Reality Boy by A. S. King Read Free Book Online Page B

some more. For now, let’s get you guys ready to go home.”
    SPED class takes a while to get ready at the end of the day. Taylor needs to gather up her coat and her book bag and anything else she needs and has to be reminded five times not to forget anything in her desk. Deirdre needs help with her jacket, and her foot has fallen off the footrest again, so Fletcher puts it back on and secures it there, giving it a loving, sturdy wiggle.
    Have you ever seen
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
with Jack Nicholson in it? SPED class reminds me of it. We’re not crazy or in some mental ward being psychologically abused by some sadist nurse, but we’re an accidental family, the same way they are. I know from driving past the mental hospital a few miles away that people on the outside look in and just see mental patients. Not people. That’s how people look at SPED, too. But we’re all people. Real people. I’m like Jack Nicholson’s character—once demanding, hard to handle, violent, and scary, but now electroshocked into brain toast by the golden rule of anger management:
Have no demands.

13
    JACKO WALKS RIGHT up to me when I get to the gym and says, “Okay, mon. I know you can’t fight here, but how about outside here? How about you and me?”
    “Dude. You’re not Jamaican. Just give it up,” I say.
    “What you mean, I’m not Jamaican?” he says.
    “I mean you’ve lived in the Black Hills development since you were three. Two developments down from me, remember? And you go to a private school that costs, like, thirty grand a year.”
    He pushes me. “You didn’t answer my question,
bumbaclaat
.” He says this in a really convincing Jamaican accent.
    “Will I fight you?” I say. “No. Not even if you rip my head off and piss down my neck.”
    My anger management coach would have a field day with Jacko. He has all the physical cues.
Clenched jaw. Shaking all over.
I walk past him to the speed bag and drop all my stuff on the floor, in the corner. I take off my shirt and start on the bag.
    Jacko says something to me, but I don’t hear him.
    I stop the bag with my left hand and ask, “So why do you call yourself Jacko, anyway?”
    He doesn’t answer me, and after looking at me for a few seconds, he just walks away.
Fists tight. Muscles tensed.
I go back to the bag and superimpose faces on it. Tasha. Nanny. Tasha. Mom. Tasha. Nanny. Tasha. Nichols. Tasha. The cameraman from the first episode who said, “Look at his little pecker!” Tasha. Mom. Nanny. Dad. Nanny. Tasha. Mom.
    I start to sweat. I feel the war paint dripping off my face and arms. The chief rolls down my back and onto the gym floor. Now I’m just Gerald. My arms burn. My neck burns. The bag hypnotizes me, and I’m mesmerized by how it seems to know when my hand is coming toward it. How it knows me. Saves me every day from going to jail.
Fuck jail.
    There is a rough push from the side into my rib cage. My first reaction is to pull my right back and let it fly. I stop mid-punch and see it’s Jacko. He’s saying some shit I can’t keep up with. I start to back up. I make him dance with me. His two friends are behind him. They walk me around the gym, weaving in and out of the equipment.
    He throws a slow punch and I dodge it. He throws a faster one and I dodge that, too. I feel the gym watching us. All other sounds have ceased except the drums in my head. I hopfrom foot to foot. I feel at one with the universe doing this dance with Jacko. Like I’m on one of the chief’s peyote trips.
    Jacko keeps throwing punches. I keep escaping them. I know how to catch his fist and flip him. I know how to knock him right out. I know how to kill him with my bare hands and eat his face, if I want. Instead, I make him dance. And dance. And dance. He’s starting to get tired. He’s getting slower. He’s sweating. I can see his American fat jiggling on the surface of his furious Jamaican muscles.
    “Okay! Enough!” A trainer steps in. “You! Back to the