Happy Kid! by Gail Gauthier Read Free Book Online Page B

lots of time to worry about where I would actually eat. I pulled the first two things I could find that wouldn’t damage my braces onto my tray, paid for them, and started looking for a table.
    The cafeteria was crawling with desperate kids trying to find people to eat with. I passed the first row of tables. No one I knew. I passed the second row of tables. Full of new sixth-graders.
    When I got to the third row, I noticed that there was a table way at the back of the room with only three people. One of them was Jake Rogers. He was sitting with a couple of eighth-graders—Brian Coxmore, who is sixteen years old and still in eighth grade, and Kenny Ferris, whose older brother is in jail. Kenny is expected to follow him there soon.
    I had to find a table before I got back to them. I had to find a table before Jake saw me.
    I moved closer and closer to the point where Jake’s Kyle Radar would pick me up. Once he sucked me into eating lunch with him, my future would be crystal clear. No one would ever believe that I wasn’t one of Jake Rogers’s badass friends. My hands were sweating so badly, I could feel my Styrofoam tray dissolving from the moisture. My head swung from side to side as I scanned the cafeteria, looking for a friendly face near a free chair. Or even just a free chair.
    I was thinking that it would be a perfect time for a fire drill when I saw Luke. And there, at the end of his table, was an empty chair. I held my breath while I slid between seats and kept my face turned away from Jake, just in case he tried to signal to me. I didn’t ask if the free seat was taken, I didn’t wait to be invited, I just dumped my tray on the table and collapsed onto the chair.
    â€œYou guys have got to let me sit here,” I pleaded. “Otherwise I’m going to get stuck sitting with Jake and those guys he hangs out with. He’s already in two of my classes, and he follows me in the hall. I can’t get away from him.”
    â€œOh, Kyle, man, having Jake like you is almost as bad as having him not like you,” Luke said, sounding pretty sympathetic when you consider that he’d had to sit with Jake in art because of me.
    â€œIt’s worse,” I insisted. “At least if Jake pounds on you on your way to the buses after school, you might get some pity. Nobody pities Jake’s friends.”
    â€œMost people are afraid of Jake’s friends,” a guy named Ted added.
    I looked around the table. In addition to Luke and Ted, who I recognized from my two months in Boy Scouts, there was someone who’d been in a study hall with me last year, plus two guys I didn’t know. None of them acted as if they were thrilled to see me, but they didn’t seem to think I was going to grab a plastic knife off someone’s tray and use it on them, either.
    â€œJake has already been sent to the office today. He’s in my English class,” Luke explained. “Mrs. Hooker was walking up the aisle, and Jake waits until she’s right next to him and then he . . . and then he . . . farts! It sounded just like a dog howling! A wolf! Mrs. Hooker turns to him with this really mad look on her face, and she starts to say something, but Jake holds up his hands and says, ‘It’s okay, Mrs. Hooker. I’ll take the blame for you. I don’t mind.’ So she sends him to the principal!”
    I was laughing around my french fries, a safe item for me to eat because I can stick them way back and chew them where they won’t make a disgusting mess all over the front of my braces.
    â€œWhat do you think he said when Mr. Alldredge asked why Hooker sent him there?” Luke gasped, hardly able to talk, he was laughing so hard. “She farted?”
    â€œRemember when we were kids and we took swimming lessons with Jake and he farted in the pool?” I asked.
    â€œThere’s a memory that definitely makes me glad I decided not to take swimming lessons