Gary Paulsen by How Angel Peterson Got His Name

Author:How Angel Peterson Got His Name [Name, How Angel Peterson Got His]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-53099-8
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2008-12-29T22:00:00+00:00

There are boys' names that you know will make a boy popular and successful and cool and able to talk to girls (more on this later) and will make him have a wonderful life and probably get rich and marry a cheerleader and have a hot car….

Clint is such a name, and perhaps Steve, although not necessarily Steven, and Brad, and maybe best of all Nick. You just know that somebody named Nick is going to get it all.

And then there are the other names:

Harvey, maybe, and Sidney and Gary and Wesley—names that connote, well, not necessarily a loser, in fact not at all a loser, but somebody who you know is going to have to work that little bit harder to make it all happen for him.

A boy stands up in the back of a new class and says, “Hello, my name is Harvey Hemesvedt”—not Harv, or Sid or Wes, but the whole name, Harvey— you just know that kid is going to be busy for a while.

And if a boy's last name is Orvisen, and his parents are silly or addled or just plain cruel enough to give him the first name of Orvis so he has to say, “Hello, my name is Orvis Orvisen,” they might as well just rub him with raw liver and throw him into a pit of starving wolves.

And if you take the same Orvis Orvisen and put him not in a public school but in a Catholic school, where all the boys play hockey—sometimes with live pucks if they can find a chicken or a cat—and think fighting almost to the death is a form of recreation …

Well, Orvis had a tough row to hoe.

“I barely made it home alive from my first day of school,” he told me when I met him. “They wanted to play catch with me—not with a ball, but throw me back and forth. Man, they were worse than the nuns.”

We had all heard horror stories about the nuns who taught at the Catholic school, how they used yardsticks like broadswords and dipped the edges in salt so they would hurt more and didn't care if you bled as long as you didn't drip on the floor. Whenever I had seen nuns they always seemed quiet and almost nice, but there were Catholic boys who were so mean they scared bad dogs, and these boys would cross the street and hide in back of a garbage can in terror when they saw Sister Eunicia walking by.

And so Orvis came to be better and tougher than all of us combined, and so Orvis became the one who tried the Circle of Death.

But first, a bit more about him.

Somewhere along in the seventh grade Orvis evolved a novel method of self-defense. He would evaluate his difficulty, consider what was going to happen to him and then do it to himself.

It was brilliant in its simplicity. If, for instance, a group of boys were going to stick him in his

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