No Place by Todd Strasser Read Free Book Online Page A

away. Meanwhile, I thought of Meg’s family living in Dignityville because her mom and brother had to spend practically everything they earned on medicine for Mr. Fine. I used to think that life was like sports: Things were rarely fair. The other team cheated. Your best player got hurt. You threw a perfect strike and the ump called it a ball.
    But that’s a game, not life.
    In sports people don’t die because they can’t afford medicine. They don’t become homeless because a company goes out of business or moves jobs overseas.
    I gestured at the posters. “You really think marching’s gonna make a difference?”
    The ratty-haired kid looked surprised. “You don’t think protests changed the war in Vietnam or segregation in the South?”
    I couldn’t say. We may have studied those events in school, but those old protest movements were about as real to me as trigonometry. You learned what you needed to ace the test. And not for an instant did it feel like it had any actual meaning in your life.
    “If we don’t do something, it’s only going to get worse,” the kid said. “And it’s not the kind of thing one person can do. Marches show strength. They tell politicians that we have the numbers and the votes to change elections.”
    I was more than three years away from being able to drink legally, but only months from being able to vote. Sure, voting may have been way more important, but given the choice, I would have switched those two age requirements in a heartbeat.
    The kid was still waiting for me to respond.
    “Can I ask you something personal?” I said. “Why do you care? You homeless or something?”
    The kid gave me a long, curious look, then said, “No, I care . . . because I’m not homeless.”
    *  *  *
    It was one of those days when no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get away from things I didn’t want to think about. I’d signed up for government and politics because Noah said the teacher, Ms. Mitchell, graded you mostly on class participation and multiple-choice quizzes. She didn’t like reading student papers, which was perfect because I didn’t like writing them.
    Wearing a red tent dress and big hoop earrings, Ms. Mitchell waddled in and dropped into her chair. “All right, my little gremlins, today we start our unit on local government and politics,” she announced in her booming voice. “Pay attention because at the end of the unit each of you will give an oral report on a topic of local interest. So what’s going on around here? Do any of you ever look at the Median Buzz , or read that miserable excuse for a neighborhood newspaper? What are the issues?”
    Ben Phillips raised his hand. “Dignityville?”
    “All right, we’ll start there.” Ms. Mitchell gazed around. “I assume you’re all familiar with it?”
    Meg sat across the room and I glanced at her just in time to catch her peeking at me out of the corner of her eye. Then she seemed to go rigid and stare straight ahead. We hadn’t spoken since that day a few weeks before when we’d nearly gotten thrown out of the library, and I felt a little bad about that. Of course, she didn’t know about the grief Talia had given me for laughing with another girl.
    “Okay, for those of you who’ve been hiding under rocks,Mayor George and the town council decided a while back to create a tent city in Osborne Park to house the homeless,” Ms. Mitchell explained. “If you’ve been in town you can’t miss it. Does anyone know why they decided to do that?”
    Susan Barrow raised her hand. “To save money.”
    “How would a tent city save money?” Ms. Mitchell asked.
    “Because they’d all be in one place?” Susan guessed.
    “Right,” said Ms. Mitchell. “Just because people are homeless doesn’t mean they don’t deserve the same services as the rest of us, whether that’s sanitation, or medical care, or public transportation. And given the financial problems towns and cities are facing these days, I don’t