Noah Krasnow, a sixth-grader at West Blackbrook Middle School,  was sitting in the cafeteria with about forty other middle schoolers, none of whom were Noah’s friends.  Noah did not really have friends. He’d been “homeschooled” for the last few years and so had lost all the contacts of his very early school years, as well as a year in grade promotion. It had been his mother’s idea; she had been his teacher and had insisted to him as well as to his father and step-father that homeschooling was in his best interest. Noah had accepted it more and more as the years went on and the adults argued. The idea of going to a real school had become something to dread. Now, in this last week in September in his first year of middle school, he felt immersed in that dread; it held him back like an illness he couldn’t shake. This morning he had claimed that illness and been sent to the nurse, again, and she had suggested he go to the cafeteria for breakfast instead of to his health class, where all his young classmates were learning more about the cilia in lungs and how the cilia was knocked cold by the onslaught of cigarette smoke, how they recovered every night, pulling themselves together every morning, ready and willing to take on the hopeless battle again. So the lungs rallied every morning. That’s what the smoker’s cough really amounted to, the fight the lungs put up to clear themselves of the junk left behind by yesterday’s cigarettes. But then the smoker inhaled the first drags of the morning cigarette and the cilia were stunned again. Noah felt bad for the cilia when he learned all this. It reminded him of that poem he had read in  English class, the one about the English soldiers; Charge of the Light Brigade it was called: Ours not to reason why ours but to do or die. Noah found that line haunting. When he thought of that line and the cilia struggling against the new smoke every morning, he felt sort of like crying. Noah’s mother smoked. She was probably at home smoking right now.

But of course he didn’t cry in the cafeteria.  He felt sheepish and embarrassed at having been tempted and looked furtively around to see if any of these other kids had noticed how babyish he had suddenly become. No one seemed to notice him at all. Noah’s cheeks had perfectly placed crimson splashes. He looked like an angel on a Christmas card, with his high color and his white Gap shirt, but he did not know that – which was fortunate,  because he would have been embarrassed by that too. Noah found much of life in middle school a desperate battle with embarrassment and humiliation. It was exhausting.

He did not feel much better after the muffin and cranberry juice. The nurse always made you go to the cafeteria before she called your mother to tell her you were sick. Noah always felt badly when it happened. It was as though she did not believe him when he told her he didn’t feel well, or else she was afraid his mother was someone who didn’t feed him breakfast. Maybe she didn’t always get up, especially if Allie hadn’t awakened and his stepdad was away, but Noah knew how to get himself breakfast. He always got himself cereal and toast. He wasn’t one of those kids who’d come to school hungry.

At the next table a big, fat eighth-grader was bickering with his companion. Noah’s head had begun to throb. He felt wretched and not at all prepared to handle what was suddenly heading straight for him. The fat eighth-grader had shuffled to his feet and Noah was flooded by the sickening apprehension that came to a sixth-grader when he was about to be sucked into one of those weird middle school things, those unwanted encounters with aggressive, cruelly sophisticated bigger kids who seemed so stubbornly determined to educate him on matters he was not sure he needed or wanted to know. Noah yearned for his usual phalanx of sixth graders. What was he doing here alone in this stuffy cafeteria? On top of everything else, it smelled terrible in here, like wet dog and old pizza.

The eighth-grader dropped noisily into the chair directly across from Noah, his spare tire banging into the flimsy table so that it banged and rattled confrontationally. Noah pulled back, abysmally aware of how hot his cheeks were, how sluggishly his mind was functioning just when he needed all his wits about him. I gotta get out of here. He longed to disappear into the throbbing mob of six graders who traveled everywhere in sanely cohesive packs. He felt hideously young and vulnerable: a porcupine unable to roll into a ball. He knew he was about to be made a fool. Big kids in middle school were trouble. This big kid was big trouble. Deadly.

The kid’s name was Tom and he was mean as well as fat; he traveled with the other, skinnier kid whose name was Desmond. Desmond was eyeing Noah and Tom from the other table. Desmond had his hair cut too short around his ears so he always looked like his ears were open car doors. Both he and Tom wore baseball caps and tee shirts under leather jackets.  Noah didn’t understand why. It seemed odd to him like maybe they were always cold or maybe they weren’t sure if they were going to stay in school all day. But either way, he could tell that the really tough ones were the ones who wore their jackets and hats all day. Like this one and his friend who were boring down on him with predatory enthusiasm.

“Hey, kid, what’s ya name?”

Noah wanted to run, thought briefly of not answering, felt the flush of his face extend down his neck, but then responded the way he had been taught to, politely, as if with faith in the friendly intentions of the questioner, this thug, who smelled so strongly of nicotine that Noah felt his already tenuous stomach lurch in disgust.

“Noah.” He answered clearly but quickly. There was no point in giving out unnecessary detail.

“Yeah, Noah? Like the guy in the ark?”

Noah did not answer but his eye widened. He wondered desperately if Tom could be Jewish. Could this big kid have gone to Hebrew School,  had a bar mitzvah? Believe in God? Have parents even?

“So, Noah, ya like West Middle?”

Noah looked miserably at the clock. How could he get out of this? Had the nurse told him when he should come back? The cranberry juice container was empty. The white paper plate had only crumbs left on it. The unnecessary second breakfast sat like a hairball in his stomach.

“It’s okay,” Noah answered. “I gotta go to class.”

He looked down at all his stuff. The trash had to be cleared. There was his backpack to pick up. He despaired of making his exit either fast or easy. Big kids never seemed encumbered with books. One of the things they liked to do was try and leave their garbage at the table. Noah didn’t understand why they didn’t just throw it away. You had to do that everywhere there were trays, like Papa Gino’s and Micky D’s.

“Noah, don’t be an ass licker. You got a pass. Take your time.” Tom rocked his chair backward and assessed Noah, who was inwardly shaken by the unexpected harshness of the term ass licker. Whose ass, he wondered. No one had talked like that when he went to elementary school. Maybe someone had occasionally said shit or even fuck just to hear how it sounded, but ass licker was an awful term. It hurt his ears, made him shaky and nervous and he’d heard worse in the cafeteria, seen worse written on the walls of the lavatory cubicles. Sometimes he wondered what the words meant and where they came from. Slut was a word he had wondered a lot about. It seemed to be something a girl was, but what did it mean? He wanted to ask someone but could think of no one to ask. He was embarrassed to ask his father. He was sure this guy Tom would know what slut meant, but he certainly was not about to ask him.

“So you like elementary school or middle school better, Noah?” Tom pressed him.

“Elementary,” he answered impulsively, emphatically, with a passionate honesty that he knew immediately was a mistake.

“Hey, Dez, you heard that?” He called backward over his shoulder. “This baby fag liked elementary school better where they got them cubbies to keep their lunch boxes in, the ones with Masters of the Universe and Ninja Turtles on the outside…and no one knows what a pimp is,” Tom howled in pleasure, reveling in Noah’s transparent discomfort.

A pimp? Noah felt panicky. Could this big kid know he did not know the words?

“Whadda ya think, Dez? “

Desmond looked over with a bored, reserved reluctance. But he was actually interested. Perhaps Tom had found them some entertainment. This pukey-looking kid looked like a ripe one, a real geek. Maybe Tom could make him cry. Dez looked around to locate the teachers who were monitoring the cafeteria study hall. One of them, Miz McNally, was looking over, her brow furrowed.

“Maybe we should get him his own teddy bear,” Dez prodded Tom approvingly, but a bit too loudly. Miz McNally was very interested now. She was coming over, Dez would bet money on it.

Noah, unaware that rescue was on its way, was squirming in mortification. He hated middle school, hated Tom, hated himself most thoroughly. Would he ever develop the wit to save himself from this kind of encounter? What was a pimp? Why hadn’t he let his father put him in private school? Let his mother homeschool him another year? Should he know what a pimp was? Who might tell him? He was crippled with embarrassment not to know. Where did the big kids find out?

“So, kid, shall I tell ya what a pimp is? They got a shitload a’ money; that’s a hint. There’s one ‘round my neighborhood drives a lime green caddy…does your daddy drive a caddy, Noah?” Tom asked, sort of friendly.

This Noah understood. Cars he could handle.

“No, my dad drives a Mercedes sedan, it’s regular gray…” He quieted as he heard the embarrassing eagerness in his own voice. “He’s got a car phone….” he continued, but Tom’s eyes narrowed menacingly and Noah retreated to silence.

“Does he now? Bet he makes a shitload of money, too. Is he a pimp?”

Noah was trapped, torn between loyalty to his father who he suspected would not like being called a pimp and his own horrible ignorance. He clung to silence.

“Hey, Tom,” Dez interrupted, inclining his head toward Miz McNally as she crossed toward them.

“Well, look’a this, Noah, ole Lady Mac is haulin’ her bony ass our way. Whyn’t you ask her if her old man’s a pimp?” Tom suggested, very low and almost gently, but without taking his eyes off the approaching teacher.

Noah looked up at this unknown woman with such a look of unadulterated gratitude that she understood instantly that Noah was not Tom’s tablemate by choice.

“Can I see your pass?” she asked Noah.

“This here’s Noah, Miz McNally. He’s with me,“ Tom bullied in but the teacher ignored him. Noah noticed a little twitch at her mouth, so one of her dimples flashed, but without humor, not like she was going to smile with her whole face. He grabbed his backpack and got to his feet, half reeling from his fever.

“I’m Noah Kraskow. I’m sick and the nurse sent me here for breakfast, but I want to go home now.”

Tom laughed harshly but said nothing.  Miz McNally gave him one brief deadly stare and then turned her attention to Noah whose face with its vivid red splotches and pale background testified to his truthfulness.

“Okay, Noah. Go on back to the nurse’s office,” the teacher suggested kindly, handing him back his pass. He started to scurry away but she delayed him surreptitiously so he fell into step and walked politely along beside her, clear that she wanted to say something. “You know in school, we have to choose our friends carefully. Other people make judgments about you because if you hang around with…I don’t want to choose your friends for you, Noah, but let me suggest you stick with your own classmates for a while.”

He turned his yearning brown eyes earnestly on her. I don’t understand, his eyes begged for help.  Miz McNally looked suddenly, oddly stricken.

“Stick to your own classmates,” she repeated obscurely and seemed to have dismissed him, pained by something he did not fathom.

He scurried out of the cafeteria still in full panic. Middle School was a nightmare. He just did not seem to understand any of it. Not that the subjects were difficult, but everything else was so weird and foreign. It felt like another planet, one that was not fully lit.

—-

When Noah returned to the nurse’s office, it was quite crowded. Mrs. Howard herself was more harried than he had ever before seen her and so without realizing what he was about to do or even that he was doing it, propelled by illness and desperation, he bamboozled her. After one quick look at his glassy eyes and mottled completion, she told him to call his mother,  When the answering machine clicked on instead of leaving a message, Noah plunged ahead talking into his mother’s recorded voice without losing a beat or allowing a false note to hint at his own dissembling.

“Mom, I’m sick. The nurse says I can come home if you will come get  me.”

“Let me talk to her, Noah,” Mrs. Howard instructed absently, but she was clearly distracted. There was a chubby seventh-grade girl who was feeling dizzy and claimed she had taken too much or too little insulin. There was that awful skinny eighth-grade girl, too, the one with the gigantic eyes and the fat hair whose legs were like twigs. She was sitting in a chair by the scale eyeing the thing miserably. Mrs. Howard had another kid, a boy, lying on a couch in the little room that connected her office to the bathroom. Noah plunged into the fray.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Howard. My mom believes me. She’s coming to get me right away.”

Mrs. Howard looked at him curiously.

“She doesn’t want to talk to me?” she asked.

“No, she believes me,” he answered, a bit too defensively, so added, “She knew this morning I was feeling bad. She’ll be here in five minutes.”

“Okay, honey. Go wait in the foyer, but don’t leave the building until she drives up.” The diabetic again compelled her attention and Noah slipped out.

He marched to his locker, grabbed his coat, and headed out. He hesitated one moment in the foyer, wanting to be the good obedient child he had always been but the desire was ephemeral. No one was going to come for him and someone might well find him out if he lingered. He hit the street.

It was more than two miles from West Middle to Noah’s house. He walked the first half mile purposefully, his head bowed, an escapee hoping to avoid detection by avoiding eye contact. But his energy dissipated quickly and then he felt weak and weary and very oppressed. Commercial city buses passed him and he peered at them with an oblique curiosity. He had never been on a bus in his life, not even when his father had taken him to London. He hadn’t the faintest idea how you did that, took a bus. Did you flag them down like a taxi in the city? No, in movies he’d seen people waiting at bus stops, designated areas by the curb, sometimes with a little shelter from the rain. Just then he noticed a yellow-painted section on the curb and looked up expectantly. The signs above said “No Parking” and “Bus Stop.” But if he waited how would he know if he was getting on the right bus? Or how much it cost? Or when one would come?

If he had not been feeling so vulnerable and ill, he might have found the brashness to wait at the stop thinking it all an adventure; but today he did not have the energy for brashness. He just kept walking, walking, walking down streets he had only known from the school bus window, finally making his way into the remotest edges of his own neighborhood. Occasionally he willed with all his might for someone he knew to be driving by, to recognize him and pick him up. But no matter how intricate the game he played with himself – I’ll walk very fast to the next curb and when I turn that corner and look up, there will be Mrs. McVey coming around the other corner – no one he knew materialized to rescue him. Sometimes he felt so tired and overwhelmed and small and abandoned that he sort of cried, but not too hard because he kept catching himself, remembering he was on the street, remembering that he had left school under false pretenses and a policeman or a truant officer would be sure to stop a kid in tears who was walking down the street carrying a book bag in the middle of the morning. Eventually, accompanied by two newly minted heel blisters, Noah reached his own house.

His mom’s car was there but the back door was locked and no one answered when he knocked. He rooted around in the garage for the hidden key and let himself in.

“Mom?” There was no answer. Noah stood still and listened, but the pounding in his head provided too great an interference. Again he felt like crying, this time from relief as well as illness. The whiteness of the kitchen was so cool and reassuring that he didn’t care if his mother was home or not. He wished she was, sort of, but at least he himself was home and could go and lie down in his own bed.

Upstairs he heard the crying. It was Allie’s sound, that urgent and inconsolable cry she had when something really hurt. It was coming from the bathroom. Noah opened the door without knocking.

The tub was running and steam made the room blurry, but Noah saw his sister standing naked on the toilet seat cover, wailing. His mother was in there too and she looked up, startled, with that puffy angry face she had so often lately. Allie reached her arms out toward Noah, who could not quite understand why he felt embarrassed, as though he had interrupted something private. It was just his mom getting Allie ready for her bath, wasn’t it?

Noah saw immediately the two angry red crescents on Allie’s shoulder; then his eyes jumped to the cigarette burning in the ashtray on the sink next to his mother’s drink. He thought of it bouncing up and down so precariously in his mother’s slightly turned head as she buttoned his shirt when he was little. Would it burn him, he had wondered, but it never had. She didn’t button his shirts anymore, only Allie’s.

“Mom, what’s that on Allie’s shoulder?” His voice sounded too high, too upset. He had meant to ask the question very soberly. Thinking suddenly of his father, Noah entered the bathroom and turned off the spigot. The water in the tub was so hot that smoke seemed to rise from it.

“What are you doing home?” his mother asked angrily, but Noah was more interested in Allie, who was still howling and reaching toward her brother as though for rescue.

“Come’er, Allie. Let me see your booboo.” Noah’s voice still sounded peculiar, even as the room cleared of steam. “I was sick, Mom. I have a fever.”

Allie climbed down from the toilet and squeezed past her mother with her back to her. She positioned herself behind Noah who still faced their mother in bewilderment.

“Mom?”

“Oh for heaven sakes, it was an accident and she is just being such an incredible baby about it. Come on, Allie, let’s get you in the tub,” she ordered sharply.

“Mom, the water’s too hot,” Noah’s voice was ingratiating; he knew she would be angry with him for correcting her. He reached over and turned on the cold spigot.

His mother stared at him ominously.

“Noah, the last thing I need is trouble from you. Go to your room. Now.”

“It was an accident,” she snapped, again grabbing Allie by the arm.

Noah left the bathroom reeling,  febrile, powerless, trying not to listen to Allie’s whimpering.

As he walked down the corridor to his own bedroom he passed his step-father’s study with the computer and video games. Inside it was dark and mahogany. For the first time ever he noticed that the key to the gun case dangled from the keyhole. Without thinking he opened the case and reached for the revolver. It felt cool and hefty in his hand. He thought of fat Tom in the cafeteria and lifted the gun.

“Fuck you, Tom,” he muttered impulsively, astonished and energized by the sound of it. Grinning, he took the gun with him to his parents’ bedroom so he could stand in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors on their closet door. In front of the mirror, he looked at himself, a tall, scrawny kid who looked much more ominous with a gun leveled at his reflection.

“Go ahead, make my day,” he muttered in his best Clint Eastwood, then felt suddenly sheepish and in a hurry to get the gun back into the case before his mother discovered him.

In the moment of turning away from the mirror, though, he felt the pull of the image and found he did not want to abandon the gun. One more second, he thought eyeing himself.

“Who’s the tough guy now?” he asked his reflection in the mirror. “Whattaya thinkin’  now, Tomcat?”

When he pulled the trigger the gun shot to life in his hand, shoving him backward like a disciplining hand.  The mirror splintered into a thousand shards and his mother screamed in the distance but he could not hear her. Noah could not have been more surprised.

copyright ©Meredith A Powers, 2015-2025