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and savanna. The dominant male at this stop was a twice-flunked eighth-grade goon named Matt Woodbridge, who had driven out all the little kids until it was just him and his crew: three slope-headed seventh graders, all of them smoking in broad daylight and daring anyone to say anything about it. The day Eli and I made eye contact, I thought about how Eli had arrived to take my beatings for me, how he’d looked down on me with such sympathy, and I was suddenly hit with the realization that Pete Decker and the button-popping, glasses-slapping, underwear-yanking routine of my bus stop was an improvement for Eli! I mean, hard as it is to believe… he actually chose to come to our bus stop.
    Even today I have trouble fathoming it, trying to imagine the tortures that Matt Woodbridge had devised, persecutions horrible enough to make Eli walk three blocks to catch the bus with an animal like Pete Decker. I did a paper on torture in college and I can never forget the worst ones: the glass tube shoved into the penis and then broken while the tortured person is forced to drink glass after glass of water, the legs encased in a vise and put in a burlap sack and then pounded with hammers until the burlap is the only thing holding them together. Right after these horrors I place whatever Woodbridge did to drive Eli down to our bus stop. And so that day, on the bus, I looked up as Woodbridge passed and at that moment I hated him, and I must have betrayed something on my face because he stopped in the aisle and turned to face me, a look of disbelief on his pockmarked, wispy-mustached face.
    “What?” he asked. “What, motherfucker?”
    The bus erupted in a chorus of “Ooohs,” and someone yelled from the back of the bus, “Kick his ass! Kick his fuckin’ ass, Woodbridge!”
    “Nothing,” I said quickly, and dropped my eyes.
    “You bet nothing,” Woodbridge said. “Nothing and a fucking ass-kicking if you ever look at me again, motherfucker.” And he continued sidling back toward the end of the bus, toward his seat in the back, the polar opposite of Boyle’s seat. “Little shit.”
    I knew what we all knew about Woodbridge, that his brother Jesse had been an A student and a good athlete who had been killed in the eighth grade in some mysterious way (I’d heard, variously, that Matt shot him with their father’s gun accidentally, that he got drunk and fell out of a pickup truck, and that he slashed his own wrists) and that Matt dealt with his brother’s death and with his parents’ grief by beating the shit out of every kid he saw, by flunking his classes, by riding his motorcycle across the flower beds of all the houses in the neighborhood, by stealing our bicycles, by selling pot to little kids, by shoplifting, fighting, fingering, smoking, dealing, shooting up, vandalizing, and generally being the worst form of life on the bus. I think that while he didn’t know it, he was trying to live up to his dead brother, trying to remain a perpetual eighth grader like Jesse.
    I stared straight ahead, hoping Woodbridge would ignore me, but of course he couldn’t. “Who is that motherfucker?” he asked the back of the bus.
    “That kid?” Pete Decker laughed. “That’s the fuckin’ Marlboro man.” His gang erupted in laughter. Pete and Woodbridge had an interesting cold-war relationship; like nervous superpowers, both knew the only thing they couldn’t afford was to lose a fight, and since each was the only one who had a chance of beating up the other, they existed in a kind of strained equilibrium. As long as there were pathetic little shits like me to terrorize, they had few dealings with each other, except maybe to bum a cigarette or fence some stolen property.
    Now that I had crossed one of the superpowers, I tensed, waiting to be nuked.
    “Nah, that’s just Clark,” Pete said then. “He’s all right.”
    The air seemed to leave the bus just then, and a great light and warmth rose up inside of me. I don’t