Thieving Weasels - Billy Taylor Page 0,3

Lightyear backpack.

We had two options: I could hang around our apartment all day, or I could go to school. We tried the former, but there are only so many hours a day a seven-year-old boy can watch television, and after I almost burned down the third floor of the Cheshire Arms Apartments, we tried the latter.

The night before my first day of school I was super nervous. With the exception of my cousin, Roy, I had never spent time around kids my own age and didn’t know how to act. Was school like jail, where you were supposed to punch out the toughest guy in your cell? Or was it like a convenience store, where you flirted with the lady behind the counter while your mother stole milk and Mylanta? I had no idea.

What surprised me the most about school was how easy it was and how much easier it became. I could barely read when I got there, so they put me in a class with the dumb kids, and let’s just say the contrast was more than a little obvious. I had grown up fast-talking sales ladies and policemen while my fellow students could barely wipe their own noses. By the end of the first week I was the star pupil, and by the end of the second I was transferred to a class where, if nothing else, the kids knew which end of a pencil to stick up their noses.

What I liked best about school was the companionship. No one had ever wanted to be my friend before, and overnight a whole new world opened up. I had been living in this alternative universe where playdates, class trips, and just about everything else a seven-year-old boy might enjoy had no value. Sure, my mother stole plenty of nice stuff for me, but even the best toys aren’t much fun when you have no one to play with. In school, however, I was just like everyone else, and it was glorious.

“Don’t get too attached,” my mother said when I told her about my new friends. But I didn’t listen and made pals with everyone from the strange kids who smelled like pee all the way up to the principal. I can’t tell you how exciting it was to have people I barely knew call me by my name in the halls. Even if it wasn’t my real name.

Then the inevitable happened.

“Get your things together,” my mother said one Saturday morning.

“Why?” I asked. “I don’t have school today.”

“We’re leaving.”

Her words were like a punch in the stomach.

“But I have a test on Monday,” I begged. “And Mrs. Fleagler said I could sing the song from Cats in music class.”

“You can sing in the car. Now grab your stuff and let’s go.”

That was the day I stopped trusting my mother. After that, I was always careful not to tell her too much about school or my classmates. Is that crazy or what? If I couldn’t tell my own mother about my life, then who could I tell?

No one, that’s who. And here’s the thing about lying: not only is it exhausting to keep a thousand stories and fabrications in your head, it’s also incredibly lonely. And I hate being alone. Not to sound overly dramatic, but I left a major chunk of my heart in that elementary school on the day we moved away. I’ve been trying to get it back ever since.

The only positive thing about my predicament was that I got to keep my textbooks, and by the time my mother got around to enrolling me in a new school I had them memorized. Math, science, and spelling, I knew them backward and forward.

No more classes with dumb kids for me, I told myself. This time it’s going to be different.

And for a while it was. I made a point of not telling my mother about school, and on the rare occasions when she did ask, I was careful not to reveal too much. I’m sure my mother knew something was up, but she was a little fuzzy in the head from the grapefruit and tuna fish diet she had started the month before. My mother was always trying some crazy diet, and this one turned her into a complete space cadet. Unfortunately, she zoomed straight back to earth on the night my second grade teacher called.

“What did she want?” I asked when my mother hung up the phone.

“Get packing.”

“What?”

“You heard what I said. And if you ever