Free B009XDDVN8 EBOK by William Lashner Page A

the land. I’m talking now of grade-school recess. At Pitchford Elementary, recess was a madhouse. Kids played snap the rope, when the only thing snapping was bones. Kids played six inches, pounding each other relentlessly on the shoulder until tears flowed. Kickball was a sadist’s dream, where any advance from base to base invited a big red welt on the jaw. And football was always tackle and always merciless.
    Unused to such savagery at my private school, I determined early on to avoid it all. While pandemonium broke out about me, fights and chases, squeals of pain, I sat on the swing, hoping to be ignored until the bell rang and I could retreat to the relative safety of the classroom. And that’s exactly where I was, on the swing, minding my own damn business, when I looked up and saw a football whizzing through the air, coming right at me.
    I decided to duck, but before my mind could send the message to my body the ball hit me smack in the face.
    Knocked too senseless to actually cry, I simply fell backward off the swing. The earth spun like a top, my cheek felt like I had been stung by a swarm of wasps, a sob of bitter indignation rose up my throat. And then I saw Tony Grubbins standing overme, grinning down as he spun in his hand the football he had retrieved from the ground. Behind him, in his usual position, was the skinny kid with the round glasses, the pilot fish, Richie Diffendale.
    “I told you to keep your dog off my lawn,” said Tony Grubbins.
    “He told you, Frenchy,” said Richie Diffendale.
    “My brother saw a little pile of your crap,” said Tony, “and almost put my head through a wall.”
    “How do you know it was my dog?” I said, my voice thin with whine.
    “A little pile of French dog crap, that’s what it was. You’re the only weenie with a dog that small. And Richie said he saw your rat nosing our lawn.”
    “And I did, too,” said Richie.
    “Your dog does it again, it will be more than a football in your face, Frenchy. You’ll catch my fist and you’ll be missing teeth.”
    I waited until he strode back to the game, with Richie Diffendale following, looking back every other step and sneering at me, before I climbed slowly to my feet. I was still rubbing my cheek, fighting the tears, when Augie sidled up to me.
    “I warned you not to let your dog near his lawn, bub,” said Augie.
    “How is everyone so sure it was my dog?”
    “Are you saying it wasn’t?”
    “No.”
    “You look like a chipmunk with half a case of the mumps. You learn your lesson yet?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Atta boy.”
    This wasn’t only the second time I had been humiliated by Tony Grubbins. He had begun to take an especial interest in me in our street games, checking me hard into parked cars at every opportunity, throwing the pimple ball at my head in stickball, touching me into a broken heap in two-hand touch. Now, Tonywas indeed a brutal bully, and I wasn’t the only kid to feel his wrath, but I suspected even then that his special distaste for me might have been well earned. He sensed all along the way I felt about him, and his friends, and his neighborhood, the way I felt slyly superior, yes, like a Frenchman. I was prideful and arrogant, I thought I was better than Pitchford, and in truth, if I were in his place I would have checked me extra hard into a parked Buick, too. But even so, for me Tony Grubbins had become an emblem of all the indignities imposed upon me by my new home.
    Which was why I had led my dog to purposely crap on his lawn at every opportunity. And why three days after the football met my face I spent the day picking through the neighborhood with a bag and a small plastic sand shovel, following any dog I saw roaming around, leashed or not. I needed a pile large enough, and with pieces thick enough, that there could be no thought it came from my little Rex. I found a nice-sized pile, shoveled it into the bag, and kept looking. Later, in a quiet moment when Tony Grubbins