When I Was the Greatest Read Free Page A

family-type kiss. Whatever it was, I wasn’t about to askno questions. I could tell he was pissed, and I was starting to figure out that he didn’t take embarrassment too well.
    I was worried that he would stop being cool with me. I mean, I still didn’t know him that well for Jazz to be clowning him so bad. But I guess he had a soft spot for her, and if not her, a soft spot for dinner at my house. Either way, Jazz promised to never let it go, calling him “noodle slurper,” and stuff like that, and after a while he ended up just getting over it. And that’s how he got the name Noodles. Before that, he was just Roland James. That name is nowhere near as cool as Noodles, and even though he never gives my little sister credit, we all know he’s thankful for it now, even if it is a funny story.
    Okay, so as for Needles, he’s only technically been called Needles for about a year, and his nickname story is nowhere near as funny as Noodles’s and mine, but it is way more interesting. But in order for it to make any sense, I have to start at the beginning.
    I didn’t even meet Needles until about three months after I met Noodles, which I thought was weird. I mean, I knew Noodles had a brother, but I never saw him. I always wondered if he was forced to stay in the house, if he wanted to stay in the house, or if he was just someplace else, like with his father or something. All Noodles ever said about him was that he was kind of wild, which is pretty much what everybody always says about their brothers and sisters, so that wasn’t a big deal.
    When I finally met him, he was with Noodles. They were walking down the block, coming from the corner store,Noodles ripping paper off cheap dime candy and tossing it on the sidewalk. I first gave Noodles some dap because I already knew him, and as soon as I reached for Needles’s hand to introduce myself, he basically started cussing me out. Scared me half to death, I swear. I couldn’t tell if this was some sort of joke, or if he just didn’t like me, but I couldn’t understand how he could not like me when we didn’t even know each other yet. But after he finished dogging me, he said, “Wassup, man” in a superquiet voice like he was scared but cool. He also apologized for coming at me that way. That really confused me. And then, to top it all off, Noodles slapped him in the back of the head. I didn’t think that was cool, but I didn’t know them well enough to be standing up for nobody.
    So yeah, I thought Needles was a little bit weird, but when I told my mom about it, she made it clear, and I do mean clear, that there was nothing funny about Needles’s condition. She said the proper term for it is Tourette syndrome. So I guess it’s a syndrome and not a condition. She said that what happens is he blurts out all kinds of words whenever his brain tells him to. Not regular words like “run” or “yo” but crazy stuff like “buttface” and “fat ass.” I figured that’s what Noodles meant when he told me that Needles was “wild.”
    My mother told me she had a girl on her caseload who suffered from it, and that once people learn to manage it, they can usually live normal enough lives. But judging by the way Needles acted when he spoke, and how Noodles slapped him around, I could see it being tough to, especially since it had to be pretty embarrassing.
    As the months turned to years, everybody pretty much got used to Needles and Noodles, especially me. I would say we were like the three musketeers, or the three amigos, but that’s so played and has been said a million times. My mother said we were the three stooges, and Jazz said we were the three blind mice, but whatever. The point is, we were almost always together. Every holiday, they would come over for dinner. Every birthday, we’d dish out birthday punches (mine always hurt the most). And every regular