Free Apologize, Apologize! by Elizabeth Kelly Page B

right in the eye.
    “You son of a bitch!” he said as the other guys, scrambling, reached in and dragged him away. I fell down on one knee, momentarily stunned, trying to get my bearings, feeling as if the world around me had exploded.
    “Christ, Bing . . . ,” I muttered, tears streaming down my cheek. I watched out of my good eye, my hand forming a patch over the other eye, as Bingo reached for his knapsack, turned, and walked away.
    “Jesus,” Crunchie said, concerned but a little titillated, too. “Are you all right?”
    I nodded, though my eye hurt like hell. I stared after Bing until he vanished into a crowd of admiring girls who parted like the Red Sea to let him through—it looked as if I were his free pass to getting laid that night.
    “If that was my little brother, I’d kick his ass,” Crunchie said as we headed back to my room.
    Bingo got expelled from Andover for giving me a black eye.
    “Say,” Uncle Tom said when I called home to give my side of the story, “it’s about time somebody took a poke at you.”
    After he got tossed from Groton for wearing a hand buzzer, the next stop for Bingo was Upper Canada College in Toronto, where he distinguished himself by failing every course he took. His overall percent was 1, which intrigued Pop and Tom as they speculated forever about whatever he did to earn one mark.
    “It doesn’t seem mathematically possible. You don’t suppose it was something to do with carnal relations?” Pop voiced his worst fears.
    “No, surely he would have earned a passing grade in that case,” Uncle Tom said, looking thoughtful as the two of them sat on the front porch rocking, nodding, sharing a beer. I could hear them from my bedroom above, the sounds of their conversation floating upward through my open window. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore.
    I stuck my head out the window. “He got one percent because he only wrote one test and he scored one out of a hundred on it, that’s all. It’s not a great mystery.”
    “I say it was the pomegranate. I gave him a pomegranate to give to his geography teacher, who’d expressed an interest in tasting one, that’s the source for sure,” Uncle Tom said, oblivious to my intrusion, his voice holding steady and full of knowing.
    “Oh, that would be it!” Pop exclaimed. “The pomegranate, of course! Jesus, you can’t beat fruit! The tales I could tell about what I achieved with a little help from an apple and an Olympian sense of timing.”
    Weirdly, despite his academic record, they liked Bing in Toronto and expressed hope for his future. Equally inexplicable, he seemed to like it there, too, and was making plans to return in the fall.
    “Canadians have a high tolerance for eccentricity,” the Falcon said when I indicated amazement at the turn of events. “For morons, too, apparently,” he continued, adding his trademark sprinkle of cyanide.
    Bingo had a more direct explanation. “I’m making it with the headmaster’s daughter, and she’s got her old man wrapped around her little finger.”
    “Nice,” I said to him, but he just laughed. Bing’s attitude toward sex could probably best be summed up in a single word, “Woo-hoo,” and that’s when he was feeling pensive. For some bizarre reason, Ma found his promiscuity oddly charming, though she didn’t extend the same latitude to me. When it came to my love life, Ma assumed the role of disgusted adolescent being forced to contemplate her parents “doing the hoob,” as Uncle Tom referred to intercourse, insisting it was a proper biological term. Thanks to him, I got the strap in grade five for referring to coitus as hoobalah in sex ed class after Uncle Tom “corrected” my terminology.
    Unlike Bingo, who lost his virginity at thirteen to the island’s official deflowerer, Melanie Merrick—he had to scramble around the kitchen, emptying cupboards to find Saran Wrap to create a makeshift condom—I was a late bloomer, relatively speaking, struggling