I Hate Everybody

by Alice Kinerk

Chase was standing by the whiteboard in his fourth-grade classroom, banging his math book against the tray at the bottom, where his teacher kept Expo markers. He’d discovered if he wailed hard enough, if he spread his stance and put the textbook above his head and brought it straight down again, like his gramps used to do with an ax, he could make the markers jump. Chase made it his goal to make the markers jump so high they would fall out of the tray.

He didn’t have to think about it. It wasn’t like the Think Sheet the school counselor gave him whenever he punched a kid or got caught stealing. Next time I feel upset, I will try _____ instead. This wasn’t words he wrote just to make adults leave him alone. Knocking the markers out was something he really wanted, and he went at it with everything he had.

As Chase swung he screamed.

I!

HATE!

(Pause for suspense.)

EVERYBODY!

He screamed it just like that, too. The first two words came slow. Wait a beat. Then Everybody shot out rapid fire. It was the same thing every time. But who cares. The kids were already out of the room. As soon as Chase started screaming, every kid in the class scooted back their chairs and calmly (cheerfully?) walked out the door, into the classroom across the hall, which was their “buddy room” for emergencies such as this, leaving the teacher to wait with Chase until the counselor, (who spent her days in the primary wing, singing “The Kindness Song” with booger-faced five-year-olds) could whip through the remainder of her lesson, grab her walkie, and hustle down to fourth grade.

It wasn’t fair. When his classmates went to the buddy room they got free time. Some had even started sneaking their Chromebooks as they left. Chase had noticed, but their teacher hadn’t. The other kids always got to go into the buddy room and play on their Chromebooks, while Chase had to fill out a Think Sheet and got suspended.

Chase doubled down on his goal. He beat the silver tray so hard the whiteboard bucked against the foldable divider wall, and the divider wall rocked back and forth, and the markers jumped, but still they did not fall. There was a second teacher in the room now, the office lady who handed out the laminate cards with the word TARDY on them when you came in late. She’d heard it on the walkie and come in to see if she could help. Chase observed his teacher smile and shake her head. It drove him crazy, her calmness. Who was she to say the situation didn’t require help? Shouldn’t the office lady be asking him? The two adults were whispering now, heads together, the way people do when they’re talking crap. Chase was too far away to hear.

Chase slammed his book against the marker tray. He looked back at the teachers. The front office lady had a mischievous grin and his teacher was smiling too.

“I!” Chase screamed. He watched as the front office lady’s mouth mimed the word.

“HATE!” His eyes were locked on her. There was no doubt. She was mimicking him. A full-grown adult, mimicking a child. And then his teacher laughed! Every kid in his class had turned their backs on him, and the adults laughed. Chase brought the book down and again the markers did not fall. The more Chase failed, the angrier he got.

This time Chase did not get to say the final word. The counselor was there suddenly, beside him, yoinking the textbook out of his hands, and when he scrabbled for it she held it up higher than he could reach and passed it to his teacher, who passed it to the front office lady, who set it on the top shelf of the bookshelf, while at the same time the counselor stepped forward, backing him into a corner where there were no books to pick up, nothing at all except Chase, the white board, the silver tray, and the half-dozen Expo markers which had still not fallen to the floor.

Chase grabbed the markers like a hawk grabs fish, and flung five of the six at the floor where they rolled away and disappeared. He uncapped the final marker and held it out. The counselor reached for him. He slashed a blue line across her sweatshirt. “Oh!” his teacher said then, and he slipped past the counselor and charged at her next. Expo marker as bayonet. He jabbed, marking an exclamation mark between her boobs. Then he ducked under her arm, shot out the door and down the hall with a roar, still wielding the marker, pushed through the double glass doors to the parking lot, all the time with the front office lady jogging behind yelling impotently. “Stop! Chase! Come back!”

Chase ran all the way home. It wasn’t far. Less than a mile.

Sometimes when Chase ran, something weird happened in his brain. Years ago, when Chase was little, he used to have a friend who lived behind them on the far side of the woods, by the park-and-ride. Sometimes after playing with this friend, Chase would run home through the woods. As he ran, he used to imagine he was crossing through some magical threshold, running away from real life and into fantasy. It was never true of course, but Chase kept on imagining.

And it was like that now. Chase had imagined as he ran away from school that Gramps was not dead, his terrible mother was. That was nice while it lasted, but only made him extra mad when he got home and it wasn’t true.

Sometimes she could be hard to waken, but Mom roused when Chase got down on his knees and screamed “I hate everybody!” as loud as he could in her face. She became immediately angry, assuming he’d been suspended. Chase would have liked to explain to his mother that he hadn’t been suspended, he had simply run out the door and nobody in the whole Donegan Elementary School was fast enough to catch him. It was just the sort of heroism that sometimes put a smile on his terrible mother’s face. But not this time, because he was still screaming at the top of his lungs and now so was she. So they screamed back and forth, full of vehemence, communicating nothing.

Then Chase’s mom’s cell phone rang, and she patted around on the couch cushions, feeling for it.

It was school. Chase didn’t have to be told. He went on screaming, even as she found her phone, put it to her ear, poked her finger in her other ear and turned away. “This’s Chelsea.”

Chase screamed all the way down the hall to his bedroom. He screamed while he stuffed his other pair of sweatpants and the twenty dollar bill his dad had given him last time he had visited, and a few other things in a pillowcase and spun it closed. Then, abruptly as a TV show scene change, Chase stopped screaming. He went to his bedroom window, slid it open, and dropped the pillowcase outside. He stuck his head and torso outside, and hung there a moment half-in, half-out. His window was low enough. It was only a few feet from the ground. He kicked and wriggled and fell. There was a bush under Chase’s window, a scrubby thing with varigated green and yellow leaves that his mom had planted then ignored. You could still see the root ball. It had never taken to the soil, but sat raised above, as though if it had legs it would have left already. This ugly little bush caught Chase, and broke his fall.

Chase stood, brushed the leaves and dry twigs off his shirt and pants, and listened. His mom was still on the phone. He could hear her complaining about him, calling him “unmanageable”. Chase could have said the same thing about her.

And so Chase set out to make his way in the world. First he had to find a job. That didn’t go well. No one would hire him. He was only ten. He inquired at Arco, Quik Shop, Louis Flowers, Burger King, Starbucks, MOD Pizza, Super Suds Car Wash & Detail, Fresh Greens, and Famous Footwear. Everywhere he went he heard no.

Chase hadn’t expected the job search to be easy, but everyone kept making aren’t-you-cute expressions, and asking whether he ought to be in school, or where his parents were.

Along with the liquor store he knew he was too young to enter, these nine businesses made up the entire Route 16 Plaza. The Route 16 Plaza was the only business close enough to Chase’s house to walk to. It was the place he had (just an hour before) felt certain he would find a job. It was now a place he hated along with everything and everyone else.

“Fuck!” Chase yelled at the pearly sky.

The sky did not respond.

Chase coughed. He scowled and spat on the cracked gray pavement of the parking lot. Then he reached into his pocket, discovered the Expo marker from earlier, and threw it down disdainfully. He dropped onto a curb and dug around inside his pillowcase. For a moment, Chase was fully absorbed in peeling shards of paper–thin plastic off a packet of fun-size Twizzlers candy. He experienced a pleasant reverie watching each piece of sticky clear plastic flutter off his fingertips and get carried away in the breeze. He thought about rationing the candy, taking tiny bites and saving some for later. But then Chase popped the whole thing in his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and it was gone.

Next to the Route 16 Plaza there was actually one more business, easy to overlook. To the right, a dark drive tunneled under madrona trees, twisted off and disappeared. Chase could just make out the corner of a squat, moss-colored building at the end. There were some garbage cans and a little wooden sign which had once been white but now was mossy green as well. The sign could not be read from where he was sitting. But he knew from prior trips to the plaza it said Taxidermist.

Chase’s gramps had told him what taxidermist meant. Thinking of Gramps, his heart panged. He stood and began walking toward the building. The madronas were soon around him, their weird, barkless trunks on either side of the driveway. There was something magic about the place, Chase decided. He felt himself stumbling on an adventure. Chase did not like reading, but he did like listening to his teacher read aloud. He’d thought he’d hate it, last year in third grade, when the teacher had switched from picture books to chapter books, one little black-and-white picture every ten or twelve pages. But he hadn’t. He’d actually enjoyed listening to a long story with almost no pictures. This year the teacher had gone on with chapter books, and he’d gone on enjoying them.

Now Chase imagined himself the hero of an exciting chapter book, one where he has to triumph against challenges every day. Chase felt buoyed by his escape from school first and then home as well. He wondered if his mom had even noticed he was gone yet. Doubtful.

The taxidermist turned out to be a manufactured house much like his own, with a dented roof and waist-high grass, fronted by a rutted driveway. Chase climbed the porch steps and opened the door.

“Are you hiring?” He did not bother with Hello.

The taxidermist was a middle-aged man with a gaunt, almost feminine face and dark, deep–set eyes. He looked Chase over with a thoughtful expression. There was something a little frightening about him. He took Chase in slowly. Chase watched as the taxidermist’s thin tongue popped out, licked spit from the corner of his mouth, then gave way to a hacking cough. This was followed by the appearance of a very white handkerchief and a dainty dabbing. The cloth had come out of the pocket quickly, but afterward had to be carefully shaken, folded in half, folded in half again, then poked back into the pocket out of sight. Chase went from fear to hope the longer the man went without speaking. Finally the taxidermist opened his mouth. “Where are your parents?”

Chase’s hands became fists. He scowled and turned away. It might have appeared as though he was actually turning to look for his parents, as though one’s parents were something a child might remember to bring with him, but then ignore and allow to wander off.

Chase went stomping down the steps shouting curse words, and the taxidermist just shut the door and did not follow him.

Chase had not been inside long enough to notice another customer in the store with him. Chase had not differentiated the customer’s liver-colored Jeep Cherokee from the taxidermist’s various vehicles, which were parked and/or broken down on either side of the long driveway. Chase didn’t even hear the engine start up. He was walking back the way he’d come, under the madronas. He was heading for the garbage cans, and planning to kick them. In Chase’s imagination, the taxidermist’s garbage cans were brimming with the guts of dead animals, and when he kicked them the slimy contents would go sloshing across the lanes of Route 16. Hearts, brains, intestines, blood. Drivers would not be able to use their brakes. Everything would be chaos. Collisions. Vehicles overturning. Chase smiled, picturing it. Route 16 would be a mess.

“Need a job?” The other customer, driving a Jeep, was suddenly beside him.

Chase turned to look. “You got one?”

The man had rolled his window all the way down and was resting an elbow on his door. His expression was squinty despite the shade. He was smiling in a way that seemed like he didn’t really care what Chase decided, he was just offering to be nice.

Chase felt unsure. He’d heard about kidnappers with candy. Chase looked past the man to the empty seat. A folded IGA circular, no candy. He looked in the back. No candy there either. Still, he wasn’t sure.

“My name’s Tom.” The man’s head bobbed up and down. “Tom Angel.” He gave a clear-the-air wave. “I know you’ve been raised not to talk to strangers. But I’m not a stranger anymore, am I? My name’s Tom Angel. And you are…?”

Chase started again toward the garbage can. Tom Angel did too. He rolled the Jeep a little ahead, then braked while Chase caught up. It seemed he was trying to drive at the same speed as Chase, but kept going too fast and had to keep tapping the brake. There was a little squeal from the engine each time.

Tom Angel looked a bit like Gramps. They had the same bushy eyebrows and there was something about the way they spoke, they had a similar way of saying the words, a way of emphasizing certain sounds. Chase hadn’t noticed at first, but then he did. They were really quite alike, once he thought about it.

Chase reached the garbage cans. He lifted up the lid of one can and looked inside. Just bagged up trash bags. He opened the other. They were thick garbage bags, the kind you can’t see through. Chase made out the curved shoulder of a milk jug, and nothing else.

Tom Angel idled nearby. “Kid, you look hard up. You want work, I got you. Otherwise, waddle home to Mama.” He made waddle fingers. “She’s probably worried sick.”

Chase dropped the lid of the garbage can and turned back to Tom Angel. “What kind of work?” He worked up some spit in his mouth and then spat it.

“Easy work. Safe for kids. I’d do it myself, but this old back won’t let me.”

“You gotta clean something out?”

“You could say that.”

“And you got to get into a small place to do it?”

“Yes, yes,” Tom Angel nodded deeply.

“I am good at getting into things.”

Tom nodded again as if this was something he already knew.

Chase made the money sign with his pointer finger and thumb. “How much?”

Tom glanced at his empty lap, then up again. “Twelve dollars.”

Chase nodded. Tom had a deal. He walked around to the passenger side and climbed in.

“Good boy.” Tom Angel said. “Buckle up.”

Chase did as he was told.

Attached to the back of the Jeep a large American flag sat jaunty like a puppy dog tail. The sun had bleached the red stripes orange, and the fly end was ripped to shreds. While the Jeep rolled along in the taxidermist’s long driveway, the flag had hung silent, but as soon as they were on Route 16 doing sixty it was whacking and cracking like fireworks. Chase kept turning around to look. Tom kept humming even though there was no music. Chase couldn’t shake the feeling that someone or something was following them. It was a creepy feeling. But at the same time, he felt proud to be headed to work. Chase turned to the flag again.

Tom Angel cleared his throat. “Sounds like freedom.”

“What does?”

Tom Angel did not reply.

Chase thought about what he’d do when he had not only his dad’s twenty but also Tom Angel’s twelve dollars lining his wallet. His career goal was to be a Twitch Streamer. Chase wanted to be one of those guys who plays games and narrates the action to a devoted audience, living off ads. Luckily, Chase had brought his Chromebook. He had forgotten it at home that morning, then found it while he was getting ready to run away. Now it was at the bottom of his pillowcase. Chase knew how to search for free Wi-Fi. He knew how to play games. As soon as his ad money began rolling in, he’d never have to go home or to school again.

“Not much further now,” Tom Angel said out of nowhere.

“So what needs cleaning?” Chase said. “Is it your gutters?” Chase had cleaned some gutters. Once Gramps had gotten out his ladder, and Chase had climbed up onto his roof, climbed all around and had a ball up there, poked his fingers into the mucky leaves and rotten pine needles, flinging handful after handful onto the lawn. He had enjoyed it so much that the next day he’d climbed up and cleaned the gutters on his own house without even being asked. And he would have done the gutters on a third house on a third day, had there been a third house available to do.

“Yes,” Tom Angel said. “It is my gutters. What a lucky guess.”

“Uh-huh,” Chase said without conviction. He doubted Tom Angel suddenly. There was something too agreeable about him. With Tom Angel, Chase was always right. He suspected there was something else that Tom Angel was planning to have him do. If Tom had some other job, why not just come out and say it? Chase wondered what the unspeakable task might be. It frustrated him. Chase knew there were things adults kept to themselves, a part of the world they believed unsuitable for children. It was in his mom’s midnight visitors, who sometimes made enough noise that he woke up (in which case it was understood that he was to remain in his bedroom no matter what unless it was literally on fire.) It was TV jokes he did not understand. Song lyrics. That kind of stuff. It made Chase livid. Chase believed he was old enough to know everything, deserved to know everything, practically did know everything, at least all the most important stuff. And so it gutted him, it really gutted him, when he sensed that he did not.

“Is that the only job?” Chase said, speaking loudly, above the flag. They’d reached a part of Route 16 that he did not recognize. Maybe he’d been here before, but if so he didn’t recognize it.

“You want more?” Tom smirked. He had his eyes on the road and both hands on the wheel, playing the perfect driver. He barely glanced at Chase. Chase’s mom usually one-handed it, and looked away a lot longer. With Tom it was just a quick glance, then eyes right back to the road.

“I don’t know,” Chase said. Regular income would help until his Twitch Stream got rolling. Already, he felt hungry. The Twizzlers weren’t going to last. “Maybe.”

Tom Angel began making a noise that Chase could only partly hear above the crack of the flag. It was a high-pitched, breathy noise, full of emotion, almost pleading. It was a weird sort of sound, probably one most adults would keep to themselves, but Tom Angel wasn’t. And it wasn’t clear to Chase why he was making it.

Chase clamped his hands over his ears and looked away out the side. Through the trees he could see they were passing a trailer park. The trailers were so close together they were all a blur, but he could see a network of trails spread out behind them. Trash everywhere.

Then Tom Angel took one hand off the driving wheel and placed it on Chase’s thigh.

Chase pushed Tom Angel’s hand away.

Tom Angel put his hand right back.

Chase pushed it away again.

For a third time, Tom Angel placed his palm across the width of Chase’s thigh, halfway between knee and crotch. This time, he clamped his hand onto Chase’s leg such that Chase did not have the strength to peel the big fingers off. Tom was squeezing hard enough to bruise.

Chase scowled. He didn’t know what to do. His chest felt tight. He was afraid. He no longer wanted to accompany Tom Angel home and clean his gutters. No. He wouldn’t do it. Even if it meant turning his back on twelve dollars. Suddenly, Chase wished he was in his bedroom playing video games and eating Twizzlers. He missed the way the shreds of his cast-off wrappers attached themselves to hod carpet fibers. In his imagination, he saw them fluttering as his mom threw open his door.

Chase blinked back tears. He was afraid of crying in front of Tom Angel. It would obviously make the situation worse if he did. Chase felt himself a prisoner, held down with a ball-and-chain.

Then, as Tom slowed for the exit, Chase looked down. His pillowcase was tangled around his leg. He wouldn’t even have to grab it. It would tumble out when he did. And his door was unlocked. Grab the handle, shove it open. Go.

As Tom turned onto the exit, Chase unbuckled his seat belt.

“Hey now,” Tom Angel said.

That was all. That was the last thing Tom Angel said to him. And this time his voice did not sound like Gramps.

Chase grabbed the handle, heaved himself against it.

Then he fell.

 

Alice Kinerk spends her free time attempting to make complicated desserts, most of which are tasty failures, such as the time she tried to make a croquembouche. She’s published dozens of stories. Read more at alicekinerk.com.