“Hey! What do you have there, Ferraro?” Pierce Stone called down the row of boys.
“A… a stuffed pepper,” I said, trying to hide the vegetable behind my yellow giant.
“I’m surprised it didn’t get lost in your lunchbox. That thing is like a school bus!”
Uproar.
I looked to see if Andrius was eating something weird, something from Lithuania, but he was biting into a plain bagel with cream cheese—the excess spread dotted the tip of his nose. He had learned the hard way after Pierce Stone told him his cepelinai dumpling with sour cream sauce “looks like it has cum all over it.” I didn’t even know what “cum” was, but Pierce Stone told us it’s what his brother did to girls in middle school. “He cums them.” He would say, “Trevor is so cool. He always has girls in the basement and he cums them.”
Tony never had girls in our basement. He was only twelve, but I wondered if he’d ever cummed with a girl. When do you start to cum with girls? I wanted to ask Pierce Stone, but I stopped myself. I didn’t want to look stupid.
“I like your lunchbox, Victor,” Michaela said, catching me off guard.
“Yeah. Okay. Thanks.” My face turned as red as the bell pepper as I slouched behind my school bus lunchbox.
At recess we played football. I was the best one, though I was never picked first. The Barriston twins, Chase and Miles, were usually the captains. If Chase picked first, he chose Paxton Shaffer. If Miles picked first, he chose Pierce Stone. If I was on Pierce Stone’s team I never played quarterback.
When I played in the backyard with Tony and George and Karl, Tony would always play quarterback. Tony loved Dan Marino and the Miami Dolphins. Everything Tony had was teal or orange or a combination of the two. My dad didn’t like the Miami Dolphins. He had season tickets to the Jets, but he bought Tony Dan Marino jerseys and posters and anything else he wanted because Marino was Italian. But I liked the players who were so fast that no one could touch them, so fast that the white lines on the field blurred beneath their feet as they cut and evaded their opponents. I liked Deion Sanders and wanted to play just like him. One time I even snuck a do-rag in my backpack and wore it at recess. Pierce Stone told Mrs. Lydell, who told me to take it off. “We don’t wear that here,” she said. I didn’t understand the problem. I was outside, hats were allowed outside, but she made me take it off anyway. Pierce Stone didn’t care about the do-rag; he was upset that I scored a touchdown on Paxton’s opening kickoff and cut right in front of him, which made him fall and dirty his corduroys. And right before I reached the end zone, I put my hand behind my head and “high-stepped” the last few feet, just like Deion.
Saturday came and I was supposed to play kickball with Karl, Paxton, Lenny, and Andrius, but Tony was with us that weekend, so I wanted to stay with him and play video games instead. He had no desire to play kickball with us, so my dad brought him to my cousins’ house in Livingston, a town with even more Jews than ours. My dad insisted that I go play kickball and that I would see Tony when we went for pizza later that night. The thing was, we weren’t going to play kickball at all. When Karl and I got to the field behind the school, Paxton and the other guys were waiting behind the chain-link fence with flashlights. They didn’t even have a ball!
I shouldn’t’ve believed Paxton anyway. He was always lying. He called them “white lies,” as if that made them any better. “You can’t get in trouble for white lying,” he would say. For show-and-tell, he brought in a shark-tooth necklace and said his dad caught the shark himself, pulled it onto their boat, and shot it with a gun. He said his dad pulled the tooth out of the shark’s mouth and gave it to him right there on the boat, all bloody and gray. I asked my mother and she said the Shaffers went to the Cayman Islands last December and that they probably bought the necklace in a souvenir shop. She also said the Shaffers don’t have a boat. Paxton was always lying and scheming like that; he was like Tom Sawyer in a cardigan.
“Hey, where’s the ball? How the crap are we going to play without a ball?” asked Karl, who took off his shirt the second my father pulled away in the station wagon. Karl didn’t like to wear shirts or shoes. My mom would watch from the kitchen window as shoeless and shirtless Karl ran laps around the Geigers’ house, their babysitter Anita chasing a few steps behind.
“We’re not playing kickball!” shouted a voice from a distance. A shock shot down my spine and into my pants. It couldn’t be, no way, it just… it couldn’t be. And when I turned around I saw Pierce Stone advancing on us, the sunlight dancing off his bright white smile. “You bozos didn’t know? We’re going to Hell.”
I turned to Paxton with all the rage of Zeus.
“What the crap do you mean, ‘going to Hell’?” asked Karl as he sat in the gold sand and undid his shoes. Karl wasn’t intimidated by Pierce Stone; he wasn’t intimidated by anybody.
“Psshh, jeez, you don’t know? H-E-L-L? It’s back there,” he said, pointing to the woods. “Everyone knows that. I bet even Ferraro knows that and he can’t even read!”
“I can read,” I said, but Pierce Stone didn’t hear me.
“I don’t even know why you invited these guys, Paxton. They’re just going to hold us back.”
I wanted to punch Paxton right in the face. My father told me to never
