Gutless by Carl Deuker

Author:Carl Deuker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Richie wasn’t at school Monday or Tuesday. I thought about stopping by his house to see how he was doing, but I figured he wanted time to himself.

Coach Jacklin called a team meeting Tuesday at lunch. As we were waiting, guys around me talked about Richie, how he’d cost us a chance at the playoffs, how dirty his play had been, how they weren’t surprised he wasn’t at school. “I’d stay home too, if I’d pissed away our chances,” one guy said.

“He should be here,” somebody else put in. “He screwed up bigtime, and he should man up.”

When other guys nodded in agreement, I’d had enough. “Give the guy a break, will you?” I said to no one and to everyone. “Without Richie, we’d have done nothing. And what would you have done if those posters had been about you?”

After my outburst, guys looked at the ground or out the window. Everybody was glad when Jacklin arrived so we could listen to his “It was a great year” speech and be done with the soccer season.

When I stepped inside Ms. Ringleman’s room on Wednesday, I spotted Richie in the last row between two kids who always slept through class. There were no empty desks near him. Our eyes met, and I motioned to some vacant seats up front, hoping he’d move, but he shook his head. At lunch I looked around for him, but he’d found a table way in the back that was full of Asian kids, and he ignored me when I pointed to where we normally ate. I don’t know where he went after lunch, but it wasn’t to chess club.

Over the next weeks, I tried to break through, and sometimes I thought I had. There’d be an open seat next to him in Ms. Ringleman’s class, and I’d take it. We’d talk a little before class, and sometimes even eat lunch together. But he was shut up tight. He didn’t want me, or anyone, around.

As a kid, I’d owned some of those transformer toys where you had a tank and then you flipped a few arms and it turned into a fighter jet. He was like that. The joking, outgoing Richie had morphed into a head-down, never-smile kid.

Maybe that’s why Hunter and his friends started getting on him again. Colton started calling Richie “Red”—short for Red Card—and lots of kids thought tagging a black-haired Asian kid with the nickname Red was funny. “Hey, there’s Red,” guys would say as he walked down the hallway, and they could use that name even if teachers were around. Same thing with MVP. At least twice, at the end of the day a group of guys followed him off campus, chanting, “MVP! MVP! MVP!”—mocking him for getting himself kicked out of the Lakeside game.

Whenever anybody I knew ridiculed Richie, I told them to knock it off, and most of the time they did. But not always.

“I don’t know why you keep defending him,” Rory shot back me at one day in the lunchroom.

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