Choir Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

easy-peel label. Brand new groove. Hey kids, you’re upperclassmen now. Just remember, with hallway privileges come maturity and respect.
    Every eighth grader seemed to have doubled in height over the summer except for Berry. He walked among evil giants and watched his back in the boys’ room, where classmates pushed his head in the toilets. The other choirboys who went to Orlac Junior High pretended not to know Berry there.
    Last year, Berry’s class was divided into two sections, the Swans and the Geese. The Swans were the smarter kids, but you weren’t supposed to say so. This year, the names were gone, but the sections remained. Now, if you tested too low on a standardized test, you copped an “intervention.” The scratch-bubble failures who received “interventions” turned out to be exactly the same kids as the Geese.
    Berry’s mom had lobbied hard to get him accepted as a Swan, and Berry had gone along because the Swans hit less hard. But even though Berry read years ahead in English, he’d scored puny in math and science. In the end, the school had put Berry into the Swans (or “intervention’’-free group) for half the day. This hadn’t helped him make friends, but he hadn’t expected to.
    Berry nicknamed this year’s teachers Toad and Rat, maybe because he’d read Wind in the Willows over the summer. Toad taught the Geese in a haze that reminded Berry of the year Marco had gotten hooked on muscle relaxants. It took Ms. Hawthorne ten minutes to explain how the sun radiated energy. Meanwhile Rat, who taught the Swans, was a lively man with sharp features. He carried a buzzer that rasped every time one of the Swans broke grammar. Berry hated both teachers and didn’t see much advantage in Swanhood. For a week, his mom had driven him around pointing at people on the street and saying either “Swan” or “Goose.” A man in a suit with a cell phone was a Swan, said Judy. The newspaper seller and the guy rooting in the garbage were both Geese. Berry had almost died when Judy had marched him through the mall pointing and barking, “Goose, Goose, Swan, Swan, Goose.”
    Berry had turned to a middle-aged woman in a velvet coat (a Swan) and muttered, “It’s a game.”
    Judy had spun and bugged. “It’s not a game. If this is a game to you, then you’ve already lost, like your father.” Judy took paralegal classes when she wasn’t working as a company librarian.
    Berry’s existence as a half-Swan half-Goose misfit might have seemed okay if he’d found the Swans anything like his image of those birds. But the real-life Swans seemed as evil as the Geese, only with nicer clothes. Berry sometimes wished he went to Quaker Day with Wilson and Lisa. Berry held his breath every moment in those airless halls.
    He let it out on Wednesday. He ran out of Goose class before the bell sounded and was on the school steps before it choked. Then he waited twenty minutes for the bus to St. Luke’s for midweek rehearsals. The gravel alley and choir room were empty. Canon Moosehead had managed to ban choirboys from local shops and restaurants on rehearsal days.
    Berry was about to give up and find a place to read when Teddy came out of the cathedral’s office building. “Hey,” he told Berry. “We’re down in the Twelve Step room, it’s our new hangout. We’re all beating up on the new kid, Jackie.” Berry nodded. They headed for the church office basement, down one flight of stairs to some offices, the soup kitchen, and the Twelve Step room, a hole coated with cigarette ash, coffee- and piss-stains. The carpet looked like a lice condo, but the boys wrestled on it every day anyway. A couple of couches and some folding chairs faced the huge board outlining the twelve steps. One cartoon showed the Higher Power holding hands with a strung-out man. A single fluorescent light and a sliver of window at ceiling level lit the room, which smelled of chemicals and animals.
    “Altar boys gonna spike Canon Moosehead’s