The Fading Read Online Free PDF Page B

wall-eyed pencil neck with a down parka feather
     stuck to the corner of his chapped lips. The child whose mother had shelled out $4.99 for a navy blue or canary yellow or
     classic orange Nerf essentially crowned her kid king of the playground.
    Such Nerffound status, however, like the ball itself, never lasted more than a few days – and its chrysalis lifespan was precisely
     what made it so precious, a currency that knighted its owner. As the rubber coating began to crack and peel like a sunburned
     shoulder, as the laces stiffened and the ball found its way into a mud puddle, waterlogged, dried hard and devolved into a
     dog toy, so too did the adoration of its owner dwindle and fade.
    By age nine, Noel Shaker needed a Nerf football day. When pressed to fill a guest list for his birthday party, he could rustle
     up three or four names, but none were guaranteed to show. It wasn’t that he didn’t fit in with the sprouting jocks, the math
     whizzes and eager bookworms, the troublemakers from the low-income families or the nascent band of preppies who lately seemed
     to spend most of their lunch breaks posing and gossiping with actual girls. It was that no one clique desired his membership,
     and as a result he had become a master of tagging along. Or simply keeping out of trouble by keeping to himself.
    Among his teachers, the running suspicion was that Noel Shaker was on the fence and soon would fall (or jump) to one side
     or the other. Good kid, bad kid. Smartkid, wasting his potential kid. Unusually quiet and attentive kid, spacey and weird and sometimes downright creepy kid. There
     were a lot of fences, even in the fourth grade, and Noel Shaker straddled most of them.
    He hardly ever missed a day of school, his parents sent him into battle groomed and dressed decently, and looks-wise he was
     perched somewhere between a little awkward and androgynously striking. He was pulling mostly Bs with one A (language arts)
     and one unsettling D (science). Nothing much to be alarmed about. But for reasons unknown, Noel had become the kind of boy
     teachers and students approached with oven mitts on both hands. Though he had never turned violent, there was something in
     his tense posture and bracing brown eyes that suggested one push in the wrong direction and he would blow.
    Only thing was, as his gym teacher Mr Coach Kanasaki put it one morning in the teachers’ lounge, ‘You don’t know if he’s gonna
     blow like a house full of oven gas or like an electrical fuse. You know, where something tiny inside just goes
click
and the turn signals never work right again.’
    Mrs McGinnis, who taught music, had been married three times, and wore shawls her sister loomed for Christmas presents, unleashed
     a funnel of Winston Gold smoke over Coach’s head and nodded in grave agreement.
    ‘It’s his fiber,’ she croaked. ‘The boy lacks fiber. He does just enough. He’s like the second house in
The Three Little Pigs
. He’s not going to be the easiest toknock down, but when he goes, there’ll be a lot more than a pile of straw to clean up.’
    Waving a hand to clear the haze of Rosalyn McGinnis’s two cents, Coach K said, ‘I don’t know if the father is too hard on
     him or if he’s maybe just stitched a little too tight at the seams, but he’s a thinker. He’s living too deep for a kid that
     age.’
    ‘I’ve met the mother,’ Mrs McGinnis said. ‘I’m not sure I cared for the way she was keeping herself.’
    ‘Mrs Shaker is a dedicated mother,’ Coach K said. ‘I don’t see a problem on her end—’
    ‘You wouldn’t,’ Mrs McGinnis said, further browning her teeth with a swig of lounge decaf.
    Coach K frowned. ‘Okay, I don’t know what that means, but my point is, if Noel can hang on till middle school and Bud Jarvis
     over at Centennial can get him on a team, a lot of that pent-up energy can be converted into points on the board. He has good
     legs. He should be running. Best thing for