Fiction
Fat Kid Charlie
The classroom bullying gets pointed.
“Oomph! Ouch!” Charlie yelled out. When he sat on the tack, it sounded like he was letting out air before the pain registered.
Right after the sound effects, the class broke out into a collective laugh, some of it a nervous laugh. Everyone realized that Freddie had finally done it.
For days, Freddie had been scheming about taking tacks from the corkboard, saying it would be funny to put them on Charlie’s seat. He had made Charlie the target of his scorn for weeks. Charlie was an odd kid, a bit on the heavy side. Chubby, that’s all. Charlie wasn’t into the games in the yard, and Freddie, a born-leader of boys, convinced us we needed to dislike Charlie as much as he did. None of us wanted to be the next “Fat Kid Charlie,” Freddie’s schoolyard put-down, something he had for everyone that crossed him. Mine was the more innocuous and subtle, “Tim,” on the account I hadn’t gotten my braces yet.
Charlie wore his hair cropped. His thick eyebrows accentuated his very blue eyes set on his very round soccer-ball head. He wore his black canvas Chuck Taylors high-tops tight. They granted him a little slack in the yard, given most of us could only afford Keds. Most days, he wore work-pants or overalls with a plain blue dress shirt. He was blue-collar in grammar school. Freddie’s uniform was an open flannel shirt over a white t-shirt and jeans, the cool outfit of the day. He kept his streaky brown hair to one side without a part. His dark complexion and freckles offset his chipped tooth. He was the tough kid in the playground.
Our teacher rushed over to check on Charlie. He was crying and holding between his stubby thumb and forefinger the flat part of a metal tack that he had just pulled out of his butt cheek. Ms. Clarkson was appalled. Turning to look at her class with a look of dismay and with one alarming thought: how could one of my little angels have done this?
Maybe at that moment, she recalled the reaction to Charlie’s scream and concluded that it was likely more than just a few angels were in on the prank. Now, she was angry.
I had never seen her angry.
She looked at Freddie, maybe the only angel she doubted, but Freddie had his patented not-me mask on. It was even better than O.J.’s look when showing the court that the glove didn’t fit.
That first time, and who could have guessed there would be more to come, I was glad my desk was on the other side of the classroom, far away from where I’m certain you could feel Ms. Clarkson’s heat.
The rest of the school day, Ms. Clarkson searched for clues, losing trust in her angels minute by minute. After he came back from the nurse’s office, Charlie sat quietly in his seat, his round face surveying the class of monsters he imagined were out to get him. Poor Charlie.
It seemed that was end of the tack-prank. Weeks went by without any new incidents. Most of us had forgotten about how upset Ms. Clarkson had been. Then, Charlie cried out in his seat again. This time there was no laugh from the class. If it was Freddie, he had not said a word to anyone, but between Charlie’s stubby thumb and forefinger was another silver tack he had just pulled out of this chubby cheek.
Ms. Clarkson threw another fit, marking the second time I had seen her angry. All the work she had done to combat bullying was for naught. I looked at Freddie across the room, as did some of the boys around me, and he gave us the O.J. look again. Because no one fessed up, the whole class lost lunch-time yard for a week. Losing the privilege of going outside made us upset with Freddie, but he pleaded that it wasn’t him, and unbelievably, he sounded believable.
Now, it would have been best if the pranks ended after these two incidents, but they kept happening. Randomly, unpredictably. Charlie would scream first thing in the morning or yell out as we were getting dismissed. It seemed the pranks occurred when Charlie began to forget to look down at his seat before plopping down. I wondered if Freddie was keeping an eye for Charlie lack of discipline, although, on at least one occasion, Freddie had an alibi — he was at the principal’s office when it happened.
Finally, the janitor came by our room and took off every paper from the corkboards, taking all the thumbtacks with him.
Charlie had become morose, withdrawing from the class. He didn’t speak to most of us monsters anymore, rather he started to relish his role of an outcast. He was a good student and he morphed into the teacher’s pet, with Ms. Clarkson trying to make up for his pain. He had become more unlikable with every new tack that stuck to his butt.
One day after school, I was in the yard playing baseball with friends when the kids, including Freddie, who attended the after-school program in the lunchroom poured out into the yard, pretty much breaking up our game of strikebox. Freddie got to talking to me about Charlie, about how horrible he had become. I agreed. I hated that he was the teacher’s pet now and how that had transformed him into a jerk. He also got to do all her errands, deliveries to the main office, wetting down the chalkboard erasers, and picking up books from the librarian for an upcoming lesson. Chores that used to be split among a few of us, now all went to him. I had cherished the freedom and power of walking the empty halls with the wooden class-pass, peering into classroom after classroom, kids stuck to their desks.
Freddie continued his harangue about Charlie, getting more animated, till I realized he and I were the only ones talking about Charlie. The other kids had gone back to the game or had gone home. Then, he exploded the demand, “You’re next. You gotta put a tack under his butt next!”
I didn’t know how to respond. Freddie had gotten me riled up about hating Charlie, but I didn’t hate him enough to put a tack under his ass. When I started to counter, Freddie moved to a different tactic. He told me I had to do it. It was a threat. I walked home distracted, didn’t even remember the route I took, but I decided I wouldn’t do it, even if Freddie beat the crap out of me.
Over the next few days, I didn’t talk to Freddie much. I avoided him, without making it too obvious, but he did catch my eye a couple of times, making a rolling motion with his hands and raising his eyebrows as if to say, “Come on, already.” Then, something odd happened, I saw another kid, nonchalantly, make a similar sign at me. I didn’t know him, so I ignored it.
In the days that followed, what was odd became routine. A number of kids made the same signal and Freddie started to get mean. During the dodgeball game, it was clear he wanted to make me eat the ball. He hated me for a few weeks, but eventually the pressure let up. Maybe the prank got old and there were no more incidents.
It must have been around the start of spring, late March, when Charlie jumped and screamed in his seat again holding a red plastic push pin. Someone got him good. He had been so careful when he sat down, always checking, then looking around, as if to say, “Not today, monsters.” He had also gotten insufferable. Ms. Clarkson had him sit near her, up front. He acted like her junior assistant, making faces after looking at our grade as he walked around the class returning our homework.
That there had not been a tack incident in months, made the standard adult response feel like a hurricane. Even the nurse stopped by the classroom. Thinking these incidents were behind her, suddenly Ms. Clarkson was at first shocked and then full-tilt pissed off.
Freddie looked at me with a smile, thinking I had finally done it, but I gave him my best O.J. After school, he and a few of the boys gave me some fives-on-the-down-low, but I insisted it wasn’t me. My denials seemed to be even more praise-worthy. They couldn’t believe I wouldn’t take the credit. They said I was good. I was good bad.
For weeks after the last incident, once I convince everyone it wasn’t me, we debated who had done it. None of the other monsters would admit to it, either. The school year ended with no more incidents. The culprit for all the tack incidents had been accounted for except one. Yes, Ms. Clarkson had a lot fewer angels than she thought, but we couldn’t solve the mystery of that last tack, of who had done it.
We started suspecting some of the quiet kids who probably began to hate Charlie as he got more and more obnoxious. Maybe one of them took matters into his or her own hands. One of the nutty girls who sat near Charlie became a prime suspect for a few days. She didn’t like Charlie. She was odd in a similar way, but struggled with schoolwork and Charlie saved some of his best faces of disbelief when he, as the junior assistant, returned her homework. When her older brother heard about the rumor, he made sure we understood that it wasn’t her and to leave her alone.
On the last day of school, Charlie was chatting with Ms. Clarkson while cleaning out his desk. It was one of those half-day, no-rules, no-work day. I walked over to the side of her desk to say good-bye so I could go play in the yard until dismissal. As she was wishing me a long fun summer vacation, just on the other side of her desk, where Charlie sat next to her, I saw Charlie put into his bag a small clear box of colored push-pins. Charlie stared at me after seeing I had noticed. With those blue eyes opened wide, floating on his soccer-ball head, he mouthed, “See you next fall, loser.” All I could say was, “Goodbye, Charlie.”
Special thanks to Walfredo Don for his illustration accompanying this story.
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