The Cruelty (The Cruelty #1)
Scott Bergstrom
For Jana,
the fearless one
“Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.”
GEORGE ORWELL
One
The boys are waiting for the beheading. They sit raptly, like impatient jackals, waiting for the blade to fall. But if they’d bothered to read the book, they’d know it wasn’t coming. The book just sort of ends. Like a movie clicked off before the last scene. Or like life, really. You almost never see the blade coming, the one that gets you.
Our teacher, Mr. Lawrence, reads the words slowly, stroking that awful little patch of beard under his lower lip as he paces. The soft drumbeat of his footsteps on the linoleum floor—heel-toe, heel-toe—makes it sound like he’s trying to come up on the words from behind. “As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the world.”
The footsteps stop when Mr. Lawrence arrives at Luke Bontemp’s desk, and he taps the spine of the book on the kid’s head. Luke is texting someone on his phone and trying to hide it beneath his jacket.
“Put it away or I take it away,” Mr. Lawrence says.
The phone disappears into Luke’s pocket.
“What do you think Camus is talking about there?”
Luke smiles with that smile that has gotten him out of everything his entire life. Poor Luke, I think. Beautiful, useless, stupid Luke. I heard his great-great-grandfather made a fortune selling oil to the Germans and steel to the British during World War I and no one in his family has had to work since. He won’t have to, either, so what’s the use of reading Camus?
“‘Benign indifference of the world,’” Mr. Lawrence repeats. “What is that, you think?”
Luke sucks air into his lungs. I can almost hear the hamster wheel of his brain squeaking away beneath his excellent hair.
“Benign,” Luke says. “A tumor or whatever can be benign. Maybe Camus is, you know, saying the world is a tumor.”
Twenty-eight of the twenty-nine kids in the class laugh, including Luke. I’m the only one who doesn’t. I read this book, The Stranger, when I was fourteen. But I read it in the original French, and when Mr. Lawrence assigned an English translation of it for our World Literature class, I didn’t feel like reading it again. It’s about a guy named Meursault whose mother dies. Then he kills an Arab man and gets sentenced to death, to have his head cut off in public. Then it ends. Camus never gives us the actual beheading.
I turn back to the window, where rain is still pattering, the rhythm of it pulling everyone in the room deeper into some kind of sleepy trance. Beyond the window I can see the outlines of buildings down Sixty-Third Street, their edges all smeared and formless through the water beading against the glass, more like the memory of buildings than the real thing.
Though we’re discussing the last part of The Stranger, it’s the opening lines of the book that always stuck with me. Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. It means: Today, Mother died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.
But I do know. I know exactly when Mother died. It was ten years ago today. I was only seven at the time, and I was there when it happened. The memory of it comes to me now and then in little sketches and vignettes, individual moments. I hardly ever play back the whole memory start to finish. The psychologist I used to see said that was normal, and that it would get easier with time. It didn’t.
“What’s your take, Gwendolyn?” Mr. Lawrence asks.
I hear his voice. I even understand the question. But my mind is too far away to answer. I’m in the backseat of the old Honda, my eyes barely open, my head against the cool glass of the window. The rhythm of the car as it bounces down the dirt track on the outskirts of Algiers is pulling me toward sleep. Then I feel the thrum of the tires over the road slow and hear my mother gasp. I open my eyes, look out the windshield, and see fire.
“Gwendolyn Bloom! Paging Gwendolyn Bloom!”
I snap back to the present and turn to Mr. Lawrence. He holds his hands cupped around his mouth like a megaphone. “Paging Gwendolyn Bloom!” he says again.
“Can you tell us what Camus means by ‘benign indifference of the world’?”
Though part of my mind is still back in the Honda, I begin speaking anyway. It’s a long answer, and a good one, I think. But Mr. Lawrence is looking at me with a little smirk. It’s only after I’m speaking for about twenty seconds that I hear everyone laughing.
“In English, please,” Mr. Lawrence says, arching an eyebrow and looking at the rest of the class.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly, fidgeting with my uniform skirt and tucking a strand of my fire-engine-red hair behind my ear. “What?”
“You were speaking French, Gwendolyn,” Mr. Lawrence says.
“Sorry. I must have been—thinking of something else.”
“You’re supposed to be thinking about the benign indifference of the world,” he says.
One of the girls behind me says, “Jesus, what a pretentious snob.”
I turn and see it’s Astrid Foogle. She’s also seventeen, but she looks at least twenty-one. Her dad owns an airline.
“Enough, Astrid,” Mr. Lawrence says.
But I’m staring at her now, drilling into her with my eyes. Astrid Foogle—whose earrings are more valuable than everything in my apartment—is calling me a pretentious snob?
Astrid continues. “I mean, she drops in here the beginning of the year from wherever and thinks she’s all superior, and now, oh, look, she’s talking in French, not like us dumb Americans. Just look how sophisticated she is. Queen of the trailer park.”
Mr. Lawrence cuts her off. “Stop it, Astrid. Now.”
A few of the kids are nodding in agreement with Astrid; a few others are laughing. I can feel myself trembling, and my face is turning hot. Every synapse in my brain is trying to force the reaction away, but I can’t. Why does anger have to look so much like humiliation?
The guy sitting next to Astrid, Connor Monroe, leans back in his seat and grins. “Check it. She’s crying.”
Which isn’t true, but now that he said it, it’s as good as reality in the minds of the other kids. lolololol gwenny bloom lost her shit and cried in wrld lit #pretentioussnob #212justice