A t my old school, recess was indoors as much as it was outdoors. What kept us in was sometimes rain, but mostly heat or it being too humid to do much but sweat. Chasing or bouncing or dodging a ball on a swelterin’ day was not my idea of fun.

Besides, I wasn’t any good at sports. Ma didn’t like them, and Cliff—when he came into the picture—might have been good with a bat, but he wasn’t interested in swinging it at baseballs.

So sports and I never really got acquainted, and that was okay. Nobody made a fuss over it ’cause lots of other kids were spending recess indoors, too. And as long as you didn’t mess with stuff or start trouble, nobody cared what you were doing in a corner by yourself, which, for me, was usually reading comics.

I love comics. The superhero kind. Which aren’t funny, but for some reason they’re still called comics. Ma bought them for me once in a while, but my old school’s media center had a secret stash of them in a back room, and Mr. Willard, the librarian, slipped them to kids who asked. “Here you go, Mr. Jones,” he’d say with a wink, and I’d be glued to the thing any chance I got.

On the back cover of every comic Mr. Willard had taped a list of vocabulary words. Words that were used in the comic. That was good for when you were reading and didn’t know what a word meant, but the payback was you had to know all the words when you checked the comic back in.

“Ready, Mr. Jones?” Mr. Willard would say in a voice all hushed and secretive. Then he’d run through the list, sweepin’ the room with a sly-eye as he went down it, like any minute the two of us might be hauled off to the principal’s office.

“Why’re there such hard words in comics?” I asked him once, ’cause after a while my brain was loaded up with vo-cab-u-lar-y.

“Because they’re really for adults,” he whispered. “Ready for another?”

At Thornhill there are no comics. On the second day of school I asked Ms. Raven, hoping she might have a secret stash like Mr. Willard had, but the answer was no. And when I asked Ms. Miller where indoor recess was held, she gave me a strange look and said, “We do recess outside.”

I walked away feeling funny inside. Like I was alone in the middle of a school full of kids, with no place to go.

So I found a secret spot off to the side of the blacktop between a building and a fence, and that’s where I’d go to work on my stories at recess. No one bothered me or even knew I holed up there.

That is, until Kandi went and messed things up.

“Why are you always hiding back here?” she asked during morning recess on the day she’d invaded the bus. She was holding on to a four-square ball and had Macy Mills and Lexi Simmons with her. They were havin’ a polka-dot day. Just lookin’ at them made me dizzy.

I’d jerked when Kandi had asked, ’cause I was already jumpy, worried that Troy might pop up out of nowhere and let me have it. But her asking like she did also shocked me. How long had she known about my spot?

“You want to play four square with us?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said, shaking my head.

She frowned. “If you don’t watch out, you’ll wind up like Isaac Monroe.”

“Who?”

But they were already running off.

I grumbled, “Great. Now I’m gonna have to find a new spot.” But I couldn’t figure that out right then, so I got back to my story. The Ninja Cat Woman was moving through the shadows of the city’s night streets, tailing a sneak thief who had stolen Old Yeller—a yellow diamond worth over a million dollars. I was putting in double agents and heart-pounding twists, so it didn’t take long to forget about Kandi and four square and where Troy Pilkers might be lurking.

When recess was over and we were lined up outside the classroom, I noticed a lot of whispering behind me, but I didn’t know it was about me until we were sitting in our seats and Colby clued me in.

“You shouldn’t be writing about us,” she hissed across territories. “It’s not nice!”

“What?” I said, ’cause it was like a snake had struck out of nowhere.

“You heard me,” she hissed.

Rayne was next to me, fiddlin’ with a hair ribbon, and Wynne was across from me, wringin’ the life out of a Kleenex, looking every which way but at me.

“I’m not writing about you!” I said. “Not any of you!”

“Prove it!” Colby said. She had whipped out her feather pencil and was now leaning across territories, shaking it at me like she was about to cast some deadly feather spell.

“Colby!” Ms. Miller called from the front of the class. “Put that away this instant!”

Colby put it away with a huff, but her attitude didn’t go away with it. She was shootin’ eye darts at me the whole rest of the morning. Then at lunch she and Rayne and Wynne surrounded me at my table. “Prove it,” Colby demanded.

Rayne and Wynne still weren’t looking at me, but they were there, which meant they were in the same camp as Colby. And looking around, I saw they had backup, including Macy and Lexi and their zillion polka dots. Lots of other kids were staring at me, too. It was like a mob out there, armed with plastic pitchforks, itchin’ to do me in.

I couldn’t believe it. Was this what I got for minding my own business?

Was this what I got for writing in a notebook?

The whole school hated me?

It felt like I was in an oven, roasting. And since I could see only one way to bust the door open and escape, I pushed my notebook forward. “Here,” I said.

Colby snatched it like she had every right to have it, and for a split second I panicked, remembering my story about Queen Colby and the spaceship. But that one had just been in my head—I hadn’t actually written it down.

They huddled over my notebook like a three-headed monster, gobbling up pages while I sat there feeling mad and embarrassed.

“Who’s Agent Leroy?” Rayne asked.

“What’s a Ninja Cat Woman?” Wynne whispered.

They flipped through the notebook fast, until Colby finally said, “These are just…stories.”

I yanked my notebook back. “See? Nothing in there about anybody!”

They stared at me, sorry written all over their faces.

And then, like someone had waved a magic wand, poof, Kandi appeared, rosy-cheeked and out of breath. “Guess what?” she said, sitting beside me.

Colby got right in her face. “You can’t sit here! That’s what!”

“Why?” Kandi said, looking all hurt.

“Leave!” Colby said, and now Rayne and Wynne were leaning in, too, like a flock of crows swooping down on roadkill.

Kandi gave me a look that was crying out for help, but I wanted nothing to do with her or the trouble she’d caused. And since I could tell I was on the verge of saying something either stupid or mean, I grabbed my stuff, gave the whole bunch of them a scorching look, and took off.