often felt beleaguered and bewildered by the adult world and the rules laid down for kids.
He’d finished his math, which he found easy because math made sense. Lots of other shit just didn’t. Like answering a bunch of questions about the Civil War. Sure, they lived sort of near Antietam and all that, and the battlefield was cool, but all that was like over.
The Union won, the Confederacy lost. Like Stan Lee said—and Stan Lee was a genius: ’Nuff said.
So Raylan answered a question, then doodled, answered another question, and day-dreamed an epic battle between Spider-Man and Doc Ock.
Since they’d hit what his mom called the lag time—after lunch, before dinner—most of the customers were high school kids coming in to play video games in the back, maybe grab a slice or a Coke.
He couldn’t plug in any quarters himself until he finished his stupid homework. Mom’s rule.
He glanced across the mostly empty dining room, past the counter, and to the big open kitchen where she worked.
Six months earlier, she’d done all her cooking at home in their kitchen. But that was before his father took off.
Now his mom cooked here because they needed to pay bills and stuff. She wore the big red apron with rizzo’s across the front, and had her hair up under the goofy white hat all the cooks and kitchen prep people wore.
She said she liked working here, and he thought she told the truth about that because she looked happy when she worked at that gigantic stove.
And, mostly, he could recognize when she didn’t tell the truth.
Like when she told him and his sister everything was fine, but her eyes didn’t say they were.
He’d been scared at first, but he’d said everything was okay. Maya had cried at first, but she’d only been seven, and a girl. But she got over it.
Mostly.
He figured he was the man of the house now, but he’d learned really fast that didn’t mean he could skip his homework or stay up later on school nights.
So he answered another dumb Civil War question.
Maya had permission to go to her friend Cassie’s house to do homework together. Not that she ever got very much. For him? Permission Denied.
Maybe because he and his best friend and his other two best friends had shot hoops and hung out instead of doing their homework the day before.
And the day before that.
Doc Ock had nothing on Mom Wrath, so now he had to report to Rizzo’s after school instead of hanging out at Mick’s, or at Nate’s or Spencer’s.
It wouldn’t be so bad if Mick or Nate or Spence could hang out with him at Rizzo’s. But their moms also had the wrath.
When he saw Mr. Rizzo come in, Raylan perked up a little. When Mr. Rizzo went into the kitchen, he’d toss dough. Raylan’s mom and some of the other cooks could toss it, too, but Mr. Rizzo could do tricks, like toss it up, spin around, catch it again behind his back.
And if they weren’t too busy, he let Raylan try it, let him make his own personal pizza with any toppings he wanted—for free.
He didn’t pay much attention to the kid who came in with Mr. Rizzo, because girl. But she had a cast on her arm, which made her marginally more interesting.
He made up reasons for the cast while he finished the last stupid questions on his assignment.
She’d fallen down a well, out of a tree, out of a window during a house fire.
With the questions answered—finally!—he started the last assignment.
He’d done the math first, because easy. The history junk next, because boring.
And saved the assignment of using this week’s spelling words in a sentence for last, because fun.
He liked words even more than math and almost as much as drawing stuff.
1. Pedestrian. The getaway car from the bank robbery ran over the pedestrian as it raced away.
2. Neighborhood. When aliens from the planet Zork invaded, the world counted on the one and only friendly neighborhood Spider-Man to protect them.
3. Harvesting. The evil scientist kidnapped bunches of people and started harvesting their organs for his crazy experiments.
He finished up the last of the ten words as his mother sat down at the two-top.
“I did all the dumb homework.”
Because her shift had ended, Jan had taken off her apron and cap. She’d cut her hair short after her husband left and felt the pixie suited her. Plus, it required almost no time to fiddle with.
She thought Raylan could use a haircut