The bus driver had a large beard. At first he did not want to talk and just stared straight ahead through big sunglasses that showed what he was looking at like a movie screen.
When I started talking to him, he turned down his radio so he could hear me. I told him that I needed to go to campus in order to save my brother.
I said that Gert saved us from living with Uncle Richard, who was a gargantuan fuck-dick. Uncle Richard’s house was always full of villainous people who got angry with Gert and sometimes fought with him. Gert got his college scholarship and moved us to the apartment we were living in, which was very far from rich people, but also not so close to really bad people like Uncle Richard.
“Sounds like your brother needs to save himself,” the bus driver said.
“I have a son like that,” the woman across the seat from me said. “He doesn’t listen to nobody.”
“Is your brother bad news too?” another woman in a yellow raincoat said.
I shook my head.
“He’s really smart, but even really smart, strong people need help,” I told her.
“Amen to that,” the first woman said.
“My mom was an alcoholic,” I said. “She was drinking when she had me in her stomach and that’s how I became the not-normal way I am. A lot of people say I am retarded, but that is not an okay thing to say.”
“Huh,” the bus driver said. He scratched at his neck with his fingernails. It sounded like scrubbing a toilet.
“I can use the word retard if I want to,” I added. “It’s okay. I am taking the power from the word and using it for good, like when black people use the n-word.”
Once I had heard AK47 use the n-word, which was a word she made sure Gert never used, and that was what she told me: that sometimes you can take an ugly word people have for you, like retard, and let the air out of it like a balloon. But she also said that only someone who had been hurt by the n-word could use it that way.
“Every other way it hurts people,” she said, and I did not understand until I thought about the word retard and how it was used to hurt people, and how I could make it not hurt me.
The other thing is that a lot of people get weird when I talk about Mom and how she accidentally poisoned me.
Dr. Laird has a lot of pamphlets, and there are websites too, that explain what happened when Mom had beer and other things while I was a baby inside her.
For example, people like me can have “abnormal” faces, which I do not have, and smaller heads. They are short like I am, and can have trouble sitting still and thinking, which is something Dr. Laird has helped me with. They can also have weak bones and need a lot of calcium, which builds bones, in order to stay strong.
“My fair maiden gets called retarded a lot,” I said. “It bothers him, so whenever I hear someone call him that I make them apologize.”
“Your fair what now?” the woman across from me asked.
“My fair maiden. His name is Marxy.”
“Maidens can only be girls,” the woman said. “That’s what the word means.”
“Well, I don’t care what the word means, because it’s my legend.”
She stared at me for a long time. “Well, anyway,” the woman said. “Sometimes people need help. My son, we all got together and told him how much we cared about him. You know. How he has children to look after. Maybe that’s something you can do with your brother?”
That sounded like a good idea. I thought of the people who could help me. There was AK47, who said she hated Gert, even though she loved him. I could also ask Dr. Laird. Those were the only friends of Gert’s that I knew and liked.
The bus turned a corner really sharply and the bus driver told me that we were going to be on campus soon.
“You going to be okay?” he said.
I said that I was. He stopped the bus and I showed him the special Viking handshake, where you grab the person’s wrist. Then at the end we made a fist dab.
“Good luck,” he said.
“You too,” I said. “Happ.”
Happ means “good luck” in Viking, along with gipta, which I said after, since I didn’t know what the difference between the two types of luck was.
When people started getting on the bus, coming in like a gargantuan wave, the bus driver held out his hand and said in a booming voice: “WAIT YOUR GODDAMN TURN.”
And the people, who were mostly young and students with books and backpacks, stopped trying to get on the bus. I felt like a hero who had just defeated hordes of bad warriors. They moved out of the way and let me walk off the bus.
“Middle building,” the bus driver said before letting all of the people back on. “The tall one with the bells.”
* * *
The campus of the college is gargantuan and reminds me of pictures I have seen of Viking towns, with lots of people walking around. Nobody has swords or axes or hats with animal bones sticking out of them, though. Students don’t look anything like Vikings. They do not have a lot of muscles, or most of them do not. Some of the students I saw were big and could do well on the battlefield. But the battlefield they were on happened in the brain.
When Gert first got into the college, Gert and I and AK47 all went together to walk around. AK47 whistled and said, “Not bad, for a state college,” and Gert shrugged and scratched his elbow. He was wearing his baggy clothes and some people walking toward us made sure to walk really far away from us as we passed on the sidewalk.
That happens a lot with Gert. It’s like he is not only big, he is bigger than he really is when he walks.
AK47 rubbed his shoulder and told him not to worry. “All that matters is your brain,” she said. “Let the rest of these idiots be shit-heels.”
While walking through the college, holding on to Gert’s calculator and the printout of his class schedule, I started to get nervous, since there were so many people around and I was not with anyone I knew. My heart felt like a bird, bouncing against its cage inside of me. In my brain I told the bird to stop going crazy, that it was time to be a Viking bird and not a coward.
I rubbed the sides of my head and closed my eyes and counted to ten.
“Are you all right?”
I opened my eyes and there was a girl standing in front of me. She was holding a large book and wore sunglasses, which were not as shiny as the bus driver’s and sat on the end of her nose.
“I am fine,” I said.
“Lost?”
I nodded. She asked me where I wanted to go. I showed her the schedule from the fridge that had Gert’s classes. People were walking by and someone hit me with their bag accidentally.
The girl pushed the person and said, “Dick, watch where you’re going.”
She read the information on the piece of paper and said where I wanted to go wasn’t far. I told her that the bus driver said it was the building with the tower.
“No. Here. Come on,” she said, and started walking.
I followed her. While we walked she asked me about what I was doing on campus and who I was and I told her I needed to save my brother.
“He needs his special calculator in order to write his test.”
“Midterms are a bitch,” the girl said.
“His name is Gert. Do you know him?” I asked, and when I told her his name she said she didn’t, but that it was a big campus. We went up the hill.