Chris Jerold picked the pimples on his cheeks in ninth grade Algebra class.  Only Algebra.  Nancy Johnson knew because she sat behind him in Algebra, English, Spanish I, and Health.  She also knew he tried to stop the bleeding with tiny pieces of notebook paper and didn’t use his shirt sleeves anymore because Mrs. Wren, the English teacher, mistook the bloodstains for rust and called the custodians demanding Chris’ desk be replaced.  “Look at the rust stains on his shirt.”

Chris Jerold was the kid everyone avoided and ignored.  The last time he fit in was the middle of eighth grade, just months before the tiny pimples on his nose spread like chicken pox down his cheeks and neck.  He convinced himself that by scratching the bumps into scabs it looked like freckles from a distance.  But keeping such self-imposed distance from classmates was difficult.

Regardless, his acne wasn’t responsible for his ostracization.  That was different.  It started the week before eighth grade promotion when Chris showed Mike Gordon how you can kill a mosquito that was biting you by pinching the skin and forcing the poisoned blood back into the proboscis.  Then he showed Justin Grant and Jack O’Connell.  If it was just the pinching, the look at this, neat, huh?  No one would have cared.  But he pointed out the reddening abdomen, the mosquito bracing its legs trying to pull out.  Did they think it knew?  

That was how it happened.

He explained the whole mosquito thing to Nancy, also.  Not that she asked.  She simply couldn’t find the balance between arriving just in time for class to avoid any opportunity for Chris to strike up a conversation but not be marked late.  After two tardies, she abandoned the effort and became Chris’s only social interaction.  He often spoke about his Black Lab, Betsy.  Nancy knew Betsy was two years old and the story behind why his dad bought the dog in the first place – his parents’ divorce.  Betsy played with tennis balls – “she can bark while still keeping it in her mouth” – hated water, and hated when his dad forced her on the canoe.  “She tucked her tail so far between her hind legs, it rested against her stomach and looked like a giant furry penis.”  Chris also said his dad insisted all Labs love water. 

***

Chris solidified his exiled status the next summer when his father died in the canoeing accident.  It wasn’t called a canoeing accident but rather the canoeing accident and the first day of tenth grade, in Trigonometry class, Chris turned to Nancy and said, “Betsy doesn’t know how to swim.”  Then he said, “My dad thought he was good swimmer, too.”  That’s when Nancy considered changing her last name.

***

In October a heat wave canceled two days of school.  Then a tropical storm dumped six inches of rain.  Two mornings in a row mosquitos invaded tenth grade Trig.  Chris wouldn’t stop.  He said it was a terrible way to die, terrible to have your stomach fill with blood.  He turned to Nancy Johnson day after day, while a mosquito probed for a location on his forearm and he tried to squeeze the blood back into it.  Sometimes class started, sometimes the insect escaped but finally a mosquito burst into a tiny, bloody mess and Chris looked up at Nancy and she knew he wanted to tell her things that she never wanted to hear.

***

That was when Nancy decided to go by Samuel.  It was a terrible middle name (after her Grandfather) but it would work well as a last name.  Nancy Samuel.  She would now sit behind Kate Posey in the back row of every class except Honors English which was her favorite class so she didn’t mind sitting in the front.  But every other class she was in the back.  Far away.  She even turned her desk slightly away from Chris’s side and pretended she didn’t hear him telling Abby Lim how oars make funny smacks against the water when you don’t row right and it sounds just like you’re hitting a human skull.

– Roger D’Agostin