Catnip Read Free

night.
    When the lights went out at nine sharp, he
dreamed of his research, and the memory of that one little mistake
that had cost him his freedom came back to haunt him. Quest for
knowledge…solved.
    Well, almost solved. He saw the constructs on
the computer screen, the matrices for life and change that danced
like snowflakes in the wind…and then heard the voices of the police
who’d arrested him and the voice of the judge who’d sentenced him
to this place of reform. Like a video of a car crash being played
over and over again in slow motion for the investigators to analyze
the whys and what-ifs, he painfully relived the events of the past
few months in living color.
    Call it overenthusiasm or plain bad judgment,
this one silly little error in judgment had screwed him for life.
He thought the court would have had a little more understanding,
but no. His dream had become a nightmare and he wondered why things
had to be this way…
     
    Harry’s mind drifted back to his junior high
days, and he saw himself sitting in the empty hallway of his
school. The sign on the door to his left read Guidance
Counselor and right now Mrs. McNamara was talking to his
mother. Putting his ear to the door, he eavesdropped to hear the
straight dope on his future.
    “Child prodigy is an understatement, Mrs.
Goldman,” the guidance counselor said. A kindly, middle-aged sort,
Mrs. McNamara was keenly aware of Harry’s situation. Grade school
had bored him out of his mind and the first year of middle school
had been no less stultifying. The classes had been all too easy,
and he raced through the homework, which earned him the praise of
his teachers and the envy of his peers. While he enjoyed the
praise, the latter quality—envy—made him an easy target.
    And he was an easy target. He was
small for his age, skinny, weak, and with a face that resembled a
baby robin’s—long beak, green eyes, and a mop of brown hair that
covered a narrow, foxlike face—and the bullies got a kick out of
whacking him before class, after class, and even during class.
Lunch was a nightmare in and of itself. He learned to eat while he
sat on the can and kept his legs off the floor in order to avoid
detection. It didn’t work. They always caught him. “Harry, wanna
come out and play?” they taunted.
    It seemed their idea of play differed
radically from his. He had come home one day and heard his mother
gasp, “Harry, you’ve been fighting again?”
    “How’d you guess?”
    She took a look at the torn shirt, bruises
all over his face, and cuts that required the strongest antiseptic
around and hugged her son tightly. “It was pretty easy,” she said.
With a sigh of sadness, she got to work and cleaned him up.
    His parents complained to the school
principal, but hey, kids were kids, so Harry suffered in silence
while the other students had their fun at his expense. He wanted
nothing more than to just read his books, do his experiments at
home and have the world leave him be…but the world had other
ideas.
    The elder Mr. Goldman, also short, skinny and
mild-mannered, told him things had to change. “Punching someone
isn’t always the answer,” his father said after the umpteenth black
eye he’d helped treat. “But you can fight back in different
ways.”
    Harry listened in silence, raged at his own
weakness, and then reason prevailed and he quietly thought over
what his father had told him. Then he thought some more before
going up to his room to study.
    The next day, when one of the kids hit him,
he hit back. Sure, it was conventional warfare, but at the
time—during recess—he’d been cornered by the punk while the other
kids watched. His tormentor should have watched the nature channels
and taken a cue. When an animal is trapped, it lashes out.
    Harry lashed out, and while he didn’t think
it was much of a punch, it left the bully with a bloody mouth. Two
seconds later he got the living crap pounded out of him. “Why can’t
I win a fight