Friends of a Feather Read Free Page B

the classroom light off and on. Finally people jump to it, because the next step after flashing the lights is time-out. If you get a time-out, you have to sit in the hall or sometimes on the floor in another teacher’s classroom. Nobody wants that.
    Elizabeth steers John over to my cluster of desks.
    â€œSit,” she commands, pressing down on his shoulders.
    He drops into his seat, and Elizabeth goes to collect her next person. Elizabeth likes telling people to do things.
    â€œHi, Ty,” John says.
    â€œHi,” I say. I shove my wadded-up drawings into my desk.
    â€œI have a loose tooth,” he says. “Want to see?”
    â€œNo,” I say. “And just to warn you, it might not really be loose. It might be a fake out.”
    â€œIt might?”
    I nod, because that very thing happened to me. Two weeks ago, Taylor whacked me on the playground and made my tooth loose, but a few days later, my gums sucked themselves back around it and suddenly it wasn’t loose anymore.
    Loose teeth becoming un-loose. Another thing that’s not supposed to happen, but that sometimes happens anyway.
    John doesn’t reply. I peek at him, and his expression makes me feel bad, because it’s possible I made
him
feel bad. I peek at Joseph, using my hair to cover as much of my eyes as I can. His expression makes me feel bad, too, but in a different way. Joseph is talking to Chase as Elizabeth steers the two of them toward their seats. His eyes are happy, and his face is lit up like it was earlier.
    Chase laughs, and so does Elizabeth, and so do Silas and Natalia, who haven’t gone to their seats yet.
    The four of them crowd around Joseph when he sits down. They breathe up his air molecules. Elizabeth should make Silas and Natalia go to their own desk cluster. She should make herself go to her own desk cluster.
    She doesn’t, and everyone talks and laughs.
    Joseph is the sun, Chase and Elizabeth are planets, and I’m space junk.
    I put my arms on my desk and my head on my arms.
    I want the universe to line up right again.

CHAPTER THREE
    T he next morning at breakfast, Winnie asks me what’s wrong.
    â€œNothing,” I say. “Or . . . I don’t know. Maybe something.” I shrug and push my eggs around with my fork. They’re a shade of yellow that usually makes me happy, but not today. Today my stomach is too worried for eggs.
    â€œIs it Joseph?” Winnie asks.
    I put down my fork. How did she know?
    Mom’s off with Baby Maggie, Dad has already left for work, and Sandra is somewhere else in the house. Probably her room. Probably text-ing her boyfriend, Bo, who probably never gets stomachaches, because he’s a baseball player and always smiles and does fun things like have doughnut-eating contests with Sandra.
    But that means Winnie and I are alone. No one is listening in.
    â€œWhen I was in fifth grade, a girl in my class broke her arm,” Winnie says.
    â€œWhy?” I ask.
    â€œShe didn’t mean to. But it happened during recess, with everyone there to see, and she cried and got rushed off to the hospital. It was very dramatic.”
    I imagine an arm with a bone sticking out of it. I’d cry, if I had that arm.
    â€œAnd then the next day she came to school with a cast,” Winnie goes on, “and guess what?”
    â€œShe broke her other arm?”
    She laughs. “No. But everyone thought she was so cool, like a rock star.”
    That sounds about right, because the same thing would happen in Mrs. Webber’s class if something very dramatic happened. Like when Lexie got hit in the head with Mrs. Webber’s clog last week, or like yesterday, when Joseph came back and everyone hogged him because
he
was the rock star.
    I don’t care if he’s a rock star. I just don’t want everyone hogging him.
    Thinking about it makes me not feel so good, and I drop my gaze.
    â€œHey,” Winnie says. “Ty.” She