A Bloody Book

By Christopher Bowen

How long does a lost child hold onto hope?

"When did you stop caring? Go into any kindergarten classroom and ask those kids how many want to become readers. All the hands go up. They keep them up until you give them some eye contact because they want you to know that they are well on their way to becoming readers. And now you're all in this remedial class with your failing grades and bad reputations. So, when did you all stop caring?" No one, dear reader, is prepared for Maxx's answer or his chilling tail of death, struggle, and murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher Bowen
• Release date: Nov 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393193241

Christopher Bowen

Chris Bowen has been the Teacher of the Year for his school, for his school district, and was most recently honored as Teacher of the Year for Los Angeles County. Los Angeles County currently employs over 80,000 teachers. His most important key to success with children is building that personal relationship with each child. There is a huge difference between being tough and being strong. Anybody can be tough with a nine-year-old, but it takes the strength of patience, empathy, and honesty to build a more effective, lasting relationship. To contact Chris Bowen, please email the author at [e-mail]

Book preview

Dearest Reader,

I assure you.  It will be a bloody book.  Scout’s Honor.  But, for full effect, this evening’s blood has been postponed due to efficient story telling.  So before you slam the book down and cry out, Where’s all the damn blood?  I ask you to take this simple mantra to heart.  It is as follows.

Start for the story.

Care for the characters. 

Stay for the twist.

Once again readers, and this time chant it with feeling.

Start for the story. 

Care for the characters. 

Stay for the twist.

Patience is the secret for relishing what’s great in books.  Patience may be the greatest ally in any person’s quest to attain deeper happiness.  And the pay-off will be gratifying.  Sure, we start in Anywhere, USA Middle School, but we end in a truly classic battle between good and evil.  And not one of those battles drenched in Disney sap and simplicity.  No.  This is a complicated and complex sort of good and evil battle.  It’s got it all.  Villains reeling in redemption, heroes mired in self-doubt and weakness.  Issues for which there will never be definitive answers.  Oh yes, and blood.  It is, as stated earlier, a bloody book.  But for now,

Start for the story.

Care for the characters.

Stay for the twist.

Enough already.  I’ll let Maxx take it from here.

PREFACE

A BLOODY BOOK

THIS HERE?  WHAT YOU have in front of you took me a few years to do.  Don’t worry about how many.  Not your concern.  This all started on account of an assignment I never did when I was in eighth grade.  I was too afraid to write it.  Speaking the truth, any truth—even just some—comes with consequences.  At thirteen, I just wasn’t ready for all of that.

It was back in a class I used to call Reading Hell with Mr. Foxx.  I could see where he was going with it.  The assignment was about trying to get you to own all your crap.  Either own it or acknowledge it.  We were just eighth graders at the time, so it was probably more about acknowledging all the crap around you.  And for a few kids, I think the assignment actually worked.  He got a few kids thinking.  He got me thinking the most, but no way.  I was nowhere near ready to give some teacher I hardly knew the satisfaction of knowing that he was having an impact on me.  I got close, but I was able to pull back just enough.  I claimed this all started with an assignment I never turned in, but technically I did turn something in.  I gave him a few lines.  It went like this:

Your assignment is stupid and impossible to do.  How can I write about when I officially stopped giving a crap about school when I am still in the process of not giving a crap?  So, if I still don’t give a crap, I can’t give a crap about this assignment.  Like I said, this is stupid and not really possible.

He was unimpressed.  He leaned in and told me that he knew I already wrote the assignment.  He knew that I had been writing in my head for days.  He said he was this master at planting seeds and that he knew the true seed had been planted in me.  In fact, he predicted that I was really taking notes for a much longer paper, maybe even something book length because I was just looking for an excuse and an invitation to spill myself, like blood, all over the page.  He told me to keep writing, and he gave me an email where I could one day send the completed manuscript.  And then, I remember he pissed me off even more because he gave me an A on my four sentences with a note explaining that he was giving me extra credit for the writing that I was doing at home.

Oh, and don’t worry by the way.  If you just panicked thinking the whole bloody book thing was just some metaphor, you’re wrong.  Blood to come, I promise.  The thing is, I knew that Mr. Foxx was a total asshole half the time.  But he was also totally right.  I had been secretly writing in a bunch of cheap notebooks for days.  I actually held off on buying chips after school for a while and bought notebooks instead.  I had to do it at a different store, too.  I couldn’t have nobody at school see me buying notebooks in the middle of March.  I never would have heard the end of it.  I went over to the pharmacy a few blocks down and picked them up there.  Mostly only old ladies buying medicines to help them poop and pee, so no threat.  It was actually kind of nice when I bought the notebooks because for a moment or two they didn’t look at me like I might jump them.

And Mr. Foxx was exactly right about me.  I had been looking for just the right invitation and the right excuse to bleed all over the pages.  Took me a while.  I was unraveling a whole bunch of stuff.  And here is what I got.  You’re looking at it.

When I started writing it, I wasn’t even shaving yet.  I shave now.  Makes me laugh when I go back and read the beginning.  Kind of makes me cry a little, too.  I mean, if I was actually capable of crying.

For kids like us, crying is one of the first luxuries to go.  I noticed that one early on.  See, crying can lead to beatings and beatings can lead to more crying.  You can see where this is going.  You can’t control the beatings, but you can control the crying.  So, it’s the crying that has to go.  The thing though that nobody tells you about tears is that crying isn’t like riding a bicycle.  Once you train yourself not to cry, you forget how to do it.  It’s like a strange half amnesia sets in.  You’re still clear on all the day to day stuff.  Name.  Place.  Address.  Who and what to avoid.  But you forget some other part of yourself.  Some important inner stuff.  It’s been lost or boarded up.  It is like you’re playing this cruel game of hide and seek with yourself and you forgot where you hid. 

And since I mentioned riding bicycles, it might be worth mentioning that I learned how to ride a bike when I stole one.  I saw kids with bikes all the time, and I knew that I could probably ride it better than half of them.  Fat, dopey kids wobbled along all the time, so I just picked a kid one day who was riding slow, fat and wobbly and I punched him in the face while he was riding by me.  Poor kid never saw it coming.  Obviously he fell, and I scooped up his bike and got on one for the first time.  And I was right.  Instantly, I could ride.  The trick is you just need to go fast enough.  Once you get moving, it’s pretty impossible to fall down.  Unless, of course, you’re a slow kid wobbling along and some a-hole punches you in the face when you least expect it.  I didn’t steal it completely.  I rode it for a few blocks, then just dropped it off somewhere.  In the distance, I could see the poor kid coming towards where I left it on somebody’s lawn.  I just assumed he got it back.  That was one of the last times I cried, by the way.  To get just a taste of the good life only because I punched a kid and temporarily stole his bike was a little too much for me.  It was quick.  You can’t look like you were crying when you come through the door.  Obviously.

And this is not a crying book.  Sorry.  It’s not called a teary-eyed book.  But you can’t have one without a little of the other.  Tears lead to violence and violence can get pretty bloody and the aftermath can lead to more tears.  You can see where this is going.

So, it’s a few years late and about 150 pages longer than it needed to be.  But it is finished.  At the very least, I can say that I finally earned the A Mr. Foxx gave me in eighth grade.  A debt has been paid, I guess.  So, both in metaphors and authentic red splatters, I give to you, A Bloody Book.

CHAPTER ONE 

A BLOODY BOOK

ADULT 101

IF YOU’RE READING THIS right now....no...that ain’t right.  That’s a stupid way to start.  Let me try again.  Dear Reader.  No.  Pathetic.  See, for a minute I was talking that glazed over adult talk.  It’s weird, but when you try to write stuff down sometimes, and it feels all official, it’s kinda like you lose your own words and you just sort of slip into adult talk.  And, in case you haven’t noticed, adult talk has nothing to do with talking. Or communicating.  It really has more to do with NOT talking to each other.  I mean, have you ever watched a couple of adults talk?

First, they laugh at so much stupid stuff they say to each other.  It’s almost like they’re taking turns.  First, one person says all the stupid stuff, then the other person laughs.  Then, they pause and switch and let the other person do the laughing and the other person says all the stupid stuff.  Here’s an actual clip from an adult conversation I heard two teachers having out on the quad the other day while they were on duty.

Hey, how’s it going?

Good.  How about you?

Good. 

Brr...it’s a cold one this morning.

And then?  Then the other teacher laughed.  She actually laughed at, Brr...it’s cold.  What could possibly be so darn funny about being cold?  I mean if one of them said something like, Look my boogers are frozen to my upper lip, now that might be at least a little bit funny.  I think the reason they keep talking and laughing is because adults hate silence.  I mean they really hate it.  That’s why middle school kids love to use silence against adults.  We know that the longer we can stay silent while adults are asking us stupid questions that they already know the answers to, the angrier and funnier adults get.  I mean, unless you know the adult is going to physically hurt you bad, there ain’t much else more funny than a pissed off adult.  They get all red in the face and little spit bubbles start to build up in the corners of their mouth.  And the bald ones are even funnier to piss off.  Their heads get red and, if you do it right, you can actually see veins bulging out of their scalps like their brains are going to bust wide open.  Actually, there is an adult funnier than a pissed-off, bald-headed adult and that’s a pissed off adult wearing a wig.  You don’t get too many of those these days, since being bald ain’t as bad as it used to be.  But, an adult with a wig is funny to watch when they’re screaming.  See, the wig starts shaking like it might fall off.  When the wig starts going one way and their fleshy heads start shaking in the other direction, you got yourself a very entertaining show to watch. I’ve only seen this happen once back in sixth grade.

It was Ms. Spencer’s last year and you could just tell she was ready to go.  She had shoes from like the 1800’s.  And, she had a wig.  And, like a lot of old-lady-wigs, it didn’t really fit too well.  The wig seemed a few sizes too big for her little head.  It really should’ve come with a chinstrap to keep it in place.  Anyway, one time near the end of the year, near the end of her teaching career, she was laying into me pretty good.  It was like she was yelling at me for all the things kids had done to her over the last century.  She was yelling at me for things kids did who were now like fifty years old.  And, to make it worse for poor Ms. Spencer, she really should’ve retired about ten years before she did.  But, Ms. Spencer had to work.  Mr. Spencer had gotten really sick and had to stop working years ago.  Ms. Spencer got into teaching late on account of having to earn a living, take care of her husband, and raise her kids.  So, for Ms. Spencer to get her 30 years of teaching in to retire, she had to teach until she was like 75 years old.  And, I did feel really bad for her because no little old lady who is 75 should be dealing with middle school kids.  I mean, we tire out the young and healthy teachers.  Just think about the woopin’ we must have been putting on poor old Ms. Spencer.  And you know, it’s a shame me and Ms. Spencer weren’t friends.  We really had a lot in common.  First, we both got stuck in the worst classes.  The principal didn’t know what to do with Ms. Spencer because she was too old to still be teaching, but her and her wig just kept showing up everyday.  So, they made her teach a class I like to call Reading Hell.  And, they didn’t know what to do with me neither.  I wasn’t no drooling idiot, but I had no kind of book smarts, so they stuck me in Reading Hell too, because even though they thought I had no business getting an education, my butt just kept showing up.  School was at least better than home.  But the school really can’t count that as bragging rights on account of how bad home is.  School just sucks less.  I could wear a t-shirt that reads, SCHOOL.  IT SUCKS LESS. 

And also, me and Ms. Spencer, we were both real tired and beat down about it all.  And, Ms. Spencer had all kinds of money and family problems.  I knew that the cafeteria lady let Ms. Spencer eat for free.  I seen it before.  Ms. Spencer, everyday, would take out the same crumpled two dollars and offer to pay and Bertha, or whatever her name is in the cafeteria, would shake her head and not take her money.  And I ate in the cafeteria for