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“Hey,” she said, pushing a piece of dark hair behind her ear.
My stomach did a somersault. Okay, so I wasn’t used to talking to beautiful girls. Reality check: I wasn’t used to talking to any girls. I tucked my cane at my side and waved slightly, saying nothing, because my voice was stuck in my throat.
“I’m Brooks,” she said without blinking.
My uncle Hondo had once taught me to act cool around girls by looking distracted. I nodded in her general direction and then turned my attention to a poster on the wall about something happening in two days. There was a picture of Father Baumgarten wearing clownish green sunglasses and a huge openmouthed smile.
TO ALL SOLAR ECLIPSTERS: YOU’RE INVITED TO THE GREAT AMERICAN TOTAL ECLIPSE. SHOW YOUR SCHOOL PRIDE. 5:00 P.M. VIEWING GLASSES PROVIDED IN OFFICE.
“Do you have a name?” Brooks asked.
Yes. More nodding. I just need to wrestle it from my twisted tongue.
“Are you always this rude?”
No. Never. Only when pretty brunettes talk to me. I turned to her, cleared my throat as casually as I could, and forced out, “Zane.”
“You’re new.”
“First day,” I said. “What about you? How come no uniform?”
Brooks smiled, and it was a million watts of wow. “Impressive,” she said. “First day and already at Baumgarten’s? That has to be some kind of record.”
I sat up straighter. “So what’d you do?”
She leaned back, super relaxed, as if she didn’t have to go face the principal.
“I’ll tell you later,” she said, and my heart sort of skipped a beat. Later? That meant she was going to talk to me again. Yes!
I looked down at the yellow folder she was clutching in her lap. She had drawn something on it. Not little doodled hearts, or her name in block letters, or cute kittens. No, she’d sketched a monster with hairy knuckles and bulging eyes. I almost fell off my chair. Wait. Could that be the same one from last night? I blinked to make sure I wasn’t head-tripping. Nope, the monster was still there, every detail the same. I was about to ask her about it when Father Baumgarten opened his door and waved for me to come inside.
Crap! I’d been so busy falling into Brooks’s orbit, I’d forgotten all about my stupid cane. After seeing me hobble into Baumgarten’s office, she for sure wouldn’t want to tell me anything later.
I did the only thing I could think of. I pitched my backpack across the floor, stood up, and pretend-tripped across the threshold. Okay, so it wasn’t the smoothest move, but I’d rather she thought of me as a klutz than as Sir Limps-a-Lot.
The results of my visit with Baumgarten were ten rosaries, detention for a week, a call to Mom, and an apology to the jerk I’d torpedoed with my cane. It was a miserable first day, except for Brooks. She’d made it all worth it. Unfortunately, she was gone by the time I’d recited my last rosary, and I didn’t see her for the rest of the day.
I wondered why she had that underworld demon sketched on her folder. Maybe she has the same Maya book as me, I thought.
Things got even weirder that night. After dinner, I fed Rosie out back before coming in to hang out with Hondo and two of his buddies and watch the big wrestling match between the Strangler and Demento. Good thing Mom was working late or she would’ve strung Hondo up by his toes for breaking her rule about not drinking beer or smoking cigars in front of the kid.
Hondo licked his orange-stained fingers before offering a half-empty Cheetos bag to me. “Want some?”
You’d think with his eating, drinking, and smoking habits he would’ve been a wasteland, but here was the thing about Hondo: he was twenty-one-ish, looked seventeen, and was built like a tank—boulder-size biceps, abs of steel, and hands of iron. He’d always wanted to be a wrestler, even won a gold medal in high school, but then his dream got “hijacked” (another way of saying he couldn’t afford college) and he went to work as a custodian at the bank. I’d asked him once what he would’ve studied if he’d gone to college. He’d smirked and said, Business, so I could become a tycoon and own the bank instead of clean it.
After I got pummeled at school two years ago, he taught me lots of wrestling moves, like the Double Leg Takedown, the Wheelbarrow, and the Gutwrench, but most of the time he was pinning me in the dirt and mimicking a roaring crowd like it was some big deal to beat me, the Freak.
“That junk food’s gonna kill you,” I told him now.
One of the guys snorted, popping a handful of orange synthetic food puffs into his mouth. “We eat them with salsa. That’s what, at least one serving of vegetables, right?”
I rolled my eyes. “Tomatoes are a fruit.”
Hondo just shrugged. “There are worse ways to die.”
How come people always said that? “Like what?” I asked, picking up a couple of empty beer cans and tossing them in the trash. “What’s a worse way to die?”
Hondo stuffed a Cheeto in his mouth and said, “A vat of acid that eats off your flesh. That would be worse.”
