Young and Exty

	In sixth grade, Joe Macintosh brought to school a list of hilariously stupid names some exties had given their children. 
	“Hahaha!” he laughed in the locker room before P.E., “look at this! Maynard! What kind of name is Maynard? I mean, no offense to those exties, but they make really crappy names!”
	“Look at that! Cyndilynn? What the hell, haha!” said York, hanging on Joe’s shoulder, pointing at the printed list.
	Joe began reading all the names off while boys crowded around near him.  With each ridiculous name, they convulsed laughing. 
	“Mykynzie Kathryn! All with Ys and Ks! Learn to spell!”
	By now, everyone had left the little benches by their lockers to crowd around Joe, all except Martin. He pretended he thought it was funny by fake-smiling and chuckling, but as everyone migrated to Joe, he realized that that wouldn’t cut it if he wanted to avoid sticking out. 
	“Severin Smith! He’d make a good surgeon!” cracked Joe before being overtaken in a wave of laughter. Martin shifted around in his red P.E. shorts, which were too small and had already led to embarrassments and insults. Fine, he decided, he would go over to the middle of the room to join in.
	“Aelwen Gwynne Jones. Haha, that’s so gay!” A chorus of “Yeah, gay!”s sprang up around Joe. Martin joined in. “Wait, I’ve got one more,” said Joe as he crumpled the paper up, “Martin Dylyn Marsleson! I think that sounds sort of familiar!” 
	Martin laughed with everyone, then said “Yeah, it’s a pretty stupid name!” By apologizing for being one of those exties, he could get out of this torture, he thought. 

	Of course Martin’s parents were exties, but if you looked at their house you wouldn’t guess it. It was two stories and pink and had no yards in the front or back to speak of, so there wasn’t much room for the exties to express themselves except with half-hearted attempts at potted plants circling the house. Even if the house didn’t look like an exty-cave, though, all the neighbors knew about who lived there. Twice they had tried to start a neighborhood petition to kick them out. Maybe once a year a death threat showed up on the Marslesons’ doorstep.
	This year’s was different, though. It was in a long cardboard box with obscenities written all over it, and Martin’s parents feared it was a bomb; the others had come only as papers. Also, it was an eight-year-old second grade Martin who found it first.
	Then, Martin had yet to be abused for his status. He still went to a private school with several other exties who didn’t even know the term “exty,” or if they did, Martin had never heard it.
	So when the box with “Die exty trash!” appeared in front of his house’s door when was coming around from watering the plants behind the house, Martin was baffled. He jumped and looked around in confusion, his eyes wide.  He stood over the box and pointed at the stenciled letters and sounded them out like they taught in Reading, but they still made no sense. Around on other sides of the box were other words Martin didn’t know: decky, exteriwhore, flowerhead. When he showed it to his parents and asked about the words, his mother started to cry, but never told him what they meant.
	The words haunted Martin as he lay awake that night, staring up at his ceiling.  What kind of words could make his parents cry? He asked the teacher the next day, and she took him into the corner and tried to talk to him in a quiet voice, but it was so quiet that Martin couldn’t understand what she was saying. He just stared at her lips and quivered.
	The next year, Martin transferred to a public school when his parents had to divert money from his education to pay for the mortgage on their house. The bank had started raising rates dramatically for no reason other than their extihood, and the bank’s president’s sneering face could sometimes be seen on his commercials speaking of this positive action against the exty dregs of society.
	“Mom, what are dregs?” asked the nine-year-old Martin when he saw the commercial.
	“I’ll tell you later,” his mother replied, then returned to trimming the leaves on the potted plant she had brought into the living room for care.
	In Martin’s new school, all the kids knew what an exty was and what good people were supposed to do to them. They ostracized him in all activities other than taunting and hitting, shoving him into walls in the halls or grinding him against play-structures in recess. 
	On the first day, school had been going on for two days already, but an ill-scheduled trip to Washington D.C. (to see the National Garden) had overlapped those days.
	“Who’s this? Who’s this?” asked York when Martin showed up at lunch on his first day.
	“He’s late. He’s late! Mr. Tarty’s going to kill him,” laughed the black-haired Joe Macintosh. He stood up with his Styrofoam lunch tray, pointed, and through a mouthful of food shouted: “Hey kid! You’re late! You’re late! You’re going to die!”
	York tugged Joe’s pants. “Look at his shirt. What the hell?”
	“Look, look!” shouted Joe, jumping, to the groups of kids near his. “An exty! An exty! He’s got a garden shirt! Why don’t you design us a golf course, kid? No, don’t get near me!”
	On that day they called him exty, decky, exteriwhore, and flowerhead: all of the words from the cardboard box. All year it continued, and he sat alone at every lunch. By fourth grade he was more resourceful and turned to a Miriam-Webster dictionary:

	ex·ty (n.) ['eks-"tE]
	vulgar slang : an exterior decorator; one involved in the exterior decoration 	process by hobby or profession: see flowerhead, deccy

	Exterior decoration was his parents’ business; Martin knew that. What was wrong with that?
	Everything was wrong with that. And Martin tried his best to disassociate himself from his parents and their terrible truth. When Joe came at him to run him into a tree, he would shout that just because his parents were exties didn’t make him one, but Joe laughed. “Of course it does, you idiot! Haha, deckyface!” 
	Martin went to the teacher with bark imprinted in his face. “Miss Tyler, he called me a deckyface!” 
	“That’s what you are, Dylyn-wynn-lynn!” she said, then she took him into the corner and shook a red pen in his face, threatening to stab. “Get used to it! Why are you vagrants even allowed in this school? This is a nice place, but look at you! Flowerhead’s the right name, you pussy! You little…”

	Martin knew now. He cut down the plastic lattice work around his window frame and put his poster of the Port Douglas Golf Course, the largest golf course in the world, in a drawer. He opened his dictionary to exty and left it open to that page on his desk after brushing off the pictures of sculptures, and used a lamp over the dictionary as his night-light. 
	He would be no exty, despite his parents, he determined. He would be a normal kid like Joe and York and Michael and everyone else. 
	The next day, he wore a black shirt and sunglasses and blue jeans and combed his hair down. As he looked at himself in the mirror, he seemed to radiate non-extihood. But it didn’t work: York held him down as Joe stood on his feet and jumped up and down on them.  “Thought you could be cool, exty?”
	In the last week of school a new student transferred in. Martin thought it was completely useless to transfer on the last week, but apparently her parents had been evicted and had to move into a new school district. Because she, too, was an exty.
	For that week Martin could run away from Joe and sit with Wyndy, although she never said anything to him.  She wore a shirt with a summary of the landscaping programs in the Great Depression on the back and a picture of FDR on the front. 
	“It’s the exty couple! I’ll kill one of you so you can’t make any more exty baby rats. Which one?” asked Joe at recess on the Wednesday of that week. But Wendy sat there and looked at the mulch ground and Martin followed suit.
	Martin closed the dictionary, put up his golf course poster, and tried to fit the latticework back onto his windowsill. Now it was fine to be an exty, now that there were two of them. 
	Then school ended, and Wyndy didn’t come back. After a week of fifth grade Martin refitted his room to its bleak state. Joe and York were still there, and now they had a ruler, to which they’d attach a flower, that they could hit him with.
	
	“Martin, why don’t you decorate your room any more?” his mother asked him two years after he had taken down the golf poster for the last time. She was putting on earrings to get ready for a party where she could talk about the advantages of pear trees while steadily getting drunk. 
	“I don’t want to.”
	“Why not? Look, I know people might make fun of you, but they made fun of me too, and I’m fine, see?” 
	Martin didn’t think she was fine.
	“Your father’s out in the car waiting for me. Go tell him I’m going to be trying to find the orchard dress, okay?”
***
	By eighth grade Martin decided to go to the library and find some counter-argument to Joe. He found thousands of memoirs of exties: Flowerface Memoir, Journals of a Real Deccy, Growing Up a Landscaper in Los Angeles, The True Diary of an Exty-Trash Kid, to name a few. Martin skimmed several. 
	Growing Up a Landscaper in Los Angeles was filled with illustrations of gardens with about two words on each of its 300 pages. 
	The True Diary of an Exty-Trash Kid apparently was made on a small budget, since it was three pages long with typeface the size of ants.
	 Flowerface Journals had the most catchy title, but half of the book was burned away, and as Martin opened it three intact pages fell out. The blurbs on the inside cover hailed it as inspirational and sure to empower any poor exterior decorator growing up in an abusive environment.
	Martin read the first chapter of The True Diary of an Exty-Trash Kid at a table in the library, but the librarian confronted him and required that he check it out. With a quarter he found on the sidewalk on the way to the library, Martin checked it out for two weeks and took it home. 
	The True Diary was obviously not a true. It had words far too large for an exty-trash “kid” to use, and it was incredibly formulaic. But Martin read a chapter each night. And then he put up his old Styrofoam window-frame decoration, put up his golf course poster, and put his dictionary in his desk. He opened all the Christmas presents from years before, all full of exty-clothes he could wear. Just like Ælex from the Diary, he would take pride in his heritage; he would upstage Joe and York and everyone; he would change the culture of his school; he would rebuild the definition of “exty.” Just like Ælex, who had even had the dictionaries of his town changed, who had gained universal respect for his extihood.
	The next day, Monday, at school, Mr. Adjutor handed back the research papers for Civics.  Joe Macintosh, A plus; Michael Matthews, B; York Hess, A minus; Martin Dylyn Marsleson, “extra credit’s your only way out of this, my boy!” and F.
	“And what the hell’s with your ridiculous clothes? Is that a flower on your hat? And grass on your shoes?” asked Joe, laughing, waving his A plus in the air, “I think Martin’s mommy’s dressed him up today!”
	Martin ignored him and held his head with pride, as Ælex had done. Now he approached Mr. Adjutor behind his desk in front of the class.
	“Mr. Adjutor, there are no marks on this paper. You didn’t even read it. Why an F?”
	Mr. Adjutor’s eyes flared up. “How can I take you seriously with that hat? And why should I, you liar? You do your race a disgrace, son. Would it take so much to raise you exty rats out of the sewer? It’s people like you that give your kind such a bad name!”
	“Yeah!” said Joe, and York laughed, and so did the other thirteen students in the room. This had not happened to Ælex; his teacher had broken down and given him a B plus. 
	The next day Martin still wore his outfit, but the flower sticking out of the hat drooped, the statues on his pant legs frowned, the grass on his shoes was brown, and the Montreal statue-park on his shirt stood still. And the next day, wearing the same clothes, Martin decided to stop pretending he wasn’t tortured in the costume.
	That night, he put the dictionary back under its lamp and read the definition of exty. His fists clenched; he trembled; he grabbed the pages; he tore them out, ripping as if digging through the dictionary; and he threw the mass of book-spine and paper-scraps at a picture of the gardens of Versailles that his parents had placed there earlier that day.