Posted: List 5

The Founding Fathers probably passed around bits of parchment with a poll on them: On a scale of one to five, how cool are you with the current tax on tea?

Mom once told me that she thought Dad was an excellent writer—the thing he was best at, really—and if it weren’t for those letters she probably wouldn’t have hung around. Dad’s words wheedled their way into her heart and got stuck there.

Maybe Dad took them with him and they are stashed in some dilapidated shoe box in the corner of his closet.

It makes you wonder where they all go, all the letters and notes, the thank-you cards and the birthday invitations, the little missives scrawled along the edges of grocery lists, the doodles on the cardboard backs of spiral-bound notebooks.

It seemed too soon, too little time to prepare, but there was a threat of rain at the end of the week, which would only make the Gauntlet more treacherous.

Rose straddled my bike. It still looked too small for her.

Nothing quite fit, but she didn’t let it deter her.

“Your parents let you watch Game of Thrones?” Rose asked. I couldn’t tell if she was impressed or appalled. Maybe she was just jealous.

“But I got the books from a used bookstore and I read them late at night while my parents are asleep.”
I smiled. This kind of deviousness surprised me coming from him.

This was how you handled things. You didn’t go to the adults. You sucked it up and made outlandish bets about who could make it down a hill on a bike without killing themselves.

The crowd was library quiet, nothing but indistinct murmurs, all of them huddled in one large mass to break the wind that had picked up, threatening to topple the bikes where they stood.

I noticed a broken bottle that had been smashed against one tree, its dark brown glass glinting in the indifferent October sun.

Deedee had his hands in front of his eyes, splayed open like he was watching a horror movie.

It was difficult to make out either bike through the colonnade of trees.

We all basked for a moment in Rose’s glow, in the admiring looks of the other students, some of whom had probably been chanting Cameron’s name only minutes before.

We walked around the base of the hill, Deedee pushing the bike now, as if he was her noble squire leading her steed, Wolf and Rose pressed so close together you could barely slip a sticky note between them.

Principal Wittingham sent out a recorded message this afternoon about a ban on sticky notes due to...how did he put it...a rash in hurtful and derogatory messages being spread around school.

I had a dozen suggestions by the time the bus pulled into school, ranging from clever pun to demoralizing put-down.

Anything derogatory or insulting would have drawn too much attention, or the wrong kind of attention.

And I relished every moment I passed him in the halls.

His face was wooden, no smiles, no grimaces, no leers.

Twice I twisted around to look at Cameron and them, but they just stared straight ahead, completely enthralled, it seemed, with a lecture on the dangers of hubris, Mr. Sword asking us, again, if we thought the characters in J. C. deserved what was coming to them.

Twice I twisted around to look at Cameron and them, but they just stared straight ahead, completely enthralled, it seemed, with a lecture on the dangers of hubris, Mr. Sword asking us, again, if we thought the characters in J. C. deserved what was coming to them.

We used the door by the gym. There was a moment of hesitation, crossing the threshold, that sense that what you are doing is wrong on some level.

We skulked across the school parking lot and crossed the street, walking for a long ways in silence until Deedee couldn’t stand it any longer.

The U.S.S. Enterprise exploded, a dozen miniature fighter jets shooting into the sky before landing in the grass, nose first, the deck of the ship splintering and flying off into a bush. The majority of the hull soared ten feet before sinking into the lawn, an unsightly gash in its side.

There were already pieces everywhere, half hulls and busted chassis.

Wolf's backyard had been turned into a plastic scrap heap, turrets and wings and wheels and engines, scattered and broken, littering the ground. It looked like a war zone.

He swiped and I dodged, the two of us choreographing some ludicrous dance in his driveway.

“You’re wrong. You find your people,” I said, repeating the mantra that carried me through those first two weeks in the sixth grade, my mother’s promise that held up when a boy named J.J. came and sat next to me on the bus.

We stood right next to each other, bodies stiff, locked in an epic eyeball-burning staring contest, the kind that you expect to devolve into grunts and shoves as two kids wrestle each other to the ground.

There was a rainbow done in marker and another done in colored pencil. The latter was shaped like a flag.

A pink note with fancy cursive said, Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. Whoever wrote it attributed it to Dr. Seuss, though I had my doubts, because it didn’t rhyme.

“Sometimes you need a change of venue,” Wolf said.

“Let’s get your stuff, get out of this place, and go do something fun.” Wolf nodded solemnly and carefully opened his locker so as not to knock any of the notes free.

The nudging and needling, the dirty looks and side-slung insults and behind-the-back tittering, that still happened, though I’d like to think there was less of it than before.

He’ll tell you he personally instigated World War Three.

Of course he was prone to exaggeration, but in this case we cut him some slack.

Her mom wasn’t much of a people person and didn’t like loud noises, and even from all the way in the basement she could hear Deedee’s groans whenever we set one of his minions on fire.

Outside the living room window you could see the first Branton snow starting to fall, a crystalline blanket the color and consistency of soft wool.