At lunch, Landon bought four cartons of milk before he entered the throng. He saw some faces he recognized from football: West and Furster presiding over a tableful of teammates, Nichols at the edge. He quickly turned away, knowing better than to sit with them, and found a table in the far corner where an odd-looking girl with pink-and-blue hair sat with two undersize boys, one with a glaring birthmark on his cheek, the other with glasses as thick as bulletproof glass. They stared at him, warning him away from their territory with dirty looks, so Landon sat at the far end of that table and began unpacking his brown bag. He’d only removed two of his four meatloaf-and-ketchup sandwiches before he detected movement from the other three kids.
Without a sound or a signal, they got up and left the table.
Landon bit down hard on his sandwich and forced himself to chew and swallow, chew and swallow, until everything was gone. In the dull roar around him, he neither looked nor tried to listen. He was just wadding up his last ball of cellophane when the bell rang and people began to scramble.
The hallways gave Landon a kind of relief because he could move in and out of people without giving them much of a chance to stare or poke fun at his ears or the way he spoke. He set his eyes on the floor, sat through a study hall, struggling with his math homework, and then practically skipped to gym class because he knew Brett would be waiting for him. After that, for the final two periods of the day, he’d have Genevieve and Megan to keep him company. And, as long as Skip wasn’t there, his first day of school might not be a total disaster. He didn’t even want to think about football practice.
That, he knew, would not be good.