he got to school that morning, when he’d tried to talk to one of the guys who was going to be in his new class.
“What’s Mrs. Schulze like?” was all he’d said that morning as he’d run into Ethan Roeder on his way out of the ugly little row of apartments they both lived in.
Ethan had barely glanced at him. “What do you care? All the teachers love you, don’t they?”
While Josh’s face burned with the rebuff, Ethan yelled to a couple of his friends, then took off without even a backward glance. Josh had struggled to hold back his tears. For one brief moment he’d felt a burning urge to pick up a rock and throw it at Ethan, but in the end he’d just thrust his hands in his pockets and started trudging by himself through the dusty streets toward the cluster of sun-baked brown buildings that was Eden Consolidated School.
Eden.
Even the name of the town was a crock.
He’d figured out a long time ago that the name of the town was just a publicity stunt, thought up by some developer to fool people into thinking there was something here besides cactus and dirt.
It was like Greenland, which he’d read was just a big sheet of ice, named Greenland by some long-gone huckster in the hope that people would move there.
Well, they sure hadn’t moved to Eden, even if it was in California.
The town looked as lonesome as Josh felt, and as he’d approached the school that morning, he’d thought about just walking on by, and straight out to the freeway five miles across the desert, where he might be able to hitch a ride to somewhere else.
Los Angeles maybe, where his father was living.
Or at least had been living the last time Josh had heard from him.
The urge to keep on walking hadn’t lasted any longer than the urge to throw a rock at Ethan Roeder, though, and Josh had gone into the middle school building, found Mrs. Schulze’s room, and finally gone in.
It was just like what had happened the last time he’d been skipped.
He’d stayed outside until the last possible second, and when he finally slipped through the door, hoping to sink unnoticed into a seat in the last row, Mrs. Schulze had spotted him and given him a too-bright smile.
“Well, here’s our little genius now,” she’d said. Josh cringed at the word, wishing he could disappear through a hole in the floor, but his wish came no closer to coming true than any of the other wishes he’d fervently sent out over the years to whatever powers might be looking after him.
If there were any powers looking after him, which he’d decided he doubted, despite what they told him in Sunday School every week.
He’d stared straight ahead as the rest of the kids, all two years older than himself, had turned to gaze at him. He hadn’t had to look at them to know the expressions on their faces.
They didn’t want him there.
They didn’t want him getting perfect scores on all the tests, while they could barely answer the questions.
It hadn’t been so bad until two years ago, the first time he’d been skipped a grade.
Back then—and it seemed like an eternity to Josh—the rest of the kids were his own age, and he’d known them all his life. He’d even had a best friend back then—Jerry Peterson. And no one seemed to care that Josh always got the best grades in the class. “Someone’s gotta be a brain,” Jerry had told him more than once. “At least it’s better that you’re it, instead of some dumb girl.”
Even then, when he was only eight, Josh had known better than to point out that if the smartest kid in the class had been a girl, she certainly wouldn’t have been dumb.
And then he’d gotten skipped the first time. By the middle of the next year Jerry had a new best friend.
Josh didn’t.
Nor had he found one, because when you’re nine, a year makes a big difference. All the boys in his new class already had plenty of people to pal around with. And they sure didn’t want a “baby” hanging around.
For a while he’d hoped that maybe someone new would come to school, but that didn’t happen either—people didn’t come to Eden; they went away from it.
Now he’d been skipped again, and the kids in his class were two years older than he, and the boys were a lot bigger.