The Take Back of Lincoln Junior High by Roseanne Cheng

Author:Roseanne Cheng
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

14.

Liam Cheney walked into journalism class on the seventh day of school. I guess walked is probably not the right word; glided might be better. From the second he opened the door, handed his transfer slip to Ms. Hope, and surveyed the room confidently for a place to sit he reminded me of one of those leopards you see on Animal Planet; the ones that don’t make a sound as they stride through the forest looking for prey. He was an eighth-grader, of that much I could be certain, based on how much more mature he looked than the rest of us. And by the look on Hannah’s face, as well as the face of every other girl in the room, he was destined to be the topic of lunch conversation for many, many weeks.

I hated him and wanted to be him instantly.

I’d been the new kid before, so I knew how it was supposed to go. Liam was supposed to sit quietly in each class, saying nothing except to ask a polite-looking classmate next to him to point him in the right direction toward the science wing. He was supposed to allow people to size him up, to pretend he didn’t notice when duos and trios of boys and girls whispered around him and cast their judgments. In a few weeks’ time, he would find a group to latch on to—the preppies, the jocks, or the nerds—and hope that the group he’d chosen had also chosen him.

I identified myself as 99 percent nerd, so that transition was always pretty easy for me. There is never a shortage of nerds in any given junior high school.

But Liam was different. He raised his hand in journalism that very first day and asked Ms. Hope what computer program we used to publish the newspaper. She answered him, equally shocked as the rest of us that he had been so confident and bold on his first day. He nodded and leaned back seemingly unaware of all the eyes on him.

Liam was also in my pre-algebra class, where he was no less brazen. He took a seat at the back of the room, right in the middle of the jock section, where Mr. Martinez had purposely put a group of football players who were taking pre-algebra for the second time. I guess there was no way he could have known that he was placing himself in the middle of the most popular boys in school, but in the ten seconds it must have taken for him to figure it out, it didn’t seem to cross his mind to move. Mr. Martinez was so happy to have someone to distract the football players into actually paying attention for once that he didn’t seem to mind that Liam didn’t ask if there was a seating chart.

By the end of his first week, there wasn’t a single person in school who didn’t know who Liam was or have a theory about him. I’d heard from various sources that he’d moved here from Panama, North Korea, and Jacksonville, Florida.

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