Free Shutout by Brendan Halpin

going to go imitate a dog and how the whole thing was the stupidest, corniest thing you could even imagine. Does any of this ring a bell?”
    It did. Slightly. My memory was that after I stopped doing the stupid stretching exercises that didn’t help my Sever’s disease at all, Mom suggested I take yoga and I said I was too busy. But I did think those things about the clothes and the dogs and the corniness, so unless Mom had read my mind, I must have actually said them.
    â€œWell, Mom, you know, high school is a time of transition, and—”
    She laughed. “I’m gonna call Ms. Beasley and have her tell you you’ll play better if you clean your room.”
    She walked away shaking her head, and I called after her, “So can you take me to this seven o’clock class tomorrow night?”
    I could hear the amusement fighting with the annoyance in her voice as she called out, “Yes, of course!”

3
    They ought to give grades for lunch. I mean, if you think about it, it’s the part of the day that requires the most knowledge and the most thinking. You have to understand all the rules about who sits where, even though nobody has ever written them down and nobody explains them. So every day is a high-stakes test, especially when somebody changes one of the factors you’ve come to take for granted.
    Take today, when I went to lunch ready to sit with Lena, even though I still hadn’t heard from her since she lied about calling me right back last night. I had dropped my folder on the way out of history class, and the time it took me to pick my papers up and put them away had made me late enough to lunch that Lena was already deep in conversation with Courtney when I got to the cafeteria.
    Shakina and Marcia waved to me from their table. I stood there like an idiot for a minute. Lena still hadn’t seen me,but either way this was a bad choice. I could go and sit with Lena and be a good friend and be mostly ignored and feel like a loser, or I could go and have a nice conversation with Shakina and Marcia and have a better lunch experience but look like a bad friend.
    I decided to be a bad friend when Duncan went and started hovering around Lena yet again. No wonder she wasn’t asking me about Conrad anymore. I didn’t want to spend the whole lunchtime seething about how the guy I’d been nursing a secret crush on since mid-August when soccer practice started, a guy who was not only gorgeous but also taller than me, had also decided to pick Lena and cut me from the dating varsity. Well, I suppose he would have had to notice me in order to cut me, but still.
    So I went and sat with Marcia and Shakina and talked and laughed and made myself not look over to where Duncan was drooling over Lena and not get jealous and not care.
    On the way out of lunch, I saw a bunch of dorky boys I knew sitting at a table being goofy. I swear, they acted more like Dominic than like me, even though we were the same age. Down at the far end of their table, eating by himself, was Angus Beef from English class, reading a book. I’d had to make a hard choice, but at least I had two tables to choose from. How much must it suck to have nobody to sit with at all, to have your only option be to sit alone, excluded even from the group of boys making fart sounds? Angus looked up at me and waved, and I waved back. “Whatcha reading?” I asked.
    He held up the book.
Animal Liberation
. I had no idea what it was. “Any good?”
    â€œI’m not sure I agree with the whole thing, but it definitely makes you think,” he said.
    I had nothing to add to that. “See you in class then.”
    â€œCool,” he said, and buried his head back in the book. Well, at least he didn’t seem to mind his social outcast status. He may have even chosen it. Weird.
    I went to my locker to get my stuff for English, and Lena stopped by. “Hey! Where were you?” she