Excerpt

It was in sixth grade, right around Thanksgiving, and a new kid was sitting in the second row of our homeroom class, where Logan Dresser usually sat. None of us had ever seen him before. None of us knew his name. He was overweight and his hair was a mess and his face was flushed pink. He sat in Logan's chair statue-still, staring straight ahead, as though reading notes off the board that the rest of us couldn't see.

Logan took a seat in the back, confused and annoyed, while the rest of us gave this new kid unnecessarily mean sidelong glances until class began.

Ms. Harlan, our homeroom teacher, opened the day by introducing him.

"Today we welcome a new student to Rawls Middle School," she said. "Darryl Datson."

She waved at the new kid.

"Please stand up and tell us something about yourself, Darryl."

Darryl moved, and disaster immediately ensued.

When Darryl stood, he didn't slide his chair back far enough from his desk. His protruding belly caught the desk's edge and sent it toppling over, right into Kelcie Donovan, who sat in front of him. It slammed into the back of her head and she let out the loudest curse any of us had ever heard. To make matters worse, Darryl tried to grab the desk as it fell, but he lost his balance in the process and landed on the floor beside it in a heap.

We all burst into laughter, even Kelcie Donovan. Crying, howling laughter. The kid had no coordination. He was awkward as a hippopotamus on ice skates. Roughly the same build, too. Husky, they say when you're a child. "Fat," we said behind our grins. Had he been athletic, we would have compared him to a gorilla or a bull and attributed power to his extra pounds. But he was the opposite of grace, so his flab became a source of derision.

That was strike one against Darryl.

Strike two came when he picked himself up from the floor and started talking.

Ms. Harlan let the laughter die down, made sure Kelcie and Darryl were okay, then again asked Darryl to continue, to give us a fact about himself.

Darryl took a deep breath and then spoke, so quiet it was as if he was talking to himself rather than the class. Some of us snickered at the delivery.

"Can you say that a little louder?" Ms. Harlan asked.

Darryl fidgeted. He took another deep breath and, just loud enough for everyone to hear if they strained, said, "Um... I just moved here with my mom and my sister. My parents just got divorced. Um... I really like reading. Especially science fiction and mythology. I really like Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 is my favorite book."

From the back of the class, Jeremy Hahn hooted, "Nerd!"

Ms. Harlan hissed a word of disapproval and wrote Jeremy up, but most of us laughed at the disruption. "Nerd" was an apt description of this new kid, based on what little we'd seen. Maybe it was even a bit too kind.

As for Darryl, he hung his head, cheeks flushing even redder in embarrassment, and sat down. When you're twelve or thirteen, you know without a doubt when you're an outsider. There are no more social training wheels, no more forced play dates. No one has to act nice anymore, and the adult knack for duplicity hasn't yet been honed well enough to bring you false friends. Darryl wasn't one of us. We knew it from the start; he knew it from the start. For reasons we couldn't have explained, he wasn't someone we wanted to befriend. He was other, an outsider, a weird and awkward kid who would make us weird and awkward by association. Just by knowing him, he made our lives weirder.

And that was his third strike: he was in our lives.

We'd never let him forget it.