Now it was a reminder of what he’d become since her death.
He opened it to the first page, yellowed with time, which was filled with legible, but immature, handwriting. Not the script of an adult but of an older child. At the top of the page was written a date from thirty years ago. Underneath it was a large, hand-sketched box with a big black X drawn through its center, beside which was written a single name: Tucker Steele. Below the box and name were smaller, denser sentences that resembled a cooking recipe or assembly instructions for a home appliance.
“What’s this?” Sebastian asked, staring at the name, and the crossed box sitting next to it.
“Tucker Steele was a boy in my eighth-grade class. Immensely popular. Good-looking. Athletic. You’re familiar with the type, I’m sure. I was, needless to say, none of those things.”
Finney touched Tucker’s name with his finger. “Tucker enjoyed tormenting boys like me. He and his popular friends. Adolescents can be unimaginably cruel, and the school administrators could not have cared less. This was a long time ago, Sebastian, when prevention of bullying among schoolchildren was not all the rage, as it is now.”
He ran his finger along the lettering of Tucker’s name, beginning with the e at the end of Steele, from right to left, toward the X.
“We had cheap, plastic-backed desk chairs in our classrooms. Uncomfortable. The plastic backs were thin, and it was easy to stick sharp objects, like tacks, all the way through them. The sharpened point would stick up from the back of the chair, waiting for an unwary occupant to lean back into it.”
Finney’s finger reached the X. “I sat in front of Tucker in English. Assigned seating. I was in the front row. The entire class could see me. I was late to class that day. Rushed. Distracted. Tucker must have primed the rest of the class, let them in on the joke, before I got there.”
Finney’s finger lingered over the X. “When I sat down, I didn’t simply lean back in the chair and onto the tack. No. I was in a hurry, and I was distracted, so I slid into the chair, with my back flush against the plastic.”
He tapped his finger on the X, as if keeping time with a beat. “The tack caught on the bottom of my shirt and the skin of my back, ripping both open. It gouged a big gash all the way up, in both my shirt and my skin, from the small of my back to just below my shoulder. Tucker and his friends—the whole class—thought it was hilarious. Erupted into laughter. The teacher yelled at me for the disruption and, when it became apparent I was bleeding all over myself and the chair, scolded me for my carelessness and ordered me to the nurse’s office.”
He glanced at Sebastian. “It was, for me, a crowning indignation in a series of them at the hands of Tucker and his friends. We’d just read about Hammurabi’s Code in history. The principle seemed apropos. I considered its practical applications, and I formulated an appropriate response to Tucker based on lex talionis. It wasn’t challenging.” He shrugged. “There was a dog. I poisoned it.”
It took a moment for this to sink in with Sebastian. “You poisoned his dog? When you were in eighth grade?”
“No. Not Tucker’s dog. His friend’s dog. One of his friends who’d laughed at me in English. Another popular boy named Ryan. The specifics aren’t important. It was rat poison, and I made it look like Tucker had poisoned Ryan’s dog as some kind of practical joke in response to a slight from Ryan. And quietly—very quietly—I made sure the entire school knew it. No one suspected my involvement, or doubted Tucker was responsible. That’s how well I set things in motion, Sebastian.”
Finney smiled faintly at the memory. “It was a big deal. Animal cruelty—things like that simply didn’t happen in our school, or our community. Ever. Bullying, yes. Animal cruelty, no. It was a scandal.”
“So you set this boy up.”
“Yes.”
“Did the dog die?”
“Yes.” Finney shrugged. “Not my intent. The dose was higher than I’d anticipated. What does the military call it? Collateral damage? At any rate, Tucker’s popularity, the one thing in the world that mattered most to him, was destroyed. Dog poisoner. Can you imagine? He became an outcast. He tried to tell people it wasn’t him, that he would never poison a dog. Cried, and begged. Nobody believed him. Not Ryan, or Ryan’s parents, or the administration of our school. Tucker and his entire family were humiliated.”
Finney pushed his finger hard against the X, as if trying to push it all the way through the paper, then drew it away. “One day, Tucker didn’t show up for school, and the news spread that he’d been expelled. That was the day I put an X through the box next to his name.”