Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 137572 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 688(@200wpm)___ 550(@250wpm)___ 459(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137572 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 688(@200wpm)___ 550(@250wpm)___ 459(@300wpm)
Winona’s adorably tongue-lolled face is my response.
I’ll pretend she understands she’s my unpaid bodyguard.
It’s a minute later when I’m halfway to the curb that my mom calls out from the front porch: “Toby, wait for your brother! He’s just finishing up in the bathroom! Five minutes, sweetie!”
I stop, suppress a groan, then turn. “Mom, I’ve got to get to school. There’s this …” The lie doesn’t come quick enough. “… this, this thing in the theater … this thing with, with my friends …”
“You can wait five dang minutes,” she sings from the porch with a light laugh, not buying a word of it. Perhaps suggesting I actually have friends was taking it one step too far.
And twelve minutes later—not five—my stepbrother emerges from the house to join me, but not before getting a goodbye kiss on the cheek from my mother. “You two have a great first day back!” she calls out, nearly giddy. “Watch over each other, boys! I already can’t wait to hear how your days went!”
My stepbrother somehow manages to make his deep, droning voice sound halfway cheery when he calls back: “Thanks, Marly!”
Then I’m finally off, making my way to Spruce High—with my dull-eyed telephone pole of a stepbrother Lee. He towers over me by a whole foot, has broad shoulders off which a curtain could hang, and feet that seem to crush the pavement with every step. Despite his arms being noodles comparable to my own, his father boasts of his son’s skill on the football field and insists he’s Coach Strong’s star player. I couldn’t even tell you what position he plays, only that from the one or two games I was forced to attend, Lee looks more like a misplaced wall painted the school colors than an actual player. And that’s not even counting how he looks in the spring when he hangs up the football uniform to don the baseball one. Talk about an awkward cluster of limbs guarding first base …
The morning sky swells a dark, bitter blue with the not-quite-risen sun by the time we finish our twelve-minute trek down the winding roads, across Main Street, and onto the school grounds. All the usual popular cliques are gathered by the trees and on the front steps leading up to the front of the school. The fuzzy noise of chatter sends my stomach turning over with expected anxiety. Did I mention how much I hate first days back?
That’s when Lee stops and faces me. “You know the drill.”
Neither of us have uttered a word to each other the whole way here. “Yes.”
“You don’t know me,” Lee goes on anyway, “and I don’t know you. Keep out of my way, I keep out of yours. Got it?”
“It’s weird that you call Mom ‘Marly’.”
He flinches, his face wrinkling up. Then, I guess deciding to dismiss my words outright, he repeats himself. “Got it?”
“I mean, your dad calls her Marly. And now you call her that? When did this start? Is there a group chat I wasn’t invited into?”
“You’re so … freakin’ weird,” he mumbles, grips the strap of his backpack tighter, then trudges off, ditching me by the road.
I smirk victoriously. Like father, like son. Except Lee has never threatened me, put a hand on me, or done anything except be a boring lump of meat with an equally monotonous voice. But being on the Spruce football team, he’s in with the crowd of puffed-up, muscled morons I’ve been trying to avoid for years—a crowd who has gained no sense of character regardless of who their coach is.
I don’t seek out anyone in the yard, as there is no one there for me anyway, with my only friends having graduated last year. I go straight through the doors of the school, navigate the echoing halls full of laughter, and locate my locker in the front hall. After putting away some things (and placing my moogle doll on the top shelf to guard everything while I’m gone, like a prince of my metal cave), I shut the locker and head off. A door just a few paces down the hall brings me to my first period class—which isn’t a class at all. I was selected as an office aide for my first hour of the day. It’s like having a free period to do whatever I want, unless my immediate supervisor and Master-of-the-Phone Becky actually has a note I need to run to a classroom, or an Excel spreadsheet to help fill in, or some other kind of mind-numbing, paper-stapling-and-filing busywork.
After the first bell rings, signaling the start of class, Becky has me put to work right away finishing something tedious she started (and is clearly relieved I’m here to do instead). Once the obligatory “How was your summer?” questions are over with, Becky wastes no time launching into a lengthy, gossipy phone call, and the minutes pass quickly. The monotony puts me at ease, and it isn’t long before all my anxieties about the rest of the day melt away.