Dunces Anonymous Read Free

Down with Josh!” they yelled.
    Mr. Bogg rose like an angry giant. The large blue vein in his temple throbbed.
    â€œMagnolia Montcrieff! Get down off that chair and march yourself to the principal’s office immediately! You too, Wang Xiu!” Mr. Bogg boomed. The class fell silent. Magnolia climbed down from the chair and hung her head. At her seat in the front row, Stacey Hogarth smirked.
    Mr. Bogg stood with his hands on his hips as Wang and Magnolia filed toward the classroom door. As she passed Josh, Magnolia lifted her head just enough to flash him a quick grin. She was out the door before Josh could smile back, but he felt a tear of gratitude spring to his eye. It took true friends to shout “Down with Josh!” so loudly and convincingly. It was good to know he had such friends.
    Josh was late getting home that evening. He felt it was a point of honor to wait in the schoolyard until Wang and Magnolia finished their detentions, and to give a bus ticket to Wang, who had missed the school bus. By the time Josh swiped his pass-card to get into the front door of his mom’s condo building, the lobby was already full of adults coming home from work. The lobby had shiny marble floors and two elevators with gold-colored doors, and Josh hated it. He liked the house they had lived in before the divorce. It was an ordinary house with swings in the backyard and a rec room in the basement. The kind of house where families with kids lived. As far as he could tell, he was the only kid who lived in his mom’s condo building.
    A knot of adults stood in front of the elevators, waiting for the doors to open. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The women wore jackets and skirts and high-heeled shoes. Some of them were talking on cell phones while they gripped briefcases or laptop-computer bags. They all looked as if they had been class presidents when they were kids. Josh veered away from them and headed up the back staircase toward the sixth floor.
    In the kitchen, his mother was making supper and talking on the phone. Josh snuck up behind her and stole a carrot slice from the salad she was making. “I just don’t think we can move forward under those parameters, Jen,” Mom was saying. Move forward under those parameters— that was how class presidents were supposed to talk. He didn’t know exactly what it meant, but from the tone of his mom’s voice, it sounded like a fancy way of saying no.
    Josh set the table while his mom finished talking on the phone. Then he held the plates while she dished out the supper, which was some kind of chicken with orange slices and pieces of crushed burnt nuts on top. Mom always cooked supper from scratch. “I’m not about to shirk my family responsibilities just because I have a career,” she’d say. His dad had a different attitude. “Cook my own dinner? What, and put all the pizza joints out of business?” Josh had eaten a lot of takeout when he’d stayed with his dad last summer.
    Mom’s eyes sparkled as they sat down at the table. He could tell she was excited about the class election.
    â€œSo,” she said, “am I speaking to the new president?”
    â€œNo, I lost.” Josh tried to sound disappointed.
    â€œOh, Josh!” Mom looked at him like he’d just dropped an expensive dinner plate. “What happened? Did you flub your speech?”
    Josh shrugged. The speech had gone brilliantly. But how could he explain that to his mom?
    â€œStacey Hogarth won.”
    â€œStacey Hogarth!” His mother pursed her lips. “I know her mother from the Women’s Business Council. Those Hogarths are all the same.”
    Not like us Johnsons, thought Josh. No one ever told him he was just like his mother. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Josh couldn’t decide, so he picked up his knife and fork and tackled his supper. If he scraped off all the nuts and oranges, he discovered, it was