Guy Wire by Sarah Weeks Read Free Book Online

conversation we’d had about the names of the streets in the neighborhood. That was pretty funny. Blue-Footed Boobie Boulevard. I laughed right out loud remembering that. And I thought about the way he’d belched the alphabet too. How cool was that? I smiled as I remembered something else. Fennimore Adams wanted to give me a nickname. Guy Wire. I decided to tell him the next day that I liked that name just fine.

Chapter Nine
    I heard Kevin Brudhauser’s obnoxious booming voice as I entered the school yard the next morning.
    “Hey, look, everybody. The Southern Fried Chicken’s been plucked!” he shouted.
    I knew this meant that Fennimore had arrived ahead of me. I hurried to find him and help him out. He was sitting on a bench by the basketball courts.
    “Hey,” I said. “How you doing?”
    “ Bruck, bruck, bruck , the bird’s been plucked!” Kevin taunted Fennimore from the other side of the court.
    “How am I doing?” Fennimore asked bitterly. “Oh, just swell.”
    Then he got up and walked away. So much for thinking things were going to be okay between us. He was just as mad today as he had been the day before.
    All day Fennimore avoided me. I tried sitting with him at lunch, but he got up and moved as soon as I sat down. I wrote him a note and passed it to him during science, but he tossed it in the trash without even reading it. Kevin taunted and teased him all day, and I’m not sure who felt worse about it, Fennimore or me.
    That afternoon, when I got home, my mother asked about how it had gone.
    “He hates me more than ever, thanks to you.”
    “I don’t see what the problem is. Mrs. Adams told me she loves the haircut, so he certainly didn’t get in trouble at home.”
    “Mom, it doesn’t matter what his mother thinks. Don’t you get it? Kids made fun of him all day.”
    “Well, I think he looks—”
    “If you say ‘cute as a button’ one more time, I’m going to start screaming.”
    I took my backpack upstairs and spent the next hour doing homework. At four o’clock I couldn’t concentrate anymore. I decided to go over to Fennimore’s. I knew he lived on Robin Street, so I rode my bike the two blocks over and started looking for his house. Finally I spotted him sitting on his front stoop, bouncing a tennis ball on the steps. When he caught sight of me, he got up and started to go inside.
    “Wait!” I cried, jumping off my bike and running across his yard. “I’m sorry, Fennimore, I’m really sorry about your hair. You’ve got to believe me when I say I had no idea my mother was going to botch it so badly. Let me make it up to you.”
    He stopped with his hand on the doorknob.
    “How are you going to do that?”
    “Well, I sort of thought of a plan.”
    “I’m listening,” he said.
    “You could pretend to be sick and stay home until it grows back,” I suggested. “I could bring you the homework so you wouldn’t get behind.”
    “That’s lame,” he said. “Everybody’s already seen my hair. Don’t you think they’d figure out why I wasn’t coming to school?”
    “I guess so,” I said. “But there has to be something we can do.”
    “We don’t have to do anything,” he said.
    He went inside, slamming the door behind him.
    I rode home and went straight to my room. I pulled out a sheet of paper and a pencil and began to think hard. There had to be something I could do to fix things up with Fennimore. I came up with a few possibilities.
    The first idea I had was to sneak into Kevin Brudhauser’s house at night and shave his head. The plan was appealing, but there were some obvious problems with it. One, I wasn’t allowed to go out alone after dark.Two, Kevin lives on the other side of town, so my mother would have to drive me and wait while I cut off his hair.
    I moved on to Plan B. Pretend to be the principal. Call up Mrs. Brudhauser and tell her Kevin was being suspended for a month. That would give Fennimore’s hair time to grow back. I liked this plan a