When I Was the Greatest Read Free

blue ink.
    â€œOh. Incredible Hulk,” he murmured while folding it up in the mini pad.
    I could tell he was a little embarrassed about the comic thing—maybe he thought I would think he was some kind of geek or something. I didn’t really see what the big deal was. If you into comics, you into comics. And even though I wasn’t, I knew who Incredible Hulk was. Who didn’t?
    â€œAw, man, Bruce Banner a bad dude,” I said.
    He opened the notepad and handed it to me.
    It was one of the scenes where Bruce was upset and was turning green and becoming the Hulk. Noodles had literally redrawn the whole thing perfectly, every muscle, every hair. The only difference was he drew a Yankees hat on the Hulk,but it looked like it belonged there. The kid could really draw! Noodles said it was one of his favorites, but when I tried to give it back to him, he ripped the page out and told me I could have them both, the comic and the sketch.
    He was on my stoop every single day after that, sunup to sundown. Noodles probably wouldn’t have been the friend my mom would’ve picked for me, but she felt sorry for him, plus Jazz liked him, so Mom made sure there was always extra food for him every night.
    Luckily, a couple weeks later the dude who owned that building finally straightened up the outside of the apartment. A new door and some new windows. Everybody in the hood was talking about how the inside was probably still a piss pot, but at least it didn’t look as bad from the outside. At least Noodles could sit on his own stoop without feeling some kind of shame. Plus, I could sit with him, which was cool because I was getting tired of always sitting on my stoop all the time.
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    I bet you’re wondering how he started getting called Noodles. Well, if you ask him, he’ll say he was given that name by the hood, just because he always tries to be hard. But the truth is, it came from Jazz, who’s pretty much the master of nicknames. As a matter of fact, she’s the person who started calling me Ali. My real name is Allen, but that’s not where Ali comes from. Jazz gave me Ali after one of my boxing lessons from old man Malloy, who I’ll tell you about later. I remember leaving Malloy’s house, running down the block, bustinginto our apartment all gassed up, excited to show Jazz what I learned. I was bouncing around the living room, bobbing and weaving, punching the air all silly. I think Malloy had just taught me the left hook, and I hadn’t really got it down yet, so my arms were flying all over the place. Jazz laughed her head off, and made some joke about how I could be the next Muhammad Ali, as long as I keep fighting air and not real people. I won’t lie, that stung a little bit, especially since she knew I was kinda scared to have any real matches. But whatever. From then on, that’s what she called me, Ali, and then everybody else started to, too.
    Noodles’s nickname story is better than mine, though. Jazz liked him a lot, especially after The Young and the Restless joke, and the SpongeBob drawing, which she had taped to her wall. Every time they saw each other after that, which was pretty much every day, they would crack jokes and tease. One day she found the perfect ammunition. She saw Noodles out the window kissing some butt-ugly girl on the stoop—Jazz’s words, not mine. She told me that the girl was twice Noodles’s size and looked like she was trying to eat his face, and she couldn’t tell if the girl was our age, or if she was an old lady, dressed like a girl our age. She said Noodles looked so scared, and that his lips were poking out and puckered so tight that it looked like he was slurping spaghetti. The next time Jazz saw him, she rode him hard about it, squeezing her lips up like a fish. At first Noodles tried to deny it. Then he said it was one of his mother’s friends, and that it was more like a