The Unmaking of Rabbit Read Free

But Paul was different. He had been deserted, walked out on. His father never sent him a birthday card or even a Christmas card. He didn’t care whether Paul was alive or dead. That was what made Paul different. He knew it, the other kids knew it, and that was that.
    â€œI should never have married him,” Paul’s mother told him when he had asked about his father. “But he was so handsome I fell in love with him, snap!” and she snapped her fingers to show how easy it had been to fall in love. “All the girls were crazy about him. He was spoiled. You’re going to look just like him, I’m afraid.”
    Gran had an expression she used when they passed someone on the street she considered ugly or funny looking. “There’s a face only a mother could love,” she would say after the person had gone by. Paul figured his mother thought he was handsome because she was his mother. That was the way mothers were. His ears stuck out, his nose, which was faintly pink, dripped even when he didn’t have a cold. And when he was nervous, which was pretty often, he not only blinked, he stuttered. At school they called him Rabbit.
    â€œHey, Rabbit, how come you stutter? Hey, Rabbit, how come you got such big ears?” or “Hey, Rabbit, come out of your burrow and do some tricks! Rabbit, Rabbit, had a habit, lost his mind and couldn’t grab it.”
    To top it off, he was the shortest, weakest kid in the class. Paul walked with his head drawn down and his shoulders hunched. He knew every crack in the sidewalk, every curve in the road, every curb and gutter in town.
    Looking sideways at himself in the mirror, Paul asked himself, What is handsome, anyway? Handsome is as handsome does, Gran says, and if his father was a ne’er-do-well who flew the coop leaving a wife and baby behind, what difference did it make if his father was handsome or ugly? Will I be no good too, when I grow up?
    â€œLittle monsters!” Gran ranted and raved the third time he brought his lunch box home from school loaded with shavings from the pencil sharpeners. “Why do they do things like that? Why can’t the teacher control them? They’ll wind up in jail,” she stormed.
    And Paul shuddered, not so much because some unknown enemy felt that mean about him, but because this meant another trip to school for Gran. She had had more conferences with the principal and the teacher than all the other kids’ mothers combined.
    â€œHe has a rough enough time as it is,” Gran once said to Miss Olah, who was young and pretty and saving her money to take a trip to see the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, in the summer. Paul did not quite believe in the Acropolis, any more than he believed in the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but he was keeping an open mind until Miss Olah returned with the slides she had promised.
    â€œI will do what I can,” Miss Olah had said, “but you know how children are. They are like little savages sometimes. I can’t promise miracles, but I will try.”
    If Paul’s mother did get married again, he would go to live with her and visit Gran on week ends. If Gran got lonely, she always had Mrs. Tuttle for a friend. Paul thought Mrs. Tuttle was a pain, but Gran liked her. He wouldn’t go off and just leave Gran alone. He’d make plans.
    If he had a proper family, with a father and mother and maybe a brother or sister, then he’d have friends he could ask over to make papier-mâché masks or to go to the movies with or to go trick or treating with on Halloween.
    Last Halloween he’d gone out alone because there was no one to go with. He’d rung three bells and three people had said, “All alone? That’s a shame. That’s no way to be traveling tonight.” Then they’d loaded him up with candy, giving him extra to make up for being alone. He’d quit and gone home with eight candy bars and two lousy apples.

3
    Gran sat