The Fort by Gordon Korman

Author:Gordon Korman [Korman, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2022-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t go to school much anymore. They’ve got nothing to offer me.

Trigonometry, for instance. Sine. Tangent. Cosecant. Garbage. What did that ever solve? When your mother and father decide that getting high is more important than being parents, the answer isn’t in any math book.

Social studies was pretty good. I learned some life lessons there. We were studying the worst tyrants in history—Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong. Trust me, those dictators could take a back seat to my grandmother. Man, does she hate me! It’s like she blames me for every bad thing Mom and Dad ever did. But since she can’t hold me responsible for them ending up in rehab and worse, she nitpicks every single thing about me. My grades are terrible; why don’t I get a haircut?; I dress like a juvenile delinquent; I’m rude and disrespectful; my grammar is lousy; I set an awful example for my kid brother, Evan.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful to Grandma and Grandpa for taking us in after Mom and Dad dropped out of the picture. And Grandpa’s pretty nice, if you don’t mind bad jokes and garlic breath. For sure, you have to feel sorry for the guy. He’s been married to Grandma for forty years. She doesn’t hate him the way she hates me, but finding faults is kind of her superpower. Grandpa never puts the garbage can lids all the way on, and he chews too loud, and his nose whistles when he sleeps, which is usually in front of the TV.

Incidentally, the one person Grandma has absolutely nothing to say about is Evan. Not that Evan’s perfect or anything like that, because he isn’t.

I overheard her talking to Grandpa about him one time: “Poor little kid, his parents just walking away. My heart breaks for him.”

All that stuff is true—but it’s true about me too! How come her heart doesn’t break for me?

Maybe she thinks that, since I’m four years older, I can take it like a man. Well, I couldn’t at first. But I can now—thanks to Jaeger.

Jaeger’s tough, and he’s teaching me to be tough. I need that. The world is a rotten place, and a guy has to protect himself. If you don’t, you get trampled.

Like Jaeger figured out how useless school is a long time ago. But he didn’t just cut classes—he up and quit. And anybody who doesn’t like it can shove it.

A lot of kids at school think Jaeger’s a jerk. But they’re just jealous because he has a great car and total freedom, and he lives his life the way he wants. And maybe he is kind of a jerk. What’s so bad about that? You have to be strong to survive and come out on top. People are afraid of him. He gets respect.

Sometimes he scares even me a little, but I know that’s only because I haven’t learned to be tough enough yet. He’s the perfect friend for a guy like me.

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