Free Dakota Dream by JAMES W. BENNETT

off.
    â€œWhat are you in for?” he asked. Saying this, he took out a switchblade with about a five-inch blade, and started using it to clean his fingernails. His nails were long, with a lot of built-up dirt. He wasn’t getting them too clean, but he did dig out these little wads of dirt on the tip of his knife blade and scraped them off on the armrest. Then he started picking his nose with the switchblade. I said to to myself, Is this a troublemaker or what? What am I doing here?
    â€œHey, man, what are you in for?” he asked again.
    I showed him my moccasins. “Saberhagen doesn’t like my moccasins.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with them?”
    â€œHe says they’re not appropriate for school.”
    â€œI’d say it’s none of his business.”
    â€œThat’s what I told him,” I said.
    â€œWay to go. It’s good to take no shit offa him.”
    â€œIf it’s so good, why am I here?”
    I guess that gave him something to think about because he stopped talking. It didn’t help the way he smelled, though. He smelled like he must wash about once a month. We’ve got a lot of guys like him in school; they should round them up every couple of days and take them down to the locker room and scour them down in the shower. I would recommend S.O.S. pads and Comet cleanser. I’m not sure what you could do with their clothes. I guess they’d have to have different ones.
    I looked around the study hall; there were maybe thirty people serving detentions, which left about three hundred empty seats. It seemed like a joke that I had to sit this close to a guy who smelled bad and was a pest besides. I thought about asking Mr. Porter to assign me a different seat, but I didn’t know if you had any rights when you were serving detention.
    I put it out of my mind. I shifted to the left as far as I could and took out the handout Mrs. Bluefish had given us in English class. It was information about a story-writing contest. I started reading through the guidelines. You could submit a story if you were under seventeen, and the deadline was the end of May. It told how long the story was supposed to be, how you had to type it double-spaced, and so forth. The person who won the contest would have their story published in some magazine I’d never heard of called Script , and would receive a cash prize of a thousand dollars. I consider myself a writer, so I found that I had a pretty bona fide interest in this contest.
    â€œWhat’s that?” It was him again.
    â€œIt’s nothing.”
    â€œBut what is it?” Nicky insisted.
    So I showed the contest form to him. Not that I thought he’d have any real interest.
    He didn’t. “Want to know what I’m in for?” he said.
    â€œNot particularly.”
    â€œYou gotta hear this. You know Mushy?”
    He was talking about the chemistry teacher. “I know him,” I said.
    â€œWell, I brought this dog whistle to class. The sound is so high, a human ear can’t hear it. But when I blew it in class, it like blew all his circuits. It was choice.” Telling this, Nicky had an ear-to-ear grin plastered on his face.
    â€œThat is clever,” I said. Mr. Mushrush wears this old-fashioned type of hearing aid, the kind that has a battery pack that you keep in a shirt pocket. There’re some guys in my chemistry class who make a high-pitched hum, with their mouths closed. Mr. Mushrush thinks it’s some kind of electronic feedback, so he usually starts slapping at the battery pack. I have to admit it was kind of funny, in a juvenile sort of way, the first time I watched it.
    Nicky had more to tell me. “Last time I was in for setting off cherry bombs in the girls’ bathroom,” he said. “But this dog whistle was really choice. I wish you could’ve been there.” He still had the grin frozen on his face. He told about these things with the kind of pride