About a year ago when I was in eighth grade, I'd wake up every few days with stuff in my bed and not know how it got there. Like a steak knife or razor blade or once my older brother Boomer's switchblade, which he used to prick me and Goony with when our parents weren't looking. Goony's my younger brother and he's slow. Boomer was so mean he bragged about killing the super's dog, Molly the Collie, with a hammer. He took me and Goony up on the roof of our apartment house to show us her dead body and said if we ever told on him about any of the stuff he did to us, he'd bash our heads in too.

When I found the switchblade in my bed, I was sure that Boomer would kill me if he knew I had it. So I waited until he went out and threw it on his bed. But my mom found it first and wouldn't give it back to Boomer because she said he was too much of a menace to have such a knife, and he hit her so hard she went to the hospital. Boomer ran away and joined the army, and we never saw him again because he died in basic training.

The wake was at Corcoran's on Flatbush Avenue, and it was so cold in Boomer's room that I couldn't stop shivering. My parents were acting all lovey dovey at the beginning of the wake. Then, they took turns going to Maguire's next door to let people buy them drinks to help with their grief, and by the end of the night they were so drunk they got into a shoving match in front of the casket and almost knocked it over. I was hoping the casket would be closed, but they kept it open. When I paid my respects, which is what they call it when you kneel in front of the coffin and pretend you're praying, Boomer looked scarier dead than he did alive. I felt bad that I had gotten Boomer killed, but I was secretly glad he couldn't hurt me or Goony again.

There were two bedrooms in our apartment. Before Boomer died, my parents slept in one, Boomer the other and Goony and me slept on cots in the living room, which wasn't so bad except when my parents wanted an audience for a fight and came out to the living room to scream at each other in the middle of the night. They had a big one the night of the funeral and that's how I learned that my dad turned Boomer into a monster by doing pervo stuff to him. And maybe if my mom wasn't such a cold fish, it would never have happened. And Goony was a retard because my mom drank too much while she was pregnant or because my dad pushed her down a flight of stairs a month before he was born. I thought we'd get Boomer's room, but my dad moved in there that night because he was sick of sharing a bed with the "frigid bitch", which is what he called my mom.

The morning after the funeral, Goony and I were putting away our cots, and a razor blade fell out of mine.

"What's that?" Goony picked it up from the floor.

"It's a Gillette," I said like it was some big deal that my dad used the same blade they advertised on TV.

"I know what it is, Billy. How'd it get there?" He held the ends of the blade between two fingers, and it was so sharp it was almost invisible when you looked from the side.

"Maybe someone put it there. I don't know."

"I don't think so, Billy," he said. "I seen you get up last night and when you came back from the bathroom you had it in your hand. And when I talked to you, you didn't even listen – like you were asleep, but you weren't."

"So?"

"So you don't have to do that anymore. Boomer's dead now. He can't hurt us anymore."

And that's how I learned I was a sleepwalker.

A priest came to our grammar school from Holy Cross Prep Seminary that year and said to the boys that if we had a vocation to be a priest, we could go to his seminary, which was a sleep away high school, even if our parents couldn't afford to pay for it. So I said I had a vocation because I wanted to get away from my family, except for Goony.

After I got to Holy Cross the next September, I stopped waking up with stuff in my bed. I was too tired at first to do any sleepwalking. Six days a week, we got up at 5:30, went to mass, ate breakfast in silence, did chores, went to class for four hours, ate lunch while a senior read the New Testament to us, did more chores, had three more hours of class, played on an assigned sports team, got dressed, went to Latin study hall for an hour, ate supper where it was ok to talk to the kids at your table, studied for two more hours, had evening services in chapel and were in bed by 9:30. Not much free time, but I was okay with it. I got three meals a day; no one beat me up; and when I was in bed at night, there were no maniacs screaming at each other. Plus we were all the way out in the country, and I liked that because I had never been out of the City before unless you count the Bronx Zoo.

Our teachers were all priests. Most of them were really strict, especially Rector O'Brien who taught Latin with a wooden ruler. If you couldn't recite the noun declensions or verb conjugations, you had to stand at your place and stretch your hands out palm up so he could wack them with the ruler. But I'd gotten worse from the nuns in my grammar school so he didn't scare me too much.

One Saturday in late October, a priest named Father Gabriel took my confession. I told him I was having impure thoughts about girls and stuff, and he asked me some weird questions about whether I got a boner and masturbated. The next night he woke me up and told me to come to his room, which was right outside the freshman dorm hall. When we got there, he said to show him how I masturbated so he could help me stop doing it.

I was too embarrassed to say anything. I just stood there looking at my feet while he sat on his bed in his bathrobe.

"I'm only trying to help you," he said. "There's nothing to be embarrassed about."

"Can I go back to bed now?"

"Yes. But I want you to think about something. You are putting your eternal soul at peril unless you conquer these urges. So go back to bed and think about what I've told you and when you're ready come back and see me."

I ran back to my bed as fast as I could. No matter how long I though about it, there was no way I was going to jerk off in front of him.

I didn't sleep at all that night because I was scared Father Gabriel would come back. Then the next night, I had this weird dream where I was walking around the upper field behind the dorm dressed in my pajamas in the cold, and then I was in the middle of the gym down the hall from the freshman dormitory, and Father Gabriel was walking toward me wearing his grey habit. When I woke the next morning, I couldn't decide whether it was a dream until Father Gabriel grabbed me on the way to mass and said he caught me sleepwalking last night like it was some kind of crime.

"Do you know why you're sleepwalking?" he said. "You're doing it because you are living in a state of sin. And you're not going to rid yourself of your sin unless you let me help you."

A few weeks later, my friend Pear, who slept in the bottom bunk below me, woke me up in the lobby of the dormitory.

"You're sleepwalking, aren't you?" he said. "You stepped on me when you got out of bed. I didn't wanna wake you cause I heard if you do that, the person might go crazy, but you were going out into the snow in your bare feet, so I had to do it. Are you okay?"

As we were standing there, Father Gabriel came out of his room in his bathrobe.

"What in hell are you boys doing out of the dorm hall?" he said. "This'll cost each of you a month of seven to nines. Now get back to bed this instant."

A seven to nine meant detention for the two hours free time on Saturday and Sunday nights, which was the only time we got to watch TV so it really sucked. Pear tried to tell him I was sleepwalking, but Father Gabriel didn't care and said he would give us another month each if Pear didn't shut up.

Detention was in the study hall on the top floor of the old building where a rich family once lived before they donated it to our order. Pear's desk was right next to mine so we could talk without making a racket. Pear was a load, but he was smart and funny, and I liked him. A sophomore called him Pear on the first day of school because that's what he's shaped like and the name stuck. His real name was James Collins, and I called him Collins to his face because I didn't want to hurt his feelings – he said he didn't care what anyone called him, but I didn't believe that.

He asked me if I'd ever gone sleepwalking before, and I told him about finding the knife and the razor blades in my bed at home and the night I saw Father Gabriel in the gym.

"Why do you do it?" he said.

"I dunno. My brother said I was trying to protect myself with the razor blade."

"From what?"

"Well, my oldest brother Boomer was a real butt hole so maybe I was afraid of him or something."

"What'd he do, beat you up?"

"Yeah, but he's dead now so he can't be why I'm doing it now."

"How'd he die?"

Before I could answer I started crying hard. I didn't know why I was crying about Boomer when I hated him so much while he was alive. But lately I'd been thinking about what my mom meant about my dad doing stuff to Boomer, and sometimes when I was going to sleep I wondered if Boomer would have been more normal if my dad hadn't been a pervert.

"Everyone cries sometimes," Pear said after a while. "I cried the first few nights I was here because I was homesick. It's no big deal. You know, maybe you're trying to run away from something when you sleepwalk," he said, and then we heard the rector coming up the stairs so we shut up. The stairs were creaky, and he was a big man. Every step he took sounded like the stair was going to break. His room was on the same floor as the study hall. He stopped at the door and glared at us for a few seconds before he went down the hall to his room.

"I'm not running away from anything," I said after the rector left. "I like it here."

"I heard Mac tell a bunch of kids that Father Gabriel is bad news and to stay away from him."

Mac McCormick was the idol of our school. He was a senior and the star of our school basketball team – the one that played other schools -- as well as the best baseball and football and everything else player by far. Everyone wanted to be like Mac.

"What's Father Gabriel got to do with it?"

"I dunno. Maybe he did something to you when you were sleepwalking that you can't remember. The way Mac was talking about him you'd swear he was a monster. Mac wasn't talking to me," Pear said -- as if I wouldn't know that Pear was too insignificant for Mac to spit at. "He was telling Santora and some other sophomores. Maybe we could ask Santora what Mac was talking about."

After breakfast the next day, we did our chores extra fast so we could talk to Santora who was on the clean-up crew in the refectory, which is what they called the place where we ate. It never even occurred to us to talk to Mac because he was such a big shot and all.

"Pear and Jerk," Santora said when we walked up to him. He said it with a smirk like he wanted to make sure we understood he was insulting us. He was the one who first came up with the Pear nickname. My nickname was just "Jerk" so I got off easy.

"Why did Mac tell you Father Gabriel was bad news?" Pear said.

"Anyone ever tell you, Pear, that you look like a fat toad?" Santora said.

"Come on, Santora, what's the matter with Father Gabriel?" I said.

"Oh, you don't like it when I talk bad about your girl friend, do you, Jerk?"

Santora wiped down another table. "You two should like him. He's a faggot. You know what that is, don't you, Pear?"

"He likes men?" I said.

"He likes to bugger boys, Jerk," Santora said. "And why are you asking me about him anyway? I saw you going into his room one night so don't act like you don't know about him. Everyone knows you two are his girlfriends."

I wasn't sure what he was saying, but the way he said it got me mad. So I told him to shut up which was a mistake. He punched me in the nose and then in the mouth before I could hit him even once. When I opened my eyes, the rector was standing over me.

"What happened?" he said. I didn't even know what he was talking about at first.

"I don't remember." I tasted blood in my mouth.

"I want the truth," he said.

I couldn't answer because I started coughing from the blood trickling down my throat. He yanked me to my feet and told me to go see Brother Darius in the infirmary. While Darius was looking me over, I told him Santora had hit me, but all Darius said was that I had probably provoked Santora – as though you had to provoke Santora to make him go ape.

That night I started waking up as I was walking down the corridor toward the dorm exit. I stopped at Father Gabriel's room and heard voices whispering inside, but I couldn't make out anything. I knocked on his door. I don't know why; I just did. Father Gabriel half opened his door and looked at me. He only wore red boxer shorts. I saw someone moving under the covers of his bed. Father Gabriel told me to go back to bed and if I didn't quit walking around the school at night, I was going to be expelled.

Pear and I were on the same touch football team. A week or two after Santora whaled on me, we were playing the team that Mac and Santora were on. Pear and I probably touched the ball twice in the prior six games. But on that afternoon, our quarterback, who was a friend of Mac's, kept on giving the ball to Pear or me, and it seemed like every time he did, Mac and Santora tackled one of us, which they weren't supposed to do as this was touch football, but the referee was Brother Darius and he didn't say a thing. I dropped the ball the next time Ferris gave it to me so I wouldn't get tackled. But Pear picked it up, and before he could take a step Mac and Santora threw him down onto the frozen ground. I could tell Pear was hurt because he was rolling around the ground and crying. Turned out his arm was broken. Brother Darius drove Pear to town, and while he was in the hospital there, Pear's parents came and took him home, Darius told me the next day. "You have to be strong," he said. "If you're weak, you can let a little adversity take away your vocation. Just like that."

We went home for Christmas. Most kids got picked up at the school by their parents. My parents didn't have a car so I went with a few other kids on the train to Grand Central Station in Manhattan, and it was fun being outside the school on our own. The other kids had parents who met them at Grand Central, but I knew my way around the subway and took it home to Flatbush Avenue. When I came up the steps, it was dark and snowing, but the Christmas lights were up on the streets and on people's houses. It felt good to be home again at least for the first day or two. We didn't exchange gifts that year – we didn't even put up a tree -- because my mom said we were broke, and it wouldn't be right anyway as we were still in mourning for Boomer. I didn't believe her about the mourning part, and she seemed to have enough money for beer and cigarettes and going out drinking every night, but I didn't say anything.

I started calling Goony Michael when I got home, just like I called Pear Collins, because I figured he deserved a real name too. Goony was in a pissy mood the first few days I returned. He wouldn't even talk to me. On Christmas morning though I wrapped up my transistor radio and a stack of my secret stash of Spider Man comics and gave them to him, and he was pretty happy about it. He disappeared for a while and came back with a present for me – Boomer's old switchblade wrapped in newspaper. After that Goony was in a good mood again.

It was pretty quiet at home because my dad wasn't there. My mom said he was off on a toot, but a kid who lived in our building said my mom had my dad arrested for something he did to Michael so I guessed he was in jail. Michael wouldn't tell me what dad had done, and he got angry when I asked him about it so I dropped it. I spent most of my time playing in the snow with Michael or just walking around the neighborhood with him to stay out of the apartment until my mom went out drinking at night. Then we'd have the place to ourselves which was pretty cool. But when my mom got home, she'd act crazy. Like the night she woke me up to go find Boomer, and when I told her Boomer was dead, she hit me.

I got the idea to go see Collins. He lived on Long Island, and he invited me to a sleep over when I called him. I took the train out there with some money I got for making deliveries for the local butcher. Collins was still wearing a cast when he met me at the station with his mother. He lived in a big house and didn't have any brothers or sisters so he had his own room. There was a rec room in the basement that had a bowling arcade machine where you slid a puck down a slick plastic board, and if it passed over some metal things sticking up from the board that made the fake pins go up and bells ring, and it kept score automatically. Plus his family had a new color TV, which I had never seen before. If I lived like that, I would've been homesick when I started at Holy Cross too. We went to see "Goldfinger," which had just opened at the movies and was the best movie I had ever seen. We stayed up late watching TV in the rec room where we were going to sleep that night. I was starting to doze off when Collins said that Mac and Santora broke his arm on purpose.

"But why?" I said. "You didn't do anything to them."

"They said I was a fag and that I gave Father Gabriel blow jobs."

It was dark in the room except for the yellow light from the bowling machine. I was so clueless that I didn't even know what a blow job meant. I wasn't going to admit it though.

"Did you?" I said. "I mean I don't care if you did or not, I'm just asking."

"What? Suck his dick? Why do you want to know? So you can tell everyone back at school that I did?"

"I won't tell anyone. I swear. And if you don't want to tell me then don't. I don't care." And I really didn't. It was quiet for a while.

"I didn't do what they said I did," Collins said after a while, "but I let him do things to me so I guess I am a fag. He heard me crying in the dorm one night, and he took me to his room. I was pretty miserable then because everyone was making fun of me all the time and I was homesick. He let me sleep in his bed with him for a few hours . . . and when I woke up . . . ."

I told him about how Father Gabriel took me to his room and wanted me to jerk off in front of him, and then it was quiet for a while.

"I was going to his room when I saw you sleepwalking that night," Collins said. "That's why he was so mad. I was supposed to go to his room and instead I went after you because I thought you'd get really sick if you went out into the snow like that."

"Were you in his room the night I knocked on his door?"

"What are you taking about?"

"Did he ever do anything to me -- when I was sleepwalking?"

"I don't know."

"You should tell your parents about it," I said.

"I know. But I can't."

"Well, as far as I'm concerned what that pervert did to you doesn't make you a fag," I said. "And it didn't give those creeps the right to break your arm either."

I returned to Holy Cross after the Christmas break with the switchblade Michael gave me. I kept it under my pillow at night. Mac and Santora and Father Gabriel pretty much left me alone though.

One Saturday in March a visiting priest, Father Thomas, heard confessions. I had a lot to confess. After my experience with Father Gabriel, I had not mentioned any impure thoughts or touching when I went to confession with the priests at the school. Father Thomas said I had made a mockery of the sacrament by not confessing mortal sins. He kept on asking me why I would do such a thing so I told him about what Father Gabriel wanted me to do in his room the last time I confessed about having impure thoughts. When he didn't say anything, I figured he didn't believe me so I told him about the night I saw someone in Gabriel's bed and what Pear said Gabriel had done to him.

He asked me if I knew how serious it was to say things like that and how much trouble I would get in if I made stuff like that up. Then he said Pear was a troubled youth and that I should take what he said with a grain of salt or something like that, even though he didn't even know Pear at all. He sounded so angry that I was sure I was going to get in trouble.

That night there was big commotion in the dorms. I slept right through the whole thing, but everyone was talking about it the next day. The rumor was that the rector had found Mac in Father Gabriel's room. The next day Mac and Father Gabriel were gone and we were told not to talk about them. The visiting priest, Father Thomas, moved into Gabriel's room and took over his classes, which was fine with me.

After they left, Santora tried to beat me up every chance he got. I didn't know why he was so mad at me again all of a sudden. But I was pretty fast and he couldn't corner me where no one would see us. One day I was doing my morning chore, which was cleaning the freshman dorm, and he came in and chased me all around. I was screaming for help, and Brother Darius must have heard me because he ran into the dorm before Santora got me. Darius gave me a seven to nine for making a racket and walked away with his arm around Santora's shoulder.

That night I couldn't sleep because I was so mad, and I saw Santora sneak past my bunk. I thought he was looking for me so I took my knife out from under my pillow and opened it. But instead he went to Mouse Marino's bunk and crawled under Mouse's covers. Santora gave Mouse his nickname because he was the smallest kid in the school. I saw him put a hand over Mouse's mouth, but Mouse started screaming and Santora got up and ran. I jumped on top of him as he went past me and held on until Mouse got Father Thomas. I was telling Father Thomas what happened when Brother Darius arrived.

"You must have been dreaming," Darius said. "I'm sure Mr. Santora wouldn't do such a thing."

"You're full of crap," I said.

"Watch your mouth," Father Thomas said. Darius looked like he wanted to strangle me, but I didn't care. I was tired of perverts and maniacs pushing me around.

"Darius is always covering up for Santora," I said. "Santora's a pervert just like Father Gabriel was, and if he's not expelled, I'm gonna go home tomorrow and call the parents of every freshman to let them know what's going on."

They took Santora away, but all of us stayed up for the rest of the night in case he came back. I told everybody that Santora and Mac had broken Pear's arm on purpose and about Father Gabriel trying to get me to jerk off in front of him. Two of my classmates said Gabriel had tried the same thing with them, and I could tell from the way some other kids were squirming that Gabriel had probably done something to them too, but they didn't want to talk about it.

Santora wasn't at mass the next morning. He wasn't at breakfast either. Later that day, the rector called me into his office. I was pretty scared because I thought I was gonna get it for talking back to Brother Darius.

"Brother Darius told me you want to leave the school," he said.

"Not if Santora is gone."

"Mister Santora has decided to transfer to another school. And unless you want to follow him, you will not say another bad word about him. He is as much a victim as anyone in all this."

I didn't get how Santora was a victim but as long as was gone, I was happy.

I wanted to let Collins know what happened, but we didn't have phones at school, and I couldn't send him a letter about it because the rector read all our mail. So I didn't get to talk to Collins until summer break. I called him the first day I got home. I thought he'd be happy to hear about those three losers having to leave, but he didn't seem to care, and I got the feeling he didn't want to talk to me. Finally, he said he knew I had told everyone about him and Father Gabriel because the rector had called him about it. He said he didn't want to talk to me anymore and then he hung up.

When I told Michael about the call, he said maybe Collins didn't want to talk about things that hurt him because then it would make it hurt again. And then when I told Michael about the rector making Santora out to be a victim, he said maybe the rector meant that Santora was acting really mean because the bad priest had hurt him, and he didn't know what else to do. "Like dad did to Boomer," he said. Sometimes I think Michael is not as slow as everyone thinks he is.