Working for Bigfoot Read Free

particular, but by ten I was clear of the child-created havoc and dealing with the standard human havoc, emptying trash cans, sweeping floors and halls, and generally cleaning up. As I did, going from classroom to classroom to take care of any full trash cans, I kept an eye out for Bigfoot Irwin.
    I spotted him by lunchtime, and I took my meal at a table set aside for faculty and staff in one corner of the cafeteria as the kids ate.
    Bigfoot Irwin was one of the tallest boys in sight, and he hadn’t even hit puberty yet. He was all skin and bones—and I recognized something else about him at once. He was a loner.
    He didn’t look like an unpleasant kid or anything, but he carried himself in a fashion that suggested that he was apart from the other children; not aloof, simply separate. His expression was distracted, and his mind was clearly a million miles away. He had a double-sized lunch and a paperback book crowding his tray, and he headed for one end of a lunch table. He sat down, opened the book with one hand, and started eating with the other, reading as he went.
    The trouble seemed obvious. A group of five or six boys occupied the other end of his lunch table, and they leaned their heads closer together and started muttering to one another and casting covert glances at Irwin.
    I winced. I knew where this was going. I’d seen it before, when it had been me with the book and the lunch tray.
    Two of the boys stood up, and they looked enough alike to make me think that they either had been born very close together or else were fraternal twins. They both had messy, sandy brown hair, long, narrow faces, and pointed chins. They looked like they might have been a year or two ahead of Irwin, though they were both shorter than the lanky boy.
    They split, moving down either side of the table toward Irwin, their footsteps silent. I hunched my shoulders and watched them out of the corner of my eye. Whatever they were up to, it wouldn’t be lethal, not right here in front of half the school, and it might be possible to learn something about the pair by watching them in action.
    They moved together, though not perfectly in synch. It reminded me of a movie I’d seen in high school about juvenile lions learning to hunt together. One of the kids, wearing a black baseball cap, leaned over the table and casually swatted the book out of Irwin’s hands. Irwin started and turned toward him, lifting his hands into a vague, confused-looking defensive posture.
    As he did, the second kid, in a red sweatshirt, casually drove a finger down onto the edge of Irwin’s dining tray. It flipped up, spilling food and drink all over Irwin.
    A bowl broke, silverware rattled, and the whole tray clattered down. Irwin sat there looking stunned while the two bullies cruised right on by, as casual as can be. They were already fifteen feet away when the other children in the dining hall had zeroed in on the sound and reacted to the mess with a round of applause and catcalls.
    “Pounder!” snarled a voice, and I looked up to see a man in a white visor, sweatpants, and a T-shirt come marching in from the hallway outside the cafeteria. “Pounder, what is this mess?”
    Irwin blinked owlishly at the barrel-chested man and shook his head. “I…” He glanced after the two retreating bullies and then around the cafeteria. “I guess…I accidentally knocked my tray over, Coach Pete.”
    Coach Pete scowled and folded his arms. “If this was the first time this had happened, I wouldn’t think anything of it. But how many times has your tray ended up on the floor, Pounder?”
    Irwin looked down. “This would be five, sir.”
    “Yes it would,” said Coach Pete. He picked up the paperback Irwin had been reading. “If your head wasn’t in these trashy science fiction books all the time, maybe you’d be able to feed yourself without making a mess.”
    “Yes, sir,” Irwin said.
    “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Coach Pete said, looking at the