THE WAY I FELT WHEN I WALKED IN THE DOOR was like I’d been gone a week, but it turned out to only be about two o’clock. Mom wasn’t home. Nobody was. I went in the bathroom and sat on the toilet backward the way I used to when I was little. Back then I did it so I could play with my army men on the toilet tank while I was doing a Big Job — that’s what Mom called it — only this time I didn’t play anything, but just laid my cheek on the cool porcelain tank until I was done.

Wayne was the first one home. I was at the kitchen table eating crackers and rat cheese — Dad said that; Mom just said “cheddar”— but he didn’t say much of anything, just went straight to the refrigerator and took a big swig of milk from the carton. Then he burped my name: “Hey, Dewey.” It was disgusting, but also maybe a little funny. I don’t think he even noticed that I hadn’t been in school. That made me kind of mad, but also made me think that if Wayne hadn’t noticed, then maybe nobody else did, either. He fixed two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and took off for JV football practice. I followed him to the front door. David Tremblay was waiting out front, sitting on his bicycle and holding Wayne’s. They traded: Wayne gave him one of the sandwiches and David handed over the bike. I could see Wayne already had a gob of jelly on the front of his shirt — that happened about every time he ate anything. David pointed at it and laughed. Wayne lifted up his shirt and licked it off, but it left a big grape stain. I would have been embarrassed about something like that, but you could just tell Wayne didn’t care.

Mom and Tink showed up right then. I watched them all through the front window but couldn’t hear anything. Mom probably asked if they had a good first day of school. Then she probably asked if they had time for a snack, and when would they be home — even though David didn’t live with us, of course — and would they please, please promise to drink plenty of water at their football practice?

Then she must have asked about me, because suddenly everybody turned to look at the house, even Tink, who had been leaning over, talking to the sidewalk, maybe to a line of ants or something. I should have waved at them — they must have seen me — but instead I ducked below the window and then crawled out of the living room and down the hall to my bedroom. I don’t know why exactly.

I was hiding under the bed — another dumb thing to do — when Tink found me.

“Here he is!” she yelled, even though Mom was standing right beside her. “He’s hiding under the bed!”

I tried to kick her. “No, I’m not.” I said. “I’m looking for something.”

Tink said, “What? Like a dust bunny?”

Mom told her to never-you-mind, then said that I needed to come out from under there right now because I had some serious explaining to do. So I crawled out.

She was holding the orange Ban-Lon shirt like it was a dead cat. I had stuck it in the dirty-clothes basket, under a towel, when I got home, hoping she would just wash it and not notice the mud and the holes I had burned with my magnifying glass. I don’t know how she found it so fast.

Mom shook it. “What is the meaning of this?”

The phone rang before I could tell her anything, or make something up.

It was the school.

When Dad came home, he asked if I had anything to say for myself before punishment. He had talked to Mom, so of course he knew everything by then already. He still had on his steel-toed work boots and his khaki pants, which had a mud stain on one of the knees, and a short-sleeved shirt but no tie. When he looked like that, it meant he had been out with the survey crew, and if he’d been out with the survey crew, it usually meant he was tired and hungry when he got off work, and not in too good of a mood if something was keeping us from sitting down to dinner right away.

I said, “No, sir. Just that they were making fun of me about being colored.”

He was already unbuckling his belt. “Who? Who was making fun?”

I told him Wayne and David. He said he’d speak to them later, but that that didn’t excuse what I did, and did I understand what Big Trouble I was in? I knew I was supposed to answer with “Yes, sir,” but I couldn’t say anything because my mouth was too dry. I hated even looking at Dad’s belt. He hadn’t used it on us in about a year, since a time me and Wayne socked each other on the arm during church. I didn’t think it was fair that time, because not only did Wayne hit me first, but also a lot harder. I didn’t think it was fair this time, either, because Dad also put me on restrictions, and with a lot of extra chores.

I could barely sit down to dinner afterward and asked if I could bring in a pillow. Mom always felt bad whenever Dad spanked us like that and so she said yes. We were having pork chops and potatoes au gratin. Tink thought it was called “potatoes hog rotten,” and everybody else thought that was pretty funny but I didn’t.

I still looked colored the next day, but at least I didn’t have to wear Ban-Lon. Nobody said anything when I walked into homeroom, but I guess that was only because it was me and I’m usually not somebody that kids notice all that much to begin with, plus I looked down at the floor the whole time so it was hard for anybody to see my face too well.

I headed for a desk in the back. I had math class in this same room first period, which was good because since I’d lost my notebooks at Bowlegs Creek all I had to write on was some of Dad’s graph paper from his work. I hoped we would get to use it, because I liked writing on graph paper and making charts and graphs and stuff. The teacher was Mr. Phinney, who was about a hundred years old and wore his pants up to his ribs and tucked in the end of his tie.

The PA buzzed and clicked. The principal read the announcements. Mighty Miners home game Friday. Key Club car wash Saturday. A scratchy record played “The Lord’s Prayer” and we all stood up for that. Then it was the Pledge of Allegiance, and then “God Bless America.”

The girl in the back row — her name was Mary Dunn and she was about a foot taller than me — she started staring at me halfway through the Pledge. It was the kind of way you look at somebody that has something really wrong with them, like a big neck goiter, or a glass eye that falls out, which Dad told me happened one time to a guy at the mine. Once the record was over and everybody else sat down, she went up to Mr. Phinney and said something, and when he looked back at me, the whole class did, too.

Everybody laughed pretty good for a while. I stared down at my graph paper and wrote my name over and over until they stopped, or until Mr. Phinney made them stop. Then Mary Dunn got all her stuff and moved to a different desk near the front, so I was the only one left in the back row after that. I tried really hard not to cry or anything, but I might have gotten kind of a runny nose, sitting there the rest of math class.

Mr. Phinney stopped me on the way out of class. He hiked his pants up a little bit higher, and tucked his tie in a little bit deeper, and I thought if he kept it up, the two things together might pull him over so far that he finally just folded himself in half.

One of his furry caterpillar eyebrows went up and the other went down, and he asked me if I was some kind of a joke boy and did I think I could get away with funny business in his class.

I told him, “No, sir. It’s no funny business. I just had an accident with shoe polish. That’s how come I missed the first day of school yesterday.”

“Shoe-polish accident?”

“Yes, sir.”

The caterpillars were on the move again, the way they did when Mr. Phinney explained math problems on the board. “Try turpentine?”

I nodded. “But my mom didn’t want to get it too close to my eyes and mouth and nose.”

He said, “Well, all right then,” but that I had to stay sitting in the back row because he didn’t want me disturbing the class anymore. And if I wasn’t telling him the truth, he said, I better believe he’d find out about it, one way or another.

The second-period kids were crowding past us by that time, and I knew I was going to be late for my next class, which was what happened: I got a tardy for English, plus a whole other bunch of kids laughing once I came in after the late bell. Somebody said, “Hey, Sambo,” when I squeezed down the aisle between two rows of desks to the one empty one.

Nothing much else too bad happened, though, and by the end of the day, I thought maybe it would all fade away — the shoe polish and the getting laughed at and the having to sit in the back of the class. I hoped it would, anyway.