The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin Read Free Page B

that?” Pat says, poking Devon’s pale and sunken chest. “Me and Derrick are dying to know your secret.”
    I make a mental note. The
D
in D. JONKER is for Derrick. I had been thinking Dick.
    “I think he’s
(something something)
steroids,” D. JONKER says.
    “Only one way to find out!” they yell in unison, pouncing on Devon like a murder of crows on a field mouse.
    After one impressively smooth movement (what, do they practice this stuff?), Pat and D. JONKER are holding Devon’s shorts like a championship trophy while Devon, nude except for flip-flops, scrambles back into the stall.
    “Yep,” D. JONKER says, although I’m sure he didn’t actually see anything. “You don’t get balls that tiny unless you’re juicing. Are those your nads, Smiley, or are you smuggling peas?”
    Devon’s retreating form makes me think of office supplies: two scrawny pencils jammed into eraser-pink trapezoids of butt.
    Mr. Fatzinger (who introduced himself to me earlier, inspiring an addition to my notebook: GYM CLASS COACH = FATZY McFATPANTS) hears the commotion and sticks his head into the locker room and yells something like “Knock it the hell off and get out here for class or I’ll
(something something)
Principal Kroener.”
    Apparently, this threat holds more water than the pool because everyone shuts up quickly. We all begin filing out, as orderly as soldiers, except for Devon, who is still hiding au naturel in the stall. Pat has Devon’s shorts behind his back. He then passes the shorts to D. JONKER, who pretends to dribble them. He jukes left, jukes right, and throws them into the toilet. And then he flushes. Score: Usual Jock Jerks 1, Usual Hapless Victims 0.

CHAPTER SIX
    When the day is finally over, I find my bus and crash into the first seat like a wrecking ball. I am shell-shocked and stunned, rattled by the enormity of it all, wondering what the fudge I have gotten myself into. I thought it’d be easier to enter this world, but I am now even more of a watcher, spying on my own life.
    No one has exactly walked up and introduced themselves. Still, my notebook is slowly filling with names and critical information. Thanks to peeking at seating charts, checking out football jerseys, some lipreading, and the weird trend of girls wearing jewelry with their names spelled out in big gold script, I have started to piece together my class roster.
    On the bus ride home, those big rearview mirrors installed so the driver can (in theory) keep an eye on the throng make espionage easy. I watch my fellow passengers’ faces, read theirlips, enter their conversations from afar while they unwittingly spill their secrets. They say more about themselves than they mean to, more than they even know. The way one kid leans over the seat in front of him, laughing along with someone else’s joke—it shows how desperately he wants to fit in. The way one guy ignores a girl behind him but puts his arm up on the seat inches from hers shows his true feelings. And the fat deaf kid in the front, craning his neck and staring? He’s a pretender. By putting so much effort into paying attention to others, is he trying not to think about himself? Will one more slight make him crumble into a pile of dust? What does he want? Who is he hoping he really is? Let’s table these … for later.
    So what’s happening on this bus? The most interesting stuff is in the back. All the cool kids sit in the back. It is pretty much a directly rising slope of coolness from the front of the bus to the back. From me to a weird skinny guy in a football shirt who clearly isn’t on the team to Marie (whose last name is Stepcoat) to the trio from my morning bus stop: A. J. Fischels, Teresa Lockhart, and Gabby Myers. If you keep going, you’d fly out the back of the bus onto the road itself and land in the cars belonging to the kids far too cool to ever set foot on a bus. I wish I had a damn car, or even a license. I sketch out this equation in my notebook. It all