IA: Initiate (6 page)

“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know the answer,” said Naz.

Students began to snicker and mutter to each other as the tall man walked to the middle of the classroom where Naz was sitting. He needed only to wave his hand and the noise from the students subsided immediately. With Naz looking up at him, the man could now see the blood seeping through the bandage on Naz’s neck. Naz lowered his head in an attempt to conceal the bandaged wound.

“You are correct, Mr. Andersen. You are sorry. But why are you sorry?” The teacher spoke in a calm, low tone that almost seemed friendly. But Naz knew that wasn’t the case so he tried to steel himself for what was about to come.

“Um … for not knowing the answer, sir,” Naz said.

“The answer to what, son?”

Naz was caught. He had no idea what the question was, let alone the answer, so he decided to shake his head and hope he would be let off the hook. A long silence followed, so Naz thought he’d better at least say something. “I wasn’t paying attention, sir.”

“Obviously, but the question at hand was not a question at all, Mr. Andersen, but instead a directive … a directive for you to tell us one interesting thing you did this summer.”

I should have known it was something like that,
Naz thought.
It is the first day of school
.

“So, enlighten us, Mr. Andersen.”

Naz was stumped. A whole summer had gone by, and he couldn’t think of one interesting thing he had done. He shook his head and replied, “Nothing.”

“Come on now, Mr. Andersen, there must have been something. Did you travel somewhere, visit a relative … go to an amusement park?” the teacher asked as he walked toward the back of the room and waited for a reply.

“I went to see my uncle in Washington D.C. ...” Naz said quickly, and then to make it more convincing and believable he added, “… with my little sister.” He felt like everyone in the classroom knew that he was lying, and it made him hot all over.

“And what did you see in D.C.?”

“Um … um … um … The White House … a monument … and …” He saw a picture of Abraham Lincoln on the wall, and in a flash it came to him from nowhere. “The Lincoln Memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Pentagon, the …”

“Thank you … Mr. Andersen! I will say this one more time for the benefit of Mr. Andersen and anyone else who was out to lunch the first time.” He pointed to the name printed on the dry-erase board in large capital letters.

FEARS

Marcus Fears was the most respected and feared teacher at Lincoln. He was also the boys’ basketball coach. To him, basketball was a microcosm of life, and he never missed an opportunity to take advantage of a teaching moment—on or off the court.

“I like to give my students choices … my choices. You can address me in one of three ways: Mr. Fears, Coach Fears, or Coach, and that is all. Sir, was my father’s name,” said Fears as he looked at Naz.

Naz wondered how he had missed all of that. He had been there for the whole second half of the day, but it was as if he hadn’t been there at all. His mind was still out on that street—in the Exclave, the battlefield. He kept rewinding it in his mind and playing it back, over and over again. His mind would retell how the ambulance came almost an hour after being called, with the police close behind.
Ham could’ve died,
he thought.
And they asked so many questions.
It was only the second time he had ever talked to a police officer, and as before, their presence alone made him feel like he was the one in trouble. They kept saying that they would catch the boys who did this, but it was well known in the Exclave that the police never caught anyone.

Fears’ bellowing voice cut through again, startling Naz back to reality once more. “This is your last hour class of the day, Health 101, and I am here to teach you all one important thing this year, Railsplitters.” He seemed to take pride in referring to the students as Railsplitters.

This took Naz’s mind back to Ham, who first said that name to him earlier that morning.

“Risk Reduction,” Fears continued. “Mr. Andersen, what one important thing will you learn this year?” He noticed Naz tuning out again.

“Uh … Risk Reduction?”

“Are you asking me or telling me, Mr. Andersen?”

“Uh … telling you, sir … I mean, Mr. …” Naz looked at the board and quickly added, “Fears.”

“Right! Risk Reduction, and how so?” He turned to the rest of the class. “Anyone have a clue?” He looked around as he continued to pace back toward the middle of room.

None of the students raised hands. Naz couldn’t remember Fears sitting down since the class began, and that seemed like half an hour ago.

“No, you wouldn’t … mainly because I haven’t told you yet,” Fears continued. He spoke in barely more than a whisper at times, but no one seemed to have any trouble hearing him.

Between the pauses of his carefully chosen words you could hear a pin drop. There was no movement whatsoever in the classroom other than Fears quietly pacing through the maze of desks and the heads of the students as they turned in sync to follow his every move. It was as if time was frozen. The students seemed transported to a static hypnotic dimension with Fears the only navigator.

“I can tell you to wear a bicycle helmet to save you from splitting your skull in half when you land on the cement after your bike hits a rock or pothole,” Fears lectured and pointed out the window, as some of the students winced and grimaced in imaginary pain. “But you won’t. Helmets look silly anyway.”

Some students laughed nervously. He stopped his pacing to look at one student’s hands in a loathsome manner then continued. “To prevent you from catching a cold, I can tell you to wash your filthy hands when you wake up in the morning. I can tell you to wash them before and after you eat. I can tell you to wash them after you use the bathroom and again before you go to bed at night.” He turned to a girl who had just finished blowing her nose. “But you will not.”

During this fleeting moment of awareness Naz noticed there was one student who sat in the front row and never looked up while Fears was talking. Naz couldn’t quite see the boy’s face from where he was sitting, but he noticed the boy’s hair was extremely short on the sides much like a soldier’s, but longer and all spiky on top like porcupine needles. Naz began to twist a tendril of his own hair. It looked like the boy was writing in a notebook,
maybe taking notes,
thought Naz. Naz noticed him in the class just before Fears’ class. He had been doing the exact same thing and had also been sitting in the front row. Naz wondered why no one, including Fears, found this boy’s behavior odd, unacceptable, or even interesting. Except for Naz, it was as if no one in the room noticed the boy just writing away and not looking at Fears. Naz then realized, if he continued to focus on the boy in the front row, he would be hearing it from Fears real soon again so he turned his attention back to Fears.

Fears, now standing in the middle of the room, turned around and began to walk slowly backwards. When he reached a large, round boy with dark, curly hair, he stopped. It was as if Fears had eyes in the back of his head. He wheeled around and put out his hand. The boy looked up, and realizing he had been discovered, he pulled a half-eaten candy bar from underneath his desk and put it in Fears’ hand.

“I can try to convince you to eat right and exercise,” Fears continued as he looked at the boy. “But most of you will not.”  His voice was slowly getting louder with each phrase as if he were a preacher in church and about to reach a crescendo. “I can ask you … no, implore that you say ‘no’ to drugs, but some of you will inevitably say ‘yes.’ And for my guys … and girls, the gangs of the Exclave are not your family. Your family is at home where you live, and here with your classmates and teachers. Gangs are to be avoided at all cost. They are for the weak-minded follower, and here at Lincoln
we
are
all
leaders.” He had a flair for the dramatic that captivated his students.

Fears’ last words caught Naz’s attention and sent him elsewhere again.
Gang,
Naz thought?

“But let me make this perfectly clear,” Fears continued. “While you are here at Lincoln, you will respect the rules of this classroom and this school. You will respect yourselves and everyone else for that matter. And when I say Risk Reduction, it will do you good to know that your very life depends on it, Mr. Andersen!” Fears bellowed. “Is there a problem?”

Naz, snapping back to reality once more, realized he had just been staring out the window and replaying the morning’s events in his brain again. On this first day of class he had been caught breaking Fears’ biggest rule about not paying attention not once, but twice.

“No, sir, I mean, Mr. Fears.” Naz reached up to feel the blood now leaking from under his bandage.

The girl next to him saw it and turned away, as if she didn’t want Naz to notice she saw it.

“May I be excused, sir?” asked Naz.

“By all means …
sir,
” Fears replied in a sarcastic, yet conciliatory tone. The students muttered to each other, as Fears was silent while Naz hurried out of the classroom into the half-deserted hallways of Lincoln.

CHAPTER EIGHT

LINCOLN

He
looked in the mirror in the dimly lit bathroom and thought everything seemed washed out—not as vibrant or colorful as before, even his own appearance.
Is it my imagination
? he wondered. It didn’t help that he always wore dark or drab colors, his ongoing attempt at anonymity.
I’ve changed somehow,
he thought.
How could I have gone through that and not have changed?

He removed the bandage and changed the dressing with the ointment and new bandage the paramedic had given him. The man told him the wound wasn’t that bad and would heal in a week or so, if he kept it clean and dressed.

After the fight that morning, Naz snuck back home to change his bloodied shirt. While climbing out of his bedroom window, he’d half torn off the first bandage. Miss Tracey didn’t trust him with a key yet, and he wasn’t sure if she ever would. He waited until he knew she was gone before he went back. He didn’t want any trouble, and a knife wound on his neck, serious or not, along with a bloodied shirt would certainly spell trouble. He made sure he didn’t leave any signs that indicated he had come back home. On the way back to school he tossed the bloodied, Henley T-shirt into the first dumpster he came across. He would replace it later with money he earned from the Market Merchants.

As he stared in the mirror he thought,
únete a nosotros
.
What could that mean?
Then he went back even further in his mind to the minutes before the stabbing occurred. What could he have done differently to prevent what happened, to get Ham to cross that street, and to keep him from confronting those boys?
How is Ham?
he wondered. He would call him later, then again, maybe not. Would Ham be angry with him for not fighting back? Would he blame Naz for everything?
But what could I have done?
Naz thought.
I didn’t have a knife.
Maybe I should carry a knife from now on.
“No, no, no. I’ve never even held a knife like that.”
I would’ve gotten stabbed for sure, or even worse,
he thought,
and Meri would be alone now.

No matter how he turned things over in his mind he still felt responsible for Ham.
It took me too long to call Ham’s mom,
he thought. She arrived frantic, just before the ambulance. “I just couldn’t think. Maybe Ham can teach me how to use a knife when he gets ...,” he paused.
The paramedic did say he’d be OK,
he remembered.

Still, Naz couldn’t help feeling he was a coward because he wanted to cross the street to avoid the whole situation, while Ham was willing to stand and fight. He felt like a coward because he had thought about running and because he had been so scared.

Finally he stood straight up and stared confidently at himself. “That’s dumb,” he said aloud to his reflection. “That’s stupid. I’m never carrying a knife. If there is a next time, coward or not, I’m going the other way, and whoever’s with me can go their way. That’s what I’ll do.” When he made up his mind to do something, he usually did it.

Naz realized he had been standing at the mirror a while and that he had better get back before class was over. He was already on the bad side of what seemed to be the most respected, and even worse, most feared teacher in the school. He didn’t want to push his luck.

But there was something about Fears, he thought, that wasn’t so bad. There was something about him that was almost familiar, something he couldn’t quite pinpoint.

He walked out of the bathroom and felt renewed. He had just about survived his first day of school at Lincoln, even though it had only been a half-day for him. As he walked down the hallway, he began to feel like himself again, finally able to take in the scene around him. The hallways seemed less deserted to him than before he went into the bathroom. There was a security guard sitting at a desk, but she was oblivious to the students that walked by randomly or stood in plain sight at their lockers.
She obviously doesn’t want any trouble
, Naz thought. He caught the eye of a boy who was flirting with a girl in a stairwell, and he immediately looked the other way, not wanting any trouble himself. At a group of lockers directly across from the stairwell, there was a girl smoking a cigarette, another girl playing with her phone, and a boy with headphones, apparently listening to music as his head bounced in a consistent rhythm.