2: Fairy Loops

In spite of the fact that Joanne and I never got back to the hayloft, I made it through the rest of my school year with few incidents. It seemed like anytime Drew or the Kowalskis or Andy or even any of the bigger kids in my class (which was all of them) started heading my way, they'd look over their shoulder and see one of the sixth graders nearby and suddenly find something else to do. I felt sort of safe at school for the first time since I started.

Camp was a big thing that summer. Betts was sent to horse camp with Princess for the entire summer. That was great as far as I was concerned, but when I found out Joanne was going to a cheerleading camp, I was really worried. That meant that I'd spend my summer hiding from Drew. I couldn't even get to my friends the Hopkinses without going past Drew's house. We managed it a few times, playing war in their yard and sometimes if there were enough people, we'd play ball in their field. My field had too many horse-apples in it.

I got pretty good at going to the barn like I was going to take care of Gypsy and then heading on out to the woods and circling around behind the Barnes' to get to the Hopkinses' place. Sometimes I even rode Gypsy and let her graze in their field. She was a good old girl. I usually just rode her with just the bareback pad. I'd only seen Drew twice and I'd avoided him on those occasions. Then came the day that he showed up for our game of war. I tried to stay close to my buddies, but Drew kept popping up nearby.

I knew when I shot him and he didn't fall down that I was in trouble. Nobody else was near.

"Hey, you're dead."

"Wrong. You're dead, faggot."

"You're supposed to fall when you get shot."

"Now you get to fall, you little runt." Drew was all over me. He tackled me and sat on me. "You've been avoiding me all year, you little cock. I'm the sixth grader now and your goon squad is all going to junior high. So let me tell you what to expect this year." He didn't tell me anything. He threw an elbow into my ribs and then kneed me in the gut. When he finally left me, I crawled back through the woods and home. I just went into the barn and cried while I brushed Gypsy. I hated him. I hated my life. I wouldn't even be riding the bus with the junior high schoolers. I was dead meat.

I didn't go outside for the next week. I went to the attic instead.

The problem with the attic in the winter was that it was too cold to stay in for long. In the summer, it's hotter than hell. One afternoon it had to be a hundred degrees up there and I just started mixing chemicals randomly. Nothing blew up, but I hit some combination that stunk to high heaven. And it was one of those "heavier than air" things that went right down the stairs. In a few minutes, Mom had me taking everything out to the garage and opened all the doors and windows—most of which were already open as it was July. She had two big box fans and a little rotating one in the kitchen trying to air the house out.

Funny. Next day, Dad said they'd found a science camp they thought I'd be interested in. Sunday I was on a bus.

I was pretty smart, but that doesn't make me a child prodigy or something. In Indiana, they wouldn't have known what to do with a prodigy anyway. I was already in the "smart kids" class in school. But the summer at camp opened my eyes to the possibilities. I learned the difference between physical science and life science, for example. Physical science included most of the things that I was interested in like physics and chemistry. Life science included biology and botany. I'm not saying that wasn't interesting. Especially when my lab partner explained it to me.

Angela Kimes was my lab partner. Science camp encouraged partnering with people who had different interests. Angela was one of about a dozen girls who were at camp with the thirty or so boys. The camp administrators made it clear that there was to be no prejudice based on sex, race, size, or even intelligence. Angela was about twice my size and a girl. She was black and I was white. Opposites in everything, except we were both really smart and—I have to confess—pretty proud of it. We conducted experiments in the chemistry lab, recorded measurements in physics, collected leaves for botany, and charted the growth of sea monkeys in biology. We found that we were eating at the same table and that we walked to convo together in the morning.

Science camp wasn't all science, and we even met to go swimming and she taught me the rudiments of playing tennis. I could barely get the ball over the net, but she held to the fundamentals of no prejudice. Angela was about the same age as me, regardless of what our size suggested. By a fluke, our birthdays being just thirty-five days apart, she was going into sixth grade as I was going into fifth. She was so good at everything and so smart that I forgot entirely that she was a girl. She was mostly interested in life science as I was mostly interested in physical science. We got each other through the rough spots.

"So everything is based on male and female parts," she said, explaining life science to me. "Until you get down to simple life-forms, like amoebas and stuff, all of the life sciences have a dual sex format."

"Yeah. Well, in physical science there's positive and negative," I answered. "That's about the same."

"Right. If you take two hydrogen atoms and combine them with an oxygen atom, which is male and which is female? You don't come out with baby hydrogen and oxygen atoms. It's completely different."

"Like there's a male and female flower," I laughed.

"There's a male part, the stamen, and a female part, the pistil and carpel. The carpel produces the egg and the stamen produces the pollen or sperm. Just like you have a cock and balls that produce semen and sperm and I have a vagina and ovaries that produce eggs. You do know about sperm and eggs, don't you?"

"Um ... of course," I lied. Chickens laid eggs. What's that got to do with those other things? I started getting uncomfortable and squirmy. Angela looked at me like I'd just grown another head. Maybe I had. I tried looking at myself. No luck.

"I thought you country kids were all about farm animals and breeding and stuff," she huffed.

"We plant corn and sometimes wheat. We don't have cattle or pigs or anything."

"Well, there you have it. Corn. You've got the male tassel that provides the sperm or pollen and the female silk that provides the carpel or egg. When the corn gets fertilized, you get little corn seeds that will grow into healthy adults if you plant them."

"Male and female corn?"

"Then you get into the animal kingdom," Angela continued. She was on a roll and we sat down on a log facing each other near the pond. We'd been walking around the campground after dinner and I hadn't paid much attention to where we were. Nobody else was around. 'Male and female created He them.' That's in the Bible. Corn has silk. I have a pussy. Corn has a tassel. You have a cock. The carpel produces the seed. My ovaries produce the egg. The tassel produces the pollen. Your testicles produce the sperm. Put them together and babies. I hope you learn some of this stuff before next summer."

"How do you know all this stuff?" I asked.

"My mom and I have been talking about this stuff since I was practically a baby. She says everything in the world can be explained through male and female or yin and yang as the Japanese say. She's a nurse. I'm going to be a doctor. Mom says so."

None of the rest of science camp was anywhere near that interesting. Every time I thought about it, I started getting stiff. Somehow, I couldn't help substituting Joanne in my mind for Angela. I mean, Angela was nice and I liked her, but Joanne was ... well she was just Heaven.

When school started that fall, all I could think of was that I was going to get beaten to a pulp by Drew and his gang every day.

I hung out at the house until I could see the bus coming and then ran to the road just in time to get on after Drew had. I could see him ahead of me as we went down the aisle and saw his elbow come up to jab me in the gut. Then all of a sudden a big guy blocked the path between Drew and me. He shoved me into the seat against another big guy. I recognized both of them. Carl Fisher and Doug Swift.

"Hey, Brain," Doug said when I almost sat on him. Carl slid into the narrow seat on the other side pinning me between the two. When did these guys get so big? They were both in my class, but last year they were nowhere near as big as this. My life was shit. Now I was going to be beat up in class as well as on the playground.

"I understand you might be able to help us with science this year," Carl said. "I don't mean like doing our homework or anything. But maybe you could help with things that we might not understand when Mr. Boyer says them." I nodded absently.

"We figure if we sit with you on the bus, maybe you could explain things. Unless you want to sit with your buddy Drew," Doug said.

"Uh, no. That's not a problem."

"We aren't a problem either," Carl explained. "You know my brother Bill? He said my year would be a whole lot nicer if nothing bad ever happened to you. He told me to tell you Joanne said. Understand?" I did understand. Carl and Doug had just become my new best friends and I'd do my best to make sure they understood science.

The thing was that Carl and Doug turned out to be really good friends and not just bodyguards. I was still close to a foot shorter than they were and I didn't weigh half as much, but we laughed and told jokes and studied. We all did pretty well that year.

"You've got to think of it in terms of science," I said.

"Huh?" Carl asked. My suggestion had to sound like it was out of thin air. He'd just been talking about how Brenda got to him. Brenda was what I later learned was called an early bloomer. She had huge bumps on her chest and was wearing a bra. Carl was as fascinated with the straps of the contraption as he was with what it contained. He sat behind her all through the day watching for tell-tale signs of the straps moving beneath Brenda's blouse. I'd watched a bit, myself, but he'd actually reached out with the eraser end of his pencil and traced the strap on her back during class. She'd turned around at one point and looked at him with big surprised eyes. She didn't tell him to stop, though. I suppose she was relieved. If we still used inkpots resting in those holes in the old desks, Carl was the type who'd be dipping her pig-tails in it.

"Whoa, man. How does Carl getting hot looking at Brenda have anything to do with science?" Doug asked.

"It's something I learned at science camp last summer. It's a male-female thing." I proceeded to tell them about stamens and carpels and penis and vagina, just like Angela had taught me.