33 Minutes Read online

  Contents

  11:41 a.m.

  11:45

  11:49

  11:53

  11:56

  11:59

  12:03 p.m.

  12:05

  12:08

  12:16:37 to 12:16:46

  12:18

  12:21

  12:25

  12:28

  12:33

  12:39

  12:46

  12:54

  1:00

  1:11

  1:19

  1:23

  1:15:52 to 1:15:59

  1:16

  To Noam

  Much Thanks To:

  • Dan Shere, Joey Garfield, and Josh Lewis, for ideas and encouragement.

  • The Dawes Boys-to-Men Book Club, for savvy feedback and an excuse to eat a Morgan Sturtz Special.

  • My impossibly wonderful daughters, Ariel and Noam, for expert commentary and the desire to write for the not-yet-adults of this world.

  • Simon Lipskar, who, even though this isn’t your book, helped me see it needed some last-minute surgery.

  • The always reliable and absurdly ­knowledgeable Daniel Lazar, for ushering me into the world of children’s literature and for making this book ­better in endless ways big and small.

  • The deserving-of-a-cape-and-chest-logo-all-her-own Liesa Abrams, for giving this book a home, understanding exactly what it still needed, and making me want this to be just the first of many, many books we work on together.

  • Taal, for making it so I can write in the first place.

  11:41 a.m.

  “Think about this: Had the British not won the French and Indian War,” Mr. Griegs says, “we’d all be speaking French right now.”

  Fact: I am in social studies.

  My hand goes up. I’m not sure I want my hand to be up, but too late, it’s up.

  Fact: I am the smartest person in social studies (although some people would say that’s only my opinion).

  Sometimes Mr. Griegs ignores me, because I have this “nasty habit of getting us off topic.” But he’s feeling generous today. He tosses a piece of chalk from one hand to the other, catches it, and points at me. “Hmm. Sam Lewis wants to make a contribution. Well, out with it.”

  I try to act like I don’t know the answer to my question. “Well, um, do you really think, Mr. Griegs, that we’d be here at all right now if they hadn’t won?”

  Fact: Laughter.

  Mr. Griegs, all eleven feet of him, considers this for a moment as he chews on his mustache. Then he crosses his arms. “Explain, Lewis.”

  Interested heads are turning toward me, because this is what happens when you’re me and you sit in the back of class and talk a lot and sometimes annoy the teacher. “Well, there is a story called ‘A Sound of Thunder’ that I read because my dad thought I’d like science fiction, which I sort of do.” Mr. Griegs and his mustache make his “please get to the point” face, which involves him pausing his mustache snack while rolling his eyes and shaking his head, so I try to hurry up. “A group of hunters go back in time, and one of them accidentally steps on a butterfly—that’s the only thing he does—and when he gets back, all sorts of things have changed, like who the president is, just because of that one butterfly. This would be much more than a butterfly, don’t you think?”

  Mr. Griegs starts munching on his mustache again, uncrosses his arms, and puts the chalk in his pocket, where he’ll probably forget it. Some days by the end of class he’s got four or five pieces in there. “Yes. Probably. So?”

  Opinion: Mr. Griegs thinks the most important thing he can teach us is to tell the difference between facts and opinions. He often says things like, “That’s just your opinion” and “It is an indisputable fact that. . . .” He gets very excited whenever he catches one of us mistaking an opinion for a fact. He points his finger at the offender (his long arm reaching halfway across the classroom), beams like a mad scientist, and says, “Aha!” Mr. Griegs is hardly my favorite teacher—in fact, he pretty much stinks—but sorting things between fact and opinion can make boring classes less boring (and there are plenty of those here), so I guess he’s not all bad.

  “So then, I don’t know, maybe we wouldn’t be sitting here right now. Maybe there wouldn’t even be social studies then.”

  Fact: Most of the class is now giggling and/or exchanging high fives.

  “Keep it down.” Mr. Griegs takes a couple long, long steps toward us as he raises his voice. “That’s enough.” He looks right at me, not very pleased. “Okay, Lewis. I get it. Very clever. How’s this? It was a pretty”—he pauses, nibbles on his facial hair, and scrunches up his face—“decisive war.”

  “Okay,” I say, shrugging my shoulders and regretting that I put my hand up in the first place.

  Mr. Griegs’s eyes light up all of a sudden. “And I’m sure, Lewis, that you know that this decisive war started over the meeting of the”—he snaps his fingers and brings his lips together, pretending not to remember something—“what were the names of those two rivers again?”

  I straighten up a bit in my chair. “The Allegheny and the Monongahela?”

  Mr. Griegs turns his back to the class, takes a couple slow steps toward the board, but then twists around quickly, with a scary smile on his face. “And those two rivers, Lewis, in what city do they meet?”

  I grip my pencil tightly and focus on his mustache. “Uh . . .” Mr. Griegs’s smile continues to grow, because he definitely never told us this. Lucky for me, maybe, my parents have a road atlas in the back of their car, which I like to study sometimes. “Pittsburgh?”

  Mr. Griegs’s face is way more red than it was a minute ago, but he won’t give up. “And what river do those two rivers form?” He’s smiling again, because he’s foolish enough to think he’s about to humiliate me, even though it’s April 12th, meaning he’s been my teacher for eight months already, meaning he should know better by now. “Well, you do know which river they form, don’t you, Lewis?”

  I really don’t want to do this to Mr. Griegs, since it will only make him want to humiliate me more later on, but what choice do I have? “The Ohio River,” I say sort of quietly, “Mr. Griegs.”

  I’d never tell this to anyone or anything, but it might be a fact that I am actually the smartest person in my school, though, obviously, some people would say that this, too, is only my opinion.

  Fact: Scattered giggling.

  Not that being smart is always such a good thing.

  Mr. Griegs’s whole face (his eyes, nose, mustache, and mouth) shrink down into an angry dot. Sometimes I wonder if his face isn’t made out of rubber, because a normal person’s face can’t do half the things his does.

  I look over at Amy Takahara, who smiles at me a little.

  I don’t know if I would call us friends exactly, but I will say that whenever she smiles at me, or even near me, especially lately, my stomach acts like I’m at the top of a giant roller coaster. She’s “the new girl,” or at least was at the beginning of the school year. I would guess that she has never spelled a word wrong in her entire life—plus, she has perfect ­penmanship. Or pengirlship.

  One day back in October, Mr. Griegs wrote “bucaneer” on the board, and then I heard Amy start squirming, even though she normally sits completely still. I looked over and saw her flipping quickly to the back of her notebook, where she wrote, October 17th: bucaneer, buccaneer. This page is now about ninety words long, because Mr. Griegs isn’t a particularly talented speller. Around Thanksgiving, I passed her a note that said, Why don’t you correct him? Her eyes got quite large when she rea
d it. I got a note back that said, NO WAY!!!! She underlined “no” about nine times.

  Not that I’m a big fan of passing notes these days.

  There is still some giggling coming from the front of the class, where Morgan Sturtz sits. I think I can make out his laugh, which comes from the bottom of his chest and sounds like “huh-huh, huh-huh, huh-huh.” But I can’t be sure, because he sits exactly three seats in front of me, because we used to talk too much during class at the beginning of the year, so Mr. Griegs moved Morgan. He’s not a very good speller, especially when it comes to vowels.

  Opinion: The problem with the whole fact/opinion model is that it isn’t always so simple.

  Because when Morgan Sturtz said I was a “big jerk” yesterday, well, that was clearly just an opinion. But when the three other people there definitely agreed, then at what point does that become a fact?

  Mr. Griegs recovers from his “decisive” defeat at the meeting of history and geography (ha-ha, aren’t I funny?) by reminding us who’s in charge and making everyone hate me at the same time: “Fine. Next Monday’s test will now be this Friday.”

  Fact: Most of the class says, “Ugh.”

  Opinion (maybe): I am going to get my butt kicked in exactly 33 minutes.

  It is hard to say whether a statement about the future is a fact or an opinion. It’s obviously not a fact, because it hasn’t happened yet. But then think about this: Yesterday Morgan Sturtz told me, to my face and with three witnesses nearby, “I am totally going to kick your butt tomorrow at recess.” His face was so red when he told me this that I was almost worried about him (and not just about myself and my butt).

  Morgan is (fact) ten inches taller and forty pounds heavier than me, not to mention the best athlete in the school (two-thirds fact, one-third opinion). Plus, I’m the worst athlete I know (fact, not opinion, trust me). Plus, I know Morgan very well, because we (fact) used to be best friends, so I know (confidently held opinion) he wouldn’t make a threat like this if he didn’t plan to carry it out.

  Then isn’t his kicking my butt pretty much already a fact?

  Fact: The bell is ringing.

  32 minutes.

  11:45

  Walking alone through the somewhat clean halls of Wagner Middle School, even when I have just over a half hour to live, helps me gather my thoughts.

  For instance:

  Why would anyone even say “kick your butt”? Yesterday evening, not long after Morgan screamed out his plan to kick mine (I was already on my bike, pedaling ten times faster than normal), I searched for some sort of explanation on the Internet. Only I came up empty. But I really did want to find out where this phrase first came from, because when a person screams something like, “Go ahead, Sam, run away. Doesn’t matter, because I am totally going to kick your butt tomorrow at recess. I’m serious!” this person is actually saying, Sam, I am going to hurt you very badly.

  And so if that’s what he meant, then “kick your butt” is a weirdly nice way of putting it. Because if you knew someone was going to kick you some place, would you not hope for that place to be your butt? The butt is, after all, the most padded location anywhere on your entire body. Consider other places and how much less you’d like them to be kicked: hand, shin, armpit, stomach, face, and, uh, a certain very sensitive region.

  I really, really hope there is no kicking of my certain very sensitive region.

  The walls of our fine hallways are half covered with posters, because this is someone’s idea of interior decoration. I pass one that looks like this:

  The halls are filled with hundreds of my fellow Wagner Middle School Vikings. Many of them are looking at me with unusual interest, elbowing each other, whispering, and, all in all, having fun at my expense.

  Because there are no secrets in middle school when it comes to the future kicking of butts.

  But here’s the thing about that STOPS poster: Morgan isn’t a bully. He has not kicked any other butts in the time I have known him. No, he’s simply very, very, very mad at me. And maybe he should be. This is different from bullying, which, according to Principal Benson (a few months back he called a mandatory nine-hour “Say No to Bullying!” assembly), is a stronger person (the bully) taking advantage of a weaker person (the bullied) over and over.

  I can’t rule out the possibility that Principal Benson forcing a marathon “Say No to Bullying!” assembly on us is an example of bullying. Because if giving him my lunch money would have made him stop blabbering, I would have happily emptied my pockets.

  Meet my locker: 28-13-21. Open says me. Hello and welcome to the smell of all the lunches I’ve ever stored here, especially the one and only egg salad sandwich I ever allowed my somewhat concerned mother to pack into my lunch box. And because that’s not bad enough on this already bad day, just two lockers down is the one belonging to Chris ­Tripadero, the jerk partially responsible for the ­transformation of ­Morgan from my best friend to someone who will, very soon, kick my butt or, more likely, punch my face.

  Chris moved to our neighborhood a couple summers ago. I remember, because a few days before the start of sixth grade there was a knock on our front door, so I went to see who it was. There was Chris, playing with his iPod Touch, and his dad, Mr. Tripadero, wearing a fancy suit even though it was Saturday.

  “Hello, I’m Bob Tripadero,” his dad said with his hand sticking out toward me, “and this is my son, Christopher.”

  “Hi, I’m Sam,” I said, shaking his hand and looking over at Chris, who didn’t even look up from his game.

  “Sam”—Mr. Tripadero grinned like he was trying to sell me something—“I was hoping to speak to your mother or father. I don’t suppose either of them is home?” Next thing I knew, they were in our kitchen.

  Turns out that Chris was going to be attending Wagner too, only Mr. Tripadero leaves for work really early every day and is actually out of town a lot, so Mr. Tripadero wanted to know, “I was wondering if it might be possible for me to drop off Christopher at your house each morning, so that he and your son [he probably already forgot my name] could walk to school together?”

  “Of course,” my mom said with a friendly smile, offering Mr. Tripadero coffee and Chris some cookies. And sure enough, thanks to her generosity, Chris was dropped off on our doorstep at 7:15 a.m. two days later.

  At first it wasn’t so bad. He was the new kid, so I could explain stuff to him and he’d almost listen (even though we were both new at Wagner, so I didn’t really know any more about this place than he did).

  “That’s Capital Drugs,” I told him that first Monday on the way to school. “It’s closer than QuikPik over on Middlebelt. But they don’t like kids because they always think we’re just trying to shoplift stuff. Plus, candy bars are cheaper at QuikPik.”

  “Whatever,” Chris said, almost laughing. “I never get caught.”

  Chris had about a thousand games on his iPod—plus, he usually gave me part of the breakfast he brought with him, which most of the time was two packets of Pop-Tarts, the super junky kind my parents never let me have.

  Soon we were kind of friends, even if he didn’t talk too much and showed up half the time without a backpack, wearing the same shirt he had on the day before. But then I made the mistake of inviting him over one day when Morgan was coming over too. Because then they became friends, which was okay at first, because at least we were all three friends. Plus, I was better friends with both of them than they were with each other.

  But then that all changed. All of it.

  “Lew [because he calls me, or used to call me, Lew], we should totally start hanging out at Chris’s house,” Morgan told me almost a month later while we were watching stupid videos on YouTube. “That place is sweet.”

  “You’ve been to Chris’s house?” I asked while some guy who was trying to do a flip landed on his head and almost knocked himself out.

  �
��Yeah,” Morgan said, cracking up at the poor guy on the screen. “It’s huge inside. Like a mansion or something. I swear.”

  “When were you at his house?” I still hadn’t been there.

  “Last Sunday,” Morgan said, like it was no big deal. “Oh, wait.” He started typing something. “Have you ever seen the one where the guy trips into his pool? It’s hilarious!”

  The whole thing looks something like this:

  Chris sees me now, even though I’m trying to remove my lunch silently while hiding my head behind the open locker door. But lockers clank and jangle, because schools are where everything is stupid. He smiles at me. And even though his gruesome smirk has nothing in common with Amy ­Takahara’s magical smile of four minutes ago except for the word “smile,” my stomach again does something it shouldn’t.

  “Hi, Sa-am,” Chris says, like he’s trying out for a job at a haunted house.

  Chris’s disastrous version of a family has money. His house has three stories, a spiral staircase, an indoor pool, a sauna, and a pinball machine—but for whatever reasons, the necessary funds have yet to be gathered for Chris’s desperately needed braces. His teeth look like they were put in his mouth by a four-year-old. Compare this to Amy’s TV-ready pearly whites.

  Chris was one of the witnesses to Morgan’s threat. In fact, it all happened on Chris’s driveway, because sometime last spring his house became our unofficial hangout spot. As usual, there wasn’t an adult in sight, because Mr. Tripadero is a “consultant” and spends most of his time in Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines (this according to his dangerous son, who definitely cannot be trusted). I’m guessing Mr. Tripadero is really an international spy or a successful criminal. All I know for sure is that a lot of the time Chris is the only person in his house, since his mother lives in New Jersey and his older sister has already escaped to college.

  I’d tell my parents all this if they actually cared. But what can I do, since they like to say, “As long as you keep your grades up, you can be as independent as you want”? So then what? I need to act stupid for them to care about me?