C4 antho - Chamber Four

~58~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
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Grade seven, the boy took the bus to middle school. The
boy’s family moved to the United States and the boy had
started to learn to play the violin. The school put him in
EEO: Extended Educational Opportunities. The boy still
spoke Canadian; he said serviette for napkin, chesterfield for
couch. Initially the boy was shy for saying these words, was
embarrassed when kids would introduce him to other kids,
like he was some Canadian ambassador. Two girls took it
upon themselves to make him a badass. The boy had never
been a badass before. One of the girls took the same bus to
school. She sat one row in front of him and turned around in
her seat and laid her head on her hands and asked him what
it was like to live in Canada.
The boy said, “It’s colder.”
The girl said, “How cold?”
The boy said, “Colder than here.” Then they stopped
talking.
“We are going to make you into such a badass,” the girl
said.
The boy didn’t know why, but talking to the girl was hard
for him. And exciting. He had bought the jeans that the girl
told him about, the ones that she said made his ass look
great. He felt that this was important: a good ass to be a
badass. He was glad for the jeans, too, because they were
loose and when he sat down, the crotch bunched up in the
front so that there was plenty of room if he got an erection.
He got erections all the time now, whenever the two girls
would grab him by the hands and take him to their lockers or
when they hugged him between classes and he could feel
their incipient breasts against his chest. And the morning.
The morning on the bus was the worst. He was tired and