Read Online In a Glass House by Nino Ricci - Free Book Online

swivel to bring a long lock of hair up out of his eyes. When he’d settled into the seat he made some comment to me that I couldn’t follow, that I hoped had simply been some sort of greeting. But when I didn’t respond he spoke again, his face twisted now, mocking or angry. Then suddenly he seemed to understand.
    “Deutschman?”
he said.
“Auf Wiedersehen? Nederlander? Italiano?”
    “Italiano,”
I said, clutching at the familiar word.
    “Ah, Italiano!”
He thumped a hand on his chest.
“Me speak Italiano mucho mucho
.
Me paesano.”
    When other boys got on the bus and came to the back, the black-haired boy said they were
paesani
as well, and each in turn smiled broadly at me and shook my hand. They tried to talk to me using their hands and their strange half-language. One of them pointed to the big silver lunchbox Tsia Teresa had packed my lunch in.
    “
Mucho mucho
,” he said, holding his hands wide in front of him. Then he pointed to me and brought his hands closer together. “
No mucho mucho
.” The other boys laughed.
    The black-haired boy took the lunchbox from me and held it before him as if to admire it. Then finally he opened it and unwrapped one of the sandwiches inside, split it open, brought it to his nose to sniff it. He screwed up his face.
    “
Mu-cho, mu-cho
,” he said, thrusting the sandwich away to one of the other boys and pinching his nose.
    The sandwich began to pass from hand to hand. The other boys sniffed it as well, clutching at their throats, pretending to swoon into the aisle. Finally one of them glanced quickly up to the front of the bus, then slipped the sandwich out through an open window. From where I sat I saw it flutter briefly through the air and then fly apart as it struck the road.
    They began to pass the second sandwich around. I tried to leap up to pull it away, but the black-haired boy’s arm shot out suddenly in front of me and pinned me to the seat, and then his fist caught the side of my head hard three times in quick succession, my head pounding against the glass of the window beside me.
    “
No, no, paesano
.”
    I avoided the older boys after that, but I carried my humiliation with me like an open sore, always aware of it; and that awareness, more than the humiliation itself, seemed to be what gave the persecutions by the boys on the bus their meaning, what marked me. I thought there could be a way in which what they did to me, then and after, could stay outside me, have nothing to do with the kind of person I was, that I had only to find the right way to act. But each time it was the same, I’d fill with the same anger and hate, and my humiliation seemed thenno longer simply a thing they did to me but something I always carried inside. The boys who picked on me had found the right way to act – they were perfectly detached, indifferent, didn’t pick on me because they hated me or were angry but only because they could see the humiliation already inside me, as if I were made of glass, and if I’d been different they’d have left me alone or been friendly.
    After school the boys would stake out seats for themselves and choose who they’d let sit beside them, and often then I’d have to sit with one of the girls or with George. George lived out near Goldsmith, in a rambling, broken-down farmhouse where in the fall and spring chickens and sometimes even pigs could be seen scavenging on the front lawn and in the laneway, roaming without restraint, as if they’d taken over the farm; and he had the unkempt, wild-eyed look of an idiot, his teeth gapped and protruding and his hair always awkwardly crew-cut, some patches longer than the others, some shaved too close to the skin. From up close I could see he was strangely large and robust, his hands almost the size of a man’s and the muscles of his arms bulging against his sleeves; but the way he hunched himself made him seem shrivelled and deformed. When he boarded the bus in the morning he’d lurch up the aisle