Fangboy. Part 2

Nathan understood death as a vague concept. He knew, for example, that when he crushed a beetle its guts came out and it stopped moving. This had made him sad, and he'd made it a point not to crush any more beetles.

Dad had read him a book about a little boy with two dogs, great dogs, hunting dogs, and at the end of the book both of the dogs had died. Dad was crying while he read it-not sobbing, but several tears trickled down his cheek-and Nathan had found the book overwhelmingly depressing, even if he didn't quite get it.

He knew immediately that his parents were dead.

Still there, but gone.

Nathan poked Mom on the arm, trying to get her to come back to life. "Mom...?"

He didn't know what to do.

He cried for a while.

Then he got scared. He knew he shouldn't be frightened of his own mom and dad, even though they were dead, but he couldn't help it. He went outside and sat in his front yard and cried some more.

He didn't want the candy anymore. In fact, Nathan Pepper would never again eat candy of any sort. Licorice sticks, lemon drops, chocolate bars-the idea of all of them would be forever repulsive to him.

Nathan sat outside for five hours. He only cried for about two of those hours, off and on, but fortunately he was weeping when the postman arrived with the day's mail. Though Kirk Keller heard plenty of bawling kids on his route, this sounded different. He knocked on the door to the wooden fence, got no answer, briefly considered continuing with his route as if nothing happened, and then decided to go inside.

Kirk would become something of a hero at the Hammer's Lost post office for the next couple of weeks. After all, none of the other carriers had ever discovered a pair of corpses while en route. He would retell the story countless times throughout his life, gradually exaggerating the level of decomposition until it became a tale of his discovery of two human-shaped piles of goo.

The police came to investigate. They asked Nathan many questions, but he kept his mouth tightly closed and never said a word.

"Perhaps we should adopt the boy," said Dr. Thompson, lying in bed with his wife.

"Is it because you want to do experiments on him?" asked Mrs. Thompson.

Dr. Thompson was silent for a long moment.

"Perhaps," he finally admitted.

"Then no," Mrs. Thompson said.

The Bernard Steamspell Home For Unfortunate Orphans was run by Bernard Steamspell, a man who was very impressed by his own accomplishments, despite their scarcity. Over the past thirty years, he had engaged in thirty-two different business ventures, all of which had failed. He'd won the Our Lady of The Weeping Statue Orphanage in a bar bet over who could inhale the most black pepper. He'd renamed it after himself, as he had all of his other businesses, and immediately sought to figure out how he could make this non-profit establishment more profitable.

There were plenty of expenses that could be cut. The Our Lady of the Weeping Statue Orphanage had never exactly served gourmet meals, but under Steamspell's leaders.h.i.+p, its dining experience only rose above the level of "vile slop" on Thursdays, which he reluctantly allowed to become Taco Night. He sold the current twenty-eight mattresses and used the proceeds to purchase fifty-four much worse ones. Hot water was limited to his private bathroom.

These were easy changes to make, because Steamspell loathed children. Whether they were well-behaved or rambunctious, intelligent or rock-stupid, fat or thin (though they would all eventually become thin in his care), Steamspell hated them all. Rotten brats. If they weren't awful little things, they'd still have parents.

Though Steamspell did not beat the orphans without justification, he found this justification remarkably easy to find. He had a large wooden paddle that he used to administer the beatings, but liked to turn it sideways, to better focus the pain. Every orphan under his roof had been beaten at least thrice, and a couple of the worst troublemakers were well into the triple digits. Despite his best efforts to control the impulse, Steamspell often burst into maniacal laughter as he struck them with the paddle.

Nathan had tried to be brave as he rode in the front of the police car that drove him to the orphanage. The officer he'd been with the most, a gentle-eyed man named William, had told him that it was time to be a big boy, and a.s.sured him that while he'd be sad for a while, he'd make plenty of friends at his new home.

The police had seen his teeth, of course. The reactions were evenly divided between horror and fascination, though those who fell into the "horror" category did not express this in front of Nathan, out of courtesy for the fact that he'd just lost his parents.

"His name is Nathan," said William, giving him a gentle shove forward to his new caregiver.

"Nathan, eh?" Steamspell asked. "Do people call you Nate? That would be easier."

Nathan shook his head.

"Well, we can make do with Nathan for now." Steamspell hated learning the children's names, and preferred to go with identifiers like Kid With Cowlick, Boy With Two Moles on Chin, and Blond Gawky Whiner.

"He's quiet but very polite," said William. "But before you take him into your care, you should be aware of his oddity."

Steamspell frowned. "Oddity. He'd better not be a bed wetter. I won't tolerate that." He glared at Nathan. "I've put many lads before you in diapers, and if you think they only have to wear them overnight, you're sorely mistaken."

"I don't wet the bed," said Nathan, softly.

"Did I just see what I think I saw?" asked Steamspell. "Open your mouth again, boy."

Nathan did as he was told.

Steamspell let out a long, harsh laugh. "Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned! I've never seen such a thing. The children I get are rarely top quality, but this..."

"He's a very nice boy," said William.

"Oh, I'm sure he is!" Steamspell held his sides as he laughed. "What a tragic young man you are! My G.o.d, the other children will eat you alive when they see those things. I don't mean that literally, of course. In a literal sense, it's much more likely that you'll eat them." He laughed some more, and committed that joke to memory with the intention of using it at least five or six more times.

"Are you going to be okay?" William asked Nathan.

Nathan was relatively certain that he was not going to be okay, but he nodded. "Yes, sir."

"Good." The police officer shook his hand, and then left.

Steamspell briefly glanced at a piece of paper inside a folder. "Parents killed themselves, did they?"

"No, sir."

"Boy, when you address me, you will say 'sir.' Do you understand?"

"I did say 'sir.'"

"Then say it in such a way that I don't immediately forget that you said it! I will be treated with respect. If you wish to eat and be sheltered from the rain and sleep without being bitten by snakes, you will need to learn that I am the most important person in your life."

"Yes, sir."

Steamspell struck him on the side of the head, an open-palmed blow that made Nathan's ears ring.

"I said 'sir'!" Nathan insisted.

"I know you did. I'm not deaf. That was for all of the bad things you did before you came to live with me. I think we can both agree that a slap to the ear is an extremely mild punishment for all of the sins you've acc.u.mulated, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"So now we're starting clean. From now on, when I beat you, it will be for transgressions after this moment. Does that sound fair?"

"Yes, sir."

"Are you hungry?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you bite the heads off chickens?" Steamspell laughed. "Wouldn't that be something to see? I wonder when real geeks get started in the geeking business. I'd guess it was pretty early, wouldn't you?"

"I don't know, sir."

"No, I guess you wouldn't, not having grown up in a carnival atmosphere. Maybe it's something I'll exploit. Do you like the taste of live chicken? Oh, no matter, we'll deal with it later. Come on, Nate, let's get you to your mattress."

On his second day at the orphanage, Nathan was given the nickname "Fangboy." His first day was mostly spent scrubbing down the kitchen with another boy who never spoke, and his first night was spent lying on his mattress, weeping softly under a thin blanket that had a mild scent of mold.

The other boys did not bother him that first night, possibly because they all remembered how they'd cried their first night at the orphanage. Nathan didn't want to cry, he wanted to be brave, but he couldn't help himself. He missed his mom and dad, and his own bed, and edible meals. (Dinner had consisted of gray and white lumps that, by popular vote, were determined by the boys to be chicken and dumplings, though in fact they were meatloaf.) The second day, first thing in the morning, a boy who was about ten grabbed Nathan's toothbrush out of his hand. "It's mine now!" he declared.

"Give it back!" Nathan shouted.

The boy, Arnold, shook his head and held the toothbrush up out of Nathan's reach. "I'm trading you," he said. "I'm older, so I get the better toothbrush."

Toothbrushes were among the many items that Steamspell felt were unnecessary to replace on a regular basis, though he did not force the boys to recycle dental floss.

"No!" Nathan shouted. The toothbrush, though not custom-made, was the largest size Nathan's father had been able to find. He knew he could make do with a smaller brush, but despite his lack of social interaction, he realized that this was a pivotal moment. If he let the boy steal his toothbrush, he'd always be the Kid Whose Toothbrush You Could Steal. He wasn't going to be pushed around. "You can't have it!"

Arnold dropped the toothbrush onto the floor. The floor was actually rather clean because of all of the available child labor, but still, one never appreciated having one's toothbrush dropped onto the floor. "What's wrong with your mouth?"

Nathan closed his mouth and said nothing.

"Hey, everybody, come over here!" said Arnold, beckoning to the other orphans. "The new kid has fangs!"

"I do not!" said Nathan.

"Look at them! Those can't be real, can they?"

The other boys all crowded around him, and Nathan felt his face burn red with embarra.s.sment. He covered his mouth with his left hand.

"Go on, show them your fangs!"

"They aren't fangs."

"They sure are! They're like Dracula fangs, except it's all your teeth! What happened? Were you born like that? Show the others!"

Nathan shook his head.

"I said, show the others!"

The other boys began a chant. "Show us! Show us! Show us!"

Nathan covered his mouth with both hands now, and desperately tried to keep himself from crying. His face burned so hot that he thought it might disintegrate into ashes.

"Show us! Show us! Show us!"

"What the blazes is going on in here?" asked Steamspell, peeking his head into the large (but not really large enough for fifty-four boys) bedroom.

"He has weird teeth and he won't show us!"

Steamspell chuckled. "What are you trying to hide, boy? Think you can keep those choppers covered forever? You might as well get it over with."

Nathan didn't want to get it over with. He was pretty sure he could keep his teeth covered forever, if necessary. But instead, he pulled back his lips and tried to give the other kids a pleasant smile.

They gasped. All of them.

One of them said a word that Nathan didn't remember having heard before but which he thought might be one of the bad words that his parents had told him never to say. "He does have fangs! He's a fangboy!"

"Fangboy!" several of the others shouted. "Fangboy! Fangboy! Fangboy!"

Nathan turned and ran. One of the kids on the edge of the crowd tripped him, and he fell to the floor, landing hard on his elbow.

"Freak show!" one of them yelled.

"Creepy mouth!" yelled another.

For a moment, Nathan thought they might hoist him above their shoulders and take him to be tarred and feathered (which had actually sounded kind of fun when his mother read to him about it, but sounded much less fun now). They did not. Instead, they just kept laughing at him and shouting new names until finally Steamspell angrily told them all to get back to their ch.o.r.es. Nathan very much doubted that this was done to salvage his dignity.

He lay there on the floor for a while, until Steamspell harshly suggested that he quit doing that.

FOUR.

If you excluded the beatings, the bad food, the ridicule, the stolen personal items, the lack of privacy, the noise, the toilet that never quite flushed properly, the drinking water with colorful specks in it, the scary shadows that danced across the ceiling at night, the drab decor, and the overall mood of desperation and misery, the orphanage was still a rotten place to live.

At least the other kids-most of them, anyway-weren't truly mean. Once the novelty of Nathan's appearance wore off they-again, most of them-treated him as one of their own. Which is to say that they included him in their daily discussions of how awful it was to be stuck in such a place.

Nathan's first beating happened on his second day, when Nathan failed to pull the weeds in the backyard garden to Steamspell's satisfaction. Nathan protested the punishment on the grounds that Steamspell had not actually bothered to look at the garden before picking up his paddle, and also because if Nathan were to pluck all of the weeds, the garden would have no actual contents.

Steamspell did not appreciate either of these explanations.

Nathan's mother and father had believed in the value of a good spanking, so he was not a stranger to receiving this sort of discipline. He was not, however, used to the level of cruelty and sheer exuberance on display. The spanking from Steamspell hurt, and went on for a good five minutes beyond what seemed necessary to send any message beyond "Bernard Steamspell is a s.a.d.i.s.t."