Free Bullyville by Francine Prose Page A

Mom or one of the more sympathetic teachers, or even sucked it up and gone to Dr. Bratwurst. What did I care about being a snitch? I had something to snitch about! There were important things at stake. My life, for example.
    Even if Tyro’s dad owned the school and they had to decide between him and me, it was fine with me if they decided to keep him and kick me out on my butt. But I knew that would break my mother’s heart even more than it was already broken. She would see it as a huge defeat, and Iwould feel like a total loser.
    Every so often, I’d run into one my old Hillbrook friends, and it was always pretty weird. It felt almost as if they didn’t recognize me, or as if they were trying to remember who exactly I was. Maybe they were trying to figure out if I was the same person they used to know, or if I’d turned into one of the Bullywell snobs. One of the Bullywell bullies.
    I wanted to say: Hey, look, it’s me! It’s Bart! We’ve known each other since the first grade! But that would have been way too embarrassing, and besides, I was starting to wonder if maybe I wasn’t the same person. I definitely wasn’t the Bart they used to know. First I’d turned into Miracle Boy, and now I was a Bullywell bully-ee. Whenever I ran into Mike or Ted or Tim or Josh, or worse, a couple of them together, our conversation was so stiff and awkward that I stopped thinking that going back to Hillbrook—that bully-free paradise—would solve all my problems. Maybe you could never go back.
    Some of the teasing and bullying was harmless, by which I mean physically painless. Still, it was depressing and annoying. Like, for example, the time when someone—Tyro wouldn’t have stooped to this, he probably got one of his lackeys to do it for him—put dog shit on the door handle of my locker. I knew that something smelled disgusting, but I wasn’t looking hard enough or thinking fast enough. Before I knew it, dog shit was all over my hand, which was bad enough, but also all over the cuff of my blazer, which was even worse. I ran to the bathroom and scrubbed and scrubbed, but the odor clung to me and I couldn’t get rid of it.
    In homeroom, Seth said, “Oh, man, what’s the deal? You smell like shit.”
    I said, “Well, actually, my puppy had a tiny little accident just before I left the house this morning, and I cleaned up after him and—”
    â€œRight,” said Seth in a tone that made me think that not only did he know the truth, but I wasn’t the first bully-ee at Bullywell to fall victim tothe not-exactly-original-or-inspired dog shit–locker trick. Luckily, I had a spare blazer at home, so we could we send this one to the cleaners. I told my mom some story about getting animal waste on my jacket in bio lab.
    I felt bad about lying to my mother, but at that point anything seemed better than telling her the truth that would have hurt her, and that would have been so shameful for me. I didn’t want her to think she’d raised the kind of kid who’d be singled out to be picked on by the other kids. The fact was, I kept telling myself, I wasn’t that kind of kid. I was just a kid who’d been unlucky enough to be sent to the wrong school at the wrong time.
    By my second week at Bullywell, it was clear that my nickname was going to stick. Every time I walked down the hall, someone would aim lip farts in my direction, and some days I’d hear a whole chorus of them. Everyone called me Fart Strangely, and even the kids who, I could tell, were trying to be halfway nice, would say, “Hey, Fart, I mean Bart.” So that became my secondnickname: Fart I Mean Bart. That’s what Tyro called me sometimes. Fart. I. Mean. Bart. He’d say it very slowly, threateningly, as if every word was a promise of something I wasn’t going to like, something dangerous and unpleasant.
    Every so often my mom would ask,