GODS AND MONSTERS , pjo

01 , a bunch if bullies

CHAPTER ONE:
A BUNCH IF BULLIES

      My day started normal. Or as normal as it ever gets at Meriwether College Prep.

      See, it's this "progressive" school in downtown Manhattan, which means we sit on beanbag chairs instead of at desks, and we don't get grades, and the teachers wear jeans and rock concert I-shirts to work.

      I hated it. I liked knowing how stupid I was.

      The most annoying thing about Meriwether was that the teachers always looked on the bright side of things, and the kids weren't always...well, bright.

      Take my first class today: English. The whole middle school had read this book called Lord of the Flies, where all these kids get marooned on an island and go psycho. So for our final exam, our teachers sent us into the break yard to spend an hour with no adult supervision to see what would happen. What happened was a massive wedgie contest between the seventh and eighth graders, two pebble fights, and a full-tackle basketball game. The school bully, Matt Sloan, led most of those activities.

      Sloan wasn't big or strong, I mean I could have taken him down, but he acted like he was. He had eyes like a pit bull, and shaggy black hair, and he always dressed in expensive but sloppy clothes, like he wanted everybody to see how little he cared about his family's money. One of his front teeth was chipped from the time he'd taken his daddy's Porsche for a joyride and run into a PLEASE SLOW DOWN FOR CHILDREN sign.

      Anyway, Sloan was giving everybody wedgies until he made the mistake of trying it on my friend Tyson.

      Tyson was the only homeless kid at Meriwether College Prep. As near as Percy and I could figure, he'd been abandoned by his parents when he was very young, probably because he was so... different.

      He was six-foot-three and built like the Abominable Snowman, but he cried a lot and was scared of just about everything, including his own reflection. His face was kind of misshapen and brutal-looking. I couldn't tell you what color his eyes were, because I could never make myself look higher than his crooked teeth. His voice was deep, but he talked funny, like a much younger kid—I guess because he'd never gone to school before coming to Meriwether. He wore tattered jeans, grimy size-twenty sneakers, and a plaid flannel shirt with holes in it. He smelled like a New York City alleyway, because that's where he lived, in a cardboard refrigerator box off 72nd Street.

      Meriwether Prep had adopted him as a community service project so all the students could feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, most of them couldn't stand Tyson. Once they discovered he was a big softie, despite his massive strength and his scary looks, they made themselves feel good by picking on him. Percy and I were pretty much his only friends, which meant he was our only friend.

      My mom had complained to the school a million times that they weren't doing enough to help him. She'd called social services, but nothing ever seemed to happen. The social workers claimed Tyson didn't exist. They swore up and down that they'd visited the alley we described and couldn't find him, though how you miss a giant kid living in a refrigerator box, I don't know.

      Anyway, Matt Sloan snuck up behind him and tried to give him a wedgie, and Tyson panicked. He swatted Sloan away a little too hard. Sloan flew fifteen feet and got tangled in the little kids' tire swing.

      I snorted.

      "You freak!" Sloan yelled. "Why don't you go back to your cardboard box!"

      Tyson started sobbing. He sat down on the jungle gym so hard he bent the bar, and buried his head in his hands.

      "Take it back. Sloan!" I shouted.