Green by Sam Graham-Felsen

Author:Sam Graham-Felsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

  CHAPTER 7

Saved

It’s been a week since the test and Mar’s icing me worse than ever. He won’t even let me sit with him on the bus anymore, and Kev sits in the middle with one of his b-ball teammates now, which means I’m back on the White Bitch Bench, by myself. When you’re by yourself, the WBB is a flashing, fluorescent FUCK WITH ME sign.

I’m reading The Source, trying to get my mind off the test, when Angel sneaks up behind me, snatches the mag out of my hands, rolls it up, and smacks me upside the head with it. He knows I won’t hit him back, so he just stands there, with his pretty-boy smile, chomping a wad of smelly green-apple gum. When I try to grab it back, he holds it out of reach, tears out a page, balls it up, and pegs it at my face. He gets bored after a few pages and Frisbees the magazine back to me.

“You need to slap that retahd,” says Vicki, the big white girl with braces, the only person who still talks to me on the bus.

“I think he might be a psychopath,” I say.

“Nah,” she says. “Just retahded. He got kept back, you know. He was in my math class. Every time the teacher asked him to do a problem on the blackboard, he’d try to make a joke—like draw a picture or something. Mr. Pimanti got fed up and, like, forced him to try to answer for real, and Angel just stood there with the chalk like a ’tahd. He got sent to remedial and he was all embarrassed, too. Looked like he was gonna cry. You should definitely slap him. If you want, I’ll slap him for you.”

“Thanks,” I say. “I can slap him myself.”

—

THE ONLY THING keeping me going right now is Carmen. Even though she’s changed her steez a lot since the school year started—swapped the glasses for contacts, stopped sporting librarian gear, even started throwing lipstick on—there’s still something about her that feels pure to me. Sitting next to her, I feel like I’m in a clean corner of a garbage world. Part of it’s how quiet she is. Everyone else at the King’s always hollering, snapping, stepping, but she never talks, and when she does it’s in a whisper. I think she might be embarrassed of her accent. I overheard her tell someone she only came here from the Dominican three years ago. She said she learned English on her own, watching Saturday morning cartoons. You realize how smart you’ve gotta be to learn English from cartoons? I’ve been studying Spanish with certified teachers for four years and I can barely say Me llamo Dave. I’ve peeped her grades over her shoulder, too—she gets A’s on all her assignments. Still, she never raises her hand in class, and when teachers call on her she shrugs even though she obviously knows the answers.

We’ve been presenting our science projects this week, and today Carmen’s up.

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