All of the Above Read Online Free PDF Page B

too long—he perches like a jumpy bird on the heater, or on the teacher's desk, or on the edge of a chair.
    He and Mr. Collins are usually the ones who take our little pieces as we finish them and join them together to make the larger tetrahedron. It takes steady hands to glue the pieces together point to point. Maybe because his whole body seems like it is always moving and balancing on the edge of something, Marcel is better than anybody at doing this.
    But
metamorphosis
is the college word I'd pick for James. For weeks, he showed up after school and wouldn't help with any part of the project. He sat in the corner near the windows, with his big feet propped on the chair in front of him, and drew in his notebook or spun quarters on his desk until they flew across the room and hit the walls or the front of the metal heater, making all of us jump. My mom would have called him trouble with a capital
T.
    And then overnight, he turned into somebody else. Once he became president, he started bringing in his sketches of how the tetrahedron should be built and where all the colors would go. His idea was to make the pyramid look like a rainbow. Even though everybody thought he wasn't being serious at first, that he was trying to be rude to Marcel by making him take apart everything that had been done, now I can see what he meant—how the colors are supposed to blend into each other.
    But sometimes I wonder if James Harris has really changed, or if underneath his pretending to care about the math club and being president is the same person. He still calls Marcel “Barbecue Face,” and me “Ron Dull,” no matter how many times Mr. Collins warns him about not using those names. And Sharice told me she heard that James’ father is in jail for drugs and he lives with his older brother, who has been in trouble for drugs, too. They're bad news, she says.
    Could someone who is bad news really change that much? For a math project? Was it a metamorphosis or something else?

SHARICE
    I'm the one who comes up with the idea for the Christmas party.
    Sometimes when we're working, this silence will come over the room when all you can hear is the buzzing of the fluorescent lights or the clanking of the old heating pipes, and if it goes on for too long, it kinda makes me crazy, you know?
    Maybe it reminds me too much of the Washington Boulevard Library, or of sitting in the hospital room next to my Gram, when she was sick. So I'm the one who always tries to keep the conversation going. When it gets too quiet, I just pull a question out of thin air—whatever pops into my head, whatever I want to know right at that moment. Why do fluorescent lights buzz? Is the new English teacher gay? Why does it get dark so fast in the winter?
    “I got a question, Mr. Collins,” I'll say in the silence, making my voice a little louder on purpose, and everybody will crack up, except for Rhondell, who usually just bites her bottom lip to keep from smiling too much and looks the other way.
    “Yes, Sharice,” Mr. Collins will answer from somewhere on the other side of the big tetrahedron, where he's working. “What's on your mind?”
    “What about a Christmas party?” I ask one afternoon.
    The snow's coming down like pillowcase stuffing outside the math room windows and maybe that's what gives me the idea. Or maybe it's the Christmas music I've been listening to every day in the mall, that won't get out of my head now. (“Have a holly jolly Christmas” … you know, what does that really mean anyway???)
    “Don't you think having a Christmas party's a good idea, Rhondell?” I kick her chair leg with my foot, trying to get her to agree. Rhondell glances around in her usual way before she says sure in a non-sure voice.
    Marcel jumps in. “I can bring all the food,” he tells us. “Whatever you want. Ribs. Wings. Sandwiches. My daddy's got the best barbecue in the whole state of Ohio—”
    “Yeah, right,” James snorts, even though everybody pretends