The last part of morning announcements is the part I dread the most. Today is a good example.

“Finally, this morning, I’d like to congratulate Julie Ferris and Amy Wheeler,” our principal, Mrs. Mead says. “Yesterday in the lunchroom Julie cleaned up trash. Thank you, Julie.”

Julie’s in my class. She tilts her head down a little, as if she’s suddenly become shy. That would be, um, unusual. Usually Julie is raising her hand and going, “Ooh-ooh-ooh,” because she knows all the answers and always wants the teacher to call on her. Or she’s showing off the new moves she’s learned in her gymnastics class, which, as she’s let everyone know, is only for the best, most talented kids.

So now she’s shy.

“As for Amy,” Mrs. Mead continues, “she helped one of her classmates who wasn’t feeling well get to the nurse’s office during recess. Thank you, Amy.”

Amy’s in my class, too. Julie and Amy are best friends, and you never saw two such perfect people. I think they have special radars built into their heads that are always tuned in to opportunities to be goody-goodies. You think they’re just eating lunch or playing basketball or whatever, but really their radars are scanning the area for their next chance to show off. They take turns at it.

Probably, Julie and Amy were both with Cindy Greer on the playground yesterday when Cindy said she had a terrible stomachache and was feeling dizzy and almost passed out. Probably they checked their little goody-goody calendars and saw that it was Amy’s turn to show off, since Julie had just cleaned up the lunchroom garbage.

“Hugs to both of these sixth graders,” Mrs. Mead continues. She’s talking about those little chocolate swirl candies that come wrapped in foil. If your name is an-nounced over the loudspeaker because a teacher has seen you do a good deed, you get a little bag of Hugs. They’re part of this program called HUGS that Mrs. Mead started at our school this year. HUGS is supposed to stand for Helping Unity Grow in School. I think it stands for Helping Ugly Girls Suck Up. If Julie and Amy keep getting Hugs at the rate they’ve been going, they’ll be able to open a candy store by the end of the year.

“America the Beautiful” now blares over the loudspeaker. “Oh, beautiful, for special girls, of Ferris-Wheeler fame. For purple mountains’ majesty, above this stupid place! Oh, Ferris Wheel, oh Ferris Wheel! God shed good grades on thee. . . .”

Well, that’s what plays in my head, anyway.

As the song drones on, I draw pictures on the tiny squares of paper I always keep handy for my flipbooks. I sketch fifteen little Ferris Wheels. In the first picture, two girls are sitting in one of the carts. But as the wheel turns (as I flip the book), the girls lean out of their seats, then lean a bit more, then still more, until they tip right out of the Ferris Wheel and fall tumbling to Earth.

I don’t really have anything against the Ferris Wheel. It’s just that they know how to be in the right place at the right time. It’s nice that Amy helped Cindy to the nurse’s office yesterday. Really. It’s so nice. But how is it she managed to do her good deed so that three teachers saw it, but when I helped Chris after he threw up on my new sneakers last month, no one saw a thing? Amy gets Hugs and her name mentioned during morning announcements. I get barf-to-go.

Last year when I turned in a stack of new comic books that someone had left on the playground, a teacher complimented me for doing a good deed, but that was before Mrs. Mead came up with HUGS. No one heard my name over the loudspeaker. No one gave me candy. And I love comic books, almost as much as computer games. (I’d like to be the next Stan Lee—who created the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, and Spider Man—but never mind.) It was a really hard decision for me to take the comic books to the office. I thought about keeping them for a couple of days, just long enough to read them, but I didn’t. I turned them in—and some of them were double issues.

Announcements are finally over. It’s time for science. We’re studying ecosystems, and the class is divided into groups of three or four kids. Each group has built its own little world of dirt, water, plants, guppies, tadpoles, bugs, and whatever else grows in tanks made out of big, empty soda bottles. We’ve built separate sections for water and dirt, with the dirt section sort of nesting above the water section. We observe the eco-columns (that’s what they’re called) every day and take turns writing our observations down in notebooks. Each group keeps one notebook, so everybody in the group has to agree about what has been observed. Today is Derek’s day to write.

“Okay,” he says, “we’ve still got two guppies and that one slug. One of the guppies looks like it’s about to have babies. The grasshopper’s alive, and so’s the earthworm. The beetle died.”

Okay, look. I am the first to admit that I’m not the greatest guy in these group things. But none of us has had time yet to eyeball our eco-column, so how Derek can sit there and announce how many guppies, slugs, and whatever we have is a total mystery to me. Not really—obviously, he’s making it up.

“Okay, write it down,” Zach says. Derek begins writing. He bends his shaggy head over the notebook and plops the hand he’s not writing with right on the page so no one can see what he’s doing. Not that, say, Zach, cares. He’ll go along with anything Derek does.

“Are you sure your observations are correct?” Elise asks.

Go, Elise! She leans in closer and forgets to hold her breath. “Phew!” She gags and jumps back. Ms. Stewart warned us that when you try to keep a slice of nature all wrapped up in a soda bottle for a few weeks, it can raise some serious stink.

So now Elise is no longer interested in whether Derek is right or wrong. But me, I can’t stand it.

“Wait a minute, Derek,” I say. “We haven’t even made our observations yet. We’re all supposed to observe as a group before we write anything down. I haven’t had a chance to check anything out yet. And I didn’t see you observe anything either.”

Derek looks up from the notebook without lifting his pencil (or hand) from the paper. “Well, Gabe,” he says, “what you don’t know is that my powers of observation are highly developed. It doesn’t take me as long as normal sixth-graders to observe an ecosystem. And that means that I can observe much quicker than sixth-grade retards like you.”

Our desks are set up face to face, like a line of scrimmage in a football game. Derek has called me a retard before. That time we were out on the playground, and I hit him, hard, right in the shoulder. Then he tripped me and jumped on my legs for a while. I’m not the greatest fighter. I can’t start a fistfight here in the classroom—Ms. Stewart would have a fit.

But I’m mad, and I can’t stop myself from shoving my desk into Derek’s. The pencil pops out of his hand, the notebook falls to the floor, and the edge of the desk knifes into his gut. “Oof!” he says.

I’m sure Derek is now going to do something like shove the desks back in my direction, so I get out of my seat to protect my ribcage. When he sees he can’t get me, the rat calls out, “Ms. Stewart, Gabe—”

Just then Ms. Ellis, the teacher assistant assigned to our class, swishes by. She’s missed this entire argument between Derek and me. She misses a lot of stuff that goes on between us kids, stuff that never gets past Ms. Stewart. Ms. Ellis seems to be the type of person who gets focused on one thing at a time, which takes up every bit of her attention. Right now she’s focused on hurrying over to Ecosystem Group Number 3 (we’re Number 5), whose members are jumping up and down about something or another. Maybe they have a tadpole that sprouted legs.

Whatever the reason, Ms. Ellis is practically sprinting across the room. Just as she dashes by me, a fat wad of dollar bills falls out of her pocket. It’s the money everyone’s brought in for next week’s field trip to the art museum. What a wad of cash! It hits the floor and actually takes a bounce because Ms. Ellis has it all rolled up tight with a rubber band. As she runs by, her foot kicks the money ball toward the radiator, where it rolls underneath, barely sticking out. One more kick by someone passing by and that money will roll way, way under the heating unit, far out of reach. If it doesn’t get totally ruined from the water that sometimes drips down under there, maybe it will get burned up when the heat kicks in.

As I dive to the floor to save our field trip money, images of Hugs flash in my head. But only for a fraction of a second, because the next thing flashing in my head is a white burst of pain. That, and Derek’s voice, yelling, “Owww!”

He saw the wad of dough, too, and dove to the floor to make the big save. We both fight through our pain to struggle for the money, but our collision and resulting scuffle send the money ball careening under the radiator like a hockey puck.

“Idiot!” I yell, springing to my feet.

“Retard!” he shouts, right in my face. That’s two retards in five minutes. I lunge at him, and he dodges, but our ecosystem is not so lucky. I knock it off our desks and observe it as it splats on the floor—a miniature world filled with two cups of dirt, half a quart of water, nine rocks, three twigs, a clump of grass, and one slug, one grasshopper, one earthworm, two guppies (the female one with that dark spot that signals she’s going to have babies). Oh, and one dead beetle.

Just as Derek had observed.