Necessary Roughness Read Online Free PDF Page B

stupid lunchroom was.
    I saw this guy coming from the opposite direction.
    Blond, no surprise, but he was wearing Adidas Sambas turf shoes. Soccer shoes. The first I’d seen here.
    He looked like a player, the way he moved, shoulders flat out, arms curved but ready at his side. Maybe even a wing—he had that look, right down to his ALL-PRO T-shirt.
    “Yo!” I said. I don’t know what possessed me. “Know where the lunchroom is?”
    He gestured vaguely in the direction I’d been heading, then he moved on.
    From down the hall I could hear the noise. Dishes clanking, voices at a low-key roar. I imagined sitting by myself, eating, and having a bunch of strangers watch me do it. Maybe I’d find Young. Great. We could eat alone together.
    Forget this. I wasn’t going to play by the rules of Hicksville High. I was going to find a quiet place by myself to chew on my sandwich.
    I turned and took the opposite corridor to its end. A sign pointed to the gym. What the heck. I crossed a tiny indoor running track and went in.
    A bunch of guys, including ALL-PRO, were sitting on the bleachers. Most of them looked like your typical jocks. A couple of them were in black shirts and shredded jeans, like the metalheads at my old school. Except that at El Caldero, the metalheads were all skinny heroin-addicts-in-training. Every one of these guys was huge, like a lumberjack.
    They all stopped talking and stared at me as I walked in.
    “Who the hell are you?” said a guy whose muscles jumped like shot-put balls under his black Megadeth T-shirt. He had dirty blond hair that hung in quasi-Rasta clumps like a mop.
    “Who wants to know?”
    “I wanna know. When Rom asks, you answer, weeg.”
    I wasn’t exactly sure what a weeg was, but I figured it wasn’t anything good, since the guy next to him started to laugh like a hyena. This guy’s hair and eyes were dark; he looked almost Mexican. I found myself staring at him, trying to figure out what he was.
    “Hey, new guy,” said ALL-PRO. “Where ya from?”
    “L.A.”
    The guys, collectively, all sort of went
“Hmm.”
Like this development was slightly interesting to them.
    But I wasn’t going to stand around for them. I went to a comer of the gym, sat on a bench, and inhaled my sandwich. I hadn’t brought anything to drink, so the peanut butter practically strangled me on the way down.
    Young and I walked home together. For about three blocks we didn’t say anything. Then we both started talking at once: “Howwasit?” “Whatdidyouthink?”
    “You first,” Young said.
    “No, ladies first.”
    “It sucked.”
    “Same.”
    We walked.
    “Everyone is about as friendly as cacti,” I said, thinking specifically of the guys at lunch. “Like they have so much to feel superior about. Iron River, home of an iron mine, state football champs when I was in kindergarten. Whoopee.”
    Young took a breath.
    “Some girl called me ‘pancake face’ in the hall.”
    “Whoa—” I said. “What was that all about?”
    Young shrugged. Her shoulder blades pointed out from under her shirt like wings. “I think she meant my face is flat.” She pushed her hand in close to her face, as if measuring it.
    “Your face isn’t flat,” I said, fuming. “That girl’s brain is flat.” Jesus. My sister gets insulted by a bigoted yahoo on our first day of school. That’s all I needed to hear.
    When we got home, there was a smell of cookies baking. We could hear Mrs. Knutson saying to O-Ma, “So you just flatten ’em out with a fork like this after you dip ’em in sugar to get that crisscrossy pattern. Easy, yah?”
    Young and I had warm cookies—something we’d never had before because O-Ma was always busy working—and we felt a little better.

nine
    Another afternoon of nothing awaited. Back in L.A., O-Ma and Abogee had started making me go to these after-school
hakwon
to bone up for the SATs. In between that I had soccer practice, and on weekends I worked at the store. That was then.