Gifted Read Free Page B

broke the silence.
    â€œWhatever you do, George, don’t fall asleep tonight.”
    â€œI
do
plan on falling asleep,” I said, “and in my own bed, too, because that’s where I plan on being when tonight comes.”
    And I meant it. The bus ride to Cape Rose would take approximately two hours and fifty-seven minutes, and I was going to devote every single one of those minutes to finding a way out of this mess.
    We joined the masses as my father, the Human Bullhorn, assembled all one hundred eighty of us happy campers into six orderly lines and announced that we were now in the capable hands of the eighth-grade faculty (“Heaven help them!”) and that we were to obey them as we would him. Then without so much as a fond farewell to me, his only son and heir, he turned around and, I swear to you,
skipped
all the way up the front steps and into the building, as no self-respecting principal should ever do. Probably to go around giving high fives to the secretaries and to tell them to break out the cranberry punch.
    And then it happened. The first assault on my person. It happened before the buses were even in motion. I was next in line to board. Anita was in front of me, and I was watching her rather wide posterior advancing rather too closely to my face as she climbed up the steps when suddenly two things happened in rapid succession: I heardthe words “Ladies first, Georgette,” hissed in my ear, then a foot shot out of nowhere and kicked my legs out from under me. I fell forward, and just as the bottom step of the bus rose quickly to meet my face, an arm shot out from the other side of nowhere and caught me around my chest.
    â€œYou okay, George?”
    I gaped as my benefactor pulled me to my feet. It was Sam Toselli. Over my head he yelled, “What did you do that for, you idiot?” I turned to look up at Gabriel Arno, a defensive tackle for the football team who’d obviously missed his calling as a kicker. Sam bent down, picked up my backpack, handed it to me, and then made a clumsy pawing gesture on the front of my jacket, as if he were dusting me off, which made me gape again. This was not the same person who, as recently as Friday, had offered to rip my lungs out through my nose and then ram them back down my throat again. This was somebody new. Was the ape evolving?
    â€œThanks,” I told him, still gaping while mounting the steps.
    This needed thinking about. Maybe my future wasn’t as bleak as I’d thought.

Chapter 5
    I’d like to say that during the bus ride to Cape Rose I came up with Plan B, and that upon our arrival I would be only moments away from spraining my ankle, or knocking a tooth out, or slipping into a coma and being ambulanced home. I’d like to say that, but I can’t. I had too much to think about.
    Anita and I had a seat sort of in the middle of the bus, and Sam and his henchmen were all the way in the back. Now, ordinarily this proximity would not have prevented Them from heckling me, but They didn’t. They didn’t utter the faintest peep, which made me think furiously well into the second hour of our trip. It was baffling.
    Sort of like the photograph in my closet gallery of Sam Toselli and me with our arms around each other’s necks. My mom had snapped the picture back in the fifth grade when the two of us were enjoying a brief friendship. We were cocompetitors for the Pennsylvania Junior Scientist Award, us and about five hundred other fifth-graders statewide, and we spent a lot of time togetherworking on our projects. It boggled the mind to look back on it. Sam had been quite nice then, and actually happy for me when I won first place even though he didn’t get so much as an honorable mention. It’s funny how things change. When I say “funny,” what I mean is “peculiar.” I think I kept the picture to remind myself that truth really is stranger than fiction. And now
this
.
    Anita spent