My mother would never have betrayed me, so I didn’t blame her for the misery and anguish I suffered at the hands of an evil man named Sontag, Superintendent of the New Orleans school board. Even the name "Superintendent" sounded evil, like "Kaiser" or "czar." Stevie Polito across the street said Sontag was eight feet tall like a Saracen; he had black teeth and exhaled fire; one of his fingers was a dagger he used to slice out children’s hearts. We called Stevie "Frog" because he had a disease that made his eyes bulge out. Stevie’s eyes were eggs. Mom said he wouldn’t live long, which meant that everything he said had to be true.

Sontag’s deputy, another bad man called Truant Officer, spread out everywhere at once. Smog. He scooped kids up with a net, kids who didn’t go to school or who ran away. Nobody knew what happened to them after the scoopings. We heard that pirates brought some of them to countries like Indo-China and the Belgian Congo and sold them as slaves. They chained them to the damp walls of underground sewers where rats chewed off their toes and fingers. I hated Sontag and Truant Officer and vowed revenge. My cousin Johnny and I would wait for a Mardi Gras Parade, when Sontag rode ahead of the floats in a big shot convertible and waved to everybody. If we got close enough we would jump into the car and stab him with the ice picks Mom kept in the refrigerator. Johnny would stab anybody I told him to stab.

When Kindergarten started my mother packed a Hopalong Cassidy lunch box for me. She made the only sandwich I would eat: tuna fish on Holsum white bread without crust. The tuna had to be so oily that it seeped into the dough and made it real slimy. Then she smashed the bread with the edges of her fists to flatten it. And I got Hi-C to drink and a bunch of figs from MaMaw’s tree for dessert. Mom said the teacher would lead our class to a place called "cafeteria," where kids ate lunch. I despised the word "cafeteria." It sounded far away, like California, and creepy as a hospital.

I hoped Sontag would die. Why did I have to go to Kindergarten? My little sister Marie could stay home and catch mosquito hawks and lizards and climb trees and sneak into Mrs. Yunt’s gardens next door. Mrs. Yunt was a hundred years old and blind and pale as moth balls. She had skin like onion peel. We knew she was a witch. She hid behind the shutters and lace of her French windows and growled "Get out of this yard" whenever she caught us trespassing, which was all the time. Johnny said she smelled us in the yard. She had no eyes, just yucky brownish goo. Melted caramel. She could put curses on people and cast spells. Once, before I was born, a little boy wandered into her yard, and Mrs. Yunt hissed "Get out of this yard." The boy refused and laughed at her emaciated shadow behind those French windows. Mrs. Yunt put gris gris on him and the boy shriveled up into a salamander; his parents kept him in an aquarium and fed him swatted flies.

Mrs. Yunt’s mother was a voo doo queen from an island called Haiti. She married a ship captain named Hans Yunt who once owned the entire neighborhood. Mrs. Yunt went to fancy dress balls and art galleries and tried to pass herself off as a ritzy uptown lady. But the real uptown ladies snubbed her, and she blamed her husband. So she poisoned him slowly with yew berries, inherited his estate and locked herself inside the house. No one had seen her in over fifty years. Her house was the only mansion in the neighborhood, and at one time, Paw said, the only house period. The whole neighborhood was her yard then. When she needed money, she divided the land into lots and sold them all. Our lot, on which a druggist named Mr. Grossman built a small shotgun house to rent, bordered Mrs. Yunt’s property. Only her gardens separated our houses. Dad said she considered us peasants. Mrs. Yunt had also chopped up her mansion into about six different apartments so she could collect money from tenants. Mrs. Yunt had more money than Fort Knox. One of the tenants was another blind person named Henry who played saxophone in a French Quarter bar. There were lots of blind and crippled people in the neighborhood. Henry poked down the street with a white cane that had red strips, like a skinny barber shop pole.

We passed Mrs. Yunt’s front door on the way to school. Marie came along for the walk mainly to taunt me. She didn’t say a word, but I felt her gloating, the way you feel a breeze. The school was about six blocks away and took up an entire block. A giant square stone. We had passed it in Dad’s truck many times. The tall wire fence seemed ominous and way too high to scale. They had named the school after an old miser, John McDonogh, who lived thousands of years ago. Everybody thought he didn’t have a dime, but when he died they found chests of gold buried under the floors. He left all his money to the city to build schools, so there were about fifty schools with the same name except for different numbers. I went to number Nine on Lapeyrouse Street.

To get there we took a right on Columbus, our street, then up about five blocks on North Miro, where Paw lived, then a final left on Lapeyrouse. All the streets were dreams. My lunch box irked me and I bent over and scraped it along the banquet. My mother told me to "stop it," which made me feel even worse. Marie just stared. She didn’t blink once. I wished an earthquake would split open the planet, that someone would assassinate Sontag, like President Lincoln, and school would close forever. I saw Truant Officer’s shadow sneaking behind the trunk of a giant live oak tree. I would climb that stupid school fence anyway and get bloody cuts and hide in my grandma Meem’s back shed, my favorite place in the world.

When we passed Meem’s house I knew there was no turning back. Then we went by Miss Videau’s house, then Pinhead’s house. Pinhead was out on the porch swing as usual, bobbing back and forth. His head looked like an upside-down ice cream cone. We passed the house where a man had murdered two people with an ax. Then Joe Salti’s house with the screeching women. And Titi Gomez’s house. Titi let boys pull down her drawers and look around with flashlights. Her mother was drunk all the time and beat Titi with an old curtain rod. Next, the burned house. An old man who lived there went to sleep smoking a cigarette and his mattress caught on fire. Next the Venezia’s. My mother remembered Paul Venezia when they were kids together. Somebody threw a football to him and he ran into a tree trying to catch it. That night his head began to swell and the screaming started. My mother said the whole neighborhood heard those screams for two weeks. Dr. Johnny shook his head and said there was nothing he could do. So Paul died. That was a long time ago, but his parents still lived in the house. They never came out. Mom said they had lost their minds.

After Paul’s house I didn’t know any of the people except for Mr. Arnoult on the next corner. He ran Arnoult’s Drug Store with the thick brass bars on the doors. It was always cold inside and smelled like banana splits, sulphur and ammonia. I went there with Meem to buy comic books and ice cream. The soda fountain had a long marble counter that was clean as a new Band-Aid. Mr. Arnoult would fix our shakes or banana splits or floats, then go back to grinding medicines with a mortar and pestle. It’s where my mother bought her Violet candies that tasted like gasoline.

Finally we approached the school and I had a fit. "I can’t go there!" I I cried, trembling, shaking my fist, gagging. My mother said I had no choice. Truant Officer would come for me. "It’s the law," she said. "I hate laws!" I cried. I broke from her hand and started to run back home, but she caught me by the collar. "You must go to school, Sal," she said in a voice new to me. A voice full of weapons, barbed wire, iron. Not my mother’s flower petal voice. Not my mother’s voice of rainbows. Marie started to cry. My mother gripped my wrist and lugged me forward and we approached the concrete steps. So many kids suddenly, everywhere, swarms of insects, locusts. and mothers. I felt dizzy and had to pee. It wasn’t a hot day but I was drenched with sweat.

"Now, Sal," my mother said, "it won’t be so bad. Everybody goes to school. Everybody must go to school. Do you want to be stupid?"

I dropped the lunch pail, grasped my head between my hands, raised my eyes to the sky and screamed, "Sontag!" Stupid was fine with me as long as I didn’t have to go to Kindergarten.

Then I was inside. My mother and Marie had vanished. Someone led me by the fingers up a stairwell to a classroom on the second floor. Oceans roared in my head. I saw dark spots and long black snakes before my eyes. But the door was open, the room bright and colorful, full of decorations and a piano and blackboards. Kids sat at little square tables. They all seemed calm and happy.

"And who are you, young man?" from a booming, cheerful voice that turned my bones to cream. "We’ll just have to find you a locker for your pail. Uhmm, I bet you have a delicious lunch. Hopalong, that’s nice."

Miss Swander smelled like ash. Her hair poked out in spikes in every direction. Craters dotted the skin of her face. Mom told me later she caught smallpox when she was little. She called sandwiches "samiches." She never frowned, never raised her voice, never looked sad, worried or upset. She ate egg salad that looked like puke. She seated me up front at table Four, with Christina LaZinni, Buddy Videau and Kenny Xnitious. There was a sandbox in her class and jars of different lizards and bugs; there were musical instruments, an aquarium with fat bloody goldfish, stacks of comic books, giant wooden boxes of crayons and clay and tubes of paint. There was an American flag and a Louisiana flag and a stuffed pelican.

I wanted to hate Miss Swander, I tried to hate her, but I couldn’t. When I cried every day the first week of school, she didn’t fuss at me or punish me. She told me I could sit in the sandbox if I wanted. And I did. Full of misery and rage, I moped in that sandbox. I stayed there until the day I decided I’d had enough and crept toward the empty chair at Table Four. "Hello," I said to the other kids. They just looked a me. Already I had a reputation.

"Truant Office didn’t get us," I said, my voice cracking.

They wouldn’t stop looking at me. Then Buddy Videau said, "You’re a crybaby."

I wanted to lurch across the table and strangle him, but Miss Swander would have sent me to the principal. Another spy for Sontag. She had sent Danny Cuccia to him the second day of school because Danny poked a girl in the eye with his pencil. The girl came back later with a wad of bloody gauze taped to her wounded eye. My mother said she might never see right again. Nobody knew what happened to Danny, but I figured he was in Africa or China carrying stones. I didn’t like him anyway. When we stood in line to go to the cafeteria, he always farted. Farts surrounded him like clouds. He looked sad and dirty all the time and he always wanted to punch somebody.

I fell in love with the girl whose eye he had almost poked out. Her name was Judy France. I gazed at her and wanted to be a doctor so I could remove her bandage and rub some tincture into her eye that would make it better. She had straight dark hair that hung down to her shoulders. Her mouth looked like a strawberry. I didn’t realize just yet that I wanted to kiss those lips, but I knew they were too good to be true. There were other pretty girls in the class too, and I stared at all their lips. But mostly Judy’s. I wanted to marry her.

But the girl who loved me, a girl who always smelled like milk, was named Molly. She had blond, curly hair. She followed me everywhere and always tried to touch me. She tied my shoelaces when they came undone. She gave me cookies from her lunch box. She told me I was her boyfriend. Mom said her parents were dead and she lived with an old, cranky aunt. I liked Molly but she got on my nerves. I told her I already had a girlfriend. WHO? she wanted to know. WHO? WHO? "I’ll kill her!"

So I could only glance at Judy when I thought Molly wasn’t looking. She was bigger than Judy and really could have killed her.

One day I got lost in school after using the bathroom on the first floor. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I had no idea where I was. My heart raced, I wanted to cry . . . but then I went blank and just sat down on one of the long benches along the walls and waited. I waited and waited. A janitor passed by with a long-bristled broom. He sprinkled red power on the floor and swept it up. He was a tall, skinny black man who pretended not to see me. Then, out of the blue, Molly came along. "Come with me, silly," she said, "I told Miss Swander I’d find you." She took me by the fingertips, led me up the stairs and back to Kindergarten. She even pulled out my chair so I could sit down. My face turned red and throbbed with shame. I saw Judy France look at me and shake her head, and I knew I wasn’t her boyfriend anymore. That’s how it happens with girls. In an eye blink. The kids at my table giggled except for Christina LaZinni. I looked at her pink lips and green eyes. I would love her now. Best of all, she sat at my table and would be close the whole year. I wouldn’t have to worry about Molly killing her. It would have been easier just to love Molly, but I couldn’t stand milk. It made me vomit. As for Christina, she had never looked at me once since school started.

One day we heard that a kid in the other Kindergarten class had drowned in the Industrial Canal. He and his twin brother had powdery white faces and short curly hair, dark as creosote. None of us could tell them apart. They only played with each other during recess. The one who didn’t drown stayed home from school for a week. When he came back he wouldn’t say a word to anybody, and at recess, the only time I saw him, he stood facing the link fence. He was spooky and looked like a ghost. None of the kids on the playground went near him. He was infected with death. Mom said he couldn’t bear the grief. She had read about the accident in the Times-Picayune. She said sometimes you never get over grief and that it can drive you mad. That’s one of the things I learned in Kindergarten.

But I dreamed about the drowned twin and tried to swat him away like a mosquito. He wanted to hug me in the dream as we stood in the shallow part of the canal. I tried to run but my feet were stuck fast in the sludge. "I’m not your brother!" I cried. He looked at me strangely and smiled. "Yes you are," he said. He came toward me and wrapped his arms around me but there was nothing there. No arms, no body, he was made of air.

I would dream about that boy for a long time and never forgot what he looked like. Once I felt an urge to tell the living twin that his brother was not dead after all, that I had seen him lots of times in my dreams. But the twin clutched the links with his fingers and refused to look at me. So I didn’t say anything and walked away. Someone, probably Billy Ferro, the school thug, threw a rock at his head. Blood oozed from the gash like a rose blooming. The twin didn’t move or flinch. Everyone started to hate him because he was infected with death. Then one day he stopped coming to school and we never saw him again. I suppose he went mad, like Mom said some people do.

One day I started to scream for no reason in the middle of the school yard. Some of the kids probably thought I was crazy too. But I didn’t care. Mardi Gras was only a few weeks away, and I would tell Johnny to stab Sontag in the heart when he drove by in that convertible. But of course Mardi Gras came and went and nothing happened. In our room I couldn’t stop thinking about Christina LaZinni’s lips. Girls’ lips. I knew now I wanted to kiss them forever. I was infected too, not with death, but love. I kept my eye on death all right, felt its cool, sour breath curdle on the back of my neck, but love felt better. And I guess after a while I didn’t hate Sontag anymore, even when Paw ranted about what an "asshole" he was. Politics was boring and stupid next to girls. I told Johnny not to kill Sontag. He seemed so disappointed I let him keep the ice pick I had stolen from Mom.

Christina LaZinni did not look at me once the entire year. And Molly? She finally gave up and found a new boyfriend. I saw her tying his shoes one day in the cafeteria. She looked up at me as I passed and snarled, "I don’t love you anymore."

She carried the new boy’s schoolbooks, led him to class, she even fed him the grapes from his blue lunch box. He looked like a baby bird with a wide-open mouth. I guess I missed Molly a little, I guess I was mean to her . . . but she still smelled like milk. It was almost summer and I had already lost three girlfriends. I felt hollow and shattered, like a broken vase. But giving up was out of the question. I dimly imagined an entire lifetime of pursuing girls and shuddered at the thought. I also knew I had no choice. Their faces, their hair, their lips, their necks, their cute little skirts, I loved everything about girls. But it would be hard, the hardest thing anyone could imagine. And as I thought about these things, what should pop into my mind but an image of Pinhead rocking on his swing. Pinhead would never kiss a girl’s lips. He had no chance. And that seemed to me the most unfair and saddest thing in the world. For the first time I really understood what the word "tragedy" meant. And it had nothing to do with a heap of dead bodies. Or airplane crashes. Or war. Or even going to Kindergarten.