Gentlemen Read Online Free PDF

the rest of us. It wasn’t the kind of thing you discussed, but everybody knew. We’d seen him around in the hallways and the cafeteria, so we knew he wasn’t new to the school, and we knew he hadn’t been in our class the year before, so it wasn’t too hard to piece together that he’d been held back. He just came with fourth grade, like the furniture.
    You could tell it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about, but he loosened up some in the second half of the year. He’d made two friends by then, the same two friends he had now, and the teachers mostly hadn’t bothered to change the tests from the year before. Even the pop quizzes were mostly the same. He’d been left back one year, but in a way, it’s like the teachers are left back every year. Anyway, he started giving Mixer and me a heads-up on the quizzes and tests, theones he remembered anyway. It was probably the first and only time in his life he qualified as smart. But that was when the other kids turned on him. I guess maybe they wanted him to share the test info a little more widely.
    Toward the end of the year, they started in on him. They’d be like, “So long! Say hi to the next class. We’ll write you when we get to fifth grade, let you know how it is.” I think that’s when the anger really started to creep into his system. And then every year after that, the teachers handing his tests back face-up, a big red D or F on top, having to sweat it out every June, whether or not he was going to move ahead with the rest of us.
    Hell, it even kind of makes me angry, thinking about the little kid he was back in fourth grade. He used to jump off the top of the slide and yell “Spider-Man!” We’d all be laughing and he’d be smiling and his face’d be bright red from the attention.
    But that smile was gone now, and it’s like all that was left were the Ds and Fs. And it’s kind of funny, too, because all those little bastards who made fun of him were right: That kid, the kid he was, never really did make it out of fourth grade. And two years into high school, I was starting to suspect that I was friends with someone who didn’t really exist anymore. Just sometimes he’d make an appearance, the old Bones, smiling out at me about some dumb thing and I couldn’t help but smile back. We had a history, you know, and isn’t that what friendship is?
    Anyway, like I said, Haberman asked all three of us, so any one of us bailing kind of screwed the others. Plus, with three of us, it seemed like it would be quick and easy to haul the barrel out to the parking lot. Throw in the facts that Haberman had a sweet car and English was on the first floor, and we were just like, All right, whatever.
    But we were wrong, because it turned out that he was not kidding about the barrel being heavy. A watermelon, my ass. At first we tried to slide it along the floor, but that didn’t work at all. The blue plastic dragged along the tile, sticking more than it slid. The floor was smooth enough, but there was some kind of grit on the bottom of the barrel. We started to tip it over to roll it, but Haberman said no way, so we had to lift it. It was tricky to grip, so it took two of us to get the thing off the ground. Then Bones found some space in the middle and became like the outboard engine. He did most of the pushing us forward, while Mixer and me did most of the lifting. Haberman didn’t even pretend he was going to help. He was just like, “This way,” but we knew where the teachers parked.
    There was the usual mob scene between classes. Kids who had early lunch period coming back, eating snack packs of Oreos and picking their teeth. Kids who had late lunch heading that way. People talking at their lockers, some couples kissing, and here we come like the hired help. I hated that. I hated how it made me feel. I knew they were looking at me, and normally I might shoot