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  “No.”

  “Maybe you should give it a chance, Sport,” Neil said. “Hockey would be good for you. When you’re part of a team—”

  “No!”

  Neil stood up. He didn’t like it when I yelled.

  “It’s okay,” my mom said. She was smiling, but I could tell she was upset. “We don’t have to talk about this now.”

  She kissed me on the cheek again. Then Neil walked her to the door. I heard them talking before she left, but I didn’t care. I took my cereal into the living room, flopped down onto the couch and flipped on the TV. a few minutes later, the local news came on. There was still nothing about the old woman. What a relief.

  I got through the morning and then caught up with Drew outside the cafeteria. He was dumping his lunch—a sandwich and an apple—into the garbage.

  “Let’s grab some pizza,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t have any money.”

  Drew checked the money in his pocket.

  “I’ve got it covered,” he said. “We’ll go to the two-for-one place.”

  See what I mean about Drew? He never pressures me. He never gives me a hard time. Things are easy around him. He was the best friend a guy could have. We walked up the street to the pizza place and got a couple of slices. It was a nice day, so we walked around eating them. I had a good time. I didn’t think about the old lady or her purse even once.

  Then we went back to school and everything went wrong.

  chapter five

  It started with Rufus. It almost always started with him. He’d been giving me a hard time from the first day I met him.

  After lunch on the second day of school, I’d found a note on my locker. It was on school letterhead, but the writing was all scribbley. I have a hard enough time reading without trying to figure out someone’s crazy handwriting. But the note looked official, like it came from the office, so I tried.

  Rufus’s locker is right across from mine. He saw what I was doing and asked me if I needed help. I wanted to say no, but I also wanted to know what the note said. All I knew about Rufus at that point was that he was friends with a couple of the guys I used to go to elementary school with. But I didn’t think he knew anything about me. And he sounded like he really wanted to help.

  “Okay,” I said finally.

  Rufus took the note from me. “It’s from Ms. Everett,” he said. Ms. Everett is the principal at my school. “It says she wants you to come down to the office to discuss how come you’re so stupid.”

  He said it as if he was reading it off the letter. I stared at him.

  “I’m not kidding,” he said. “That’s really what it says.” He was frowning, like he was as surprised as I was about what the note said. He glanced around and spotted one of his friends. “Hey, Tad! Come here.”

  Tad was standing a couple of lockers away with a few other guys. They all knew me from elementary school, and they all came down the hall toward us. Rufus handed him the note.

  “What does this say?” he said.

  Tad squinted at the note and then at me.

  “It says that Catastrophe has to go to the office so that Ms. Everett can figure out why he’s so stupid,” he said. Tad had been calling me Catastrophe since fifth grade. I hated it. He handed the note to one of his friends. Before long, they had all read it, and they were all nodding and looking serious. Finally one of them burst out laughing. The next thing I knew, they were all laughing.

  I grabbed the note from one of them, wadded it up and threw it into the garbage. My face was burning, and I knew it was bright red. That just made them laugh even harder. Drew fished the note out of the garbage can later when I told him what had happened.

  “It’s just scribbles,” he said after he’d smoothed it out. “Rufus was just trying to get you going. He’s a jerk.”

  Ever since then, I tried to stay out of Rufus’s way, but it wasn’t easy. He was always after me. He made me wish I was invisible. One of his favorite tricks was to sneak up behind me—in the schoolyard, in the hall, in the washroom, at the bus stop, anywhere he could find me—and pull my hood off. In class, where I wasn’t allowed to have my hood up, he made a big deal of staring at my neck and the side of my face. In gym class, he liked to grab me and pull my T-shirt up so that everyone could see my side and my back. He got a big kick out of saying that he knew dogs that were smarter than me. He said even a stupid dog knew better than to run into a burning building instead of out of it.

  The more I tried to dodge Rufus, the more he came after me. A person can only take so much—at least, this person can. So sometimes when he hassled me, it ended in a fight. I admit it: Most of the time when that happened, I was the one who threw the first punch. But that doesn’t mean I was the one who started it. I never started anything. I never would have hit Rufus if he hadn’t teased me or pulled down my hood or found a million ways to embarrass me. The thing is, he only ever did it when there were no teachers around. And whenever I lost my temper, he always got his friends to say that he hadn’t done anything, that I had attacked him. That meant that I was the one who got in trouble. Always.

  Like the day after I took that woman’s purse.

  Drew and I went back to school after lunch. I had a special reading period in the resource room with Ms. Larch, a teachers’ aide. Halfway through, I glanced up and saw Rufus looking in through the window in the door. He was making faces at me. I tried to ignore him, but it was hard. Ms. Larch noticed that I wasn’t paying attention. She glanced at the door. Rufus wasn’t there anymore. A minute later, I took another look, and there he was again, grinning at me and making stupid faces. That went on for maybe ten minutes. But when the bell rang and I went out into the hall, he was gone. At least, that’s what I thought. I started down the hall to my locker. All of a sudden, I tripped over something and landed face-first on the floor. My books and my binder went flying. Behind me, kids laughed. When I twisted my head around to see what I had tripped on, there was Rufus standing in the doorway to a classroom. I wasn’t one hundred percent positive, but I was willing to bet anything—anything at all—that he had tripped me on purpose. Everything in front of my eyes turned red and then black. I flew at Rufus and caught him right at the knees. He crashed to the floor. Everything went quiet in the hall. Then I hit him.

  I hit him just as Ms. Larch came out of the resource room. She saw the whole thing. At least, she thought she did. She saw me fly at Rufus and hit him. She didn’t see what had happened before, and, for sure, none of Rufus’s friends were going to tell her. Ms. Larch told me to get up. A girl—Jana King—picked up my binder. A bunch of the pages had fallen out. She picked them up too, and stood there staring at them and frowning. Great, someone else was taking a good long look at how stupid I was. I grabbed the binder and the papers out of her hand. Ms. Larch saw me do that too.

  “Jana is just trying to help,” she said. She told me to apologize to her. But by then, the vice-principal had turned up. He talked to Ms. Larch and then walked me down to the office.

  Ms. Everett looked disappointed but not surprised to see me. She shook her head, gave me a detention and told me that she was going to have to call my mom. She asked me if I had anything to say for myself.

  I did. “Please don’t call her,” I said. My mom would freak if she heard I’d been tagged for fighting again. Neil would be even worse. He’d lecture me all night.

  “I’m sorry, Kaz,” Ms. Everett said. “But you know the rules. You’re lucky I don’t suspend you.”

  I didn’t feel lucky.

  chapter six

  That afternoon, instead of going home like everyone else, I went to detention. Two other kids had detention that day: Jonathan Morris and—big surprise—Jana King.

  “What’s she doing here?” I asked Jonathan.

  “I heard she slapped some girl,” Jonathan said. “People think girls are sweet, but when they get mad, look out.”

  “What was she mad about?”

  Jonathan just shr
ugged. “Probably girl stuff,” he said. “You should have seen her in the office after. She was crying and begging Ms. Everett not to call her parents. She promised she’d do anything if Ms. Everett didn’t call.” He shook his head in disgust.

  I stared at Jana as she took a seat at the back of the room. She was smart and popular—she was always on the honor roll, and she had a million friends. Drew called her The Princess behind her back, partly because her last name was King and her family lived in a big house on Royal avenue, and partly because she seemed so perfect. It was hard to imagine her hitting anyone. But Jonathan was right. You never know about girls. Just because they look sweet, doesn’t mean they act sweet all the time. To be honest, I wanted to laugh knowing that Jana King was in detention for more or less the same reason that I was.

  Mr. Porelli, who was in charge of detentions that day, made all three of us move up to the front of the room where he could keep an eye on what we were doing.

  “I’m going to give you a break, people,” he said. “I’m going to let you get a head start on your homework.”

  This was supposed to be a big deal, because a lot of teachers who were in charge of detention made you write an essay about whatever stupid thing had landed you there and what you could have done differently. I hate writing stuff like that—I hate writing anything—mostly because my spelling is pretty bad. So is my handwriting. So I guess it was nice that Mr. Porelli wasn’t making us write anything. But doing homework is just as hard for me as writing an essay, so it wasn’t like he was doing me a huge favor.

  I pulled out my math book and opened it. I did the first part of my math homework okay—it was equations, you know, solving for x. I’m not so bad at that. But the second part was harder. My math teacher had assigned ten word problems. The first one went: John is building a fence around his mother’s garden, which is shaped like an isosceles trapezoid with a square attached to the shortest end. If the sides of the trapezoid section are 200 m, 500 m and 800 m, and the side length of the square is 200 m, how much fencing does John need? You can’t believe how much trouble I had just reading and figuring out the questions, never mind trying to find the answer. The more words in the question, the harder it was for me to work out what I was supposed to do. I puzzled over that first question for at least five minutes. Mr. Porelli glanced at me a couple of times, but he didn’t say anything. I could have asked him for help, but I didn’t know him very well and I didn’t know what he knew about me. I don’t like asking people who don’t know about me. I don’t even like asking people who do know, but at least then I don’t have to explain why I’m having trouble.

  Mr. Porelli got up. He said, “I’m going to trust you people to behave yourselves and do your work while I’m out of the room for a few minutes. Don’t disappoint me.”

  He didn’t have to worry about me. Things were bad enough. If I got into trouble while I was already in detention, I don’t know what my mom would have done. So I kept my eyes on my work. But Jana didn’t keep her eyes on hers.

  “That’s not right,” she said.

  At first I didn’t think she was talking to me. She had never talked to me before. But when I glanced up, I saw that she was looking at my math binder.

  “You’re doing that all wrong,” she said.

  “Who asked you?” I said. I hate when people look at what I’m doing. I hate it even more when they tell me I’m wrong—like I don’t know that already.

  “You’re supposed to add five hundred plus eight hundred plus two hundred times four,” she said.

  I stared at her. What was she even talking about? I turned back to my work and pretended I hadn’t heard what she had said.

  “Fine,” she said. “If you want to get it wrong, be my guest.”

  “Why don’t you just mind your own business?” I said.

  “I know how to do math,” she said. “I tutor math.”

  “Big deal,” I said. I turned sideways in my seat and put my arm alongside my work so that she wouldn’t be able to look at it. I think she was going to say something else to me, but Mr. Porelli came back into the room. That shut her up.

  By the time Mr. Porelli let us go, the school was almost deserted. I went to my locker and got what I needed for the night. Then I headed for the door. On the way down the stairs, I ran into Jana. I didn’t want to talk to her, but she stepped right in front of me.

  “I wasn’t trying to tell you what to do or anything,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve heard about you and—”

  She’d heard about me?

  “You heard how stupid I am so you thought you’d tell me how smart you are, is that it?” I said. “Okay, so now I know. But let me ask you something—do your parents know that their little princess goes around hitting girls? Or did turning on the waterworks convince Ms. Everett to make an exception for you and not call them?”

  Jana stared at me. Her face turned red. Her lips started to tremble. Her eyes got all watery—what a baby!—and she wiped at them with the back of her hand.

  “What I meant was, I saw some of the papers that fell out of your binder earlier,” she said. “You mix up a lot of letters. You’re dyslexic, right?”

  I felt my hands turn into fists. I hate that word. I hate when people say it.

  “I have a cousin who has the same problem,” she said. “He’s good at math, like you, except when they’re word problems. Then he has trouble. I was going to ask if you had tried the peer-tutoring program, because I tutor my cousin sometimes, and he says it helps. But forget it, okay?”

  She spun around and started down the stairs. She was moving fast, even though she wasn’t supposed to be running on the stairs. Her dark brown hair flew out behind her.

  I watched her for a moment, and then I chased after her. I didn’t catch up to her until she had reached the main doors.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Punching Rufus was one thing. Making a girl cry, especially when it turned out that she wasn’t trying to give me a hard time after all—that was something else. “Really, I’m sorry.”

  When she turned and looked at me, I saw that she’d been crying again. She didn’t say a word. She just raced out of the school. I felt like an idiot for apologizing. It never got me anywhere.

  chapter seven

  Neil was making supper when I got home. I could tell from the way he popped his head out of the kitchen to look at me that Ms. Everett had called my mom, and my mom had called Neil. But he didn’t say anything. He never did. He always waited for my mom.

  My mom got home an hour after I did. I was in my room, but I heard her come through the door. I heard her drop her purse on the floor beside the table in the front hall. I heard her talking to Neil, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. For the longest time after Neil moved in, I thought my mom agreed with him about everything. I never heard them fight. But after a while that started to change. They started to close the door of whatever room they were in, and I would hear from the sharpness in their voices that they were arguing. This was one of those times.

  Finally someone knocked on my door.

  “Who is it?” I called.

  “It’s me.”

  My mom. I told her to come in.

  But when she opened the door, I saw that Neil was with her. They stood side by side at the foot of my bed.

  “Ms. Everett called me at work,” my mom said.

  “It wasn’t my fault.”

  My mom shook her head. She looked tired. She glanced at Neil.

  “Ms. Larch saw what happened,” he said.

  “No, she didn’t. She only saw part of it.”

  “But you did knock that boy to the ground, didn’t you, Sport?”

  “Yeah, but that’s because—”

  Neil cut me off. “And you hit him, didn’t you?” he said.

  “He deserved it,” I said. “He—”

  My mom sat down on the edge of my bed.

  “Oh, Kaz,” she said.

  “But, Mom, you don’t understand�
�”

  “There’s no excuse for fighting, Kaz.” She sounded as tired as she looked. Worse, she sounded disappointed. “You used to be so happy. You never made any trouble. You never got into fights. You were always outside with your hockey stick playing road hockey, ice hockey...” Her eyes glistened with tears. Geez, was everyone going to cry today? “Remember, Kaz? Remember that boy?”

  Neil came up behind her and squeezed her shoulder.

  “I think what your mother is trying to say, Sport, is—”

  “I want to live with Dad,” I said.

  That took my mom by surprise.

  “what?” she said.

  “I want to live with Dad.”

  I thought about the old lady and her purse. I wished it had had lots of money in it. If it had, I would have used it to buy a bus ticket. I would have gone to my dad’s place.

  “Your dad has a new family now,” my mom reminded me, as if that were something I could ever forget. I’d been stunned when she told me. She hadn’t seemed happy about it either. A few weeks ago, I heard her complain to Neil that having a new baby was my dad’s latest excuse for not sending child support payments like he was supposed to. She said she hadn’t got a check from him in over three months. But I didn’t care about that.

  “He’s still my dad. I can be with him if I want to.”

  “But you haven’t seen him in years,” my mom said.

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “Watch the tone, Sport,” Neil said. He still had his hand on my mom’s shoulder.

  “You think I’m to blame?” Mom said.

  “He’s the one who decided to move so far away.”

  “He moved after you wouldn’t let him have joint custody,” I said. “You never let him see me.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” my mom said slowly. “Your dad...” She shook her head. “It’s just complicated, Kaz. And now that you have a little sister...” There were more tears in her eyes now. “We can talk about this another time. For right now, you need to know that what you did today was wrong. I know you’re having a hard time in school. But you can’t take your frustration out on other kids. It’s not right. I know you’re a better person than that. I just know it.” She stood up. “Supper will be ready in half an hour.”