Donutheart Read Free Page B

was a direct quote, the word
nude
still made the blood vessels in my cheeks dilate.
    “I could perform in my warm-up suit,” Sarah offered, as if we hadn’t been over this a thousand times.
    “And the judges would think you didn’t care and give you low marks.”
    “What about…”
    “You have to wear a skirt or a dress. All the girls do.”
    “Your mom doesn’t.”
    “That’s how much you know. She’s going out to buy a dress tonight.”
    “Is not.”
    “Tree nymphs are always nude,” Bernie said, biting down on his own deli pickle and releasing vinegar fumes into the air.
    “At least in my story.”
    Sarah hunched over her casserole and stabbed it with a fork. “Where were we, Bern?” she said, as if our conversation was already over.
    I knew she’d heard me.
    “In the Malogon Forest,” Bernie replied, mouth full of pickle. “At the edge of the Jun Dun Plain. The Sandroheens, a small band of Dorgon Trolls, are making their way through the forest, hacking at the undergrowth with their double-broad tonken blades—”
    “They were looking for the queen,” Sarah broke in. “They knew she was captured somewhere nearby.”
    “Right.” Bernie rewarded Sarah with a big grin. “Dorgon Trolls have a very keen sense of smell. They were tracking her.”
    While the two of them crashed through the underbrush of the Malogon Forest, I stayed behind in the lunchroom, continuing with a quest of my own. I found the third long lunch table and traveled along it with my eyes—noting infractions along the way that included a blob of mustard launched from a plastic spoon and condiment packages stuffed into backpacks. It seemed that Mr. Fiegel was falling down on the job today.
    I kept this up until my eyes alighted on their prize. Glynnis Powell. A creature of habit, Glynnis always sat at the near end of table number three.
    She was surrounded by girls I did not know, since they’d come from other elementary schools. It was a mystery to me why Glynnis sat with these girls, who seemed more like a flighty bunch of sparrows than serious students the way they always laughed at the same time and covered their mouths in shock, whispering furiously. I could tell in an instant that she was not comfortable there. Her excellent posture was a little stiff, her smile a bit forced. Only a boy who had chosen her as the object of his affections would notice these things, I told myself. Only I, Franklin Delano Donuthead, understood her distress.
    I watched her politely touch the corners of her mouth with her napkin and imagined that I was a Dorgon Troll, distinguishing her clean, Ivory-soap smell from Bernie’s deli pickles, from the odor of Mr. Kervick’s smoke that clung to Sarah’s hair, from the combined stench of a dozen mayonnaise-slathered sandwiches that had been sitting unrefrigerated in poorly ventilated lockers for at least four hours, and I sighed happily.
    As if to make my bliss complete, Glynnis’ eyes met mine, and she smiled before looking down at her lap. Did this mean that the events of this morning had been understood in their proper context and I was forgiven?
    Suddenly a hand was thrust in my face.
    “C’mon, we gotta get to the john,” Sarah said, snapping her fingers.

CHAPTER THREE
    Positive Rewards, Positive Results
    We chose the bathroom by the gym because it was on the opposite side of the school from the lunchroom and less likely to be populated during those hours. As we reached the entrance, she pushed open the swinging door and glanced inside.
    “Uhhh…anybody here?” she asked. When no one answered, she dropped her backpack on the floor and tilted her head to indicate that the coast was clear. Knowing there was no safer place to stow my backpack, I was forced to hand it over to Sarah for safekeeping.
    This I did with my head down. After all, I’d just had a mature moment with Glynnis Powell. What would Glynnis think if she knew I required Sarah Kervick as a “lookout” and the senseless