Like A Charm

When I told them I had lost the bracelet, they asked me to leave school. My folks said a twenty-year-old who wasn't in school had to support herself, and I didn't bother to point out that I had been supporting myself even while in school. So here I am two years later in the airport bar, wearing a black polyester skirt that gives me a permanent visible panty line and dusting peanut skins from the seat. I am taking classes at the community college, but I still have a few years to go before my degree, and then I'm going to look at MBA programmes. What do you think, Wharton or Kellogg?

I hope business picks up again soon. It's not just that fewer people are flying, but that people aren't as anxious to get blotto before a flight anymore. Everyone thinks they're going to be wrestling a terrorist to the ground somewhere over Pittsburgh. They almost seem to wish for it. But my mother said this is a good place to meet men and I guess she should know. She met my father this way, back in the day when they called this airport Friendship.

So – are you married? Do you have a family? I don't mind. I know how to keep things casual.

THE THINGS WE DID TO LAMAR by Peter Moore Smith

We gave him noogies, Indian burns, charlie horses, wet willies. We tickled him till he peed in his pants. We dangled him by his underwear from the dogwood tree in front of his house and left him hanging there. We held him down and let daddy-long-legs crawl all over his face. Once we gave him a potato chip and after he ate it we told him it had been dipped in formaldehyde; later, he hugged his stomach, rocked back and forth against the chain-link fence between our houses, and puked. The two of us, me and Benjamin, we'd trap Lamar in the concrete playground tube by the school, one of us on each side, and not let him out until he held his ears and squealed. Lamar had this sideways smile that flashed, all crooked and weird, even when we were beating the crap out of him. Christ. The things we did to that poor fucker. We shaved stripes into his head with Benjamin's dad's barbershop clippers. Sometimes we'd ask him if he wanted to go to the movies, and after he got the money from his mom we'd just take it to the 7-Eleven and buy Slim Jims.

Lamar. Oh, Jesus.

One afternoon we took his latch-key and threw it up on the roof. Next thing we knew old Lamar was up there, hanging by one hand from the rain gutter, smiling and giggling.

'Jump!' we said. 'We'll catch you!'

Yeah, right.

Lamar's fat friend Anthony, who followed Lamar everywhere, had to call the fire department to get him down.

We took his comic books; we took his baseball cards; we took his clothes and made him run home in his underpants; we took his money, his food, his toys. Anything he had, we took it. One time we noticed he was wearing a girl's bracelet. He said he found it under a park bench when he went to Baltimore to visit his grandma. Benjamin took it and threw it to me. I pretended to drop it down a sewer drain but really I stuck it in my pocket. We played keep-away with his hat, his books, his Scooby-Doo lunchbox; we took his homework so many days in a row that Lamar started making multiple copies, hiding little squares of folded paper all over his clothes.

And fat Anthony, who was always just sort of standing around while we tortured poor Lamar, even he would laugh, his stomach jiggling like one of Mom's church picnic Jell-O moulds.

This is a good one.

One time we told Lamar that if he put on girls' underwear we'd let him come over to Benjamin's house and listen to Benjamin's dad's quadrophonic hi-fi system. Then, in the vacant lot behind the Safeway, after he'd slipped on my sister's training bra and underpants, we took a Polaroid and dropped it into the mail slot of Lamar's house.

There was also the time Benjamin said Lamar was retarded but that no one was telling him.

'I am not retarded,' Lamar said. 'I get straight As.'

'Sure,' Benjamin said. 'In retard class. You're a straight-A retard.'

'It's not a retard class.'

'How do you know?'

'Because it's the advanced class.'

'How do you know they're not just saying that to make you feel smart, and that you're really all a bunch of retards?'

Lamar's eyes grew wide.

'Retard,' Benjamin said.

Lamar put his hands over his ears.

'Tard.'

We'd punch Lamar in the same place on his arm until the bruise turned black, with concentric rings of purple and yellow. When we punched Lamar he would close his eyes but keep smiling. Then, after a few days of getting punched in the same spot, Lamar would do anything to guard it, offering up almost every other part of his body, giggling and at the same time twisting away in this grotesque, prissy dance.

The more he danced, the more we laughed.

Even Anthony.

It wasn't any fun to beat up Anthony, incidentally. He would just fall down, never saying anything, never begging or squealing or giggling like Lamar. Fu

This made Benjamin crazy.

I can say this now – if I had said it then he would have beaten the crap out of me – but Benjamin was kind of fat himself.

'You wa

'You do it,' Lamar would say.

'I' – punch – 'do' – punch – 'not' – punch.

'Stop it.' Lamar twisted his body and fell to the ground.

'It's all right,' Anthony said softly. 'He was just joking.'

We were on the school playground, on the swings.

'Shut up, faggot,' Benjamin said. 'Just because I'm beating up Lamar because he called you fat doesn't mean I won't beat the crap out of you because you're a faggot, you faggot.'

So Anthony and I waited until Benjamin got tired of beating the crap out of Lamar.

Then, as they walked away, Lamar rubbing his arm, Anthony a few steps behind, Lamar turned around to Anthony and sang, 'Fatty fatty fat-butt! So fat you ate the cat's butt!'

From where I was on the swings I could see Anthony's face. I could almost feel the hot tears exploding down his cheeks.

Infuriated, Benjamin took off after Lamar, chasing him across the soccer field, over the pedestrian overpass, and into the vacant lot behind the Safeway. I ran behind Benjamin, Anthony huffing and puffing behind me. I thought the whole thing was hilarious, to tell the truth. Benjamin was fat, and Lamar had found this weird, indirect way of saying it. Lamar jumped up on a rock and held his tight little fist in the air, smiling hugely, like he was about to say something magnificent. But Benjamin just crashed into him, grabbing him around the waist and pushing him into a huge pile of trash. 'It's not nice' – punch – 'to call someone' – punch – 'fat' – punch.

'I didn't call you fat,' Lamar said.

'I didn't say I was fat,' Benjamin said, punching him again. 'Are you saying I'm fat?'

Lamar squirmed and tried to twist away.

Benjamin reached for the nearest thing, which happened to be a rusted tin-top to an old can of something, and held it to Lamar's throat.

Me and Anthony were standing on the rock looking down.