27. The Worst Thing

THE WORST THING

I've tried to tell you this story in order, but now I'm going to have to take a detour to tell you about the terrible thing the boy did that landed him at Shady Glen. And to do that, I need to back up and tell you a story about the boy that occurred several months before we met.

He had just recently been sent to live with his aunt and uncle after his mother had left the hospital too soon and not come back. He was starting yet another school, sitting across from yet another guidance counselor, who was pursing their lips as they read the boy's transcripts. The guidance counselor told the boy that he would be getting a math tutor.

"I don't want a tutor!" the boy protested. "I'm good at math."

"I understand," the counselor replied. "But you've missed quite a bit of school, and math is scaffolded. This is something we do for many of our students. We find they benefit from the extra help."

"I don't need extra help!"

"Everyone needs extra help," they said.

The boy had some issues with this statement. Did Aaron Judge need extra help playing baseball? Did Albert Einstein need extra help with physics? No! They did not. And he did not need extra help with fractions!

"Our school has an excellent peer-tutoring program," the counselor bragged. "I think you'll soon see it's an opportunity to excel."

By this point, I think you understand how the boy felt about that word, about people in authority promising to do things for his own good. The boy felt as if he were on one side of a seesaw while on the other side was someone much bigger than him, a force that could send him flying or thudding at will, and there was not a thing he could do about it.

Two days later he met his tutor. Toby Crawford was a year younger than the boy but a grade ahead. He wore rainbow suspenders over shirts emblazoned with slogans like QUEER4LIFE . He was fond of math puns. "Parallel lines have so much in common; it's a shame they'll never meet," he told the boy at their first session.

The boy had been to enough schools to know that certain rules were universal and that kids like Toby occupied lower rungs of the social ladder.

But the rules didn't seem to apply to Toby. He was immensely popular, receiving so many fist bumps as they walked down the halls it was a wonder his knuckles didn't bleed. "Hey, Toblerone," people called out to him. Even his nickname was sweet.

The boy hated Toby from the start, for reasons not unlike those that caused you to hate me when we first met in the alteration room. The boy had nothing. Toby seemed to have everything. To make matters worse, the boy was better at math than Toby. Toby had put parentheses after exponents when explaining PEMDAS, even though the order was literally p arentheses, e xponents, m ultiplication, d ivision, a ddition, s ubtraction.

In the beginning, Toby didn't seem to notice or care that the boy hated him. He just told his dumb jokes and dutifully showed him how to do pre-algebra.

The boy refused to do the problems. It was his way of protesting.

He didn't tell Toby that, obviously, so Toby assumed it was because the boy didn't understand the material, and he came back with even easier assignments. Long division and multiplication of negative numbers. As if the boy were some kind of idiot!

To further protest, the boy stopped turning in math assignments altogether. The guidance counselor increased the frequency of the boy's tutoring sessions to three times a week, which, mathematically speaking, cubed the boy's anger.

It went on like this all winter and into the spring, and as the boy's anger grew, it became impossible for Toby to write it off as a case of the bad-at-math grumpies. The boy, Toby was realizing, didn't hate math. He hated Toby.

Toby went to the guidance counselor and asked if he could be assigned to another student. "He's not getting any better. And he obviously doesn't like me."

"I'm sure he likes you," they replied, because everyone liked Toby. "He's just had a rough go of it."

Toby wasn't so sure. A few nights earlier, he'd discussed this with his friend Emma, who had said that the boy was clearly homophobic.

"You think?" Toby hadn't been sure. Silent glowering was not how other kids had tended to display their antipathy— because yes, even popular Toby had been mocked with limp wrists and lisps and the occasional slur. But the boy hated him so much and all he'd done was try to help him, so maybe Emma was right.

"I think he might be homophobic," Toby told the guidance counselor now.

This got the counselor's attention. "Oh, that's very serious, Toby," they said, writing it down. "I'll assign someone else to him next week."

This was a Thursday, and Toby assumed this meant he would see the boy one more time, on Friday after school.

That Friday turned out to be a warm late-spring day, the trees heavy with the promise of summer. Instead of working in the library, Toby suggested that they work outside. He had a worksheet on binomials that the boy ignored. This time Toby didn't push. Instead his attention wandered to a softball game being played on the nearby diamond.

The boy noticed that Toby had checked out. "You're supposed to be tutoring me," he said with venom in his voice.

"I'm not tutoring you anymore," Toby replied. "Today's my last day, so do whatever you want."

The boy might have said, "Good, I don't need a tutor!" But instead he asked, "Why?"

"Because," Toby began, tired of this weird kid and his malevolent presence. He had worked so hard to make people like him, and it got exhausting. "You don't work, you don't care. So why should I? You're nothing to me."

One of the softball players trotted over, carrying a bat. "Hey, Toblerone, we need a sixth. Wanna jump in?"

"You know I kind of suck at batting," Toby said, shrugging like it was not a big deal.

The kid holding the bat was captain of the soccer team, the type of kid who should have cared that Toby couldn't bat. But he chuckled in a friendly way. "Yeah, I know. Doesn't matter. C'mon."

As Toby stood up, a gust of wind scattered the worksheets, and the softball player set down the bat to help Toby gather them up. And then the two of them jogged off back toward the baseball diamond, leaving the bat behind them. Leaving the boy behind them too.

And why wouldn't they? He was nothing. Everyone thought so. The teachers, the guidance counselors, his aunt and uncle, his mother, even the boy himself. And now Toby, too.

And that's when it happened. Everything just went hot and blank, like it had when he'd thrown the clock at the kid in his foster family. He didn't even remember doing it, only heard about it after from all the people who'd seen him run after Toby, holding a baseball bat and screaming, "I am not nothing!"