Authors: David Lubar

B005N8ZFUO EBOK (4 page)

BOOK: B005N8ZFUO EBOK

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I
’d watched him on and off during the meal, and I didn’t have a clue why he was by himself. Well, as my dad always said, if you don’t know the answer, ask a question. Of course, whenever I asked
him
a question, he usually told me to shut up and stop being such a wise ass.

But dad wasn’t here, so I figured it was safe to ask a question.

“Who’s the loner?” I asked Torchie, looking over toward the kid eating all by himself at a table near the opposite wall. There was nothing I could see about his clothes or appearance that would explain his isolation.

“Him? That’s Trash.”

“Nice name,” I said.

“It’s not like that. It’s just that he trashes stuff. You know, breaks things.”

“Yeah,” Cheater said. “I heard that at his last school, he smashed up a whole classroom—desks, chairs, windows. The kid’s wacko.”

I looked back at Trash. It was hard to imagine why someone would break stuff for fun.

“Hey,” Lucky said to Cheater, “you shouldn’t say
wacko
. It’s not nice.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Cheater said. “My mistake. He’s not wacko—he’s bonkers. Or maybe he’s loony. How about
deranged
? I like that one.”

“How’d you like to be called that?” Lucky asked.

“I think I’d prefer
insane
, if you’re going for technical terms,” Cheater said. “But
flipped
out has a nice ring to it. And let’s not forget all those wonderful phrases that can be used to indicate a mind that is somewhat less than perfect: one card short of a full deck, one sandwich short of a picnic, off your rocker, out in left field—the list goes on and on. Hey, do you know where the word
bedlam
comes from? It was a crazy house in England.”

“Listen,” Lucky told him, his voice dropping so low I had to lean forward to catch the rest of it. “If enough people call you crazy, maybe you begin to believe it, even if you aren’t.”

All three of them started arguing about putting labels on people and about stuff like self-esteem. Everyone was talking at once. They sounded like a bunch of miniature psychiatrists. I guess they’d gotten a lot of that in class here. Personally, I thought they were all a bit crazy. Or wacko. Or bonkers. But I kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t do much about kids like Bloodbath who’d hate me because that was how they treated everyone, but I didn’t want to turn the whole place against me. I didn’t want to end up eating dinner all by myself every day, like that pathetic loser they called Trash.

So I stayed quiet and let them go at it. Eventually, the argument faded out and everyone went back to eating.

“Well,” Cheater said as we finished our meal, “welcome to Edgeview.”

I was about to say,
Thanks
, when a crash from across the room made me jump. Nobody else seemed surprised. I realized Trash had thrown his plate down. It sounded like it had hit hard. I expected to see shattered pieces all over the floor, but the plate hadn’t broken.

“He does that a lot,” Torchie said. “They give him a plastic plate, so at least it doesn’t break.”

I watched Trash to see what he would do next. I wondered if he’d throw his fork, or maybe even his chair. Even though he was off on the other side of the room, I got ready to duck. But he just sat there. I couldn’t see his face really well—he was hunched over and his hair
hung down kind of long on the sides—but he didn’t seem angry. He didn’t seem happy, either. He actually appeared kind of sad.

“Wacko,” Cheater said.

Lucky glared at him.

“What do you guys do after dinner?” I asked as we got up from the table.

“There’s a TV in the lounge,” Torchie said. “But Bloodbath and his gang hang out there.”

“The library’s not bad,” Cheater added. “And on Friday nights, we all—”

“Play checkers,” Lucky said.

He cut off Cheater so quickly I was sure they were hiding something. That was okay. I couldn’t get angry over a secret or two. They didn’t know me yet and they had no way to tell whether they could trust me. Just like I didn’t really know yet if I could trust them.

“Yeah,” Cheater said. “That’s what I was going to say. We play checkers. Yup. Every Friday. That’s what we do.”

A bell rang, signaling the end of dinner. “Oh crap,” I said as it hit me.

“What?” Torchie asked.

“Nothing.” It wasn’t a thought I felt like sharing, but I’d just realized my whole life was going to be measured by bells.

When we got back to the room, I borrowed a magazine from Torchie. He had a great selection—monster stuff, sports, comics, cars—though some of them looked like they’d been snatched from a fire. I read for a while, then decided to go to sleep. We had to turn out our lights at ten, anyhow, so it wasn’t like I was missing anything.

Right about now, back home, I’d be saying good night to my sister.

Good night, you spoiled brat.

And she’d be saying good night to me.

Good night, you creepy little twerp.

It was sort of a ritual with us. Funny how, in one day,
home
had turned into
back home.
Somewhere else. Somewhere I wasn’t.

I could hear Torchie across the room breathing. Out in the hall, it
sounded like someone was wrestling. The walls shook with the thud of a body hitting hard. Maybe it was a fight. I didn’t care. It had nothing to do with me.

Tomorrow was Monday. I’d get to find out firsthand what classes were like. Maybe these teachers would be better. Maybe I could get along with them.

I closed my eyes and thought about the places I’d been before Edgeview. All of a sudden, the other schools didn’t seem that bad. Sure, there’d been a lot of jerks to deal with, but I guess there were jerks everywhere. Maybe I was a jerk myself for getting kicked out so often.

But this was it. Edgeview was the last place that would take me. This was the place for kids who had been thrown out of all the regular schools where they lived. Six counties in the northern part of the state had gotten together to make this dump. There was nowhere to go from here. Edgeview was my dead end.

THE THINKING HERO

DENNIS WOO

A LITTLE CLASS

A
bell woke me.

“Good morning,” Torchie called from across the room in a disgustingly cheerful voice.

I coughed a couple of times as I sat up, wondering why my lungs felt like I’d spent the night in an ashtray. The answer sat in the bottom of my wastebasket. I stared at the charred ball of burned paper that had once been a student handbook.

“Hey, are you trying to kill us?” I asked Torchie.

“I didn’t do nothin’,” he said.

“Right.” There was no point arguing. We’d just get into one of those did-not, did-too things that don’t go anywhere. So I dropped it and got ready for my day at Edgeview.

My first class after breakfast was math. When I reached the door, Cheater waved to me from the middle of the empty room. “I got us some seats,” he said.

“Thanks.” I plunked down next to him. “I was afraid I’d have to stand.”

“I’m not going to copy off of you,” Cheater added. “Everyone says I do. But I don’t.”

“Fine.” I didn’t care if he copied from me.

Torchie grabbed the seat on my other side. He’d sort of attached himself to me. That was okay—! didn’t mind sticking with someone who
knew what was going on. And, compared to a lot of the kids I’d seen, he was reasonably normal, if you didn’t count his slight problem with fire. Besides, he was so relentlessly friendly that being mean to him would be like kicking a puppy. He didn’t act like those kids who ask,
Will you be my friend?
Now, those kids I don’t mind kicking. With Torchie, it was more like he was saying,
I’m going to be your friend.

I didn’t see any point fighting it.

Bloodbath wasn’t in my math class, but I saw three kids just like him sitting in the back row. They all had that same deadly look. One had rings in his nose and in both eyebrows. He might have had a ring in his tongue, too, but I really didn’t want to get close enough to see for sure. I didn’t even want him to catch me looking in his direction. His buddy had a tattoo of a skull on his forehead. It looked like he’d done it himself. Just the thought of a needle being jabbed over and over into my flesh made me shudder. I wondered if his pea-sized brain realized the humor of putting a skull on the outside of his own skull. Probably not. The third beast in that cluster of thugs had GRUNGE tattooed on the back of each hand. As far as I could tell, none of them carried any books to class.

“Here comes Mr. Parsons,” Torchie whispered as the teacher stepped into the room. “Careful. He’s got a bit of a temper.”

A teacher with a temper? Now, that was a shock. I watched Mr. Parsons walk to his desk. He looked pretty much like any of a million other middle-aged math teachers, except for the long strands of hair that he’d combed over the top of his head from the side. He was wearing a rumpled green jacket, rumpled green pants, and a blue tie—not a bow tie, but I still didn’t trust him.

“Good morning, class,” he said.

There was no answer, but about half of the kids at least glanced in his direction. One kid—I learned later that they called him Flying Dan—was running around at the back of the room with his arms spread out like airplane wings. Another was carving something on his desk with his pen. At least he was doing that until the pen snapped from the pressure.
A couple kids stared out the windows. And I guess I was looking all around the room at everyone else.

Mr. Parsons cleared his throat. I faced forward and tried to escape his notice.
Be cool, I told myself. Just sit back and get through it.
That was my plan.

“Well, now, I see we have a new student,” Mr. Parsons said, glancing down at a sheet of paper he’d taken from his lesson book. He scanned the room until his eyes landed on me—not a tough trick to pull off, since I wasn’t a moving target like Flying Dan. “Martin, why don’t you tell the class something about yourself.”

I shrugged. “There’s really nothing to tell.” I hated the whole new-kid song-and-dance routine—stand up, stutter a bit, say something totally stupid, sit down. What did he think I was, a dancing dog?

“Come on, don’t be modest. Surely you have something interesting to share.”

I shook my head. At least I wasn’t the center of attention. In this class, there was no center of attention. I was just one bubble in a glass of cola, clinging to the side while a giant soda straw of a teacher tried to stir things around and suck us up.

Parsons shuffled over to me and smiled a thin smile. His upper lip was nearly the same pasty color as his forehead. The head reminded me of the belly of a dead fish. “Now, Martin, one of the basic things we’ve discovered at Edgeview is that the students must learn to be open and honest about themselves. Open and honest. That’s the key. Please, stand up and share something.” He leaned over and patted me on the shoulder, then returned to the front of the class and crossed his arms. His whole body said,
I’m waiting.

It looked like there was no way out. I stared at him, standing straight ahead of me, acting all-powerful and filled with expert ideas and theories about what was right for us poor little students. Open and honest? As I rose to my feet, I realized that was the perfect description—I honestly had no idea what was going to come out when I opened my mouth.

“Hi. My name’s Martin Anderson, and I’m not bald.”

I sat back down.

Mr. Parsons’s face grew red. Even the top of his scalp, through the strands of combed-over hair, turned the color usually only seen in ripe garden tomatoes. His face wasn’t just changing color, it was also twitching, like in the monster movies right before a guy turns into a werewolf. I expected him to start shouting, but he whirled away from me, fumbled around for some chalk, and wrote the lesson on the board. He broke three pieces before he was finished.

I glanced over at Torchie. He held his finger up like a knife and ran it across his throat. Then he flopped his tongue out, closed his eyes, and dropped his head onto one shoulder. I guess that was his subtle way of telling me I’d probably not made a good first impression on Mr. Parsons.

“Way to go,” Cheater whispered.

Yeah, way to go.

The class itself was pretty strange. I guess it was some kind of experimental teaching method. The idea seemed to be that we could learn math better if we didn’t have to spend so much time memorizing stuff and just used numbers in lots of different ways.

I wasn’t sure whether it would work, but I was willing to give it a try, and I certainly didn’t want to get any further out on Mr. Parson’s bad side—if that was possible—so I paid attention. I even raised my hand once or twice, though he didn’t call on me.

Things didn’t stay peaceful for long. About halfway through class, Mr. Parsons handed back some tests. When Cheater got his, he shouted, “It’s not fair!” He jumped up, knocked over his desk, kicked his chair, and rushed from the room.

Nobody paid any attention. Not even the teacher. I glanced at the test where it had landed on the floor. On top, written in red pen, there was a large F. Then I looked over at Torchie.

“He’ll be back,” Torchie said.

Sure enough, Cheater returned a couple minutes later, acting as if
nothing had happened. He put his desk back and sat down. The bell rang.

“Wow, you sure know how to blend in,” Cheater said as we were leaving for our next class. He raced ahead.

“Yeah,” Torchie said. “Parsons looked like he wanted to strangle you.”

I shrugged. “He’ll get over it. I didn’t really say anything all that bad. I hope the other teachers aren’t that sensitive. Is his class always like this?”

Torchie shook his head. “Parsons keeps trying different stuff. Last month, we had to learn a bunch of songs about fractions. There’s this one jingle I still can’t get out of my head.”

“You’re kidding.”

He shook his head. “I wish I was.”

Before I could ask him about our next class, someone punched me on the shoulder hard enough to knock me into the wall.