The Scar Boys

School's Out

It was around this time that my grades hit rock bottom and my parents were called to the school for a meeting with the principal.

Mom and Dad got there a few minutes early, and the three of us sat in the seats outside the principal's office in uncomfortable silence. That this meeting had been called wasn't a surprise to anyone.

The first few years after the lightning strike, when I was spending more time in hospital beds than classrooms, I was never able to catch up in school.

The best I could manage was to squeak back. It's not that I wasn't smart enough, it's that I was too physically and emotionally tired to do the work.

My parents tried hiring tutors, but there just wasn't enough gas in my tank for academics.

Even after I stopped the doctors' visits and even after I started to live a more normal life--thanks in large part to Johnny--I never became the kind of student my parents hoped I would be.

"You know, Harry," my father would tell me each time he saw my report card, "a boy like you will have few prospects in life if he doesn't go to a good college." I didn't know if a "boy like me" was a boy who looked like me or a boy who tested like me. I'm not sure which one was worse.

My dad, who didn't look please to be sitting outside the principal's office, was just raising his finger to say something when the door opened and we were called inside.

"Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Harry, please come in," the secretary said. She closed the door behind us as we entered.

The principal, Mr. Sewicky, was a thick, lurching man who wore suits that were too small; it always seemed like he was going to bust out of his clothes like the Hulk.

His hair was cut short in a military style, and on his desk was a gold-colored golf ball affixed to a piece of wood with a plaque that read "Hole in One, Stillwater Greens, October 1978." Behind him on the wall was a mounted and stuffed fish that didn't look happy.

Why Mr. Sewicky was a principal in suburban New York instead of, say, Oklahoma, is a mystery to me.

He didn't come out from behind his desk to shake anyone's hand. Instead, he motioned to three empty seats and we all sat down.

This was the first time my parents had ever been called to Mr. Sewicky's office. Not so for me. The principal and I had become well acquainted over the years. While I had been called down once or twice to talk about my grades, more often it was because one or more of the school's thugs had been picking on me.

Even though I had started to make friends, and even though hanging around a popular kid like Johnny McKenna offered a certain level of protection, that protection had it's limits. 

I was still a favorite target of the school's Nazi youth. There was no shortage of kids like Billy the Behemoth in high school, and I was one of their go-to guys.

There were the obvious things like wedgies and punches and kicks, but sometimes the more twisted of the school's goons would  get creative. There was a kind of art to it.

The worst was in ninth grade shop class when a boy named Alvaro Dimatteo discovered the mystery and wonders of a blowtorch. (You need a license to drive a car or own a gun, but the board of education will hand any fourteen- or fifteen-year-old a blowtorch. I need someone to explain that to me.)

I don't know if Alvaro knew about my deeply ingrained fear of fire, but it didn't matter. Five minutes into class he had me pinned into a corner, the lit blowtorch a few inches from my arms, which were held cowering over my head.