Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser Read Free Book Online Page B

got their awards? There would be a massacre.
    â€” Dustin Williams

Tenth Grade
    We moved to Middletown at the end of ninth grade, so tenth grade was my first year here. It’s so different from my old school. You expect it to be different, but what surprised me was the way it was different. It’s just a lot more rigid here. It’s like, are you in the popular crowd or not? There was a popular crowd at my old school, too, but they were still nice to most people. They didn’t act like if you weren’t one of them you didn’t deserve to exist.
    I remember coming home after the first week and telling my mom I didn’t like it.Some of the kids just weren’t nice at all. They’d push and curse in the hall, and it didn’t seem like any of the teachers really went out of their way to stop it. Mom said to lie low. I’ve always been pretty good at making friends, and she knew I’d find some at Middletown High. She said I only had three years to go. I remember thinking it sounded like an eternity.
    â€”Chelsea Baker, a transfer student to Middletown High School

    â€œThere has never . . . been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. . . . We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed [children] to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.’”
    â€”Prof. William Damon, Stanford University, New York Times , 10/3/99

    One thing I don’t think a lot of people on the outside realize is how incredibly hard a football team trains. The hours of practice on the weekdays and weekends. Learning forty or fifty plays in your playbook, plus each week studying the films of the team you’re facing that Friday night. On top of that you’ve got schoolwork. And the weight and strength training you have to do on your own just to survive out there. The pressure is huge, and to be honest, there are guys who . . . well, the only way they have to blow off steam is fighting.
    â€” Dustin Williams
    I always felt Brendan and I had a special connection, even after the point, around the beginning of tenth grade, when we didn’t talk much anymore. Maybe it went back to seventh grade, when we were both new. Maybe it was because we were both quote, unquote “outcasts.” Anyway, you know how Brendan always seemed to attract trouble. There was just something about him. Every slight, real or imagined, made his fur go up. And he couldn’t back down. I mean, it wasn’t like he was trying to prove how tough he was. I really think there was something in him. He was helpless to resist it. Even when he was scared silly, he had to stand up to it.
    â€”Emily Kirsch
    A lot of what they’re saying about the football players is a load of crap. So what if we wore our jerseys to school on game days? All we were doing was trying to get some school spirit going. I’ve got news for you. You’re out there on the field banging heads with some 220-pound lineman for four quarters, youneed some support from the stands. But it wasn’t like it was a rule. If you didn’t want to have school spirit, that was your business. But some of those guys went further than that. It was like they wanted to destroy school spirit.
    â€” Sam Flach
    It’s important that you look at this realistically. The issue of school spirit is certainly a factor in the tensions between these two groups of kids, but you have to believe it’s been blown out of proportion. You’re not going to have cheerleaders for the chess team. You’re not going to fill the bleachers with fans who cheer when a kid from Middletown takes his opponent’s rook. Even the chess players don’t want that. Of course we want to produce scholars and we take pride in our National Honor Society members. But that’s a matter of school pride, and it’s different from school spirit.
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