The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan Read Free Book Online Page A

know was a lie. I waited, breathless, for the teacher to decide.
    In the event, the catastrophe rarely struck. I generally made such a convincing show of being smart that it never occurred to my teachers what an ignoramus I really was; it never occurred to them to test me. The axe almost always fell on some other poor shnook with lower grades and a worse reputation. From him who has not, even what he has shall be taken away.
    But though one unbearable moment of suspense might have passed, I knew there’d be another one coming and soon. As I grew in ignorance, my fear of exposure began to haunt even my off-hours. Increasingly, my afternoons and nights and weekends became poisoned with a pervasive nausea of anxiety. I soothed myself with daydreaming and play, so that I neglected my homework even more and had to worry even more about being found out.
    Dreams and anxiety: they fed on each other. The dreams—my heroism and courage and genius in the dreams—created an image of myself that I felt I had to live up to, or try to live up to, or appear to live up to at least. I couldn’t stand the idea of being exposed as weak or cowardly or stupid. It was strange really, when you think about it. In some ways, I was such a little conman. But at the same time I seemed to be nurturing the first small glimmerings of what might one day become a sense of integrity. I wanted to be what I pretended to be. I wanted to be what I dreamed.
    That was why, or one of the reasons why, I got into so many fistfights. A lot of fistfights, all through elementary school and into junior high. It didn’t occur to me until much later how bizarre it was that I should have fought so much. I lived in an affluent Long Island suburb of Manhattan. I wasn’t a roughneck. It wasn’t a roughneck town. And yet I always seemed to be slugging it out with somebody, and often it was somebody who was a lot bigger than I was. Sometimes I was in the right and sometimes in the wrong and sometimes there wasn’t much to choose between one argument and the other. Once or twice, I was the aggressor and a bully, occasions that make me ashamed to this day. But more often than not, I was just standing my ground in a situation where another boy would have yielded to the intractable boy logic of big and small. Some older kids would try to chase me off a field and I wouldn’t go. Or one of the school thugs would pick on a little kid or on a girl and I’d step in. Sometimes I got beaten up. Sometimes I dusted the guy. A lot of times it ended with nothing more than some big talk and posturing. But because of my dreams, because I had to live up to the image of myself in my dreams, I could never back down or run away. And if another kid and I agreed to meet somewhere after school and punch out our differences, I could never fail to keep the appointment. I had to be there.
    By the time I was in fifth grade, my reputation was such that when my teachers sent a really bad kid to the principal’s office for discipline, they would assign me to escort him, my hand on his elbow, as if I were the law of the land. One of these tough guys once elbowed me in the stomach and ran for it, trying to escape. I had to chase him across the playground and tackle him. It was like a scene out of a cop movie—except we were ten years old!
    I remember a touch football game I played in summer camp once. I was on the line. A much older boy, fifteen or sixteen at least, a head taller than I was and a real muscle man, was positioned opposite me. Each time the ball was snapped, the kid would run straight into me, smack me around, trample me. It was not the usual touch football roughhousing. It was elbows to the face and fists to the stomach and when he knocked me over he’d step on me where I lay. I told him to cut it out. He refused. I complained to the ref. But the thug wouldn’t listen to the ref either. Pretty soon, I was crying. Blood and snot were running down my face. The ref told me to line up