“Mom?” He was scared.
“You can do this. You’ve done it before. Right?”
“Mommy—”
“You call me Mom. You’re not small.”
“But they’re going to be smarter than me—”
“Grades and smarts are not the same thing. Keep trying. You’ll get it.”
He nodded and kissed her.
Christopher got out of the car and approached the school. Dozens of kids were already milling about, saying hello after their summer vacations. These twin brothers were pushing and shoving and laughing. The smaller one had a lazy-eye patch. A couple of girls itched at their new school clothes. One of them had pigtails. When the kids saw him, they stopped and looked at him like they always did in new places. He was the shiny new thing in the store window.
“Hey,” he said. And they nodded the way the kids always did. Quiet and mistrustful at first. Like any animal pack.
Christopher quickly walked into his homeroom and took a seat near the back. He knew not to sit up front because it’s a sign of weakness. His mother said, “Never mistake being nice for being weak.” Christopher thought maybe that worked in the grown-up world.
It didn’t in the kid world.
“That’s my seat, Squid.”
Christopher looked up and saw a second grader with a rich boy’s sweater and haircut. He would soon know Brady Collins by name. But right now, he was just this kid who was mad that Christopher didn’t know the rules.
“What?”
“You’re in my seat, Squid.”
“Oh. Okay. Sorry.”
Christopher knew the drill. So, he just got up.
“Didn’t even fight back. What a Squid,” Brady Collins said.
“And look at his pants. They’re so short you can see his socks,” a girl said.
When the teacher took roll call later, Christopher would hear her name, Jenny Hertzog. But right now, she was just a skinny girl with an overbite and a Band-Aid on one knee, saying,
“Floods! Floods!”
Christopher’s ears turned red. He quickly moved to the only open seat left. Right in front of the teacher’s desk. He looked down at his pants, and he realized that he must have grown because he looked like Alfalfa in the Little Rascals. He tried to pull them down a little, but the denim wouldn’t budge.
“Sorry I’m late, boys and girls,” their homeroom teacher said as she quickly entered the room.
Ms. Lasko was older like a mom, but she dressed like she was still a teenager. She had a short skirt, Sound of Music blond hair, and the thickest eye makeup Christopher had ever seen outside of a circus. She quickly put her thermos down on the desk with a thump and wrote her name on the blackboard with perfect penmanship.
Ms. Lasko
“Hey,” a voice whispered.
Christopher turned around and saw a fat kid. For some reason Christopher couldn’t figure out, the kid was eating bacon.
“Yeah?” Christopher whispered back.
“Don’t listen to Brady and Jenny. They’re jerks. Okay?”
“Thanks,” Christopher said.
“Want some bacon?”
“Maybe not during class.”
“Suit yourself,” the kid said and kept chomping.
As it was in the kid world, that is how Christopher replaced Lenny Cordisco with a new best friend. Edward Charles Anderson ended up being in Christopher’s remedial reading class, lunch period, and gym. He ultimately proved to be as bad at reading as he was at kickball. Christopher called him Eddie. But everyone else in the school already knew him by his nickname.
“Special” Ed.
Chapter 4
For the next two weeks, Christopher and Special Ed were inseparable. They had lunch every day in the cafeteria (trade you my baloney). They learned remedial reading from the sweet old librarian, Mrs. Henderson, and her hand puppet, Dewey the Dolphin. They failed math tests together. They even went to the same CCD two nights a week.
Special Ed said that Catholic kids have to go to CCD for one reason…to get them ready for what Hell is really going to be like. Marc Pierce was Jewish and asked him what CCD stood for.
“Central City Dump” was Special Ed’s hilarious reply.
Christopher didn’t actually know what CCD stood for, but he had learned a long time ago never to complain about it. There was one time back in Michigan that Christopher hid in the bushes so he didn’t have to go. His mother called his name over and over, but he didn’t say anything. Then, finally, she got really mad and said,
“Christopher Michael Reese, you get out here…NOW.”
She used his three names. And when she did that, there was no choice. You went. That’s it. Game over. With a stone face, she told Christopher that his father was Catholic. And she had promised herself that his son would be raised Catholic, too, so he would have some connection to his father besides one picture at Christmas.
Christopher wanted to die.
When they were driving home that night, Christopher thought of his dad reading the Bible. Christopher’s dad probably didn’t scramble his letters like Christopher did. He was probably much smarter because that’s what dads were. Much smarter. So, Christopher promised that he would learn to read and know what the Bible words meant, so he could have another way to be close to his dad besides the memory of the tobacco smell on his shirt.
*
As for picking the church, Christopher’s mother always followed the Cold War strategy of her grandmother’s favorite president, Ronald Reagan. Trust but verify. That was how she found St. Joseph’s in Mill Grove. The priest, Father Tom, was fresh from seminary. No scandals. No former parishes. Father Tom checked out. He was a good man. And Christopher needed good men in his life.
But for her own faith, it didn’t matter who the priest was. Or how beautiful the mass. Or the music. Her faith died in the bathtub next to her husband. Of course, when she looked at her son, she understood why people believed in God. But when she sat in church, she didn’t hear His word. All she heard were whispers and gossip from all the good Catholic women who regarded her as that working-class mother (aka “trash”).
Especially Mrs. Collins.
Everything about Kathleen Collins was perfect. From her tight brown hair to her elegant suit to her polite contempt for “those people” Jesus would have actually loved. The Collins family always sat up front. The Collins family was always first in line for Holy Communion. And if her husband’s hair slipped out of place, her finger would be there instantly to put it right back, like a raven’s claw with a tasteful manicure.
As for their son, Brady, the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.
If Christopher’s mother only had to deal with Mrs. Collins on Sundays, it would have been tolerable. But Mr. Collins was a real estate developer who owned half of Mill Grove, including Shady Pines, the retirement home where she worked. He put his wife in charge of the place. Mrs. Collins claimed that she took the position to “give back to the community.” What it really meant was that it allowed Mrs. Collins to yell at the staff and the volunteers to make damn sure that her own elderly mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, got the finest care possible. The best room. The best food. The best of everything. Christopher’s mother had traveled enough to know that Mill Grove was a very small pond. But to the Collins family, it may as well have been the Pacific Ocean.