Corey

Corey was big, bad and freckled. His eyes were the exact color of mean. His nine-year-old self was so bloated it fit into a twelve-year-old's body despite the laxity of the Red Wings jersey he wore most days. Corey, ice-white and sprinkled with orange, always had a well-groomed mullet that curled in the back. He was two grades ahead of me and overripe.

First grade introduced me to Corey. Everyone else was already under his dominion, even Joyce. Miss Pardick taught the lower grades in Wilde Elementary's deaf program. Corey was the leader every recess; he was bigger, badder and his pink fists were the size of honey-baked hams. Once his nose started to scrunch a new decision was about to overturn the current rules. Screwed up, it served as a warning not to get pummeled.

He would make Kelly give him her wide plastic headbands so he could wear them as visors, like Geordi, thin mod sunglasses. Clear tortiseshell, royal blue with lacy edging or linked pink figure eights. Kelly sure was sorry she'd taught us that trick! Every day, once Kelly's flat greasy hair was exempt from its tiara, Corey decided who was cool and who was vile, excluded from his playground empire. He beat up anyone who defied his rule. Every day everyone nattered nervously waiting for him to decide, savoring our last few seconds of freedom. Most days Kelly was the ugly, bad girl no one could play with: her nose was thin but hooked like the puffin's beak adorning the spine of many of my books.

Until the day Corey figured out that I was smarter than everyone else in the room. Even Christie couldn't save me from exile. Every day from then on, because I was in the hearing classroom almost all day and practiced syllable-catching by clapping along to each phonic break, I was breaching protocol and condemned. I got to learn Reading from a real book with pictures on the cover but dozens of words per page. Even Angela, who was in sixth grade, had a tiny thin book with simple pictures and single-sentence pages that read, “The car is _______ down the road.” The textbooks and workbooks were nearly indistinguishable from each other and color-coded by cover.

Angela couldn't protect me. We rode the bus together but she had after-lunch recess with the hearing kids in the upper three grades. I never told Angela about Corey anyway, and she had long auburn waves to attend to with tortoiseshell barrettes and bleach, her glossy lips ready for kissing. Her large hoop earrings accentuated her Italian nose and tan. She sat in the back with Alex and struggled to make the car “driving” instead of “the drive.” She was for after school.

Corey beat me up once. After that I knew better than to become a serf or try to lobby for a position as a feudal lord, protecting the snub-nosed and snarl-toothed king. Every day, Kelly's greasy honey tresses tumbling around an invisible line at her ears, Corey smiled leered, “Look at Ugly! Beth's so ugly and stupid! She's too stupid to be our friend, right?” Everyone else nodded, happy to play unfettered. My hearing friends couldn't be seen with me at lunchtime either; I was Special Ed. I was the ugly girl who chased David around the room after lunch trying to tag him into boyfriendhood before Mrs. Lavey opened the door.

One day on the bus ride home Steve, who was seventeen, told me I hadn't won when he didn't understand numbers well enough to beat me at Uno: “Haha, stupid, you lost! I win because I say so! This is my deck of cards, loser! You can't play for shit!” My crush on the only Asian I'd ever met evaporated, his pitted golden face receding under tight purple pimples. I refused to play another round. As I scowled I replied with the universal sign for “sore loser,” my tiny white middle finger exposed. Angela had already been dropped off. When Bob pulled up to my house, Steve rushed to meet Dad. Afterward, he bounced past me back to his seat, laughing with a squint that slit my throat.

In the dank living room, shuttered with the television running, Dad and his beer rankled. His eyes narrowed and his lip curled and tightened. “Bethie,” he bit off, “did you...say...a bad word?” His hands shook with each sign. “Steve told me what happened.” “No! I didn't!” I protested, thinking, I'm so fucking gonna get Steve back for this! All because he's ten years older and can't fucking beat a seven-fucking-year-old at fucking Uno! Shit! What an asshole! Does he even know what Dad's like?

“Well, because...Steve told me you gave him the finger. Did you stick out your middle finger at him?” Dad yelled harder and harder, trembling and white around the edges. His Budweiser sweated. I stayed cool: “No! I did this: I made a fist and raised the knuckle of my middle finger just a little.” THWACK! “Same difference!” Crying, I thought, What a goddamn asshole. Fucking baby. I beat you at Uno and you know it!

The next day I started fighting back. The weather was still warm, like butter running down corn at the cider mill, like the fresh unsugared donuts for dunking in the cider. My personalized sweatshirt was zipped up with the BETH crossworded diagonally. Corey continued to feint punching me, cornering me and hissing, but I squinted the way Steve had shown me to. I threatened Christie, Kelly Mike and Joyce with wily hurts beyond the physical plane and beyond Corey's duration at Wilde. They stayed my friends in the classroom and never managed to weasel out of it; Corey couldn't either. I was the smallest kid with the brightest eyes.