B005N8ZFUO EBOK by David Lubar Read Free Book Online

Mr. Acropolis,” Torchie said, pointing to a man standing in the middle of the floor. The guy looked like someone who used to lift weights but had given up exercise a year or two ago. His muscles were still there, but they were starting to drip.
    I checked around the gym to see what we were going to play. There weren’t any nets up, so it wouldn’t be volleyball, and there weren’t any mats, so I figured we wouldn’t be wrestling.
    Mr. Acropolis blew his whistle, then said, “Have a seat, class.”
    Everyone dropped to the floor. I figured he was going to give us some sort of talk. Maybe he’d roll out a chalkboard and teach us football plays.
    I wasn’t even close.
    “Now breathe slowly and empty your minds,” he said. Then he stopped talking while we breathed slowly and tried to empty our minds. Mine kept filling up at first, but that was sort of cool, too, since I passed a good chunk of time imagining what I could do to Bloodbath if I had a laser cannon. I saved a couple of shots for Mr. Parsons, too.
    “This is gym?” I whispered to Torchie after I got tired of slicing Bloodbath into convenient pieces for easy storage.
    “Yeah,” he whispered back. “Kind of weird, but we get to do what we want for the last fifteen minutes.”
    Actually, I hated to admit it but the empty-mind thing was sort of relaxing once I got the hang of it. Of course, Flying Dan didn’t stay still for long, and a couple of the others didn’t seem to enjoy sitting in one place. Every five minutes or so, someone would make a farting noise. A couple of kids would laugh and Mr. Acropolis would blow his whistle. Then things would settle down for a bit. Most of the farts were fake, at least, though Hindenburg let one loose that made everybody rush to the other side of the room. Bloodbath and his friends horsed around the whole time, but the teacher didn’t seem to care.
    As we were finishing up, Mr. Acropolis went around telling all of us what a great job we’d done. Then he asked, “What do you want to play?”
    A bunch of kids shouted, “Dodge ball!”
    That was fine with me. I liked dodge ball. There’s a wonderful satisfaction in smacking someone nice and hard with a fairly harmless ball. Of course, it’s no fun getting smacked. But that wasn’t a big problem for me. I managed to see most of the hard throws before they could hit me, and I didn’t do too badly during the first game. I also made sure I was on the same side as Bloodbath. As I expected,
he really liked to aim for the head, even though Mr. Acropolis kept telling everyone not to.
    I got eliminated early in the second game, so I had to stand on the side of the gym and watch. Torchie was next to me. He was the first one to get out in both games. It’s like he was a ball magnet. I noticed one player on the other team was really good at dodging. “Who’s that?” I asked Torchie, pointing to a tall, skinny kid who didn’t seem to ever get hit.
    “That’s Flinch,” he said. “He’s really good at dodge ball, but he’s pretty jumpy. He usually eats with us, but he went home for the weekend.”
    I watched Flinch. Every once in a while, you run across a true artist. I’d known one kid, Stevie Manetti, who made the best card houses I’d ever seen. He could pile up three or four decks of cards into these great castles. Nobody else I knew even came close. And there was this girl down the block from me—she could climb trees like she was born in the woods. And, of course, I’d run across kids who did other stuff like paint or dance or play the piano.
    Those kids were true artists.
    So was Flinch. He was the best dodge ball player I’d ever seen. He almost always managed to get out of the way. Even after the rest of his team was blasted off the floor, he kept going. One ball—no problem. Two at once—piece of cake. Even three. Flinch jumped and twisted and ducked. The balls shot past and smacked into the wall behind him. The cool thing was that he had his hair in