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Authors: David Lubar

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THE EDGEVIEW EXPRESS
DATED FIVE YEARS AGO
“
H
ey!” I shouted.
Bloodbath, passing by in the other direction, glanced back and grinned. I guess the punch was his way of saying hello. It would have been nice to return the greeting with a baseball bat, but there didn’t seem to be one handy. I waited until he was out of sight before I rubbed the sore spot.
Torchie didn’t even seem to notice. I guess punches from Bloodbath in the hallway were as common as mosquito bites near a swamp—a pain in the butt at times, but nothing unusual. Torchie stopped in front of an open door decorated with a picture of Shakespeare taped to the lower half. “Here we are. English class. You’ll like Miss Nomad.”
I followed Torchie inside, where we grabbed the seats Cheater had saved for us. Between them, I felt like I was sitting in a box full of puppies.
As the bell rang, Ms. Nomad swept into the room, her long skirt brushing the floor, her long brown hair brushing past her shoulders and flowing all the way to her waist. She wished us a cheery good morning, smiling as if today were the most wonderful day in the world and we were the most fabulous students a teacher could wish for. She was so young, I figured she couldn’t have been teaching for more than a year or two. She zapped a huge grin in my direction and said, “Welcome to the class, Martin. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Feel free
to join in the discussion.” Oh man, she reminded me of some kind of life-size talking animal from a cartoon. She beamed an even bigger smile in my direction. It looked like she had more teeth than anyone would ever actually need.
I waited for her to say,
Tell us something about yourself
. I would have bet a million bucks she’d do that next. But she just picked up a book and started the lesson.
Perfect. I relaxed and sat back. Maybe we’d get along just fine. Everyone groaned when she pulled out a book of poetry, but I sort of liked the first part of the poem she read to us.
Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me.
I actually felt a chill when she read that. I didn’t completely understand it, and I sure didn’t understand the rest of the poem, but those two lines sounded pretty cool.
“I told you she was nice,” Torchie whispered.
“Yeah.” Maybe this class would be okay.
Unlike math, English class went well for almost ten minutes. At that point, we were talking about writing. “Writing is such a wonderful way to express yourself,” Miss Nomad said. “And the best part is that anyone can write.” She had a habit of walking all around the room as she talked, as if she were weaving herself among our desks. It made me feel like I was part of one of those pot holders kids make in craft classes. I was getting a sore neck from watching her. At the moment, she was passing right by me. As she said the word
anyone
she gave me this look that seemed to say,
yes, Martin, even poor little you can scrawl meaningful words
. She almost seemed to expect a poem to burst from my forehead.
Move on, lady
, I thought.
She stayed where she was, her smile burning a hole through my face. All that talk about only sharing when I felt like it—that was obviously
a pile of crap. She wasn’t going to budge until I spilled some warmth.
I raised my hand.
“Martin, you have something to contribute?” Miss Nomad asked. “That’s wonderful. I’m so glad you’ve chosen to participate.”
“Yeah. Maybe
anyone
can write, but won’t some people stink at it? I mean, anyone can paint, but most people really stink at that. I know I do. The last painting I tried looked like dog puke. And the same for playing the violin or making a chair. Have you ever heard someone who’s really bad on the violin? It’s not very pleasant. And I sure wouldn’t trust my butt sitting in any chair I’d made with these two hands.”
She sort of gulped. In my mind, I saw this human goldfish that suddenly found herself stranded on dry land. Then the smile returned. “But that’s the wonderful thing about writing. Nobody else can judge your work. As long as you think it’s good, that’s all that matters.” She leaned over and stared at me with those big eyes, giving me that I-may-be-a-teacher-but-I-understand-you look. “Can’t you see how wonderful a thing that is?” she asked.
Can’t I see that you’re a fruitcake?
I almost let it go, but I couldn’t. She was wrong. I had an uncle who was always trying to write books. He’d send them out and they’d come back three or four months later with a printed slip that said,
No thanks
. Not even
Nice try, or Good effort.
Just
No thanks
. Which I think really meant:
your book truly sucks. Please leave us alone
.
I tried to read some of his stuff once. It really stunk big-time. Talk about dog puke. Nothing ever happened. People just sat around and discussed life. Everyone drank coffee and felt bad about things they’d done in the past. I had a feeling Uncle Stan could write books for the next thousand years and he’d still stink. I looked up at Miss Nomad. She seemed so happy and eager for us to share the joys of writing.
“It matters,” I said. “People might say they just write for themselves. That’s a lie. Everyone wants to show off. And if you stink, you can’t show off, can you? Because nobody will buy what you write. So you’re
just lying to yourself.” I stopped talking. Damn. I didn’t care either way. Why was I even bothering to say anything?
Miss Nomad gulped again, a bit louder, then said, “Well, thank you for sharing your thoughts, Martin.”
I had the funny feeling she didn’t like me.
“Bad move,” Cheater whispered to me a minute later. “She’s always trying to sell her poems. She keeps sending them to magazines.”
“She’s got hundreds of ‘em,” Torchie said. “Boxes full.”
“And?” I asked.
“Hasn’t sold a single one,” Cheater told me. He shook his head. “Sometimes she reads them to us.” He made a face and pinched his nose.
Yipes. I should have figured that out before I opened my big mouth. I could just imagine Miss Nomad, fountain pen in hand, sitting at a desk jammed in the corner of some small room, filling page after page with bad poetry. I didn’t think she’d hold it against me the way Parsons did, but I’d certainly made sure I wouldn’t be the teacher’s pet in this class.
Miss Nomad pretty much ignored me for the rest of the period. I’d become the invisible boy. Hey, that could be a nickname for me—Glassboy. See right through me. I’m not really here.
When the bell rang, I checked my schedule. I had gym next. That would be more like it. Gym would be fun. Gym would be nice and normal—just run around and sweat. No matter how modern they got in their teaching methods, I didn’t see how they could mess with something as simple as gym.
On the other hand, it’s amazing what adults can do when they set their minds to it.
PRISCILLA NOMAD
T
he locker room was just a hallway next to the gym with double doors on each end. There were two long rows of dark green lockers, and a couple of wooden benches that looked like they’d been borrowed from a cheap picnic table. The place smelled a lot like the cheese section of the supermarket.
I found a new pair of gym shorts and a shirt waiting for me in a paper bag that had
Anderson
written on it. I also found Bloodbath in the locker room, but he was busy horsing around with a couple of his buddies and stuffing one of the runts into a locker. I wondered whether he had some sort of checklist. If he did,
Hit the new kid
could be marked off for the day, along with
Cram small kid in locker
. The main thing was that I hadn’t become the focus of his attention.
I was definitely ready for some exercise. There’s nothing like a good sweat to make a guy feel happy. I followed the rest of the class out of the locker room and into the gym.
“That’s Mr. Acropolis,” Torchie said, pointing to a man standing in the middle of the floor. The guy looked like someone who used to lift weights but had given up exercise a year or two ago. His muscles were still there, but they were starting to drip.
I checked around the gym to see what we were going to play. There weren’t any nets up, so it wouldn’t be volleyball, and there weren’t any mats, so I figured we wouldn’t be wrestling.
Mr. Acropolis blew his whistle, then said, “Have a seat, class.”
Everyone dropped to the floor. I figured he was going to give us some sort of talk. Maybe he’d roll out a chalkboard and teach us football plays.
I wasn’t even close.
“Now breathe slowly and empty your minds,” he said. Then he stopped talking while we breathed slowly and tried to empty our minds. Mine kept filling up at first, but that was sort of cool, too, since I passed a good chunk of time imagining what I could do to Bloodbath if I had a laser cannon. I saved a couple of shots for Mr. Parsons, too.
“This is gym?” I whispered to Torchie after I got tired of slicing Bloodbath into convenient pieces for easy storage.
“Yeah,” he whispered back. “Kind of weird, but we get to do what we want for the last fifteen minutes.”
Actually, I hated to admit it but the empty-mind thing was sort of relaxing once I got the hang of it. Of course, Flying Dan didn’t stay still for long, and a couple of the others didn’t seem to enjoy sitting in one place. Every five minutes or so, someone would make a farting noise. A couple of kids would laugh and Mr. Acropolis would blow his whistle. Then things would settle down for a bit. Most of the farts were fake, at least, though Hindenburg let one loose that made everybody rush to the other side of the room. Bloodbath and his friends horsed around the whole time, but the teacher didn’t seem to care.
As we were finishing up, Mr. Acropolis went around telling all of us what a great job we’d done. Then he asked, “What do you want to play?”
A bunch of kids shouted, “Dodge ball!”
That was fine with me. I liked dodge ball. There’s a wonderful satisfaction in smacking someone nice and hard with a fairly harmless ball. Of course, it’s no fun getting smacked. But that wasn’t a big problem for me. I managed to see most of the hard throws before they could hit me, and I didn’t do too badly during the first game. I also made sure I was on the same side as Bloodbath. As I expected,
he really liked to aim for the head, even though Mr. Acropolis kept telling everyone not to.
I got eliminated early in the second game, so I had to stand on the side of the gym and watch. Torchie was next to me. He was the first one to get out in both games. It’s like he was a ball magnet. I noticed one player on the other team was really good at dodging. “Who’s that?” I asked Torchie, pointing to a tall, skinny kid who didn’t seem to ever get hit.
“That’s Flinch,” he said. “He’s really good at dodge ball, but he’s pretty jumpy. He usually eats with us, but he went home for the weekend.”
I watched Flinch. Every once in a while, you run across a true artist. I’d known one kid, Stevie Manetti, who made the best card houses I’d ever seen. He could pile up three or four decks of cards into these great castles. Nobody else I knew even came close. And there was this girl down the block from me—she could climb trees like she was born in the woods. And, of course, I’d run across kids who did other stuff like paint or dance or play the piano.
Those kids were true artists.
So was Flinch. He was the best dodge ball player I’d ever seen. He almost always managed to get out of the way. Even after the rest of his team was blasted off the floor, he kept going. One ball—no problem. Two at once—piece of cake. Even three. Flinch jumped and twisted and ducked. The balls shot past and smacked into the wall behind him. The cool thing was that he had his hair in dozens of little braids, like a rap singer, and every time he jerked or twisted, the hair flew out like a bunch of exclamation points.
Finally, in an unusual display of teamwork, about five kids on the other side threw at once. There was no way Flinch could avoid getting hit, but he gave it a good try. He leaped and twisted, like the star of a dolphin show, but one of the balls clipped his foot.
Mr. Acropolis blew the whistle again. Gym was over. Score one for me. I’d gotten through a whole class without pissing off a teacher. Of
course, Mr. Acropolis had never even given a sign that he knew I was there.
It was time for lunch next. “They do anything strange during the meal?” I asked Torchie.
“Sometimes,” he said. “For a while, Principal Davis read to us while we ate. And sometimes they play music. But lunch is lunch, and there really isn’t too much they can do to mess with it.”
He was right. Lunch was pretty normal, except that the food was just as awful as it had been at dinner and breakfast. I guess that was normal for Edgeview. After lunch, it was time for science, which I was looking forward to, since I’d heard so much about Mr. Briggs.
THE FRACTION SONG
(TO THE TUNE OF MY DARLING CLEMENTINE)
CHEATER ON THE PHONE AFTER LUNCH
Cheater
: Hi. I can’t talk long. Class starts in a minute. I just wanted to say hello.
 
Mrs. Woo
: Are you studying hard?
 
Cheater
: Yes, Mom.
 
Mrs. Woo
: Your father and I will pick you up this weekend.
 
Cheater
: Great. Hey, guess what. I met a new kid.
 
Mrs. Woo
: Is he a nice boy?
 
Cheater
: Yeah. Well, sort of. I think he’s okay. He likes to kid me, but he’s not mean. At least, not too mean. He seems pretty smart, too. Not as smart as I am, of course, but he isn’t a dummy.
 
Mrs. Woo
: Well, just be careful who you associate with.
 
Cheater
: I will.
 
Mrs. Woo
: How are you doing with your tests?
 
Cheater
: I have to go. I need to get a good spot for science. Bye.

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