Guy Wire Read Free

worrying. Come on. Think about Buzz. Maybe some great time you had in the old fort. Or at camp. Or school. You guys have had a million terrific times together.”
    I closed my eyes and tried to picture Buzz. I sure had looked at his silly old freckled puss enough to have it memorized. But for some reason the first thing I pictured wasn’t his face; it was his left sneaker. Why? And then I remembered. One of his shoes must have come off when the car hit him. I had seen itlying on its side in the gutter, with the laces still tied, a few feet away from where Buzz was lying on the pavement. As I pictured the empty shoe, I heard my own ridiculously happy voice coming back to me as I shouted to Buzz, “That’s it, gum ball. Prepare to die!” The horrible relevance of those words made me sit up with a jolt.
    “What’s the matter?” my mother asked.
    “I’m trying to think of positive stuff, but it’s not working,” I explained, still shaken by the image of that sneaker and the memory of those fateful words. Prepare to die! How could I have said that? I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it.
    My mother put her arm around me, and I leaned against her again.
    “Think back to the very beginning, Guy. When Buzzy first came to town. Do you remember that?” she said.
    “Yeah, as a matter of fact we were kind of talking about that right before he—before the…”
    I felt my chest tighten.
    “Try not to think about the present, Honeybunch. Go back to the beginning. To the very first time you and Buzzy met each other. What a lucky thing that turned out to be, huh?”
    I closed my eyes and let myself travel back in time. Memories spun in and out of focus, clicking into place like a slide show. My mom was right; meeting Buzz had turned out to be a lucky thing. The luckiest. But it hadn’t exactly started out that way….

Chapter Three
    T he summer before second grade started, I turned seven, and when I blew out the candles on my cake, I made the exact same wish I’d made the year before. And the year before that too. I wanted a best friend more than anything in the world.
    Lana Zuckerman had Autumn Hockney. Max LeMott had Frankie Arches. Even Barry Madison, who was creepy and had a rotten front tooth, had a best friend. But I’d never had one. Not ever. I was pretty sure there was nothing wrong with me. People seemed to think I was a perfectly likeable, regular kind of kid, despite the fact that both of my parents were notoriously weird. So I figured thatfinding a best friend had more to do with luck—and that for some reason I was just unlucky.
    My second-grade teacher was named Mrs. Hunn. She was pretty nice and hardly ever yelled at us unless we did something really bad like throwing wet paper-towel balls on the bathroom ceiling. She had neat stuff on her desk, which she didn’t mind if we looked at as long as we didn’t touch it. There was a framed picture of her waterskiing with her husband in Florida. A statue of the Empire State Building that had a thermometer in it that worked. And a little glass bell, which she rang whenever she had an announcement to make to the class.
    I remember one day in the fall of that year—it must have been October, because I think we were making jack-o’-lanterns out of orange construction paper—Mrs. Hunn rang her bell, and when I looked up she was standing in front of her desk with her arm around this boy I’d never seen before. I knewright away that this was the new kid she’d been telling us was going to be joining our class. My heart sank. I’d been kind of hoping that my luck might change and he would turn out to be potential best-friend material. But that was obviously not going to be the case.
    First of all, instead of jeans and a T-shirt, which is what all the rest of us boys had on, he was wearing a suit. A little blue jacket with matching pants, a bright white shirt, and a red-and-white-striped tie with a tiny tie pin shaped like a horseshoe stuck in it to hold it down