Scurvy Goonda Read online

  “Thank you so much,” said Debbie as the doctor handed her the Ab-Com Patches. A feeling of relief washed over her. Her Ted would be like other kids. He would be happy. These patches were going to fix everything.

  XI

  In addition to supplying the box of patches, the doctor instructed Ted to simply ignore Scurvy. He said the patches would take a few days to really start working, and during that time it would be better if Ted didn’t talk to Scurvy, because it would make the break in their relationship easier. The doctor indicated that Scurvy, being predisposed to tantrums, might act up at the prospect of being ignored, but he encouraged Ted to stay strong and just let the medication run its course.

  Ted attached an Ab-Com Patch to his shoulder. Debbie, thrilled by the recent changes in her son’s attitude, patted the patch firmly onto his skin, trying hard to be helpful.

  “Now move around a little,” said Debbie. “Make sure it is really stuck on there.”

  The rest of Ted’s family was sitting at the dinner table, the same as always, waiting to see what happened once the patch was fully attached to his arm. Would his head explode? Would his arm fall off?

  “WHAT IF HE BECOMES A ZOMBIE?” said Grandma Rose. “I CAN’T RUN THAT FAST WHAT WITH MY HIP.”

  “He’s not going to become a zombie, Mother,” said Debbie.

  “Take the patch off, Ted,” said Adeline, pulling at the bottom of his T-shirt, her eyes wet. “You know this isn’t right.”

  Ted hid the patch under his sleeve and bent down to talk to his sister.

  “Everything is going to be fine, Addie,” said Ted.

  “That patch won’t make you happy.”

  “Then you’ll have to make me happy, squirt.” Ted tousled Adeline’s hair.

  “You’re being stupid,” said Adeline.

  “You just don’t understand, Adeline,” said Ted. “I’m doing what I need to do.”

  Ted tried not to make eye contact with Scurvy, who was leaning against the refrigerator, watching Ted adjust the patch.

  “Ya don’t know what yer doing, Ted,” said Scurvy somberly, but Ted rolled his sleeve down around his wrist and walked to the refrigerator to get some orange juice. Scurvy shook his head, and so did Eric.

  “It was good knowing you, Eric,” said Scurvy.

  Eric nodded. From the look in the planda’s tired eyes, Scurvy could tell he felt bad about the whole situation.

  “But heck, chances are I’ll be seeing ya soon,” said Scurvy. “I might need a mate up there in Middlemost.”

  Eric nodded again. He could also use a buddy if he had to leave. Scurvy walked out on the deck to look at the ocean.

  Inside the house, Debbie embraced her son. “You did the right thing, Ted. School starts in a couple of weeks, and you want this year to be better.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  Ted heard the thud of something falling to the ground, and when he turned in the direction of the sound, he saw Scurvy lying crumpled on the deck, his legs having given out from under him. Scurvy crawled to one of the plastic patio chairs and tried to pull himself up into it. Ted struggled against the urge to run out and help his friend, but the psychiatrist had told him he was supposed to ignore Scurvy no matter what. So that was what he was going to do.

  “You’re so mean,” said Adeline. “Can’t you see you’re hurting him?”

  Adeline ran out onto the deck to help Scurvy up. Ted saw Scurvy fall again. The pirate’s legs were suddenly too weak to support the weight of his body.

  “His hands have green bumps on them!” yelled Adeline.

  Ted wished the patch worked some other way. But at the same time, Ted noticed something peculiar. As Scurvy grew weaker, he felt himself getting more confident. This was the right thing to do. This was what had to happen. He had to take care of his life. His real life.

  XII

  Weeks passed, and though Ted tried to enjoy what was left of his summer, it was impossible because Scurvy was still always around. When Ted went to the harbor, he’d see Scurvy sitting out on the jetty rocks, looking shrunken, his face and arms now covered in green bumps. When Ted went to the library, Scurvy would be there slumped in a study cubicle, overhead light off, popping green boils while he flipped through his books. When Ted went for a walk around the cranberry bog, he’d see Scurvy sitting on a rock in the middle of the pond, which was his way of making sure Ted remembered that this was the spot where they’d first met. But no matter where Scurvy popped up, Ted never said a word to him, and after a while Scurvy stopped talking too.

  At home, Ted’s relationship with Debbie and Grandma Rose had never been better. Grandma Rose yelled that she’d written him back into her will, though he wasn’t sure what she could possibly leave behind, given that all she owned in the world was her wheelchair, a stack of Life magazines, and the license plate from her old Chevy Nova.

  “Scurvy is right there,” said Adeline, glaring at Ted and pointing to the couch, where Scurvy lay sprawled over the cushions, reading a copy of Cosmopolitan. “He’s reading a magazine for girls because he’s too tired to do anything else!”

  “Ask him about tha bacon,” Ted heard Scurvy whisper to Adeline.

  “Scurvy wants to know if you’ll make him some bacon,” said Adeline. “He hasn’t been eating, and he’s really hungry.”

  “Adeline, I…”

  “NO! Make him the bacon, Ted! It’s not a big deal, and he’s your friend.”

  “Tell him he’s rottin’ from tha inside out like a fish on tha shore,” said Scurvy.

  “You’re rotting like a fish!” said Adeline.

  “Adeline—”

  “Tell him his heart is as black as a crow.”

  “Your heart is a crow!” said Adeline.

  “Stop it,” said Ted, firmly.

  “Tell him—”

  “NO MORE,” said Ted, whipping around to face Scurvy. “You will not turn my sister against me!”

  “Oh, hello, Ted,” said Scurvy. “Didn’t see ya there.”

  “You know as well as I do that this is something that needs to happen.”

  “It’s not right ta kill a pirate on tha land.”

  “I’m not killing you,” said Ted. “You can’t kill something that’s only in your head.”

  “Ah, poor, poor Ted. Ya’ve always known that I’m much more than a figment of yer imagination. All of us—me and Eric here and tha rest of tha beings you call imaginary friends—we’re all real, but there comes a day when most kids just decide that we aren’t, and we leave because why would we stay around if we’re no longer wanted? But ya never had that day, and ya know I’m real—otherwise, I wouldn’t be here in front of ya.”

  “You’re lying to me.”

  “Fer all my life, I was in tha business of lyin’, Ted, but I’ve never lied to ya. If ya want ta believe I was ever untrue to ya, well then, put on another patch and give it a good squeeze tah make sure all those drugs get into yer system faster.”

  Ted walked into the kitchen, disappearing around the corner and clanking through the cabinets.

  “Are you making him the bacon?” said Adeline, but when Ted reappeared, he was holding a glass of water and a fresh patch.

  “Adeline, I want to be a basic, normal teenager. I want some control over who I am and who I become, and that’s why I’m doing this.”

  “Ya were born fer something more than a normal life!” said Scurvy.

  Ted’s prescription called for him to use one patch per week, but now he slapped a new patch directly above the patch he already had on.

  “Come on, Eric. You shouldn’t see this,” said Adeline, walking out of the room with her hand hanging in the air, leading Eric away by his invisible paw.

  Ted and Scurvy looked at one another.

  “If you’ll just leave on your own, I promise I’ll stop using the patches,” said Ted.

  “When I’m gone, you’ll know,” said Scurvy.

  “I don’t want to hurt you. Why are you staying?”

&n
bsp; “Maybe there’s something I need tah tell ya.”

  “Then say it.”

  Scurvy used the strength he had been saving for the rest of the day to stand up so that he could look Ted directly in the eye.

  “I still think … ya should consider … making bacon from seals,” said Scurvy, with a wink. “It’s delicious.”

  “You wasted my time for THAT?” said Ted, beyond irritated. As he walked away, he heard Scurvy laughing behind him:

  “Maybe I’ll tell ya tha other thing later!”

  XIII

  The night before the first day of school, Scurvy Goonda disappeared. Ted was laying out what he was going to wear on his bed, all the new things that he’d bought with what was left of his supermarket money, eager to start off the year on the right foot. He was a sophomore now, which meant that he was no longer at the absolute bottom of the social totem pole.

  He was about to shut off the light and go to bed when he looked out the window—sure enough, there was Scurvy, limping slowly down the middle of the road to town. Ted felt bad. Whether his pirate was imaginary or not, he was still worried that Scurvy might get hit by a car walking in the middle of the road like that. He put on his shoes and went outside.

  “Scurvy!” he yelled, standing on the house’s front steps, causing the pirate to stop for a moment. But then Scurvy just shook his head and kept walking.

  “At least use the side of the road!” yelled Ted, but Scurvy continued on his way the same as before. There was something about the way he was moving that made Ted nervous.

  “Scurvy!”

  No response.

  “Where are you going?” yelled Ted. The question made Scurvy stop in his tracks and turn to look at him. When he spoke, Ted barely recognized the sandpaper voice that coarsely filled the night: “Middlemost,” said Scurvy.

  “The middle of what—”

  “Don’t ya worry about tha middle of what!” snapped Scurvy. He turned back toward the road.

  “Am I going to see you again?” said Ted.

  Scurvy looked at him.

  “If I was right about ya,” he said, “then ya will see me again.”

  And with that, Scurvy took the final few steps around the bend in the road and disappeared from sight. Gone gone gone.

  XIV

  Rumor had it that the architect who had designed Ted’s high school had also designed the state prison in South Walpole, where Massachusetts’s hardest criminals were locked away. The high school was filled with long hallways and small windows that refused to let in any natural light, and the lockers lining the corridors were thin and gray, invoking the same parallel lines as the bars of a cell.

  Inside the sterile, cavernous cafeteria, Ted stood in place holding his tray, surrounded on all sides by tables full of kids who were talking about vacations and hookups and parties and other things that had happened to them on the Cape and elsewhere. He looked for a table where he could make new, unimaginative friends, and spotted one nearby that was filled with guys of average intelligence and social standing. Ted sometimes heard them in the hallway talking about televised no-holds-barred fighting championships. In terms of the social strata, they were just there, and that was all that Ted wanted to be—just there, just a part of a herd shuffling from class to class, normal and going through the days without getting beaten up or picked on or singled out as a freak.

  Ted put down his lunch tray in front of an empty seat. The boys sitting at the table turned to look at him.

  “I’m Ted,” said Ted. “And I’m letting everybody know that my pirate is gone.”

  The boys looked at each other.

  “I truly did not know he could talk,” said a guy wearing a Bud Light T-shirt and warm-up pants.

  “I’m talking,” said Ted. “I’m turning over a new leaf.”

  “Well, that’s super-duper, Ted,” said another guy, who was wearing a beaded hemp necklace. “We can’t wait to have some conversations with you, and help you turn that leaf.”

  “We’re huge leaf-turners,” said the Bud Light guy. “I can’t walk past a leaf on the street without wanting to know what’s on the other side.”

  “Nothing better than a mutual exchange of ideas with an interesting new friend,” said the hemp-necklace guy, and Ted’s heart jumped a little at the word friend. His instincts were right—these were his people.

  “You say you got rid of your pirate? Take some medication for that?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Ted. “I used a patch.”

  “Well, that’s a fantastic thing, Ted. Being pirate-less is going to help you a lot. Actually, Charlie here”—the Bud Light guy pointed to a kid who was laughing on the other side of the table—“Charlie just got rid of his imaginary antelope. Isn’t that right, Charlie?”

  “Sure is,” said Charlie.

  “And if I’m not mistaken, that antelope liked to dress like a paratrooper—isn’t that right?”

  “Thought he had served in Nam,” said Charlie. “And actually, he claimed to have fought alongside Sully’s friend—what was it again, Sully? Wasn’t it a dolphin, or something?”

  “That’s exactly right,” said Sully. “War dolphin. It fought in a couple of battles, which screwed it up in the head, which is why I had to get rid of it. Post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “You see, Ted?” said Bud Light. “You’re surrounded by a whole table of guys who had to get rid of their crazy imaginary friends, just the same as you. Heck, it took forever to get Jimmy there to give up his Pegasus.”

  “I still sleep with a feather from its wing. I miss its smell.”

  The table erupted with laughter, the howling loud enough to draw the attention of much of the lunchroom. By now, Ted had figured out that he was being mocked, and rivers of nervousness were running up his back and all over his body. He picked up his tray.

  “If you didn’t want me to sit here,” he said, “you could have just said so.”

  Ted was about to walk to an empty table, but other kids were already filling it up. All the kids at tables with open seats were staring at him, imploring him with their eyes not to sit there. Ted turned in a circle, with nowhere to go, and then—

  “A YO HO AND A BOTTLE OF RUM!” said bully Duke. “HEY, TED, SAY SOMETHING CRAZY!”

  Oh, man.

  “MAYBE HE’S SO CRAZY HE FORGOT HOW TO TALK!” said Duke, who apparently hadn’t learned new taunts during the summer.

  “You were a senior last year,” said Ted. “I thought you graduated.”

  “What did you say?” said Duke, stepping forward.

  “You were a senior. You should have graduated.”

  “Plenty of guys do a FIFTH YEAR, you moron. SPORTS!

  Colleges want older players, and I’m gonna get NOTICED. If it wasn’t for me, nobody would CARE about the cross-country team in this town.”

  Ted thought about this. “Wait, what?” he said. “You’re running cross-country instead of playing football?”

  “I got kicked off the football team,” said Duke.

  “For what?”

  “NEVER MIND FOR WHAT. I’m gonna EAT your pirate this year.” Duke smacked Ted on the forehead and walked back to his table, where Carolina Waltz was sitting, little splotches of Tater Tot ketchup surrounding her mouth.

  However, for the first time ever, she wasn’t laughing.

  She was just looking at Ted.

  Ted searched around for an empty table where he could finish his lunch, but he couldn’t find one, so he stood in the middle of the cafeteria floor and tried to balance his tray with one hand and eat with the other. Taking a sip of his milk, he wished he had someone to eat lunch with. He just wanted a place to start.

  XV

  A week into the school year, Ted found somebody—a foreign-exchange student named Kettil, who was from Sweden, and whose name actually meant “kettle.” It was an appropriate label. Kettil had a stocky midsection and stubby arms and usually looked like he was overheating.

  The first time he saw Ke
ttil, Ted felt bad for the Swede, who was standing in the hallway watching the hordes of students rush past. Kettil repeatedly glanced down at a piece of paper in his hand and then back up, until Ted finally walked over to figure out what was going on.

  “I’m Ted.”

  “Kettil.”

  “Do you need help with something?”

  Kettil pointed at the sheet of paper, showing his class schedule.

  “You’re in Algebra II?”

  “Yes please you’re welcome.”

  “Come on. We’re in the same class. I’ll show you where to go.”

  “Yes please you’re welcome.”

  “Kettil” and “yes please you’re welcome” were pretty much all that Kettil seemed to be able to say in English. This baffled Ted, because wasn’t Scandinavia known for its multilingual education system? He had assumed that a high school-age kid would speak at least a little English.

  On the third day of their friendship, Kettil sat across from Ted, pointing at different objects in the lunchroom and giving their Swedish translations.

  “Bord,” said Kettil.

  “Okay, then. A bord is a table,” said Ted.

  “Bricka,” said Kettil.

  “A bricka is a tray.”

  “Vägg,” said Kettil.

  “The wall is a vägg. Got it,” said Ted.

  It wasn’t quite the conversation about girls and movies and those kinds of things that Ted was hoping for with a new friend, but it was something.

  During the second week of classes, when Ted walked through the door after school, Debbie called him over for a hug. Ever since he had gotten rid of Scurvy Goonda, he had become just her normal kid enjoying a normal existence at a normal New England high school.

  “How was your day, Ted?” said Debbie.

  “It was fine, Mom.”

  “Making friends?”

  “Yep. I’m hanging out with a Swede.”

  “Well, how about bringing your Swede over one of these days? It would be wonderful to meet him. Tell him how I love ABBA.”