Victor Vacinni

No one ever grew fond of Victor Vacinni. Amid our preadolescent years and elementary era, middle school society conformed to the norm of growing use to someone; Victor Vacinni was an exception. In classes, we usually found him–glassy eyed and nosed stuffed–staring straight at someone: no blinking, no nonchalant glances at the ceilings. At lunch, his isolation often disturbed our ability to eat with tranquility. He sat there, in his own empty table, staring straight at one of us: no blinking.
We all had our reasons to feel uncomfortable near him. Daniel Clemens once told us that they both attended the same private preschool and he would perform acts of passive-aggressive sexual exploitation. “He would take off all the clothes of the girl’s Barbies and draw all the privates where they should be,” he reported to us, during one of our many lunch-table gatherings, “When our teacher caught him Sharpie-ing a penis onto a Ken, he told her that he liked things to be realistic.” Sunny Days Preschool admits students from age four to six; Victor was five in Daniel’s testimony. Jared Stewart cited another example of Victor’s odd behavior at a viewing of The Godfather. “We went to the same church when I was eight,” he said, taking a swig of his soda, “every time the pastor would want us to repeat a passage, he would always talk in tongues. To this day, I don’t know if he was faking it or if he was actually possessed by something.”
Chris Peters once recalled an event where he was rehearsing through another laborious period of biology–which he and Victor both attended–and, unfortunately, had the pleasure of sitting by him. Here, Chris, the opportunist that he was, paid careful attention to the physical aspects of Victor. “He looks even crazier up close, man,” he said, lighting a cigarette as we all huddled behind our high school bleachers one Sunday afternoon, “that crazy bastard had two lazy bright brown eyes. I remember Mrs. Smith, dumb braud, told the whole class to ‘converse’ with each other about decomposition or something. Hell, I needed to pass, so I talked to him, but as soon as I uttered a word he got really close, like this,” he got as close as he could to Johnny Carlson’s face; the tip of his cigarette brightened as it inched closer and closer to Johnny’s nose, “About this fucking close that creep-o got. Tell you all, I never seen so much disgusting hygiene on a kid before. Fuck, I’ve seen roadkill cleaner than that boy.” We all urged him to go on. “His snot: wet and dry. You could notice the dried up layer because it was magnified, like a jello, by the running wet snot falling and gathering up on his upper lip. His skin was greasy and reminded me of an old leather wallet. God damn it, man, I’ve never been so disgusted by a person in my life.”
We all formed separate opinions on one or two differing physical traits he held. Jared Stewart recognizes Victor the most for his sporadic hair lining, “It’s the type of hair lining where your only hope to pull it off is to completely shave it.” Daniel Clemens remembers him for the huge bug eyes he had, “They always look as though they capture the light in the room. It has a strange gloss to it.” Robert Miller recalls his mangy posture and the way he raised his wrist to chest level. Rudy Romeo juxtaposes Victor’s unspeakably high voice and his greasy curly hair. Kevin McDonald, his scrawny legs. Tyler Beard, his skinniness. Taylor Jackson: big cheeks. Johnny Carlson: mongoloid teeth. Chris Peters: snot.
Every lunch, we all sat parallel to his empty kingdom. Victor never ate; he stared. It was a silent mutual rule that none of us ever bring up his prolonged gaze towards us at the table. We would either burst out into false laughter from Chris’s naughty joke or made fun of eachother; We all looked for ways to conceal the discomfort of his stare.
Once, during an after school detention, Chris Peters and Taylor Jackson decided to amuse the two-hours of confinement away by passing notes. It started with a game of hangman inscribed into the college-ruled by granite pencils. The frustration of guessing, the silent laughter with the eyes, and the lingering hint of boredom at the innocent entertainment evolved the topic, evoked into the wadded up paper ball, to the taboo that was Victor Vacinni. First, a drawing of Victor with the more cartoonist angle. Chris exaggerated his odd shaped head, his bug eyes, and payed the most attention to the running snot. Taylor added labels and arrows such as: tiny dick, shit-stained pants, unzipped zipper–each arrow pointed to the appropriate anatomy location. The mocking within the note escalated with such a speed that the velocity sped up the detention time itself, but before the last two minutes of their sentence Taylor wrote one last thing into the flagrant note: Victor Vacinni is gay.
“I threw it out,” said Taylor, when we all asked while walking at a mall one evening, “someone might have picked it up.” Whatever the cause, the rumor permeated through every hall of middle school. The topic penetrated every gossip requiem the day prior. ‘Victor Vacinni is gay’ invaded the notes passed, in secret, throughout classes. The questioning of Victor’s sexuality spread faster than the medieval Black Plague, carried out by rats and maggots, infecting virgins to the news. It was a God damn epidemic.
Maybe it was bias on knowing that we spread the rumor, but Victor’s gaze at the cafeteria seemed more concentrated since. We all knew laughing loudly or telling an irrelevant story wouldn’t cover up the tension amid our sandwich eating and the glare, so we feasted in silence those days–the days the news was still saran wrapped. “You remember that one day, when everyone, like, made fun of him during fifth period and all he did during lunch was stare at us and write in some weird notebook?” said Tyler Beard, in a reminiscing moment we all shared during a lull in a road trip.
All of us produced theories of what he might have written in the notebook. Daniel thought he was compiling a hit list. “Come on, guys, he had all the motives to want to kill us. He was a major creep and he probably knew about the note that started it all,” said Daniel once, ill in bed. Kevin McDonald speculated that perhaps Victor was an artistic individual, and was simply jotting down his emotions. “Nothing great, in art, is ever produced through happiness,” Kevin stated, as we all drank coffee at a Starbucks, “the haunting experience may have been perfect inspiration for a piece.”
Over time, we all abandoned justifying the mysterious writing. Over time, we resumed our obnoxious laughter and mechanisms to refute the discomfort. We all continued digging into our lunches, our Pringles, Cheetos, carrot sticks. None of us could resist the thought that we were silently mocking the kid as we ate. Here we were: eating. There he was: alone.
However, our middle-school mystery of Victor Vacinni was answered by Mrs. Devila–our study period advisor. We all notice that he was gone that day at school. “I knew that day was gonna be really fucking weird. He was never absent at school, never,” Chris stated to us, beneath the bleachers, dropping the cigarette stub and extinguishing it with his foot, “it was ironic ya know. The thing more creepier than him being at school was him being absent from it.” The classroom air had a mundane chill the day we all received the news about Victor Vacinni. “You know ever since preschool, that kid always sent an eery warmth into the atmosphere. Like a dying animal breathing his last warm breath,” said Daniel Clemens as we all packed our left-overs of lunch and placed a tip for the waitress. The distinct facial expression Mrs. Devila wore, as she stepped up from her desk onto the center of the room–we all remembered that look, the look of sympathy and mourn. “Tell you one thing, our middle-school teacher was a heartless bitch, the way she gave us the news felt so forced. It’s a shame. No one ever liked that kid. The teachers had to act,” said Jared Stewart, as the movie credits fell and we begun to exit the theatre. We all remembered how we simultaneously stopped talking and turned in our chairs to face her. “She always use to complain about how we never stopped talking. I wonder why that day we all did,” yawned Tyler Beard, as he approached sleepiness and began to rest in the backseat of our car.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Mrs. Devila, “I am sorry to inform you that Victor Vacinni will not be joining us any further,” that long pause, “Due to some graphic news that was sent out into the school today, it was brought to our attention that Victor is no longer with us. He died. I have been taken aback by the news that his life was taken,” another lull, “by his father.”
“His father apparently was some psycho murderer.”
“Fucking tells you a lot about why Victor was the way he was, huh?”
“The father,” Mrs. Devila now crossed her arms: body language for sincerity, “was arrested this morning, and, rest assured, he has been imprisoned and will not harm anyone ever again. A notice to each of your parents has been sent out to bring this to there attention.”
“Makes you think.”
“Why do you think we never stopped messing with him? Wasn’t it obvious this kid had problems?”
“We were kids, man, we were kids.”
We all waited through Mrs. Devila’s longer pause, and then she stated, “Let’s all take a minute in silence, to mourn Victor Vacinni.”