Steamspell frowned. “Oddity. He’d better not be a bed wetter. I won’t tolerate that.” He glared at Nathan. “I’ve put many lads before you in diapers, and if you think they only have to wear them overnight, you’re sorely mistaken.”
“I don’t wet the bed,” said Nathan, softly.
“Did I just see what I think I saw?” asked Steamspell. “Open your mouth again, boy.”
Nathan did as he was told.
Steamspell let out a long, harsh laugh. “Well, I’ll be damned! I’ve never seen such a thing. The children I get are rarely top quality, but this…”
“He’s a very nice boy,” said William.
“Oh, I’m sure he is!” Steamspell held his sides as he laughed. “What a tragic young man you are! My God, the other children will eat you alive when they see those things. I don’t mean that literally, of course. In a literal sense, it’s much more likely that you’ll eat them.” He laughed some more, and committed that joke to memory with the intention of using it at least five or six more times.
“Are you going to be okay?” William asked Nathan.
Nathan was relatively certain that he was not going to be okay, but he nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Good.” The police officer shook his hand, and then left.
Steamspell briefly glanced at a piece of paper inside a folder. “Parents killed themselves, did they?”
“No, sir.”
“Boy, when you address me, you will say ‘sir.’ Do you understand?”
“I did say ‘sir.’”
“Then say it in such a way that I don’t immediately forget that you said it! I will be treated with respect. If you wish to eat and be sheltered from the rain and sleep without being bitten by snakes, you will need to learn that I am the most important person in your life.”
“Yes, sir.”
Steamspell struck him on the side of the head, an open-palmed blow that made Nathan’s ears ring.
“I said ‘sir’!” Nathan insisted.
“I know you did. I’m not deaf. That was for all of the bad things you did before you came to live with me. I think we can both agree that a slap to the ear is an extremely mild punishment for all of the sins you’ve accumulated, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So now we’re starting clean. From now on, when I beat you, it will be for transgressions after this moment. Does that sound fair?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you bite the heads off chickens?” Steamspell laughed. “Wouldn’t that be something to see? I wonder when real geeks get started in the geeking business. I’d guess it was pretty early, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t, not having grown up in a carnival atmosphere. Maybe it’s something I’ll exploit. Do you like the taste of live chicken? Oh, no matter, we’ll deal with it later. Come on, Nate, let’s get you to your mattress.”
On his second day at the orphanage, Nathan was given the nickname “Fangboy.” His first day was mostly spent scrubbing down the kitchen with another boy who never spoke, and his first night was spent lying on his mattress, weeping softly under a thin blanket that had a mild scent of mold.
The other boys did not bother him that first night, possibly because they all remembered how they’d cried their first night at the orphanage. Nathan didn’t want to cry, he wanted to be brave, but he couldn’t help himself. He missed his mom and dad, and his own bed, and edible meals. (Dinner had consisted of gray and white lumps that, by popular vote, were determined by the boys to be chicken and dumplings, though in fact they were meatloaf.)
The second day, first thing in the morning, a boy who was about ten grabbed Nathan’s toothbrush out of his hand. “It’s mine now!” he declared.
“Give it back!” Nathan shouted.
The boy, Arnold, shook his head and held the toothbrush up out of Nathan’s reach. “I’m trading you,” he said. “I’m older, so I get the better toothbrush.”
Toothbrushes were among the many items that Steamspell felt were unnecessary to replace on a regular basis, though he did not force the boys to recycle dental floss.
“No!” Nathan shouted. The toothbrush, though not custom-made, was the largest size Nathan’s father had been able to find. He knew he could make do with a smaller brush, but despite his lack of social interaction, he realized that this was a pivotal moment. If he let the boy steal his toothbrush, he’d always be the Kid Whose Toothbrush You Could Steal. He wasn’t going to be pushed around. “You can’t have it!”
Arnold dropped the toothbrush onto the floor. The floor was actually rather clean because of all of the available child labor, but still, one never appreciated having one’s toothbrush dropped onto the floor. “What’s wrong with your mouth?”
Nathan closed his mouth and said nothing.
“Hey, everybody, come over here!” said Arnold, beckoning to the other orphans. “The new kid has fangs!”
“I do not!” said Nathan.
“Look at them! Those can’t be real, can they?”
The other boys all crowded around him, and Nathan felt his face burn red with embarrassment. He covered his mouth with his left hand.
“Go on, show them your fangs!”
“They aren’t fangs.”
“They sure are! They’re like Dracula fangs, except it’s all your teeth! What happened? Were you born like that? Show the others!”
Nathan shook his head.
“I said, show the others!”
The other boys began a chant. “Show us! Show us! Show us!”
Nathan covered his mouth with both hands now, and desperately tried to keep himself from crying. His face burned so hot that he thought it might disintegrate into ashes.
“Show us! Show us! Show us!”
“What the blazes is going on in here?” asked Steamspell, peeking his head into the large (but not really large enough for fifty-four boys) bedroom.
“He has weird teeth and he won’t show us!”
Steamspell chuckled. “What are you trying to hide, boy? Think you can keep those choppers covered forever? You might as well get it over with.”
Nathan didn’t want to get it over with. He was pretty sure he could keep his teeth covered forever, if necessary. But instead, he pulled back his lips and tried to give the other kids a pleasant smile.
They gasped. All of them.
One of them said a word that Nathan didn’t remember having heard before but which he thought might be one of the bad words that his parents had told him never to say. “He does have fangs! He’s a fangboy!”
“Fangboy!” several of the others shouted. “Fangboy! Fangboy! Fangboy!”
Nathan turned and ran. One of the kids on the edge of the crowd tripped him, and he fell to the floor, landing hard on his elbow.
“Freak show!” one of them yelled.
“Creepy mouth!” yelled another.
For a moment, Nathan thought they might hoist him above their shoulders and take him to be tarred and feathered (which had actually sounded kind of fun when his mother read to him about it, but sounded much less fun now). They did not. Instead, they just kept laughing at him and shouting new names until finally Steamspell angrily told them all to get back to their chores. Nathan very much doubted that this was done to salvage his dignity.
He lay there on the floor for a while, until Steamspell harshly suggested that he quit doing that.
FOUR
If you excluded the beatings, the bad food, the ridicule, the stolen personal items, the lack of privacy, the noise, the toilet that never quite flushed properly, the drinking water with colorful specks in it, the scary shadows that danced across the ceiling at night, the drab décor, and the overall mood of desperation and misery, the orphanage was still a rotten place to live.