Assault Cafe: “Gotham Elementary”

In case you haven’t noticed, a lot of the people who write for Assault are what you might call “real classy guys.” We like to dress in tweed jackets, smoke pipes, and (when we’re not too busy tossing word-bombs at 30 Seconds To Mars) we sometimes even like to do a little old fashioned, rootin,’ tootin,’ straight-up creative writing. In that vein, I introduce Assault Cafe – a cozy little corner of the site where the arty-farty types can get together and share their passion for putting sentences together. For our first installment, I present Jeremy Clymer’s “Gotham Elementary,” which I think you’re bound to enjoy…..

GOTHAM ELEMENTARY
by Jeremy Clymer

Fifth grade was a strange and turbulent time at Gotham Elementary. We were about to enter the world of junior high school, where we would practically be adults. The boys were starting to notice the girls and the girls had long since noticed the boys. The city was in the grip of a crime wave and stories made their way to our ears of the violence at Gotham Junior High. As the end of the school year approached, we were all on edge.

Nowhere was the dark pall that hung over Ms. Cunningham’s class more apparent than in the seething animosity between two of its most peculiar students, Bruce and Chester. Bruce was a dark, brooding boy who usually sat by himself at lunch and often spent recess punching and kicking trees while the other kids played on the jungle gym. He had gone to a private academy in fourth grade but was kicked out for behavioral problems. The rumor was that he had broken the arm of a bully who had been picking on him. Before Bruce arrived in Mrs. Everly’s fourth-grade class the year before, Chester had been its undisputed king, reigning over the rest of us with his charisma as class clown. Within a week of Bruce’s first day of class, though, there was an incident. Chester walked over to him during recess and said something. None of us ever found out what it was, but Bruce responded by punching him square in the jaw. He fell to the ground and howled. This howl of his, it sounded inhuman, like he was a feral child who had been raised by wolves.

None of us quite looked at Chester the same after that. Instead of being admired for his cleverness, he was teased as a crybaby. Some of the other boys, smelling blood, began picking on him ferociously. It became more and more common for him to show up to class with a bloody lip or a black eye. Even the class egghead, Edward, made up riddles taunting him.

“What is red and yellow and sounds like a dying infant?” Edward would ask. “Little baby Chester on the ground pissing himself after Bruce socked him in the face.”

There was one person in the class who came to his defense, a girl named Harley. She would yell at the other boys to stop picking on him and sometimes she would even lash out and attack them on his behalf. If he appreciated these gestures, he didn’t show it. Instead he would hiss at her to leave him alone and tell her he could fight his own battles. For whatever reason, though, this did not deter her.

Something changed in Chester over summer break and by the time fifth grade began he was not recognizable as the seemingly happy-go-lucky class clown that he had started off as the year before. He was making jokes again—something he had stopped doing after the incident with Bruce—but they were exceedingly cruel jokes. He would pull elaborate pranks that sometimes ended with a classmate going to the nurse’s office. The kids who first admired him and then bullied him now kept their distance from him.

Not everyone returned for fifth grade. Harley’s parents had pulled her out of the school, worried about her increasingly erratic behavior after she bit the vice principal’s leg following a fight in the cafeteria. Edward was accepted into a program for the gifted and was taught in a special classroom at the high school. Bruce was there, though, and as Chester became the terror of the classroom, Bruce took over the role of his classmates’ protector. He had been sent to a sports camp over the summer and came back not only in better shape but also in a better mood. He made friends with other students in the after-school floor hockey team and even started talking to girls, which he had not done the previous year. His hatred toward Chester had not diminished, though, and he made it his mission to put a stop to his constant pranks. He would watch Chester wherever he went and tip off anyone who looked like a likely target.

There were a few more fights, too. It was always Chester that started these, baiting Bruce into hitting him by mocking his dead parents. This was a particularly sore spot for Bruce, and although he could usually contain himself there were a few occasions when his temper got out of control. Whenever this would happen, Chester would immediately go to the school’s principal to report it and Bruce would get suspended. Then he would be back a couple weeks later like nothing had happened.

All the tension that had been building up in the school exploded one day in April when Miss Candace, the gym teacher, was found stabbed to death in the girls’ locker room. There were stab wounds all over her body, but particularly gruesome were the cuts on her face that started at the corners of her mouth and reached up almost all the way to her ears, making it look like her bloodied, inanimate face was grinning wickedly. Once word of the murder hit the evening news, the whole city reacted with horror and outrage. This sort of awful crime would not have been out of place on the streets of Gotham, but inside the walls of the elementary school it was unheard of. Even worse, the police did not yet have any leads on who had done it. The schoolchildren were still in danger.

The school was closed for a full week while the investigation was carried out. There was talk of closing it for the rest of the school year, but when put to a vote among the school board it was decided that this would be detrimental to the children’s educations. When the school opened back up, most parents opted to keep their kids at home anyway. The hallways were empty save for a few stragglers, mostly kids with absentee parents or no parents at all. Bruce and Chester were among those kids, and with myself and a chubby, eccentric kid named Oswald brought the headcount of Ms. Cunningham’s class to a grand total of four students.

Without rows of students separating them in class, Bruce and Chester did little besides glare at each other menacingly. Or rather, Bruce would glare and Chester would just grin back at him, which had the same effect. There wasn’t a grin in the world as sinister as Chester’s. Bruce apparently thought so, too, and one afternoon when Ms. Cunningham stepped out of the classroom to retrieve some books from the supply room, he told Chester so.

“You’re sick and evil,” he said to Chester, “and I’d bet anything you killed Miss Candace.”

“Now why would I do that?” Chester asked, the grin not leaving his face.

“Because you’re weak. You couldn’t keep up with the other kids in gym class and Miss Candace gave you bad grades for it.”

“Now what kind of reason is that, Brucey-boy? You’ve got me all wrong. If anyone here is batty enough to have killed the old broad, it’s you.”

“I’m going to pound your face into the cement until there’s nothing left of it,” Bruce growled.

Chester made a face of mock-horror and sat back in his chair, his smile broader and more menacing than ever. Ms. Cunningham walked back into the room and Bruce turned around in his seat to once again face forward.

“OK, class,” Ms. Cunningham said as she passed out a book to each of us. “For homework tonight I want you to read the first story from this book. It’s about a detective named Sherlock Holmes, and I think you’ll all like it. It’s a murder mystery.”

“A case of art imitating life, eh, Ms. C?” Chester said with a wink.

“Yes, Chester,” replied Ms. Cunningham. “You could say that.”

“Please, call me Moriarty. And Bruce can be Sherlock. Don’t you think that’s perfect?” Chester cackled loudly.

Ms. Cunningham gave Chester an odd look and then glanced over at Bruce, who made no response.

The next day in class, Chester was not there. The classroom seemed even gloomier with only three students. The day after, he was absent once again. Bruce kept glancing over to the empty desk where he had sat. He looked almost disappointed that his nemesis was not there, like he no longer had a reason to be there himself. Days came and went and then finally the end of the school year was upon us and Chester had not returned. Oswald asked Ms. Cunningham one day where he had gone, but all she would say was that he was no longer going to our school.

I don’t know what happened to either of them after that. My father got a job as an insurance agent in a small town in Kansas and we packed up and moved away from the crime-ridden city. It was a deliberate move on his part; he had gotten mugged one day on his way home from work and decided that Gotham was no longer a safe place to live. I enjoyed my new home in Kansas. I felt safe there. I made friends with a boy who reminded me an awful lot of Bruce. He didn’t have Bruce’s anger, but he was just as intense. He has since moved to a city himself, but I’ve stayed here, happy to live in a place where nothing much happens.

(You can find more of Jeremy Clymer’s writing at Eggy Toast, his personal blog.)

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About the Author

Jeremy Clymer lives in Michigan with his wife and kid. He shoots his writings out into the ethers of the Internet in the hopes that someone will pick up on his transmissions and shower him with money and/or praise.

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One comment “awaiting immediate, obnoxious rebuttal”

1. Jeremy Clymer says:

   July 7, 2010 at 8:20 am

   Is that Frenchman holding a diaphragm?