The Revealers Read Free Page A

“Save the planet.”
    Â 
    By the time I got home—in town, people kept turning to look at me—my fingers were sticking together. My shirt was heavy and stuck to my chest, and my hair felt really weird. It was plastered down. My underwear was chafing and sticking at the same time.
    Then I was inside peeling off the clothes, thankful for once that my mom wasn’t home yet. I felt for stuff in the jeans pocket, and pulled out a soaked-brown folded-up square. The Daredevil picture.
    I went into the kitchen where the garbage is, and slowly I tore it—the paper fibers just pulled apart—into little wet wads. Then I dropped the wads in the trash.

STREAMING
    Well, that was it. That was enough. I had to do something. I just had no idea what. I mean, what do you do in a situation like this?
    It was pointless to ask my mom—it would only make things worse. I do my own laundry after school, so I was able to wash out the evidence.
    I had to get myself home from school every day, right? I couldn’t send for a helicopter. I couldn’t climb into a limo with tinted windows that no one could see in. I liked thinking about that for a while, the limo, but it was also pointless. And I could not avoid or elude Richie just by going different ways.
    All of a sudden he had this power over me. He was kind of lording it over me, too—and that, frankly, was what got to me. I didn’t want to be friends with this guy, or co-weirdos or whatever. Never mind wearing a stupid jacket; I wanted to figure out how to make him stop.
    But how?
    The basic trouble was, I had no idea what Richie would do next. I didn’t understand him at all, even though most of
the time he was all I could think about: where he might be, what mood he would be in … what he might do to me. It was kind of an obsession. And that, I suddenly realized, was exactly how he wanted it.
    Hey, yeah!
    But why?
    I had no idea. But I wanted to figure it out—I really wanted to. It suddenly occurred to me that I needed advice. Expert advice. I needed to talk to someone who had been in this kind of situation, and every situation like it, many many times before.
    I needed to talk … with Elliot Gekewicz.
    I sat up straight. Yeah!
    You know how there’s always one kid in school who’s the dirty one, one kid who’s the smelly one, one kid who throws the ball over the backstop … and one kid who it’s okay for anybody, absolutely anybody, to trash?
    In our school, that last kid was Elliot. Not that he was dirty or smelly—I don’t mean that. I wasn’t really sure why he was the one, but the fact was that in Parkland School seventh grade, no matter who you were, Elliot Gekewicz was lower on the social scale than you.
    He was small, and that wasn’t good; he had a horrible name; and he was smart, which only made things worse. And anyway somebody has to be on the bottom, and in our class it was him.
    I had known Elliot since we were in kindergarten, and I had seen a lot of stuff happen to him. I never really joined in, but I never tried to stop it either, not that I could have. Kids had done all the usual things: called him names, stomped on his feet, played keepaway with his stuff, hung him by the back of his underpants on the cleat for the climbing rope in gym … Kids poured water inside Elliot’s backpack—while he was wearing it. They stuffed him in his
locker—upside down. They took his milk in the cafeteria, soaked his sandwich with it, squirted in a packet of ketchup, squashed the red-white mess between two trays, took his cookie and walked away eating it while everyone else laughed. Kids would say stuff in the hall when Elliot walked by, like: “Where’d you get that shirt—from a Dumpster? Who cuts your hair—your mom?”
    Elliot didn’t get mad, he didn’t cry, and he didn’t seem (to me) to ask for it. He wasn’t your classic bully magnet. I guess