Free Double Double by Ken Grimes Page B

coursed through me as I washed my hands. “No, thanks.”
    â€œC’mon, you don’t want to get high wit’ us?”
    They all laughed as I dried my hands and fled. My radar to the outside world signaled “Don’t hurt me.” Teenagers can sense weakness and how to exploit it.
    The next day on my way to class, I was startled to find one of the local Hawaiian kids falling in beside me. “So, what’s your name?” he said in a friendly tone.
    â€œKen.”
    â€œKen, I don’t have no lunch money. C’n you give me some?”
    I put my hand in my pocket and felt the quarters. “No,” I said cautiously. I could feel the shame flooding my body, because he knew, and I knew, that I couldn’t stop him. I was too scared to fight.
    â€œWell, brah, see, that’s gonna be a problem, because if you don’t give it to me, I’m gonna have to take it.” He smiled.
    Walking quickly, I reached into my pocket and gave him four quarters.
    â€œYah, thanks, Ken. I really ’preciate it. I won’t bother you again.” We both knew that this was just the beginning. He was going to take my lunch money every day.
    The idea of going to a teacher was laughable. The teachers were terrible. In many of the classes, they didn’t bother to give lessons. They just handed out workbooks with questions to answer. Math class was the most painful, because although I was good at math, I didn’t retain it well over the summer and needed a little help at the beginning of the year to remember the basics. This math teacher started giving out problems, then testing us during the first week of class. I couldn’t remember how to solve the problems. I started crying quietly, the tears burning. I rubbed my eyes so no one could see, and tried to figure out the different equations. I was ashamed that I couldn’t provide the answers.
    By the third week of school, my mother complained to the principal about the bully constantly stealing my lunch money. The principal was a nice man but ineffective. “We asked the other boy, and he said he didn’t do anything. So there’s nothing we can do. It’s his word against your son’s.”
    A hopeless situation.
    We moved to Pearl City, near Pearl Harbor, to live in a two-bedroomin a high-rise condo building with a swimming pool. Instead of school, it was studying alone at the University of Hawaii’s library while my mother taught.
    Here, in the most beautiful place in the world, my mother sat in her room and typed, and typed, and typed. The result was her first Richard Jury mystery. A novel set and steeped in rainy England, written in balmy, fragrant Hawaii.
    I was into science fiction then: I read all of Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov. The main branch library in the old part of downtown Honolulu is famous for its beauty. I spent many hours there, marveling at the quiet, at the statuesque banyan trees by the entrance, the palm trees rising above the chairs in the open courtyard, the sweet-smelling air with hints of flowers and the sea. We didn’t have a car when we lived there. I rode the bus everywhere around the island. I read Catch-22 on those buses, and Frank Herbert’s Dune .
    But I could read only so much. It was here that the painful parts of adolescence took over. The desperate longing I experienced in looking at yet barely being able to speak to some of the most beautiful girls in the world—all of them older and with nothing to say to a twelve-year-old—drove me crazy. I began to have nightmares like the ones I’d had when I was little of people trying to kill me, and several times I experienced a druglike disembodiment in our elevator, a sensation that I was looking down on myself from above.
    My loneliness became more acute. Like any twelve-year-old, I wanted to distance myself from my mother, to make friends. I was the new guy, the stranger, and younger than