Neil watched from his seat in the hall as a kid emerged from the classroom across from him. He was lounging lazily on a bench outside Room 210, Mr. Bates's general science class, when the blond-headed kid slipped through the opposite classroom's door and pressed himself against the wall like a slug, his pale face burning so bright pink he looked about to ignite into flames. Neil didn't know the kid's name, nor did he care to, but he did know, like everybody else at school, that he was that one smart kid, an eighth grader, like himself, although Neil Darragh was supposed to actually be in the ninth grade—another thing which everybody at school knew and which caused him to be referred to as that one kid who stayed back a grade.

His face set in a look of disinterest, Neil forced a sarcastic smile onto half of it and nodded at the smart kid, who happened to glance his way. The flushed boy immediately turned away, causing Neil to laugh quietly to himself. He didn't laugh because he was happy—no. He laughed because he was mean. At least, he liked to look that way. So people usually did have a scared reaction toward him, and he was used to it.

Neil Darragh had the perfect appearance for someone who was mean. He was taller and wider in the shoulders than anyone in the eighth grade, and he was darker too. Darker because he only wore shades of black and blue, and also because he wore dark expressions at all times. He had plugs in his ears—the things whose goal was to make big holes in the lower earlobe; they were the one thing his father had let him get, right before things at home started getting worse. And Neil had a tattoo of a bat on his wrist (which he faithfully inked on every morning before school, seeing as there was no way he could get a real one yet). There was more paraphernalia to Neil's wardrobe—things like a safety-pin necklace he'd made when bored once, strange patches of weeping, bleeding, or drooping characters that he drew and then super-glued onto his clothing or falling-apart book bag, a pair of Converse sneakers he'd painted flames on. Sometimes, when extremely bored, Neil would even take an eyeliner and draw fake scars around his wrists or on his face. Things like that always got the good, creeped-out or grossed-out reactions from the kids or teachers at school.

The only thing that didn't really go with Neil's image at all was his hair. It was the orangest hair of any kid at school—the color of carrots, or pumpkins! And it whirled out from the top of his head and fell as straight as rain across his forehead and down the back of his neck. Neil hated it; somehow, orange hair didn't fit into his whole dark persona. The only thing he could do with it was gel it into strange forms, which he did only sometimes, seeing as his hair was the one thing he didn't want to draw attention to. Once, Neil had dyed it green, and that had gotten such a reaction from the adults at school (the dress code strictly forbid hair-coloring) that he would've definitely gone blue the next week if his father hadn't been called in. That had been a bad time. Things at home were bad enough without Mr. Darragh getting called into school "on account of his son's idiocy," as he said to the principal. There was no more thought on hair coloring after the green washed away.

Neil very often got bored with the way he looked. He was always thirsting for something new and strange. Being only fourteen, though, he wasn't able to do much of anything too interesting. All the really cool things needed parental permission, and that wasn't going to be obtained any time soon, he knew. Mr. Darragh had problems of his own, and Neil knew better by that time than to ask his father for anything. No, whatever Neil wanted, he'd have to get it on his own, and the majority of what he wanted was, due to his age, off limits.

The kid across the hall from Neil—the little blond kid—was being scolded by his teacher now. Neil couldn't hear what was being said, but he was grinning like an imp. He loved to see kids in trouble. He himself hardly got into trouble anymore. Not the real kind, where teachers yelled and got all worked up and sent him to the office. No, Neil Darragh was a well-known delinquent to every teacher around. He was, they figured, a hopeless case. So in general, if they thought he looked troublesome, they severed the ties for any potential problems by sticking him out in the hall. Since the seventh grade, Neil had almost daily partaken in all the wonderful education that the school's hallways had to offer.

Now, he was taking in some of the rare entertainment that the hallway gave him. The teacher across the hall had finally stopped scolding, and she was opening the door for the blond kid to go back into the classroom. The boy's face was so red by that point that it looked sunburned, and the kid was scowling so bad that Neil couldn't help but laugh out loud as he watched him go back into his class.

After school that day, Neil took his time in getting home. He walked, like he always had to, and that took up a good amount of time anyway, but this time he decided to take an even longer route. He went through some of the vacant lots behind the school and toward a ratty old playground. He sat on the merry-go-round, staring at its peeling paint with a slight curl in his upper lip. He kicked his shoes in the gravel beneath it, slowly spinning around. The sky was gray and he could see his breath coming out in little puffs, but he wasn't too cold. He felt colder at home than he would in a blizzard in Antarctica. His mind suddenly shifting to polar bears and then quickly to Klondike bars and, after that, an encounter with an ice cream man he'd had last summer, Neil lay down on the merry-go-round and stared up into the sky. He folded his hands on his chest and hung his legs over the edge of the metal piece of equipment, and the spinning slowly came to a stop.

Why does life have to be so boring? he thought to himself. There was nothing interesting in lying on a merry-go-round in a deserted playground on a chilly September day. Nothing interesting at all.

He watched his breath condense and let his mind fall blank. Twenty minutes passed before he realized that it looked like it was going to rain and remembered he still had a pretty long way to go before he reached home. Sighing like he hated the world (which he really believed he did), Neil slid off the merry-go-round, landing on his knees in the gravel, and then forced himself to get up and continue on his way home.

By the time the boy walked through the front door of his house, he was soaking wet from the storm that had burst upon him, and his large shoes tracked a bit of mud into the hall. Grunting in aggravation, Neil nevertheless dropped his backpack and used the bottom of his long-sleeved shirt to wipe up the mess. Then, he took off his shoes and, re-opening the door, set them on the front stoop. All the while, his ears took in the droning blare of the television and occasional coughs coming from the den. He knew his father was in there, watching TV, and he wanted to avoid making his presence known.

Unfortunately, when Neil was closing the door for the second time, a wind sucked it out of his hand and slammed it shut. The noise was too loud not to hear.

"Neil!" came his father's gruff call. "Is that you? Don't slam the door."

"It's me," replied Neil, not wanting to answer but knowing that he'd get an earful if he didn't. He was hoping that he'd be able to get up the stairs and to his room without much more interference.

Mr. Darragh was, however, not yet so intoxicated that he was entirely out of sorts. "Come in here for a minute. Let me talk to you," he said.

Neil sucked in his breath. For as tough as he was at school, his stomach trembled at the thought of speaking with his father. Mr. Darragh rarely came home from work so early. Neil had purposely wasted his time after school because he knew his father had the afternoon off, and he was hoping that by the time he got home, the man would have drunk himself into another one of his sleeping stupors.

"Come in here, Neil. You aren't deaf. You hear me!"

Escape was impossible. Slumping his shoulders, Neil reluctantly shuffled into the den, his socks moving soggily across the wooden floor. The den was, by normal standards, a very nice room. In fact, the whole Darragh house was pretty nice. It looked like most other people's houses. It was a typical three-bedroom, two-bathroom place. The rooms were large and the furniture was nice. But it was so cold. Cold because there were things missing from it. Things Neil couldn't exactly envision or put into words—he just knew that they were missing. It was an empty place, and Neil had felt that way about it for quite some time. The only place he liked in the house was his own bedroom.

"What in God's name . . ?" Mr. Darragh said when he saw the water dripping from his son's sopping wet clothes. He sat up in his white-leather chair, which he'd been slouching in. "You're getting water all over the damn floor!"

Neil noticed his father was still in his suit-and-tie work attire, but he held a half-empty bottle of beer in his hand. Just getting started, the boy thought.

Mr. Darragh looked from the floor to his quiet son. He narrowed his eyes, confused. "What's that on your face?"

"Uh . . ." Neil thought. He couldn't remember what he'd drawn on it that morning. He lifted a hand to his cheek as if that would help him remember.

"Well what is it?" his father cried angrily.

"I—I can't remember."

"What do you mean, you can't remember?"

"I . . . I put it on this morning," Neil muttered, his words shaking from the look on his father's face, "and I c-can't remember what it was."

Giving a sharp, angry nod of his head and pursing his mouth into a line, Mr. Darragh said, "So not only is my son dressing like a freakshow, he has to paint scars on his face too? What next, huh Neil? A black eye? Do you want people to think I'm beating you? Because tell me if I'm wrong, but this is not normal behavior for a juvenile!"

Neil hated the way his father called him a juvenile. It sounded stupid.

"Maybe it's high time you met your godfather."

"You said he's a psychiatrist!" protested Neil despite wanting to keep quiet.

"And a good one, too!" Mr. Darragh shot. "Or at least . . . he was. Haven't seen him in years. Not since he left the country on some hair-brained farming nonsense. Just like your mother's side of the family to be partial to lunacy. Probably just what you need, though—your head examined. Now get the hell out of here. You're dripping on the floor."

Watching his father slump back into his chair, Neil felt his mouth turn into a frown that seemed to brand itself into his face. His eyes watered—more from anger than from some sort of sadness. And his hands were balling into fists at his sides. It took him a lot of effort not to respond to his father, but he knew he'd end up the worse for it if he did spit out some rude comeback. Still, as he turned to go, he said under his breath, "Maybe you're the one who needs his head examined." There was no way Mr. Darragh heard the comment over the sound of the television.

Neil left a trail of water in the hallway and drips on the stairs, but this time he didn't clean up his mess. He knew his father wouldn't leave the front room for a while, and even if he did, it would probably be to go to the kitchen to get something to eat. He had his drinks and his television, and that was all the man needed.

Mr. Darragh's drinking began when his wife walked out on him without any intention of looking back. Neil had been in the middle of his fifth grade year, and neither he nor his father had seen such a shock coming. They handled it in different ways. Mr. Darragh turned to drinking; Neil began to turn inward. The boy worked on not having friends and refusing to interact in school. Eventually, that refusal turned from passive to aggressive, and that was when the acting out started. And as his father became more preoccupied with the drink and hardly noticed his son, Neil turned himself into someone who didn't seem to care what the world thought of him. He was going to do what he wanted to, when he wanted to do it (except when his father was around), and that was when his dark side first appeared. Mean, black-clad, freak-show Neil. That was him, and that was the way it was going to be.

When he opened the door to his room, Neil was greeted with the various posters of metal-grunge-punk bands that he'd taped onto his low, sloping ceiling. His dresser, bookshelf, and bed-frame were all painted black. One of the walls in his room was black, too. He'd wanted to paint the whole room dark, but his father had caught him in the middle of doing so and gotten angry, so Neil had only been able to complete one. Other than that, his room was made up of clothes scattered around, CD cases lying half-open on the carpet, a few action figures on the dresser top that were leftovers from his elementary days, balls of scrunched up paper that he'd written partial math problems and scraps of journalistic rants on. The room was pretty much a mess; but Neil loved it. It was the only place in the house that he liked. Everywhere else seemed to be permeated with his father's presence. Here, in the chaotic solitude of his own room, Neil knew that what others might see as disorderly was really his very own style of order. He knew where everything was, and it was all his. All his. None of it belonged to the man downstairs.

For a brief second, after flopping down onto his black-comforter-covered bed, Neil toyed with the notion of doing his homework. It seemed that even when the teachers stuck him out in the hall, they found a moment to give him work. So he actually had quite a bit to do. Of course, Neil only did what he wanted to, and he really didn't feel like working on school stuff at the moment.

School. What a joke it was.

Neil's brain turned almost automatically to the wuss kid he'd seen blushing outside the class across the hall from room 210. What a loser that kid was—trying to please his teacher and feeling bad for acting up. Neil never felt guilty for his actions. He figured they were his, and he could do whatever he wanted with them. Why should someone else tell him what sort of actions were good or bad, right or wrong? He was his own person. Or, at least, he would be when he turned eighteen. He was totally, one-hundred percent different from that lame little blond kid. They were from two different planets. Neil would never, in his entire life, care what anybody thought about him.

Suddenly, the door to Neil's room swung inward, startling the boy up into a sitting position. His father stood at the door, bottle in hand and indifference on his face. He hardly looked at the room or his son as he muttered, "Frozen pizza's down on the table." Then, without doing anything else besides rubbing his nose, Mr. Darragh sauntered back out into the hall.

Neil heard his father's footsteps as he descended the stairs. He was certain the man was going to return to the television, probably drink himself to sleep, and wake up in the same suit he was then wearing.

The boy was surprised, actually, that his father had even come up to his room. "Must be the alcohol," he said to himself. Alcohol did weird things. Because the boy knew his father's act was not one of concern. The man didn't care about much of anything on most days. Still, his father's action and earlier anger caused Neil to think. Even a small bit of attention was good. Maybe it had been the drawing on his face.

Standing up, Neil picked a CD off his floor and stared at his rainbowed reflection on the back of it. Oh yeah, he thought. I drew a cut. With an eyeliner and a red permanent marker, he'd painted what looked like part of a pirate's Halloween costume on his left cheek. It looked slightly like an open wound. Neil was a decent artist even when using limited supplies. Since the rain had drenched him, though, the black had run in streaks down to his chin. The red was permanent for a while, so it still showed bright blood-colored in all its gory glory. Maybe on Friday, just as a start for the weekend, he'd draw a red line around his throat—some blood-like trickles dripping down into his shirt collar—so it would look like he'd slit his neck. What would people's reaction be, then? It was a prospect that excited him. Despite himself, Neil allowed a slight smile to cross his face. The streaks on his cheek crinkled. Things were looking brighter already.

Changing into a drier pair of pants and an enormous black sweatshirt, Neil decided to head downstairs and grab a slice of pizza.