Bug-Dog

Karla played the cello in third grade. Oskar had a habit of wearing his socks on his arms, puppet style, one hand talking quietly to the other all day long.

Karla touched herself, and others, in inappropriate ways. She didn't know it. Nine years old, thick in the head, tall for her age and lanky; nothing made sense with her, inside or out.  

Oskar was more available. Also nine, but strikingly different from Karla. He was tall but ungainly - thick in the waist, fat elbows, belt riding up high enough to cause suspicion. He smelled like pizza and his long black hair hung down in front of his face in a weedy fashion, the ends shorn at odd angles.

The two had been easy and separate targets for the other third-grade students. The children ruthlessly cultivated their newly-discovered powers of emotional and physical abuse on the two loners with shrieking enthusiasm. The boys tended to torment Oskar, the girls focused on Karla.

The two rarely met; their orbits as far from one another as the two ends of a grammar school hall could allow. Oskar was in Mrs. Bile’s class, next to the stairs on the south end of the hall. Karla was in Mr. Licky’s class, on the north side of the hall, next to the music room. For third-grade students, it was the opposite ends of the world, and both peculiar children endured the trials of their peers in solitary. 

“Mrs. Bile, Oskar won't stop with his stinky socks! He keeps hitting me in the head!”

“Oskar! Please put your socks back on your feet and leave Jonathan alone.”

“I didn't...,” Oskar protested.  “He hit me!”

“I did not!”

“Did too!”

Oskar slaps his shoes on his bare feet, stamps the hard tile floor and squeezes his lips together with such ferocity that Hellen Bile once again fears that the strange child will harm himself.

“Oskar! Stop that right now! That's not how we behave!”

And the other students laugh.

Down the hall and across the universe is not much different.

“Karla’s crying again!”

“I am not!” Karla sobbed.

Dwight Lickey, a kind and simple man, was not equipped to deal with Karla’s specific brand of strange. The sexual aspect of her inappropriate touching pushed him away from dealing with the particular issue and, besides, dealing with Karla in general was about as much as he could manage in a small room with one door.

“She smells like celery!”

“Gross!”

“Mr. Lickey! Bug has her hand in her pants again!”

By the last half of third grade, the children had taken to calling Karla, Bug. They called her Bug because at random times during the day, Karla would stop whatever it was she happened to be doing, push out her cheeks and widen her eyes until it appeared they might simply fall out of their sockets. 

“Mr. Lickey! She's doing it again!”

But Mr. Lickey did nothing positive in response to Karla’s behavior, much in the same manner that Mrs. Bile also did nothing positive about Oskar’s behavior. 

“Bark like a dog!”

“Woof! Woof!”

“See, he’ll do it whenever you ask!”

The children marveled. Oskar would bark like a dog on command. It didn't matter where or when. Mrs. Bile did her best to ignore it, believing that this was simply Oskar’s attempt to find something that would draw attention and perhaps make him some friends. It looked to her like a clumsy attempt to fit it.

A small number of the children were enticed by Oskar’s behavior, and saw his barking on command as something nearly mystical, the irreverence, the daring, the simple indignity; compassion and curiosity won Oskar a number of tentative friends. If he cared much, it never showed.

Some of the other children did not find the new behavior as entertaining. That is when Oskar picked up the nickname, Dog. The simplicity and accuracy made it stick. The aggression burned it in like a hot branding iron.

“It's your turn to feed the dog!” Marsha snorts to Brady at snack time while handing out the crackers and water.

“Dog! If you want a snack, bark!”

“Woof! Woof!”

“Why does he do that?”

“I don't know. Let's ask him again.”

“He won't tell you. He never does!”

Which was true. The child behaved as if he had no knowledge of his own behavior. This made Mrs. Bile nervous. She spoke to the school psychologist, who spoke to the principal, who spoke to Oskar's parents who spoke to Oskar, who would neither confirm nor deny anything related to his barking like a dog on command. A meeting was arranged.Oskar barked, his parents smiled. There was a discussion and more smiling.

The next day the barking stopped.

“Bark, Dog!”

“Why would I bark?”

“Timmy, Dog won't bark anymore!”

“Bark!” Commanded Timmy.

But by the time Oskar had stopped barking, he had already earned the nickname among those callous students who believed he fully deserved ridicule.

End of part 1