But too late. Manus was only a few feet away, and as his father’s head continued to come around, he flung the pot violently forward, keeping his grip on the handles so the pot stopped at the limit of his reach. An enormous red blob emerged like a dragon from its lair, seeming to float through the air as his father kept turning, turning toward him in slow motion…
The boiling sauce caught his father directly in the face and neck, smothering his features. He shrieked and collapsed to his knees, his body shaking, his hands clawing at his eyes. For a moment, Manus thought his father was wiping away mushrooms, and then realized what he was seeing instead was melting skin.
Manus ran past him and knelt next to his mother, who was lying on her back, her legs folded weirdly underneath her. Her eyes were open but rolled up in her head. He shook her and patted her cheek, whispering “Mommy, Mommy, wake up” again and again through a constricted throat. It had been Mom for years at that point, but his terror at her unresponsiveness was childlike and she was suddenly Mommy again.
He kept shaking her and patting her face. He could faintly hear his father howling, but soon there was no sound at all, and when he looked up, his father was lying still. He realized he should have called 911, how could he not have thought of that? He ran to the phone and dialed. He couldn’t hear if anyone picked up or what they were saying so he just kept repeating that he was deaf and needed help, his mother was hurt, please, he needed help.
An ambulance came. Police. Everyone went to the hospital. His mother was dead. Something called a subdural hematoma, a doctor explained. Bleeding inside the head. His father was unconscious. They bandaged his face like a mummy and doctors said he wouldn’t be able to see again even if he woke up. But he didn’t. He got pneumonia and died two weeks later.
The police brought in an interpreter who knew sign, and they asked Manus a lot of questions. He didn’t want to talk about it, but he told them the truth. Someone who called himself the district attorney explained that Manus wasn’t going to be prosecuted. But his grandparents didn’t want him. His deafness had always been a barrier between them, and now it was only worse — his father’s parents didn’t believe his story, while his mother’s wanted to know why he hadn’t done something sooner. Manus didn’t have an answer for that. He’d been too afraid, and look what had happened.
They put him in a special school. He got in a lot of fights. He had teeth knocked out, his nose was broken, he fractured knuckles. No matter what happened, he always learned. What parts of the body to hit with. What parts to hit. How to read people’s intentions, to know when it was coming and how. When to attack beforehand, when to attack back.
The other boys spit threats and cursed and shouted when they fought. But Manus never said anything, never made a sound. When someone was trying to hurt him, hurting them back came to feel like a job, just work to be done. The thing he found best was to get the other boy on the ground and then stomp his pelvis or face or neck as though he were crushing a can or breaking a log. But it was also good to bite, and attack the eyes. Even the toughest boys forgot everything except trying to get away when Manus dug a finger into an eye socket.
The people who administered the school made him take a lot of tests. They told him he was intelligent but that he was wasting it. He didn’t care. They told him if he didn’t stop fighting, they would have to send him to another special school, one “for boys like him.” But people kept trying to hurt him, and he kept going to work on them in return, so eventually they sent him to the other school, which was actually more like a prison.
One night during his first week there, he was awakened by a weight on his back. He tried to get up but couldn’t — someone was pinning him to his cot. He struggled and the somebody held something cold and sharp against his throat. He realized it was a knife. Two pairs of strong hands pulled at his pants. He knew what was happening and struggled, but the knife pressed harder. He froze. The hands stripped off his pants, then gripped his legs and spread them. He wondered why none of the other boys in the dorm were doing anything, then realized: they were just glad that this time it wasn’t them.
Three of them, and a knife — there was nothing he could do. So he relaxed. He wasn’t submitting. He was waiting. They were going to hurt him and he had to let them. Until he could go to work.
As his body relaxed, the one on top of him began to shake with laughter. The hands on his legs gripped less tightly.
It hurt. The boy who was doing it was trying to make it hurt, too. It wasn’t as bad as some of his father’s beatings, but it was worse, too, because it was inside him, inside his body. Manus gritted his teeth, tears spilling from his eyes, and waited.
The boy shuddered and Manus could feel him finishing. Manus hadn’t resisted. They were holding him only loosely now, thinking he wouldn’t fight, thinking he just wanted it to be over.
The hands came off his legs. The knife started to come away from his throat.
He grabbed the blade with his left hand, his right hand seizing the wrist of the boy holding it. The edge cut deeply into his palm, but he didn’t let go. He thought the boy might have yelled, but he wasn’t sure and anyway it didn’t matter. Manus pushed hard on the blade and the leverage broke the boy’s grip. Manus grabbed the handle with his right hand. The boy tried to grab it back. Manus got his mouth around the boy’s thumb pad and bit down on the meat there.
The boy howled and tried to pull away. His hand came loose, something remaining in Manus’s mouth. Manus spat it out and twisted toward them. They tried to pin him, but he was slashing with the knife and they couldn’t get hold of him.
One of them had fallen to the floor and was getting to his knees. Manus stomped the back of his neck and flattened him. He stomped the same spot again and felt something shatter under his heel.
The second one started to run, but tripped over something in the weak light. Manus tried to grab the boy’s hair, but his hand was bleeding and the fingers wouldn’t close. He shoved the boy’s face onto the concrete floor and stabbed the knife into his neck. Blood erupted from the cut. The boy screamed and thrashed.
The third boy, the one who had hurt him, had made it to the locked dormitory door. He was pounding on it, screaming for someone to help. Manus moved in. The boy glanced back and saw him coming. Manus could see a guard through the thick glass in the center of the door, fumbling with his keys.
He didn’t know how long it took the guards to get inside. Long enough. Manus went to work on the boy. By the time the guards had used their batons and dragged Manus off, the boy’s face was mostly gone and he looked like a giant rag doll soaked in blood.
Two of the boys died. The one whose neck Manus had stomped lived, but he couldn’t move his arms or legs, and they sent him somewhere that knew how to take care of him. They made Manus take more tests. There was a hearing, and Manus was transferred to what they called the Special Ward. The boys there were scary, but there were no gangs like the one that had attacked him. And people heard about what he had done. Killing two boys and paralyzing a third inspired respect.
A few times, other boys tried to hurt him. When that happened, he would go to work. It wasn’t long before nobody wanted to try to hurt him anymore.
There were a few other boys like him in the Special Ward — quiet boys who left other people alone, and who other people had learned were better left alone themselves. Those boys knew ways of hurting people that Manus hadn’t figured out yet. They exchanged information. Manus learned a lot.