Alice Close Your Eyes. Averil Dean

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      CHAPTER THREE

      There was a boy in my third-grade class named Danny Kukal. When they lined us up for the yearbook photo, he was at the tall end, while I brought up the rear as the smallest in class. He ran with a pack of unruly boys with chapped lips and cowlicked hair, easily dominating even the fifth-graders on the playground. Every recess they took over the tetherball courts and the coveted red rubber balls, merciless and loud and endlessly annoying.

      I felt myself somewhat protected from the worst of their behavior. I was a girl. A pretty girl, apparently. But as the school year went on and the boys settled on their targets, my distaste for them grew. Danny Kukal was the worst. I resented his popularity, his quick cruelty toward the smaller kids, his arrogance. I detested his wide yellow teeth, too big for his face, and the swaggering upturn of his butt under the school corduroys. Quietly my disgust swelled into a hatred too big to contain. I began to offer a snarky counterpunch to his taunts, under my breath at first, then bolder as others heard and appreciated my childish wit. I felt my power. The power of words, of mind over might.

      Danny heard, too, and didn’t know what to do about me. I could see the struggle play out on his face and in his attempts at bluster. I was an unfamiliar target. A girl. Even a kid as charmless as Danny Kukal knew it was unacceptable to punch me in the nose or call me out after school.

      In the spring, he came upon a solution at last.

      “I heard about your mom,” he told me. “A little prostitute, that’s what I heard.”

      Looking back, I can see the word was as foreign to him as it was to me, but neither of us was too young to understand an insult when we heard one. He’d picked up some ammunition and was set to deploy it.

      “Should’ve kept her knees together.”

      Baffling. But accompanied by howls of appreciation from the boys, along with other words I did understand.

      “Slut.”

      “Whore.”

      “Trailer trash.”

      My wit deserted me. I ran sobbing to the girls’ room and sat in crumpled agony for the rest of the day, trying to make sense of what was clearly a monumental insult. When I got home that afternoon, I told Nana all about it.

      I had never seen her so angry. Usually Nana’s temper was quick and loud, easily triggered and quickly forgotten. This anger was different. This was slow, deliberate, maternal fury. Her face hardened and flushed a plummy red.

      She folded up the dishcloth and sat next to me at the wobbly Formica table. Pulled my chair around slightly to face her.

      “Did you start this?” she said.

      I opened my face to her, tried to hold my eyes steady. “No, he started it, he—”

      She held up a hand.

      “I see.”

      We sat that way for a minute or two.

      “Lovey,” she said, “when someone insults your mum, when they use that kind of language, you mustn’t let it pass. There are some words that... There are things that require a response. You understand?”

      I nodded.

      “If you were a boy, I would tell you to knock the piss out of him. But you can’t very well do that, can you? You’ll have to think of something different. You’re a clever girl, Alice. Learn to use what you have.”

      She dismissed me after that, but called to me as I left the room.

      “Don’t mention any of this to your mother,” she said.

      The next day, and the days after that, I worried over the problem of Danny Kukal. He was the large centerpiece of a straggling army, and I was a loner, now more than ever. I had no ally, no rebuttal to what he’d gleefully hit upon as a successful series of taunts that the group repeated now and then, with gradual loss of interest, as at a joke that has played out. I kept my face still and thought about what Nana had said.

      On my way home from school about a week later, I stopped in front of the Kukals’ double-wide. The family dog came rushing up to edge of his pen, broken teeth bared, snapping and growling as he did every day. He was junkyard ugly, a bad-tempered nuisance with a grizzled brown coat and one missing ear. All the neighborhood kids hated and feared Schultzie. Everyone but Danny Kukal. He was proud to be the only one the dog didn’t bite.

      “Hey, Schultz,” he would croon, tossing down his backpack after school. “Hey, Schultzie, I saved you a cookie.”

      Danny really loved that dog.

      That afternoon, most of the boys were at baseball practice, so the house stood empty. No car in the driveway, no bikes in the street.

      Learn to use what you have, Alice.

      I went around the side of the dog pen and sat down in the grass СКАЧАТЬ