B.u.g. Big Ugly Guy (9781101593523) Read Free Page A

and turn on someone else.
    Being quiet’s just not in my DNA,
he thought, all the while doubting that any of the boys who had dunked him had a clue as to what DNA was.
    Besides, he told himself, by missing detention I can get home before they get out. Because most of them are in detention every day. And that’s in
their
DNA.
    Then he had a darker thought. Better watch out at lunch.
    Lunch was a jostling, shoving scrum, where kidney punches could be delivered with no teacher the wiser. Besides, the food could be spit on, sneezed on, boogered, soiled. And there was the long, lonely walk while carrying a tray full of food back to his seat, dodging legs that suddenly shot out to trip him.
    Yes—lunch could turn out to be even worse than the trip home on the bus. At least there, the driver—a hairy man named Baer who looked like he really did have bears somewhere on his family tree—kept order by turning his head and growling at any misbehavers. Sammy had actually considered bringing him a jar of honey but had resisted the idea at the last moment. He wasn’t sure Mr. Baer’s sense of humor was any more advanced than the Boyz.

    A few hours later, when Sammy entered the cafeteria, he realized that today’s lunch was going to be different.
    Very different.
    Because his tormentors had found a new target.
    Skink.

2.
    Lunch Is a Battlefield
    By Sammy’s estimation, Skink had made three rather large mistakes.
    Number one
, he’d sat down at the center table. Everyone knew that table was reserved for James Lee Joliette and his ninth-grade crew. Even if Skink hadn’t known anything about them, he should have recognized their
clubbiness
by their leather jackets and combat boots and by their hair, cut as short as their tempers.
Clubbiness
might not be a real word, but Sammy thought it fit. They were the Toilet Dunkers Club.
    Number two
, Skink hadn’t moved when Joliette and crew showed up. He might have been let alone if he’d admitted his mistake, being a new kid and all. If he’d laughed at their jokes about him, stood up and found another seat, preferably one on the other side of the room, close to the door. But Skink seemed to be content to sit and pick at his meal while James Lee loomed over him, yelling in his ear.
    He doesn’t even have the sense to look scared,
Sammy thought.
    Third mistake
—and, Sammy figured, probably the most important—Skink had been born black. A light black. Sort of a hot chocolate with lots of cream color. He had strange lozenge-shaped eyes. Sammy didn’t believe in aliens, and sometimes wasn’t entirely sure about God, either. However there was something wonderfully, comfortingly alien about Skink in the sea of pasty white faces in the lunchroom.
    But James Lee hated people who were different. James Lee’s father was well known in town for his drunken tirades about what “furriners” had done to this country, meaning anyone who hadn’t lived there, in Hicksville, for at least three generations. James Lee had obviously inherited his old man’s views.
    Sammy’s dad had smiled when he first heard this and said, “We’re in the middle of the Midwest. What immigrants is he worried about? Canadians?”
    Sammy’s mother had laid a hand on his shoulder. “Us,” she said.

    With Skink, the differences were all right out there on display. James Lee didn’t need a week to discover them.
    â€œYou’re at my table, kid,” James Lee said. “You’re in my seat.”
    However, Skink didn’t look offended or upset or scared, all of which made sense to Sammy.
He looks kind of . . . peaceful
. Sammy gulped
. He must not realize the danger he’s in.
    â€œOkay, listen—if you don’t get up on your own, I’m gonna have to make you.” James Lee’s voice cut like a knife across the lunchroom. Everyone heard it.
    The prospect of James Lee making