he was like a balloon with the nicest wig on top. The teacher said, I have twenty-five other kids to look after, and he said, Go, Ms. Carroll, go on I’ll take it from here. When she left he smiled sadly at me and I smiled sadly back at him and I had never smiled sadly before, not like that, and it felt good, almost as good as being an animal wearing sunglasses on some cellophane. Perley, the principal said, we can’t have kids wander away what if you were hit by a car or a stranger kidnapped you, think what would happen to us here at this school think about it we are responsible for you. I thought about it. I smiled sadly. You have to focus, he said. You have to do what the teacher says. Don’t you want to do your Specials? I said, Yes, sir, of course, sir. And he said, Why did you go outside without permission? And I said, My body did it my body went outside without permission, and he said, That is unacceptable, and I said, Yes, sir. And he said, Did you pee in the bushes you can tell me. And I said, The Best Practices Binder says, Don’t pee in the bucket. Pee on a tree but instead I peed on a bush. I waited for the principal’s sad smile to turn to a sad smile of understanding, but it didn’t. Instead he asked, Don’t you have a toilet at home, Perley? And I waited ten seconds. I waited exactly ten seconds I know because I counted and I looked out the window behind the principal and I saw that Nightrunner the wolf had come back and was winking his green eyes at me from behind the oak tree. I wanted to make the principal happy so I said, Yes, sir, you should see our toilet it has one of those automatic flushers with a flashing light, it’s even more powerful than the one at the IGA. Which was my second lie.
I thought the principal was going to make me do like fifty push-ups or run laps or something where I could show my physical strength and endurance, but the principal just sighed and wrote something on a piece of paper and then he said, This is an adjustment period, Perley. You’ll soon understand how things work around here. Remember our motto here is excellence.
He sent me back to my classroom but by that time Specials were over for the day and anyway no one cared about the skills I had and I could hardly even remember what they were because there was no place to try them out because we were always inside except for half an hour at recess. And later, when we opened our lunch boxes I realized that sardines were the funniest thing a person could eat. They were the funniest thing a person could eat and I was eating them and everyone was laughing.
I knew what my women would say, they’d say, Fuck Bexley, don’t say fuck, and Mama K would point out all the reasons Bexley could never be a Wolfrider and was totally not noble. But they hadn’t seen him mix. It was like Bexley built the school himself he was that easy inside it. He was like Winnowill, who was evil but was also beautiful and in charge. I wanted to know if Bexley’s way could be my way. So I threw my hilarious lunch in the garbage and I stood against the chain-link fence and I watched. Bexley and the other kids did everything like they’d always known how to do it, like they’d known how to do it even when they didn’t exist yet, even when they were just an energetic force in the universe which is what Mama L said I was before I was born. Even then, they were an energetic force that knew all about tablets and Specials and kickball and shoes that flickered and animals wearing sunglasses, and they had bubble gum instead of yarrow and they knew what was funny and what wasn’t funny and they knew why.
And I saw that even though it seemed like all the other kids were one way and I was the other way, actually there were some other kids that were also the other way. For example, there was this one kid, a chubby kid, he was in the second grade, but the other second-graders avoided him, and this