Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie (2 page)

First day of high school
.

I couldn’t believe it was finally here. Dad had already left for work. Mom was sitting on a stool by the kitchen counter, reading a magazine. But as my nose had told me, she’d been hard at work creating breakfast. “Good morning,” she said. She slipped the magazine under the newspaper. “Hungry?”

“Starved.”

Mom always made blueberry pancakes and bacon on the first day of school. As she loaded up my plate with enough protein and carbs to fuel a Mars mission, I glanced at the corner of the magazine where it stuck out from under the paper. Mom didn’t usually hide stuff. It was probably one of those supermarket things, with stories about aliens who
looked like Elvis and kids who’d been raised in the desert by giant toads.

Mom got herself a plate and joined me as I tried to make a dent in my stack. We didn’t talk much while we ate. She seemed to be a million miles away.

“You okay?” I asked.

The too-big smile reappeared. “I can still make you a lunch. There’s plenty of time.”

“Maybe tomorrow.” I glanced at the clock. “Gotta go.” I grabbed my backpack and headed for the bus stop.

I was the first one there. I should have brought a book to help kill the time. But that would immediately mark me as a real geek.

Eventually, I heard a noise in the distance. “Hey, Scottie,” Mouth Kandeski shouted when he was still half a block away. “Whatcha think? High school. It’s the big time. We’re in high school. Man, that’s cool. That’s sooooo cool.”

He dribbled a trail of words like a leaking milk carton as he closed the distance between us. My best guess is that he can only breathe when he’s talking.

“Hi, Mouth,” I said when he reached me. His name’s Louden. Bad move on his parents’ part. He got called Loudmouth the moment he started school. It was shortened to Mouth soon after that. We didn’t hang out or anything, but I guess since I was one of the few kids on the planet who’d never screamed, “Shut up!” at him, he figured I was interested in what he had to say. I was more interested in wondering what would happen to him if I clamped a hand over his mouth. Maybe he’d swell up and explode. Maybe the top of his head
would pop off, sending his dorky orange ball cap into orbit where it belonged. Maybe the words would shoot out of his butt with so much force his pants would rip.

Left unclamped, Mouth had plenty more to discuss. “I’ll tell you, I can’t wait. This is awesome. I’m kinda nervous. Are you nervous? I mean, I’m not scared, or nothing, but just kinda nervous. You know, nervous isn’t the same as scared. It’s sort of like the buzz you get from lots of coffee. I drank eight cups, once. I started drinking coffee this summer. You drink coffee? It’s not bad if you put in enough sugar.”

Past Mouth, I spotted more freshmen. Familiar faces from Tom Paine Middle School, looking like Easter eggs in their new clothes. Then one unfamiliar face. A goddess. An honest-to-goodness goddess. At the first sight of her, even from a distance, I felt like I’d been stabbed in the gut with an icicle. I wanted to gather branches and build a shrine, or slay a mastodon and offer her the finest pieces, fresh from the hunt.

“Whoa, it’s Julia,” Mouth said, breaking the spell. “Hey, Julia, you look different.”

Wow. Mouth was right. It was Julia Baskins. I’d known her most of my life, and I hadn’t recognized her. She was one of those kids who blend into the background. Like me, I guess. Well, the background had lost a blender. She was gorgeous.

She’d always kept her dark brown hair in a braid. Now it was cut short and shaggy, with a couple of highlights. She was wearing makeup that did amazing things to her eyes, and a sweater and khakis that did amazing things to the rest of her. She looked taller, too.

“You’re wearing contacts, right?” Mouth called to her.
“I wanted contacts, but Mom said I had to wait until I got more responsible. Just because I let my braces get gunked up and had all those cavities. And lost my retainer three times. Well, really just twice. The other time, my dog ate it, so that doesn’t count. You have a dog?”

Julia shook her head and managed to squeeze in the word “Cat.”

“I don’t have a cat. I have an Airedale,” Mouth said. “He’s not purebred, but that’s what we think he mostly is.” He jammed his hand into his jacket pocket, fished around, and pulled out a broken Oreo. “Want a cookie?”

“No, thanks.” Julia slipped away from Mouth and joined her friend Kelly Holbrook near the curb. I worked my way closer and tried to think of some excuse to talk to her.

I never got the chance.

a
hush fell over our cluster of freshmen, cloaking us with that same sense of dread that ancient civilizations must have felt during a solar eclipse. But we weren’t awestruck by a dragon eating the sun. We were facing a much less mythical danger.

Older kids. An army of giants. I’d just spent a year in eighth grade, towering over the sixth and seventh graders. Okay—that was an exaggeration. I only towered over the short ones. But I wasn’t used to being at the bottom of the food chain. Or the wrong end of a growth spurt. I felt like the towel boy for the Sixers.

As the loud, joking, shoving mob reached us, I slipped toward the back of the group and pretended to adjust my watch. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a kid kneel to tie his shoe. That earned him a kick in the rear from a member of the mob as it passed by.

Mouth kept talking. Big mistake. The giants closed in on him, dumped the contents of his backpack onto the sidewalk, and threw his hat down a storm drain.

“Hey, come on, guys,” Mouth said as his possessions spilled
across the concrete. “Come on. Hey. Stop it. Come on, that’s not funny. We’re all classmates, right? We all go to the same school. Let’s be friends.”

The scary thing was that the big kids didn’t seem angry. I’m pretty sure they trashed his stuff by reflex, like they were scratching an itch or squashing a bug. Some people step on ants. Some people step on freshmen. I guess it was better to be a freshman than an ant. At least the seniors didn’t have giant magnifying glasses.

Mouth was spared from further damage by the arrival of transportation. With an ear-killing squeal of brakes, the bus skidded to the curb, bathing us in the thick aroma of diesel fuel, motor oil, and a faint whiff of cooked antifreeze. The driver opened the door and glared at Mouth as the mob pushed their way aboard. “Pick up that mess, kid!” he shouted.

When I walked past Mouth, I thought about giving him a hand.

“You’re holding us up!” the driver shouted. He kept his glare aimed in my direction while he took a gulp of coffee from a grimy thermos cup. Great—of all the types of bus drivers in the world, I had to get a shouter.

I hurried on board, hoping to grab a seat near Julia. No such luck.

As dangerous as the bus stop is, at least there are places to run. There’s no escape from the bus. It’s like a traveling version of a war game. All that’s missing is paintball guns and maybe a couple foxholes. I could swear one of the kids in the back was in his twenties. I think he was shaving.

I sat up front.

That wasn’t much better, since every big kid who got on at the rest of the stops had a chance to smack my head. I should have grabbed a seat behind Sheldon Murmbower. There was something about his head that attracted swats. Everyone within two or three rows of him was pretty safe.

For the moment, all I could do was try to learn invisibility. I opened my backpack and searched for something to keep me busy. Now I really wished I’d brought that field guide, or anything else to read. All I had was blank notebooks, pens, and pencils. I grabbed a notebook. The driver was shouting at a new batch of kids as they got on. Then he shouted at Mouth, who was sitting in the front seat.

“Shut up, kid! You’re distracting me.”

Last year was so much better. I had the greatest driver. Louie. He used to drive a city bus. That gave me an idea. I started writing. It didn’t cut down on the smacks as much as I’d hoped, but it kept my mind off them.

Twenty minutes and one full page later, we reached J. P. Zenger High.

“No pushing,” the driver shouted as we scrambled out.

“High school,” Mouth said, staggering to the side as someone pushed him out of the way. “Here we come. This is going to be great. We’re going to rule this place.”

Wrong, Mouth. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

There were so many buses, the parking lot smelled like a truck stop. On top of that, the lot was jammed with a long line of parents dropping off kids and a wave of seniors driving their own cars with varying degrees of skill.

I stood on the curb for a moment, my eyes wide and my head tilted back. I’d seen it a thousand times before, but I’d never really looked at it. Zenger High was huge. It sprawled out like a hotel that had a desperate desire to become an octopus. Every couple years, the town built another addition. The school mascot should have been a bulldozer.

My homeroom was located as far as possible from the bus area. I got lost twice. The first time, I asked some older kid for directions, and he sent me off to what turned out to be the furnace room. I assumed this was an example of upperclassman humor. The janitor, who I’d wakened from a nap, yelled at me. I reached my desk just before the late bell rang.

I didn’t see a single familiar face in homeroom. The teacher passed out blank assignment books. Then he gave us our schedules. I scanned mine, hoping to get at least a clue about what lay ahead.

I had no idea what the
H
or the
C.P
. stood for. Since there was no teacher listed for lunch, I grabbed a pen and wrote
Mr. E. Meat
.

My first class turned out to be as far as possible from homeroom, and nearly impossible to find. But at least I knew enough not to ask for directions. Ten minutes into my freshman year, I’d already learned an important lesson.

When I reached the room, I finally saw a face I recognized. The same face I hadn’t recognized earlier. Julia was in my English class, along with Kelly, and a couple other kids I knew. Still no sign of Kyle, Patrick, or Mitch.

I grabbed a seat two rows away from Julia. Things were looking up.

“Welcome to Honors English,” Mr. Franka said. He was a short guy with a beard and sideburns and the sort of rugged face you see on the cable hunting shows. Instead of a camouflage outfit, he was wearing a light blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, but no tie or jacket. “I hope you all love to read.” He grabbed a stack of paperbacks from his desk and started tossing them out like literary Frisbees. I noticed a Marine tattoo on his left forearm.

He also passed out a textbook, which weighed about nine pounds. Fortunately, he didn’t toss it. Otherwise, there’d probably have been a death or two in the back row.

Instead of reading in class, we started discussing how to define a short story. It was actually fun. I didn’t say too much. I didn’t want anyone to think I was some kind of brain—which I’m not. I wasn’t even sure how I’d ended up in the honors
class. Maybe it was because of the tests we’d taken at the end of last year.

Mr. Franka kept asking us all sorts of questions to keep the discussion going. At one point, he said, “What do you think is easier to write, a short story or a novel?”

I almost raised my hand. I’d read so many of both, I figured I had a good answer. A story was harder because you couldn’t wander around. You had to stick to the subject. At least in a good story. It was a matter of focus.

Most of the kids said that a novel would be harder because it was longer. I wasn’t sure whether to speak up or just keep quiet. Then Julia raised her hand. “I think stories are harder,” she said. “In a novel, the writer can wander. In a story, the writer has to stay focused.”

“Right!” Oh great. I hadn’t meant to shout. But it was so amazing to find we felt the same way. Everyone was looking at me. “I agree,” I said in a quieter voice as I slunk down in my seat. Wonderful. Now she’d think I was some kind of suck-up.