Stotan! by Chris Crutcher

in the class, but I hung right in there. You know why? Because I know if you’re abused as a kid there’s a good chance you’ll grow up and beat on your family. And I’m an abused kid. Boy, you don’t know the half of it. My old man’s been beating on me as long as I can remember. That day you saw him out in the driveway? Remember? That was like a prelim to what he usually does. Did you know I had an older brother who killed himself before we moved here? He was thirteen years old and he killed himself.” Nortie was running full tilt. Tears streamed down his face and snot ran out of his nose and he unloaded. “Thirteen years old and he killed himself. Hehung himself in our garage. He took a rope and hung himself. Because he was tired of feeling like hell. He was tired of feeling just like I feel around my dad all the time. And you know what else? I’m classic. You could write a book about me. I still love my dad. I still try to please him. I can’t please him. He doesn’t want to be pleased. He wants to be mad. He wants to hate me. He hates me and I just keep going back.” Nortie’s hands were out, palms up; he was asking for help—from anywhere. “When I hit Jamie, it felt good. I wanted to hurt him. I could feel exactly why my dad hits me.”
    His last words trailed off a little, like he was running down. “Look, Nortie,” I said finally, “that’s what temper feels like. It feels good to everyone to blow up sometimes. That doesn’t mean you’re like your dad. It means you’re like everyone else in the world.” I got my coat out of the closet. “Now listen. You stay here. Lock the door and just stay here. I’ll make sure no one bothers you; even my parents. Just lock yourself in and stay put. I’ll go down and see what the damages are, okay? Just wait here. Somebody needs to tell Maybelle where you are. We’ll figure something out.”
    He started to protest, but I said, “Just promise you’ll stay here, okay? You won’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
    He sank back on the bed and I took his silence as agreement. On the way out, I stopped and asked Mom to please just leave Nortie alone—he was upset, but he was okay. She absent-mindedly said fine and went back to work on her cutwork pillowcases. Then I phoned Elaine and asked if she’d come up and sit down the block in her car and make sure Nortie didn’t leave, because it was not lost on me what he’d said about his brother. And no, I didn’t know he had a brother who killed himself. None of us did.
    I hopped in my car and headed for the east side, wondering what I was going to say to whichever childcare worker had walked back into the activity room to find her coworker gone, two kids wounded and one finely organized science experiment shattered on the floor. Maybe Stotan Week had come early.
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    The room didn’t look as bad as I had imagined. The experiment—whatever it was—was cleaned up and Maybelle had things back under complete control. Jamie the Spitter sat in one corner stretched out in a metal chair, arms folded, staring at his shoes. One side of his face was red and it looked like he might have a mark for a few days. Kathy Scarpelli, whoever she was, was sufficiently recovered to be integrated back into thegroup and wasn’t visibly identifiable. I knew from Nortie’s story that she was black, but the group is about a fifty-fifty mix.
    I stood in the door and motioned to Maybelle to come over. She was moving about the room as if nothing had happened. When she saw me at the door, she smiled politely and said, “Yes, can I help you?”
    I asked if I could talk with her a second.
    â€œSure, honey,” she said, “just a minute.” She turned back to the group. “I’m going to be right outside the door for a few minutes. Go on with what you’re doing, and