Bullyville Read Online Free Page B

they had families) minivans, mostly because that was what they could afford but also supposedly to teach their students a lesson, by example, about fossil fuel consumption. Dr. Bratton’s giant steroidal SUV was sending anotherkind of message, and it sent it all up and down our middle-middle-class block in our upper-middle-class suburb. It wasn’t so much the size of the truck that was making the big impression. Several of our neighbors had shinier, even more luxurious cars. But something about Dr. Bratton made it seem as if he was a messenger bringing news from a shinier, more luxurious world.
    I said, “I didn’t know high school principals drove serious SUVs.”
    â€œI didn’t know school principals made house calls,” said Mom.
    It was a Saturday morning. Dr. Bratton (I didn’t yet know he was called Dr. Bratwurst) was wearing a V-necked cardigan over a white shirt. Tweedy jacket. Bow tie. He was slightly plump and balding, not at all the stately, white-haired, distinguished Founding Fathers type you’d expect to be running a place like Baileywell. He bounced a little on his toes. He wore steel-framed glasses. From the house, I could see them glinting at me, like headlights flashing in my eyes late atnight when Dad was driving.
    It wasn’t helpful to think about Dad at that particular moment. I watched Dr. Bratton bounce up our front walk as if he were coming to sell us life insurance, or convert us to some perverted new religion. To this day, I don’t know why he came to see us instead of summoning us to his office in the heart of the heart of the castle. Maybe he wanted to observe us in our natural surroundings, maybe he wanted to see for himself the house where the half miracle, half tragedy had occurred, or maybe (and he would have been right about that, at least) he thought that Mom and I were too (as Mom said) fragile . We might never have accepted an invitation to come see him in his office. The strain and the effort would have been too much.
    Because by that point, Mom was not in her most reliable get-out-of-bed-bright-and-early-every-morning mode. In fact, we’d both slipped into a kind of dream state. We didn’t go out much, we mostly stayed home with the curtains closedand lay on my mom’s king-sized bed, the bed that used to be Mom and Dad’s. By then we’d learned to navigate our way around the disaster newsreel footage and avoid the burning towers and the choking survivors stumbling through clouds of dust. We spent a lot of time watching Law & Order reruns.
    Everyone understood. When Gran and my aunts drove over to bring casseroles and clean the house and do our laundry, they tiptoed around and whispered as if the slightest disturbance would make us shatter into a million tiny pieces. And they were right. It would have.
    It had all come down on Mom at once: Dad’s death, their separation, her own near miss. In fact, I thought that Dad’s dying that way just wiped out the whole part about the separation and brought Mom back to the place where she and Dad were a more or less happy couple with a kid, a house in the suburbs, and the two jobs in the city. That was what she missed, and now that she’d forgotten the detail about having to see Dad and Caroline everyday, she also missed going to work. Every once in a while, she got calls from relatives of other people from her office; most of her coworkers were dead. The relatives asked how she was doing, and passed along the latest rumors about compensation payments and how the company might move somewhere else and start all over again. Mom didn’t seem to care about that, or about anything much.
    One day, someone called from the city coroner’s office asking her if she could bring in Dad’s toothbrush so they could match his DNA to whatever they found at the site. That drove Mom straight back to bed. She hadn’t felt like telling them that he’d taken his toothbrush with