Page 84 - What They Did to the Kid

72 Jack Fritscher

“Yeah,” Hank the Tank said, “and you were sitting in the stands.”
Ka-boom!
I hated Hank Rimski so much it would have been a mortal sin
except I couldn’t help my own true feelings. He had injured my
body permanently. My hands were perfect, but my front teeth were
not. His kicking out my teeth was our secret. I never reported him,
because I didn’t want to give him credit, especially when he said he
did it on purpose. I was afraid of what he might do next.
The pecking order was pecking.
Father Polistina, our classical Latin teacher, began calling on me
every day, five days a week, in a class of thirty-eight boys.
Singled out, I prepared my translation of Cicero’s Pro Milone.
Daily I had to be ready to stand up in my desk, the second desk in
a long row of six desks, and line-by-line recite my translation and
explain the grammar, sometimes for twenty minutes of the hour.
“Be prepared,” Lock warned. “Polly’s got it in for you.”
During my recitations, oftentimes the four or five boys in the
row of desks behind me horsed around, joking, putting their feet on
the desks in front of them and, slowly pushing with their four or five
sets of legs, shoved the connected row of desks, with me standing in
the row, forward inch by inch, foot by foot, until the boy in front of
me, the boy in the front desk was only twelve inches away from the
face of Father Polistina.
“Polly hates me,” I said to Lock. “And I hate him. What did I
ever do to him?”
For reasons I could not divine, Polly Polistina found my mere
existence fearsome, but to me he was only another kind of bully. I
vowed he’d never win whatever contest we were playing. He would
never catch me unprepared. I honed my daily Latin class perfor-
mance always to earn B’s and sometimes A’s. I grew to love my slow-
shuffle advance toward Polly as my classmates pushed the row of
desks, causing me to tip-toe baby-steps closer to him every day, inch
by inch, two feet up to his face.
Father Polistina, Misery’s mystic, was a mystery to me, but I
obeyed him, studied for him, and hated him, personally hated him
for personally hating me for no reason at all.
I thought about the priestly mystery behind things the priests

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