Page 27 of The Bad Weather Friend

The next few seconds seemed like half an hour, and Benny broke the silence. “You called me ‘boyfriend.’”

“Did I?”

“Earlier, you said, ‘Don’t go Sigmund on me, boyfriend.’”

“In that context,boyfriendis like sayingpalorbuddy. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“That’s what I thought. I didn’t think it meant anything. I didn’t think it indicated a subconscious attraction.”

“There’s no subconscious attraction that I’m aware of,” she assured him.

“But then you wouldn’t be aware of it.”

“Aware of what?”

“A subconscious attraction, because it’s subconscious.”

“I assume you’re like this because you’re so stressed.”

“Exactly,” Benny said.

“I sure hope you’re not like this when you’re not stressed.”

“I’m nothing like this. You just caught me on what is one of the worst days of my life.”

“One of? Well, I guess the day you saw your father shot.”

“No, that doesn’t even rank. How long do you think we should stay put before we have to go into the garage?”

She checked her wristwatch. “Two minutes more. Maybe three.”

Wound tighter than Harper Harper’s watch spring, Benny expected something horrific to burst through the door from the garage, some sight even worse than what he saw on his third night at Briarbush Academy, in Catherine Baneberry-Smith’s laboratory.

(The playwright Eugene O’Neill said, “The past is the present. It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that, but life won’t let us.” Benny is where he is now because of where he has been. I wish he hadn’t gone to Briarbush Academy, because I find the place almost too creepy to bear. On the other hand, I like the person his experiences have shaped him into. It’s good to know he wasn’t torn to pieces at Briarbush, but of course he could be torn to pieces tomorrow. As could we all.)

WAITING WITH HARPER, BENNY RECALLS A MONSTROUS SIGHT FROM HIS THIRD NIGHT AT BRIARBUSH ACADEMY

Jurgen Speer’s previous roommate, Prescott Galsbury—whose lunulae turned blue because he was ingesting massive amounts of formic acid by eating large quantities of ants—supposedly had been expelled from Briarbush Academy and sent home more than five weeks earlier.

In a visitor’s chair in the dorm room of Jurgen Speer and Benny Catspaw, elbows on the arms of the chair and hands folded against his chest in a Yoda pose, Mengistu Gidada declared, “It is all a most egregious lie. Prescott comes from a family of such merciless overachievers that if he were to be expelled from Briarbush, his parents would not have permitted him to come home, but would either have committed him to a mental institution or dispatched him to live out his days in a monastery built by pyrolater monks.”

Having learned from his roommate how to present himself with maximum drama using his adjustable reading lamp—which Jurgen called “intimidation by lighting”—Benny sat half in moody bronze light and half in penumbra, one eye full of reflection and the other hooded in shadow. “What’s a pyrolater?” he asked.

“A fire worshipper,” Jurgen replied from a weaving of light and shadow more artful than Benny’s effort.

“There really are monasteries of pyrolater monks?”

“When it comes to human behavior,” Mengistu said, “if you can imagine people doing something stupid or dangerous, thenthere are people somewhere who are doing it. Often highly educated people.”

Jurgen said, “We call that the Gidada-Speer Law of Pointless Human Transgression.”

Mengistu, a resident of Felthammer House, was almost fifteen, a year older than Jurgen Speer and two years older than Benny Catspaw, but he looked younger because he was very thin with a large head and enormous, expressive eyes—reminiscent of characters in Japanese anime or certain animated Pixar films. He was considered to be by far the smartest boy at Briarbush and was therefore envied and hated by the 95 percent of his classmates who feared he would become president of the United States before they did.

Mengistu was also, according to Jurgen Speer, one of the few sane individuals among the student body and the faculty. They met every evening during the social hours after dinner, and by this third night of Benny’s incarceration, Mengistu and Jurgen were the only people he’d encountered at Briarbush on whom he would wager a dollar if the bet was on their sanity.

Better yet, both boys were nice. Although just thirteen, Benny nevertheless had come to esteem niceness as much as he did honesty and cleanliness. However, he’d begun to suspect that by holding the first two of those values, he was making a target and an outcast of himself.

Earlier, when Benny expressed that concern, Mengistu agreed. “Yes, I believe that to be true when we’re speaking of the current ruling class and the institutions that prepare them to run things. During the past thirty years, they have brought the nation—and much of the world—to the brink of ruin. Rather than admit their errors, they target those who dare note their incompetence. Thenicer you are when you disagree with them, the more vicious they are in their treatment of you.”

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