The Secret Life of Lincoln Jones by Draanen Wendelin van

Author:Draanen, Wendelin van [Draanen, Wendelin van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult, Contemporary, Childrens, Writing
ISBN: 9781101940419
Amazon: 1101940417
Goodreads: 28814927
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Published: 2016-10-25T07:00:00+00:00

A t my old school, recess was indoors as much as it was outdoors. What kept us in was sometimes rain, but mostly heat or it being too humid to do much but sweat. Chasing or bouncing or dodging a ball on a swelterin’ day was not my idea of fun.

Besides, I wasn’t any good at sports. Ma didn’t like them, and Cliff—when he came into the picture—might have been good with a bat, but he wasn’t interested in swinging it at baseballs.

So sports and I never really got acquainted, and that was okay. Nobody made a fuss over it ’cause lots of other kids were spending recess indoors, too. And as long as you didn’t mess with stuff or start trouble, nobody cared what you were doing in a corner by yourself, which, for me, was usually reading comics.

I love comics. The superhero kind. Which aren’t funny, but for some reason they’re still called comics. Ma bought them for me once in a while, but my old school’s media center had a secret stash of them in a back room, and Mr. Willard, the librarian, slipped them to kids who asked. “Here you go, Mr. Jones,” he’d say with a wink, and I’d be glued to the thing any chance I got.

On the back cover of every comic Mr. Willard had taped a list of vocabulary words. Words that were used in the comic. That was good for when you were reading and didn’t know what a word meant, but the payback was you had to know all the words when you checked the comic back in.

“Ready, Mr. Jones?” Mr. Willard would say in a voice all hushed and secretive. Then he’d run through the list, sweepin’ the room with a sly-eye as he went down it, like any minute the two of us might be hauled off to the principal’s office.

“Why’re there such hard words in comics?” I asked him once, ’cause after a while my brain was loaded up with vo-cab-u-lar-y.

“Because they’re really for adults,” he whispered. “Ready for another?”

At Thornhill there are no comics. On the second day of school I asked Ms. Raven, hoping she might have a secret stash like Mr. Willard had, but the answer was no. And when I asked Ms. Miller where indoor recess was held, she gave me a strange look and said, “We do recess outside.”

I walked away feeling funny inside. Like I was alone in the middle of a school full of kids, with no place to go.

So I found a secret spot off to the side of the blacktop between a building and a fence, and that’s where I’d go to work on my stories at recess. No one bothered me or even knew I holed up there.

That is, until Kandi went and messed things up.

“Why are you always hiding back here?” she asked during morning recess on the day she’d invaded the bus. She was holding on to a four-square ball and had Macy Mills and Lexi Simmons with her.

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