Free The Bloody Souvenir by Jack Gantos Page A

judgment. We were only having fun like the time we put on roller skates and blasted down their metal sliding board and through a flaming Hula-hoop at the bottom as their cousin Jennifer Pagoda filmed us. Sure, that was dangerous, but I wasn’t compelled to do it like my mom suggested. I did it only after I weighed the consequences and decided it was mostly a safe activity. I had self-control when I wanted to use it. I just didn’t want to use it all the time. To me, this was the difference between me and the Pagoda boys. They were obsessed with danger and driven like mindless beasts to hurt themselves. On the other hand, I was just a casual thrill seeker who could give up danger whenever I felt like it.
    Or maybe not.
    And this is really where my story begins, and where I proved to my mother that I was a pathetic example of a defective human a full rung below Pagoda-stupid . I started out the day by exercising some better judgment over at the Pagoda house. Gary wanted to have a cigarette-smoking contest to see who could suck through a pack the fastest, and I stood up and said, “No way am I doing that!”
    â€œWhy not?” Gary asked, and took a quick step toward me as he reached for his knife, which was tucked into his back pocket.
    â€œBecause smoking will kill you,” I smugly replied. “Ask anyone.”
    â€œWhat if I kill you first?” he suggested, and opened his knife, which was as sharp as a razor. “What is worse? A knife through the neck or a pack of smokes? Answer me that, brain-boy .”
    â€œI’d rather die with a knife blade through my lungs than smoke a pack of cigarettes and die like a coughing dog,” I replied. “Smoking is about the most stupid thing a person can do.”
    Gary spit tobacco juice on the ground. “Oh, go be a public service announcement and leave us alone,” he said, and waved his knife toward my house. “Beat it.”
    â€œNo problem,” I replied, and marched off feeling very proud of myself. I was walking across my front yard while thinking that it was a shame I couldn’t tell my mother how mature I had just been because she had forbidden me to play with them in the first place.
    I didn’t have shoes on because it was hot and shoes made my feet sweat. I took a step and suddenly I got a sharp pain right in the bottom of my left foot. “Ouch!” I yelped. It really hurt. I figured I had stepped on a sharp rock or a piece of glass or a nail. I lifted my foot to see what it was, but it wasn’t any of those things. It was a great big wart on the bottom of my foot and it was madly throbbing. How could it have so suddenly grown on me? Maybe warts are like volcanoes , I thought, and they just spring up overnight . I reached down and touched the painful tip of it. “That is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen,” I said out loud as I balanced on my other foot. I figured I had better go in the house and tell Mom, but then I thought, No, don’t tell her. She’ll just take you to the doctor, and he’ll remove it somehow and that will hurt. So I concluded that I would take care of this little wart problem myself.
    I limped into the house remembering how Gary had showed me two little scars on his hands. When he was born, he had six fingers on each hand but the sixth one, he said, was like a rubber worm. It just limply hung down by the base of his good little finger. There was no bone in it and no way to control it, so it was always getting caught in car doors and dresser drawers, and when he wiped his butt, it always dipped into the toilet water, which was really gross. So one day when he was ten, he took a pair of garden shears and snipped them off. “Sure it bled a little bit,” he said. “But I rubbed dirt on the cut parts and the blood stopped and a week later the skin healed over. It was no big deal.”
    â€œWhat’d you do with the fingers?” I asked.
    He