griffith Show reruns. Some days he wore shoes, but most of the time he wore boots. No matter which, they were always caked with dried mud. He didn’t care that everyone thought of him as the Student Most Likely to Spend Life in Prison. And when Stiller picked a victim, most of the other kids (whether they liked Stiller or not) offered support because they feared being next on his list.
One day in mid-September, I’d taken my seat in first hour when Stiller came in. He’d been sick—or in juvenile detention, I wasn’t sure—and ended up coming back to school a lot later than everyone else. He’d intended to find me on his first day back, because as soon as he entered U.S. History, he approached me with a clipping he’d cut from the morning’s Armadillo Courier. It was an ad for the funeral home, with a picture of my family at the ribbon cutting ceremony.
Stiller waved the clipping under my nose. “So, your mommy’s a mortician, huh?”
A dozen kids circled my desk. I started to sweat a little but figured if I played it cool he’d get tired of messing with me and move on. “Yeah, my mom’s a mortician, and my dad is too. They just opened the business this summer.”
“Ain’t that special,” he jeered, thrusting the clipping in my face. “That’s an awful nice suit you’re wearing there. Looks like you want to grow up to be just like Daddy.”
The posse surrounding my desk laughed. I tried to ignore my embarrassment. “No, I just help my parents when they need it.”
“Is it true, Kevie, you live inside the funeral home?”
“Yes.” He wanted to go somewhere with this, and my fists wanted to go somewhere too—right between his eyes.
Stiller exhaled a mock sigh. “You gotta make friends where you can. Since you don’t have any friends at school ’cept that Mormon girl,” he waved his arm at Dani, “I guess dead friends are better than none at all.” By this time the entire class was laughing, except for Dani. She was pretending to read, her head ducked behind The Story of America: Our History to 1865.
At lunch, Dani told me to ignore Stiller. Maybe he’d get tired of teasing me after a while, she said. But as I waited for Mom to pick me up that afternoon, Stiller and a new gang stood next to me in line and asked if there was enough room in the hearse for all of them to get a ride home. When Mom pulled up in the S-10, I told her that if she ever picked me up from school in the hearse, I’d leave Armadillo and never come back.
The next day Stiller burst into first hour again. He grabbed my lunch sack and started parading it around the room. “Well, Kevie, what’s for lunch today?”
I jumped out of my seat and snatched it back. “Nothing that concerns you.”
“What does your mommy do with all those body parts, Kevie?” Stiller snickered, and the class began to roar. “What does she do with all the intestines and stomachs and eyeballs and livers?” He held his nose up in the air and began to sniff. “Could that smell be your lunch, Kevie? Did Mommy fix you a fried brain sandwich?” He grabbed the sack again and ran to the window. He put his free hand up to his throat and began making gagging sounds. “This stinks SOOOO bad, it’s makin’ me hurl. We’ve got to get it out of here!”
Stiller stuck his arm out the window, and I heard the sack pop as it hit the concrete two stories below. Our teacher, Mr. Hampton, walked in then and sent Stiller straight to the assistant principal, who gave him two weeks’ detention for throwing stuff out the window.
Detention quieted Stiller down for a little while, since getting caught at something else would make his punishment worse. But it did nothing to help me. A few days later I didn’t have any trouble finding my locker. It was the one with KANNIBAL KEVIN scrawled on the door in black permanent ink. Clearly, Stiller’s seventh-grade project was to destroy my reputation.
At lunch, after our unsuccessful attempt to clean Stiller’s artwork off my locker, Dani gave me a pep talk as we sat in a booth in the back of the cafeteria.
“I don’t care what Chuck does. I’m your friend. So what if your parents are morticians?” Her brown eyes were solemn behind her wire-rimmed glasses. “Somebody has to be. He’s just looking for someone to pick on, and you’re an easy target because you’re new.”
I studied Dani’s straight brown hair and the bright yellow hair band she’d pulled it back with. It felt odd to sit with a girl, but I liked it. And I liked Dani. Everything about her, from her braces to her white leather sneakers, oozed sincerity. So even if her friendship was the result of being her latest charity project, some support was better than none at all.
The days dragged on, and so did Stiller’s relentless teasing. I managed to get through the first quarter with all As, and Dani and I made the honor roll. So did Stiller. When I searched for my name on the honor roll banner by the front doors, I found someone had marked out my first name and written over it in big black letters, KANNIBAL.