Episode 29: Sunday (Rhyss)

He stood on the corner of Grant and Endicott. He was twenty-one years old, and the summer sun beat down on his skin. He had a grocery bag in each hand. Bertrand Gable the Third was on his mind, because tonight was the night he was supposed to help catch the possum.

He stood on the corner of Grant and Endicott. He was thirteen years old, and the summer sun beat down on his skin. He had a grocery bag in each hand. Bertrand Gable the Third was on his mind, because Rhyss had eggs in one bag and Bertrand was approaching with his posse.

Rhyss looked across the street. Running would be pointless; they knew where he lived.

He set the grocery bags on someone’s lawn, away from the sidewalk, and waited.

There were two of them with Bertrand, older than Rhyss. They sat on the dead grass on either side of the grocery bags.

Bertrand stood close to Rhyss. Too close. Rhyss could see the blurred lines of the tattoos on his biceps and smell beef jerky on his breath. “What are you doing out here?” Bertrand asked.

Rhyss looked at the grocery bags.

Bertrand looked too. One of his friends opened the carton of eggs and tossed one to Bertrand.

Rhyss was going to need a shower. “I haven’t changed my mind,” he said. Even though he was four years younger, he was taller than Bertrand, not by much but enough that it showed just standing there. He wished that meant something useful, like that Bertrand would stay away from him.

“Still too good for us?” He raised the egg and dropped it on Rhyss’s head.

Some of the clear stuff ran down Rhyss’s forehead.

He had a job to do.

“Where’s my sister?” he demanded.

Bertrand’s friend passed him another egg.

Bertrand shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t say. Too bad you won’t join.” This egg he threw into the air in a tight arc that landed on Rhyss’s head.

Rhyss’s hands started to shake.

There were two types of runaways in this city. Jill was the second type.

And Rhyss didn’t think she’d run away.

“I’m going home.” He stepped towards his two bags of groceries as Bertrand blocked his path. He had somehow gotten another egg. “I don’t think so.” He smashed the egg into Rhyss’s back and turned him, showing him across the street.

It was full of row houses, some abandoned, some burned out. One had been demolished but an imprint of the staircase still marked the wall of the adjacent house.

“You see all this?” Bertrand asked him. “Somewhere in here is the last place we saw your sister. People like your sister know what happens when you say no too many times.”

He shoved Rhyss to the ground.

Rhyss landed on the stinging pavement with his hands behind him and his knees in front of him.

He knew better than to get back up.

“I’m not going to say no again, because you’re going to leave me alone. I won’t change my mind.”

Bertrand picked up the carton of eggs.

His two friends stood. They grabbed Rhyss by the arms from behind, slamming his head into the sidewalk.

Bertrand shook his head.

One of his friends moved down to Rhyss’s feet, holding them so he was pinned down. The heat from the pavement burned his bare skin.

He refused to fight back. There were three of them and one of him. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to disappear like Jill.

“Open your mouth,” Bertrand ordered.

Rhyss set his jaw; his teeth and lips pressed together.

Bertrand pinched his nose.

“You’re not going to say no again because you won’t be able to.”

The world waited. Stars pulsed in Rhyss’s vision.

He gasped for air, his back arched. As soon as his mouth was open, Bertrand shoved an egg in it and forced Rhyss’s jaw closed.

The egg broke in his mouth, sticky and sharp.

“There’s eight more eggs in here,” Bertrand told him. “Open up.”

Rhyss counted back from ten. If he went to jail for fighting, or if he got killed fighting, his mom would be on her own.

He opened his mouth eight times.

By the end it was full of little cuts and he’d gagged on the eggs and then choked on his own vomit.

Bertrand stood. “Last chance.”

There was even egg in Rhyss’s nose, burning.

“I won’t,” he said through thick egg and sore throat.

“Drag him,” Bertrand snapped. He kicked Rhyss’s right side, between his ribs and his hips.

The two friends tore his shirt down the middle and pulled it off. They flipped him onto his stomach, onto the rough surface of the road.

He yelled before it started because he knew what it would be.

They held his ankles and walked down the street while his chest scraped against the gravel and glass all over the road. He had to hold his head up to keep his face from scraping too.

They walked diagonally across the street, up the curb, across a lawn, and around the corner. There, they deposited him in front of his house.

Bertrand kicked his side one more time.

He heard them walk away.

He lay in his yard a long time. He tried to remember how to breathe and how to stop shaking.

The door to Ms. Anney’s opened. He heard the groan as her front porch shifted under the weight of her tank of a body.

“Rhyss? You okay down there?”

He rolled onto his side and propped himself up on his hands and knees.

He breathed.

He lurched to his feet.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

Her face was obscured in shadow, but he heard the frown in her voice. “You need anything?”

His mom would panic if she saw him like this, with his skin peeled and bleeding, with lumps of gravel coming out of his flesh.

“Do you have a shirt?” he asked.

It took over an hour. She cleaned him and used magic to stitch up a place near his collarbone where broken glass had sliced his skin.

He sat at the table while she cooked, and she slid a grilled cheese sandwich and bowl of tomato soup in front of him.

“Tell me,” she ordered.

He shook his head. His tears made him ashamed.

“Rhyss Hartmann,” she said sternly. “How long have you known me?”

All his life, he guessed.

He swallowed a bite of sandwich he’d dipped in the soup.

“Bertrand,” he said.

She stood up. “Least you had the sense to say no to them.”

He ate the sandwich.

“Do you think they got Jill?” he asked her.

She leaned against the counter in front of the sink, her hands behind her resting on the plastic surface. “Maybe,” she said.

He loved that she was honest about it.

He drank the soup.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

She handed him a paper pouch smaller than a trading card, which contained herbs in just the right proportions. He knew what it was – escape, safety.

“Keep this in your pocket, and next time you see them you run.”

That week, he learned how to make the pouches himself. He never went anywhere without them again.

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