Free The Crazyladies of Pearl Street by Trevanian

kind of cereal and I was reading... really reading.
    Typically, my mother immediately decided that I was a genius, and that I would bring success and riches to our little family by appearing on station WGY's weekly 'Child Wonder' slot, a tri-city precursor to the nationally popular program, The Quiz Kids. She used to brag to whoever would listen that “Not only can he read, my boy, but he's developed a vocabulary,” and it was true that I sought to elicit praise by trucking out my most exotic words. 'Riboflavin' was a favorite gleaned from my in-depth reading of cereal boxes, but a little difficult to work into a conversation. As you see, I was well on my way to becoming an insufferable little wiseass. But as it turned out, being a wiseass was the one thing about me that was universally applauded by the kids on North Pearl Street, even the dimmest. They admired cheekiness in all its forms, and particularly cheekiness in the face of authority.
    I was anxious to get back into school after missing a whole month because I was afraid I would be behind and have to work hard to catch up. I needn't have worried. Expectations were low at P.S. 5 where most of the kids were unmotivated, few had models of excellence at home or praise for intellectual accomplishment and many were just stupid. Nor were the teachers much better. Some of them had long ago forsaken real teaching and had settled for policing, some were disenchanted after years of frustration, and some had been low-grade teaching material to begin with. Because I had been far ahead of my first-grade class at Lake George, my mother decided to put me into the second grade at P.S. 5, where I was astonished to discover that these bigger kids read haltingly and some still didn't even know the alphabet. I had been miles ahead at Lake George; here I was a visitor from a distant planet. I could see that I was in for long days of boredom.
    But first there was the humiliating ordeal of being introduced to the class, which looked at me as a robin looks at a worm. The pretty young second-grade teacher was new enough to the profession to be still making an effort. I don't remember her name, but her bright little eyes above an up-turned smile, made her look like an umlaut U. She twittered how interesting it must be to have a French name. Don't we think so, class? Then she wrote 'Jean-Luc LaPointe' on the blackboard and pronounced it in a French-ish sort of way. She said she was sure the class would be interested to know how my family pronounced it. Wouldn't we, class? I told them we pronounced it John Luke LaPointe (with no nasal in the last name). But for the next couple of weeks I had to deal with being called Jean, a girl's name. During recess out in the fenced-in playground of cracked and scabby macadam I was teased about my name, and this led to more bullying after school and to confrontations and fights, the usual ritual ordeal all new kids face. I was wiry and quick, but the opponents I tangled with were a year older and bigger than I, and they were tough street kids. Fortunately, I had an edge... well, two edges, really. My first edge was the tactic of focused rage I had learned in the drugstore that had refused to sell me aspirin. While my tormentors were still in the chest-pushing, 'Wanna make something of it?' preliminaries to battle, I would be totally silent, afraid and nauseous as I hovered for a moment on the rim of battle, then I would unleash a flood of blind rage and get two or three shots in before my antagonist realized we had gone to Fistcity. I would strike out with a jugular fury that squirted adrenaline into my blood, making me stronger and oblivious to incoming damage and pain. I punched kicked bit elbowed and gouged anything I could reach, while my opponent clumsily tried to stifle my frenzied attack as one might try to smother a grass fire by flapping a damp handkerchief at it. My second edge was that I absolutely refused to give up. Bigger kids could throw me