Eight

         “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,” Kurt counted off his friends in the schoolyard of William J. Browne Elementary School.  On that Saturday morning in October, gray skies hung over yellow grass and bare trees.  There wasn’t another person in sight on that cold Massachusetts morning.  The old brick school building on Oxford Street loomed behind him as Kurt knelt on a bare patch in the lawn, by the gnarly roots of the ancient maple tree in the corner of the field.

         As a third grader, Kurt was still quite a little boy, but had attended Browne for several years now, since kindergarten, and so he knew his way around the place.  He felt comfortable here, sure of himself, especially now that he was alone, with none of his schoolmates to push him around.  All he really wanted was to make friends, a part of the crowd, not singled out.  He wanted to feel like he belonged at this school, this grade, these classmates.  But in the three plus years that he had been a pupil at Browne, everything he tried to do to become friends with anyone ended up a ridiculous failure.  Kurt looked up at the skies crammed with bleak winter clouds.

         “Kurt, Kurt, the little squirt!” Ethan would say.  Noah would grab his lunch, stuff handfuls of dirt from the playground into his sandwich, and make him eat it, with everyone laughing to no end.  Hot tears would race down his cheek at the memory of his mother from earlier in the morning, packing his lunch for him, making his meal with love, being careful that the food was protected from any random circumstance, and here was this hurtful, terrible person purposefully contaminating the little thing of love his mother made just for him.  Nelson would put poor little Kurt in a headlock at every morning recess, until Kurt desperately conceived of a distraction that freed him from the animal child’s grip.  All these cruel acts were responses to the little boy with a big heart extending an offer of friendship with a hearty “hi” and an open heart.  He remembered the look on George’s face when Kurt offered to share his new battery-powered robot to play with, as George grabbed the toy and swung it at Kurt’s head.  When he came to, seconds later, Kurt’s heart was broken when his new robot, a loving gift from his grandfather, lay in pieces beside him on the grass.

         Kurt ran to the fence in the empty schoolyard.  He looked down Oxford Street to his house.  His mom told him to get home in a little bit, because they planned on going to the flea market, the family’s Saturday morning ritual.  The family car still sat there in the usual place, and Kurt breathed a sigh of relief.  He ran back to his eight friends in the middle of the yard.

         His memories returned him to Brian, who would punch Kurt for no reason, and Ryan, who joined Ethan in the banal chants, copying everything Ethan said.  Then he remembered Nathan, far too popular to notice Kurt’s attempts at friendship.  While he remembered, Kurt tended to his only true friends, who stood abreast before him, all eight of them.

         Then of course the worst was Andrea, the one girl he had a crush on, that he tried to be extra sweet to, but she only laughed in his face and got all the other girls in his class to laugh at too.  It was far too much for the sensitive child.

         Kurt examined the rank and file of his true friends, standing silently under the forgotten blustery sky, awaiting the next utterance of the eight year-old.  “One,” he said, picking up his first friend, a jet plane that turned into a robot.  He did the actual conversion of plane to robot once, then back to plane.  “You’re Ethan.”  He went to the next friend, a toy oven range that glowed orange to simulate a hot stove top.  “Two,” he muttered, “You’re Noah.”  The next toy he picked up was an action figure “Three,” he said to the next toy he picked up, an action figure wrestler with bendable arms and legs, from the American Wrestling Federation.  “You’re Nelson.”  Next to this one stood Four, the remains of the broken battery-powered robot that his grandfather had given him, that Kurt had scarcely played with before its ruin.  “You’re George.”

Kurt picked up the toy snake, whose eyes rolled up and down and whose tongue jutted out as it was rolled back and forth on the ground.  “Five,” Kurt said, “You’re Brian.”  After that came Six, a toy parrot that had a pull string and would say whatever Kurt said but in a parrot voice.  “You’re Ryan.”

“Seven,” Kurt said with conviction, as he picked up a toy pirate sword that was part of his new Halloween costume, which he would be wearing in a few weeks.  “You’re Nathan.”  The last one was not a toy at all, but a birthday card with large heart-shaped balloons gracing the cover.  “Happy Eighth Birthday!” it said on the front, and it was from his parents, who he knew loved him very much.  “Eight,” he said.  “You’re Andrea.”

Kurt got up from the ground.  He ran the one-and-a-half blocks to his house.  His parents had just left the house when he showed up.  They began their trip to the flea market.  When they drove past the school, Kurt could see that his friends had already gone.  At the flea market, Kurt made a new friend: a car that could be loaded onto a launcher and roll fast across flat surfaces.

#

         On Monday morning, the schoolyard seemed a little less crowded than usual.  Even though it was the middle of October, the sun shined bright and a warm breeze replaced the usual crisp fall air.  Before the morning bell rang, Kurt played tag with a fourth grader named Billy Louis, whom he had heard of but never truly met.  When it was time to line up, Kurt found himself amidst other fourth graders.  “Do you wanna play tag again during recess?” he asked Billy.

         “Tag is for girls and sissies,” Billy said, mockingly laughing at Kurt.  Billy’s classmates joined in on the laughter.  Kurt seethed at what he heard.  He fished in his backpack and pulled out the new friend he made at the flea market.

         “Nine,” he whispered.  “You’re Billy.”

         When Kurt sat down at his desk, he noticed that Mrs. Foley had a sad look on her face.  At this point he looked around and noticed the much smaller composition of his class.  “I have some terrible news to tell you,” Mrs. Foley said.  “You can see that there are quite a few of your friends missing from school.  I regret to inform you that Ethan Orson, Noah Reese, Nelson Carlton, George Allison, Brian Brody, Ryan North, Nathan Green, and Andrea Rook all died this past weekend.”

The class sat stunned and speechless, and that was all that Mrs. Foley had to say about it.  But Kurt need not hear anything else, because he already knew how it all happened.  A plane crashed into Ethan’s house.  Noah got stuck inside an oven during the self-cleaning cycle.  Nelson choked while playing wrestling moves alone in his bedroom.  George was electrocuted while his older brother was changing his car battery.  Brian was playing by some rocks at the park when he was bitten by a poisonous snake.  A bird scratched Ryan was scratched on the back of the neck by a bird and a fast infection killed him.  Nathan accidentally fell on a carving knife in the kitchen.  Andrea suffered a hemorrhage from an as-yet-unknown congenital defect.  Kurt felt relief from the lack of bullying that day.

         During morning recess, Kurt found Mike Wells from his class and they played tag all throughout the allotted time.  During lineup time, Billy started giving the third-graders a hard time.  Kurt silently steamed, holding the car he named Billy so tightly in his hand that the windshield popped off in his palm.  “Knock it off, Billy, pick on someone your own size,” Mike said.  “Do you want to come over after school and we can play soccer or something?” Mike said to Kurt.

         “Yeah, good idea!” Kurt said, thrilled that Mike had become a good friend.  Kurt put his car, including windshield, on the ground, right before entering the school again.

         At the end of the school day, when release time had come, Kurt and Mike walked together to Mike’s house, a block away from the school, where Kurt would call his mom and tell him where he was, then play the afternoon away with his new friend.  As he left the school, he had scarcely noticed whether the toy car he left outside, Nine, which he called Billy, was still where he left it.  It wasn’t.  That afternoon, Billy Louis was killed in a car accident on the way home from school.  He had been thrown from his seat through the windshield and crushed by the car.