Читать книгу The Milk Chicken Bomb - Andrew Wedderburn - Страница 10

Days I can’t find Mullen I like to walk over to the gully and throw rocks. There’s this grocery cart in the gully I like to throw rocks at. Rattles real good when you hit it. Or I like to walk over to the football field and watch them building houses in the new subdivision. Some of them wearing hard hats, with stickers: Safety First, and 1,000 Consecutive Hours. They’ve got heavy belts and hammers. If Mullen and I had hammers and tools like that, we could build all sorts of stuff. We could get shovels and dig out the back wall Underground. Dig tunnels and other rooms: a library for our comics and a workshop for all the building we’d do. We could build shelves, put down a plywood floor. We could put down roofing felt so we could take off our shoes and not get slivers. We could build a wall, like the fur-trading forts in social studies class, with sharpened logs, and a drawbridge. Then we could just stay down there and do whatever we wanted. Grown-ups from the school could come by and hammer on the log walls and we’d just ignore them from inside our underground fort. They’d fall into the sharpened logs underneath our drawbridge and we’d laugh and laugh.

After recess, all the Dead Kids stop what they’re doing: hanging up coats or unlacing boots or popping open the rings of their new binders. They start to point and then realize what they’re doing, and stand there, looking awkward. A few binders pop, like grasshoppers jumping.

Jenny Tierney walks to her coat hook. Hangs up her black leather purse. Takes off her black jean jacket. She looks around the hallway and all the kids have to pretend like they weren’t staring at her, get back to taking off their boots or getting their textbooks off the shelf.

Jenny Tierney is the only kid who gets sent up more than me and Mullen. But me and Mullen get sent up for dumb stuff, like wallpaper paste and soap flakes and racing toilet-paper rolls down the staircase. Jenny Tierney told a kid to stick scissors into an electric socket, and he did. Jenny Tierney is twelve years old and still in the fifth grade, like us. She’s two inches taller than me and four inches taller than Mullen. Jenny Tierney hit a kid in the face with her math textbook so hard he has to wear glasses now. They didn’t even send her up for that, at least not like we get sent up, cleaning chalkboards or washing the windows on the school buses. She had to sit in the office for hours, and her parents had to come and sign forms. I remember her math book sitting on Mr. Weissman’s desk, the brown paper cover with a dark red splotch. Some people say that every time Jenny Tierney hits a kid with her math book, she peels off the brown paper and puts it in a scrapbook. She’s got pages and pages of other kids’ bloody noses, beat into brown paper.

We all rush off to class with Jenny Tierney watching us. She waits until we’re all on the way off to class before she follows, her hard-heeled boots ringing on the tiled floor.