Chapter Three: Thursday

As Jeremy dressed and got ready for school, he was haunted by his dream as well as the strange tingling he had felt in his fingers. He went through his morning routine on auto-pilot, without really paying attention to what he was doing. He ate his breakfast, a bowl of cornflakes, without tasting a morsel of it. As he was getting ready to leave the house, he spent a few minutes looking around for his backpack until he realized that it was already on his back. This did not bode well for his day at school, since he was more likely to do something embarrassing if he was distracted.

When he stepped out of the house, the cool morning air helped bring him back to reality. The dreamy mood he had awoken in started to fade as he walked to school, and concern about more mundane matters began to take its place. By the time he got to school, he was feeling pretty normal, like his old self. As he sat in math class, he was able to focus well enough on his work that his teacher actually said that he was “really on the ball today.” The compliment pleased him but the idiom was unfortunate since it made him think of the spinning ball in his dream and momentarily made him lapse back into daydream mode. But he snapped out of it pretty quickly. He was having an above-average day at school. He got through two periods without even doing anything embarrassing.

At fifth period, Jeremy entered the gym and his heart immediately sank. Pepto was back. Before he even saw the tyrant, he heard the familiar bullying voice barking at the boys lining up on the gym floor, “No slouching. Stand straight. Shirts tucked in. Look alive. Jog in place.” Jeremy took his place at the end of the third row and along with the rest of the class waited to see what form of torture was in store for them today.

“Hit the floor,” Mr. Abizol ordered. “Twenty push-ups. Backs straight.” The class went through several more warm-up exercises including sit-ups and jumping-jacks before they were told to stand at ease.

“Heard you played dodge ball for two days,” boomed Mr. Abizol in his snide way. “Let’s see what you learned. Form two teams. Hurry up.” Most of the boys had enjoyed playing dodge ball with Mr. Hayes in charge. It was just a game and it was fun. Everyone knew that today’s game would be different. All the fun would be drained out of it and it would be full of stress and intimidation because what Mr. Abizol liked to do most was terrorize and embarrass students.

Mr. Abizol did not look like a PE teacher, or what Jeremy thought a PE teacher should look like. He was overweight and out of shape. His head seemed disproportionately small for his ungainly pear-shaped body and was hardly wider than his short, thick neck. His persistently pink face was crowned with a sparse covering of whitish-blonde hair cropped in a military buzz cut style and an incongruous pair of rimless glasses sat on his bulbous nose. Mr. Abizol never did any of the exercises he delighted in making the PE class do. Indeed, it is unlikely that he could have successfully performed five pushups, much less the twenty he demanded. This hypocrisy bothered Jeremy, who felt that a person should be able and willing to do what he made others do.

Jeremy might have forgiven the hypocrisy if Mr. Abizol had been a nice or decent person in other ways, but he wasn’t. No PE class ever ended without someone being thoroughly embarrassed or humiliated, and often enough that person was Jeremy. For some reason that Jeremy never understood, Mr. Abizol took an immediate dislike to him and gave him a hard time from the very first class. If a “volunteer” was needed for Mr. Abizol to demonstrate a headlock or half-nelson, Jeremy was often coerced into taking the part, and it was rare for him to complete the task without acquiring a bruise or cut or bloody nose. But it was the embarrassment that accompanied these demonstrations, being the butt of everyone’s nervous laughter, more than the injuries, that bothered Jeremy. Mr. Abizol was one of those people who use their position of power to be despotic and unfair, and Jeremy hated him for it.

One of Mr. Abizol’s favorite pastimes was using names to needle students. Perhaps it was in retaliation for being given the nickname, Pepto, or maybe he was just exercising a natural talent, but Mr. Abizol found in names a sure and convenient means to torment students. Thanks to Mr. Abizol, a boy named Underwood became forever – and not just in PE class – Underwear. A boy from Eastern Europe named Sczertznofski was also the recipient of an Abizol nickname. Excusing himself by saying he didn’t want to mispronounce the name, the PE teacher assigned him the moniker “Alphabet.” That was another name that stuck.

With the surname Chance, Jeremy was used to receiving nicknames. At various times he had been called Fat Chance, Slim Chance, Last Chance and No Chance. But Mr. Abizol had a sense of subtlety. What he did, whenever the class finished a particularly strenuous set of exercises such as pushups or pull-ups, was to call out, “Another, Chance.” He did this with such regularity that the phrase “Another, Chance,” or in Pepto’s clipped speech “Nuther Chance,” achieved notoriety.

Whenever he heard the words “another, Chance,” Jeremy knew he was in for a strenuous ordeal. He got to hate the sound of his own name when it was coupled with that ominous word “another.” To make matters worse, some classmates had gotten into the habit of sometimes calling Jeremy “Nuther.” Jeremy hated the nickname Nuther because it reminded him of Pepto every time he heard it, and he hated to be reminded of Pepto.

Mr. Abizol stood on the sidelines, yelling orders and insults as the game of dodge ball began. Instead of sitting out the rest of the game, anyone who was eliminated was penalized by having to run around the track for the remainder of the period. This motivated everyone to try as hard as possible to stay in the game, so the play was vicious. Jeremy ran himself ragged trying to evade the ball that shot back and forth. About half his team had already been eliminated and Jeremy was getting tired when someone fired the ball right at him. Jeremy’s strength was in dodging and he was never very good at catching the ball. He never really bothered to try. He heard Mr. Abizol bellow, “Good shot! There goes Chance.” Jeremy thrust out his hands and amazingly caught the powerfully thrown ball right in front of his face. His fingertips felt unusually strong and he hung on to the ball.

It was a spectacular catch and everyone was stunned. It would have been an astonishing catch by the most athletic boy, and Jeremy was not known for his athletic prowess. The members of the opposing team were so sure that the ball would bounce off Jeremy’s head that they momentarily forgot to move. Jeremy’s fingers, however, did not hesitate for a second. Before he was even aware of it, his fingers had positioned themselves to launch the ball, his arm drew back, and Jeremy fired a cannonball at the player who had thrown at him. The ball smashed so fiercely into the boy’s left knee that he fell to the floor. What happened next was even more amazing. The ball ricocheted off the boy’s knee and hit Mr. Abizol square in the face, causing his glasses to fly off his face and land ten feet away. A red stream sprang from the teacher’s nose and dribbled onto the gym floor.

For a second the gym was as quiet as a crypt and then the laughter erupted. Students were laughing so hard they couldn’t control themselves and a few literally rolled around on the gym floor hooting and bellowing. Mr. Abizol was apoplectic with rage. Trying to staunch his bloody nose with one hand, he pointed and gesticulated wildly with the other. Finally he roared, “My glasses. Get my glasses.” The raucous laughter subsided when the class saw how angry Mr. Abizol was. A quaking student quickly retrieved the glasses and placed them in the teacher’s outstretched hand.

Now, somewhat back in control of himself, Mr. Abizol pointed at Jeremy and screamed, “You, outta here. To the principal, right now.”

“But, sir,” Jeremy started to say. Mr. Abizol interrupted him and shouted, “You heard me. On the double!”

The injustice infuriated Jeremy but he had no choice but to leave the gym and go to the principal’s office. He felt silly and out of place walking down the corridor and into the office in his sweaty gym clothes. He felt eyes looking at him and heard snickers and muffled laughter – or did he just imagine it? The secretary asked what she could do for him and Jeremy said he needed to see the principal. She led him to the inner office, knocked twice on the door, and when a deep voice uttered, “Come in,” ushered him inside. She said to the figure seated at the desk, “This boy would like to speak to you,” and then stepped out of the room.

Jeremy had never been to the principle’s office before and had never had any personal contact with him. He saw him at assemblies and class visits and sometimes walking in the corridor, but he had never spoken to or been spoken to by Dr. Peterson and therefore had very little idea of what the man was like. He had no cause to either like or dislike him. He heard stories from time to time but they didn’t really indicate what kind of person Dr. Peterson was. Students respectfully called him Dr. P., but outside of his hearing referred to Principal Peterson as PP, which they pronounced pee-pee. There was no shortage of nicknames at Higgins Elementary. Now, entering PP’s office, Jeremy had no idea of what to expect.

The principal, obviously in the middle of writing something, looked Jeremy up and down, tapped his silver pen on the desk a few times and said, “What can I do for you, young man?”

“My name is Jeremy Chance, sir,” Jeremy said in as steady a voice as he could muster. “Pep . . . I mean Mr. Abizol sent me to speak to you.”

“I see,” the principal said in a not unkind way. “Have a seat.”

Jeremy obediently sat down and the principal asked, “And why did Mr. Abizol ask you to pay me a visit?”

“Well, sir, I accidentally hit him with a ball in the gym.”

“Accidentally, Mr. Chance? I don’t think Mr. Abizol would have sent you here if it was an accident.”

“We were playing dodge ball, sir. I threw the ball at a boy on the other team. It hit him on the knee and it bounced off and hit Mr. Abizol in the face.”

“Oh, really?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “And then what happened?”

“It knocked his glasses off and gave him a bloody nose. And then he sent me to you. That’s all, sir.”

Jeremy thought that he saw the beginnings of a smile start to form around the principal’s mouth, but it may just have been his imagination. There was no trace of a smile on his face as he began to speak. Then there was a disturbance outside and a second later the door flew open and Mr. Abizol barged in.