It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC by Dean Ing Read Free Book Online

and polishing each detail until it suited him to perfection. Finally in sight of home, he had convinced himself that superior Hardin skill, and not luck, was the secret of his triumph.
    He did not alter his opinion until he felt the thump of Ray Kinney’s mottled mouse-brown egg, hurled from behind the Kinney hedge, against the back of his head.

CHAPTER 4:
    CHARLIE’S HIGHWAY
    In the next few days, the egg-warriors learned that it had been a mistake to bring war to school. Roy had no classes with the bigger boys and merely kept a wary eye peeled at lunchtime. The others soon developed headaches from frequent dartings of the head, and a whole-body flinch at every sudden move by some other student. Even then, Charlie was grazed between classes by something that might once have been most of an egg—though after being molded into a missile between Aaron’s hands it looked more like a blob of paint-flecked cement—and the same day, Aaron’s locker door took a direct hit as he was about to close it.
    Aaron didn’t see the marksman, but an hour later, when called with Charlie to the principal’s office by school loudspeakers, he soon got a broad hint. From fifty feet away they saw through the office doorway that someone sat almost hidden across from Principal Frost, but they recognized a familiar pair of rundown cowboy boots.
    “Whad you do,” Charlie asked softly, “tell on him?”
    Aaron, his lips barely moving: “Nah. He’d just tell back. And then get me later.”
    Charlie was nodding agreement as they stopped in the doorway. “We were s’posed to come, Mr. Frost,” said Aaron as he locked eyes with a Jackie Rhett who looked as if all the meanness had dribbled out of him.
    “But we can come back later,” Charlie put in.
    “Ah, Fischer and Hardin. Right on time, boys,” said the principal, and swung around in his chair without rising. Mr. Frost was a small man of economical movements and eyes that shone with sly intelligence. It was rumored that his bow ties numbered in the millions. “An eyewitness tells me you young thugs have been terrorizing this poor lad with Easter eggs,” he said calmly. A flicker of his glance made it clear who that eyewitness probably was.
    “Not me,” said Aaron. “Ask anybody, Mr. Frost; it has to be somebody else.”
    Frost’s gaze flicked to Charlie who only said, “Nossir,” with a shrug that practically hid his head in his shirt.
    “But what am I to think when this innocent boy is so terrified of you that he throws eggs at your friends?” said Frost, still at his mildest.
    Charlie and Aaron lifted eyebrows at one another. “I dunno,” said Charlie, thinking of Roy. “What friend?”
    “Felice Gutierrez,” Frost replied, with a friendly nod toward Jackie.
    The other boys stared at Jackie as if he had begun singing opera in some dead language. Aaron managed to squeak, “Sir?”
    “Sixth grade, never talks, scared of everything,” said Charlie, and Aaron nodded. “What about her?”
    “She’s with the school nurse, getting boiled egg combed out of her hair,” said Frost. “It was her distinct impression that young Rhett hit her deliberately.”
    In an effort to make sense of it all, Charlie turned to Jackie. “What did she do to you?”
    “I was aiming to egg you back,” Jackie said abruptly, then added to the principal, “I don’t even know that greaser kid.”
    “But now she knows you,” Frost replied, resigned to such disrespect for Tex-Mex children from the likes of Jackie. “And I expect her brothers will, soon. They’re both in Austin High, you know.”
    The boys digested this in silence. Austin High School stood just across Twelfth Street, facing this very school. It did not take an honor student to figure out how quickly a pair of offended Latino teens could launch a search-and-destroy mission after school to find one short-legged Anglo egg thrower. “She didn’t mention me or him?” asked Aaron, indicating Charlie.
    Frost shook his head.