6
BUK, BUK, BUK
“Ooo,” Jared whispers at lunch. “Here he is, finally. What’s the matter, EllRay? Scared to be alone with us?”
“Yeah,” Stanley chimes in, his voice soft. “BUK, BUK, BUK!”
This is his idea of how a chicken talks, I guess, which is just dumb, because chickens do not talk. But basically, Stanley is saying that I’m chicken.
“Shut up,” I tell him out of the side of my mouth.
I suddenly realize, though, that I am sitting at the end of the picnic table bench, not somewhere safe in the middle—like between Corey and Kevin, for example. Or even between two girls, if girls sat at our table—which they don’t, lately, ever since the food fight.
But that’s a whole different story.
Uh-oh. I have made a b-i-i-i-g mistake.
Jared makes a knuckly fist and secretly starts twisting it into my ribs, which are still aching from yesterday’s knuckle-grinding. He smiles at everyone else in a fake-friendly way while he is doing it, so they won’t know something bad is happening.
Stanley stands back and watches the knuckling, and his eyes are nervous and bright behind his smudged glasses. They look even more lizard-like than usual.
Every single rib I have on that side burns, and I try not to cringe, but I can feel myself starting to get mad.
Okay. When I lose my temper, three things happen:
1. First, I can feel all the juices inside my body start racing around really fast.
2. Then my heart starts pounding so hard I can barely hear people talk.
3. And then my hands get clenchy.
Orange sparks may fly out of my ears, for all I know!
Seated across from me, Kevin does not know why I am leaning over so far. “Hey, EllRay, you’re going to fall,” he says, giving me a friendly smile. Then he goes back to eating his sandwich, a gigantic grinder with pink flaps of meat hanging out. Kevin’s hand grips the roll as if it might try to escape from him at any moment.
It would if it could!
“Yeah. Stop crowding, EllRay,” Jared tells me, giving me an extra-hard knuckle twist.
“Yowtch! Quit it, Jared,” I yell.
“‘Quit it, Jared,’” Stanley says in a whiny voice, trying to copy me—even though I didn’t really whine. Like I said, I yelled. In a manly way.
I try to count to ten, which is what my mom says to do when I start getting mad. One, two, three, four. My lips move a little as I silently run through the numbers.
“Oh, look. He’s gonna cry. The widdle baby’s sad,” Jared says, sounding happy. Then he throws back his head and gives his famous HAW—HAW—HAW laugh.
“I’m not crying,” I say, trying to get to my feet.
I do not want to get into trouble, even at lunch, because the lunch monitor would tell Ms. Sanchez. Then Ms. Sanchez would call my parents, and bye-bye Disneyland on Saturday.
But do I want to go through the rest of my life saying, “BUK, BUK, BUK”?
No way!
