Posted: List 2

“Oh. Oh man. I am so, so sorry,” Deedee blathered, suddenly bug-eyed, trying to shrink behind his lunch box, probably afraid of that carton of milk being smashed over his head, which is exactly what somebody like Jason Baker or Cameron Cole would do.

She was even more imposing up close.

Deedee watched the pseudo-nacho-cheese congeal in his plastic cup.

The strangeness of it hit me. Like how sometimes you’re on the bus taking the same exact route that you’ve taken a hundred times before, with every coffee shop and neighborhood sign memorized, but you look up and you are certain that the bus has taken a wrong turn because everything seems unfamiliar, and it takes you a moment to get your bearings.

I tried to read Wolf’s face, to see if he thought he’d miscalculated, if his plan to do the right thing had backfired, but he didn’t give anything away, just went back to eating his lunch, maybe even smiling a little.

“Um...you know it’s breadstick day?” he mumbled after ten seconds of awkward silence, as if confirming that there was something abnormal about a girl who didn’t like garlic-butter-soaked lumps of bread stretched to look like some grandmother’s gnarly fingers.

I won’t talk about my hair or blather on and on about celebrity heartthrobs or all the girls I hate, because, frankly, I’ve only been here for three hours, which isn’t quite enough time to hate anybody yet.

"Well,” Wolf said finally, “Bench here plays, like, fifty-seven different sports.”
“Three,” Bench said curtly, finally snapping back to attention.

“You like Tolkien?” she asked.
“Yeah?” Deedee ventured. “I mean, kind of but not really...all that much...maybe?”

“Yeah, Aragorn’s cool. Reluctant, brooding king and all that. But personally, I like Gollum.”

“I’ve got it. Professional turkey wrangling.”
Rose snapped her thick fingers right back at him. “So close. It’s wombats, actually. And I don’t wrangle them. I groom them for professional wombat breeding competitions.”

I shook my head—a little too emphatically, maybe—then looked at the clock on the wall and calculated how many more minutes until the bell rang.

Bench promptly crumpled it up and stuffed it down the back of Deedee’s shirt, then threatened to find some real pom-poms and stuff them somewhere else.

I will sound my barbaric yawp, as Mr. Sword calls it, over the rooftops of the world.

Passing notes had nearly gone extinct back when everybody snuck their phones into class. But only two days into the ban, the furtive art of note passing had experienced a resurgence, and teachers were probably wondering if it wasn’t better before when it was just screens being tapped and not elaborately folded sheets of paper being shuffled under desks like some gossipy game of telephone.

There was absolutely no talking allowed in art; Mr. Stilton said it “disrupted the creative energy flows that emanated from each artist’s soul.”

I shook my head vehemently.

You can track the shift in trajectory, the other kid working the angle to guarantee impact. Sometimes they even smile at their friends before it happens. A premeditated shoulder slam.

Wolf didn’t get nudged much, not that I saw, anyway. More often he got dirty looks or snide comments from the kids who sat behind us in class.

I figured it was from Deedee—some little quip or stupid drawing, maybe of Deedee skewering Noah on the tip of a sword.

None of us played soccer, unless you count my brief stint on the worst team in the 7–8-year-old division six years ago.

We hopped on our bikes and kicked off, careening into the street and pedaling as fast as we could from the two screaming teenagers swearing to hunt us down and kick our butts, though they weren’t that polite in their terminology.

Apparently tragedy claimed that life was full of pain and suffering moving inexorably toward death, and comedy said life was ridiculous and people were pretty much fools who sometimes stumbled upon happy endings.

“In a tragedy,” Mr. Sword continued, “the hero struggles against his inevitable fate, so it is naturally a losing battle. But in a comedy, he is often the victim of chance or coincidence, so even in his folly he can still somehow do the right thing.”

“We didn’t almost blow our lips off,” I said. Though I guess we could have. We got a little singed, at least.

“Fish murderer,” Deedee scoffed.

Middle school is a minefield. Deciding who to like and not like and who to follow and who to ignore completely. Worrying that you’re going to trip while walking down the hall and sprawl all over the floor like a beached starfish.

His official title, I guess, was explosive ordnance disposal specialist, but his buddies gave him the nickname Pinky.

Uncle Mike liked to use acronyms. He was full of them. I suspected he was full of a lot of things. Nobody could have that many stories. “You take cover, clinch hard, and cross your fingers, but you stay out of the way. Sometimes there are no RSPs.”

Render safe procedures. Whatever you gotta do to make sure a bomb doesn’t hurt somebody. You know—don’t cut the black wire or whatever crapola they teach you in the movies. But sometimes there’s really not much you can do. Nothing but trigger the thing and stay out of the way and try not to get hurt.

That’s what everyone called the Gauntlet when nobody was careening down it: Hirohito Hill.

In Branton, the Gauntlet is an institution. As integral to our way of life as Mr. Twisty’s, Stockbridge’s statue, Fredo’s greasy pizza parlor, or Mustache Mick, the homeless guy who begs for loose change outside Andy’s Bar on Tenth Street and has a big, black broom curtaining his mouth.

There was no single straight-line path. To navigate, you had to turn, and turning on that kind of slope going that kind of speed was tricky to do once, let alone the dozen times you would need to in order to dodge the trees and reach the bottom intact.

“You sure know a lot about her,” I said, maybe more suggestive than I meant to.

He wasn’t wearing a helmet. It was tradition. The kids who ran the Gauntlet forty or fifty years ago didn’t wear them, so kids today didn’t wear them. Convoluted logic. Like saying you shouldn’t wear sunscreen because your grandma never bothered.

There were no speeches. No bequeathing of material possessions.

Evan hitched a huge breath and then hunkered down over his handlebars.

Evan Smalls careened down Hirohito Hill on an orange-and-black Huffy, undulating over the rutted terrain.

Try not to crash. It sounded like sage advice.

My cursor hovered over the send button, finger poised over the mouse, reading that one sentence, over and over, making sure I hadn’t said anything I hadn’t meant to, which would have been hard given the fact I’d only used eight words.