The Prisoner of Cell 25 Read Free Page A

said.
    Hearing him talk that way to Taylor infuriated me. “You shut your mouth, you loser,” I said to Jack.
    “You need to learn manners, blinky boy.”
    “You need mouthwash,” I said.
    Jack grabbed me by the hair and pulled my head around. “You’re going to be wishing you’d kept your mouth shut.” He smacked me again on the nose, which sent a shock of pain through my body. At  that moment something snapped. I knew I couldn’t hold back much longer.
    “Let me go!” I shouted. “I’m warning you.”
    “Ooh,” Wade said. “He’s warning us.”
    “Yeah, whatcha gonna do?” Mitchell said. “Cry on us?”
    “No, he’s gonna wipe his nose on us,” Wade laughed. He pulled off my shoes while Mitchell grabbed my waistband and started tugging at my pants. I was still trying to curl up.
    “Stop struggling,” Jack said. “Or we’re going to take everything you got and make you streak home.”
    “Leave him alone!” Taylor yelled again.
    “Mitch, hurry and pull his pants off,” Wade said.
    A surge of anger ran through my body so powerful I couldn’t control it. Suddenly a sharp, electric ZAP! pierced the air, like the sound of ice being dropped onto a hot griddle. Jack and his posse screamed out as they all fell to their backs and flopped about on the grass like fish on land.
    I rolled over to my side and wiped the blood from my nose with the back of my hand. I pushed myself up, red-faced and angry. I stood above Jack, who was frothing at the mouth. “I told you to leave me alone. If you ever touch me again, I’ll do worse. Do you understand? Or do you want more?” I lifted my hand.
    Terror was evident in his eyes. “No. Please don’t.”
    I turned and looked at his posse. Both of them were on the ground, quivering and whimpering. In fact, Wade was bawling like a baby and moaning, “It hurts . . . it hurts so bad.”
    I walked over to him. “You bet it hurts. And that was just a little one. Next time you bully me, or any of my friends, I’ll triple it.”
    As the three of them lay there groaning and quivering I sat back on the ground, pulled on my shoes, and tied them. Then I remembered Taylor.
    I looked back over at the door, hoping she had gone inside. She hadn’t. And from the expression on her face, I could tell she had seen everything. Bad, bad news. My mother was going to kill me. But there was nothing I could do about that now. I grabbed my backpack and ran home. 

5. Hiding the Evidence
    By the time I got home my left eye was nearly swollen shut. I set my backpack on the kitchen table then went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. My eye looked like a ripe plum. There was no way of hiding it from my mother. I got a washcloth and wiped the blood off my nose and chin.
    My mother usually got home around 6:30, so I heated up a can of SpaghettiOs for dinner, grabbed the blue ice pack she kept in the freezer for her occasional headaches, then held the ice against my eye while I played video games with one hand. I know I should have been studying for my biology test, but after a day like this one, I just didn’t have it in me.
    I really didn’t want to talk to my mom about my day, so when I heard her key in the door I ran to my room, shut the door, turned out the lights, threw off my shirt, and crawled into bed.
    She called for me from the front room. “Michael?” Twenty seconds later she knocked on my door, then opened it. I pretended to be sleeping, but she didn’t fall for it.
    “Hey, pal, what are you doing in bed?”
    “I don’t feel good,” I said. I pulled the covers over my head.
    “What’s wrong?”
    She turned on my bedroom light and immediately saw my bloody, torn shirt on the floor and the blood on it. “Michael, what happened?” She walked over to my bed. “Michael, look at me.”
    “I don’t want to.”
    “Michael.”
    Reluctantly, I pulled the covers down. Her mouth opened a little when she saw my face. “Oh my .