This Kid Will Chop You Up

By Thom Tracy

My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns’ lounge. But her sobbing wasn’t coming from the lounge. I could hear it through the auditorium door at the end of the hall. I peeked through the glass toward the top of the swinging oak door leading to that room. She sat in the red chairs—where we sat when we had an assembly. Behind the chairs is where Mike O’Shannon got on his knees undetected one other day and peed downhill for a minute-and-a-half to let the stream find its way through Mary Janes and penny loafers before it pooled at the feet of Father Womer who preached to us about damnation.

Sister sat one afternoon in the shiny tile-dry middle of all that with her head in her hands. One of my other teachers, Mr. Deering, beetle-browed with a bushy dark moustache, sat beside her with his hand on her shoulder. They called him a lay person. I never figured out why that was.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this, John. Every year they get worse.”

“Sister. The year’s almost over. School’s out in three days and you can use the summer to recharge your batteries. Feel refreshed. You’ll be in a better frame of mind by the time next year rolls around.”

“He embarrassed me in front of everyone. He wouldn’t pick up that desk. And he stood there and smirked. And laughed at all of us. The little son of a…”

Oh, man. Now I knew who she was talking about.

I’d known Pat Terwilliger for eight years now. My mom worked for his dad for a while at the hardware store, and me and Pat became fast friends. I knew his parents pretty good too so I couldn’t figure out where he got it from. My mother would say “I don’t know where he came from” when reflecting on things like this. She’d say this when my older brother got sent home from our school in familiar shame about twice a month.

It just seemed to me that Pat’s mom and dad were quiet people. And serious. The ones who sat in the front pew every Sunday at 12 o’clock mass. Pat stayed quiet in church. That wasn’t the case in our eighth-grade class. So I had to wonder where he came from too.

He had this obsession with scissors. Not the big-ass type the teachers had on their desk— to do whatever they’d do with them. Pat’s scissors were the little kind. The ones with the handle-hole you could only squeeze a finger into with your thumb in the other one.

The problem—well, Sister Mary Ethel’s problem anyway, was that Pat used those scissors to chew up other students’ classwork. Or homework from time to time. And when the kid went home with a bad report saying he or she (Pat didn’t discriminate) didn’t do his homework, the mom or dad came storming in the school saying they witnessed their son or daughter doing their homework and there was no way they didn’t do it. It was in their bookbag when they left, the parents said.

By the end of the school year, Sister wigged out. When she turned her back to write on the blackboard one day in late May, she heard a growling sound. Like a little leopard latched to a polyester pantleg. That’s how Pat liked to sound when he was doing his thing. As though he were a little dog or a big cat or a baby chainsaw. By the time she turned around to face our class, he’d shredded a bunch of construction paper, and the pieces littered the floor. It’s not really litter like a blue-lettered waxy-white hamburger wrapper but whatever.

He wouldn’t pick the papers up, so she grabbed his desk and pulled it toward the hallway. He grabbed one side and they had a tug of war over the desk. She pushed. He pushed back. Her cheeks turned red. Her voice turned high-pitched and orchestrally robotic. Then the desk tipped over and all his stuff—papers and four-colored Bic pens and composition books and Bloop candy wrappers— spilled onto that light grey floor in the hallway of Pat's would-be Elba.

She told him to pick everything up. He wouldn’t. He said she started it. He said it was her fault the desk fell over in the first place. You could argue for Pat, but you could argue for Sister. It depended on what side of the field you watched from.

Sister went and got the principal. Pat laughed at her.

They summoned the Monsignor from the rectory next door. The old guy had been around for a while. He whistled when he pronounced his esses and that sent Pat—and all of us pretty much—into a laughing fit. We had to try to stop from laughing. But Pat didn’t. He only laughed harder.

The nuns stood with their mouths open and their eyes like ping pong balls just dabbed with a circle of shoe polish.

The Monsignor waved his hand over the mess on the floor almost as if he gave it a small blessing. Or a curse.

“Pick it up, Patrick,” he said.

Pat didn’t flinch.

“Patrick,” the principal bellowed. “Monsignor gave you an order.”

Pat stopped laughing long enough that a kind of serious look came over his face. We thought maybe he was gonna give in. I mean, Pat was a good Catholic kid after all.

“Oh.” Pat’s voice rose like a teakettle coming to boil. “Monsignor gave me an order.”

The two nuns relaxed their shoulders. They donned the look of Napoleon way before Waterloo.  

“Well, Patrick. Then— ”

“I still ain’t pickin’ it up,” Pat said.

And I watched Sister Mary Ethel lean a good way backward and then catch her balance. But I don’t think her color was good. That’s what my mom said too when someone didn’t feel all too well. That they had no color.

The door got closed and we didn’t hear much more. We wouldn’t see Pat in class again that day or for the next three days when school ended for the year. Some kid in seventh grade told me he was crossing the street from the church to the school, and he did see Pat. His father made a beeline for his car and Pat walked a few steps behind, grinning until his father glanced over his shoulder to see where Pat was. When Pat caught the kid’s eye as he hopped into the passenger seat, he gave a little wink. And off they went.