Casualty (Excerpt Ch. 1)

“Casualty. …Casualty.”

My little brother Len was over there at the computer playing War For the World. Again.
Are all little brothers this boring?
I would wonder what goes through his mind all day while he gets C’s at Haywood Elementary, but I’m sure I couldn’t understand. It would probably consist of a lot of bleep blop blooping in between periods of blinking “booting up, please wait” images. Len isn’t the most social person.

I’m not either, but only because Haywood Middle keeps socializing out of my daily routine.

“Dang it!” Len shouted at our family computer screen. His general was wounded.

“Casualty.” The computer responded. Len would have to start a new game.
Every time he lost a soldier to things like enemy warfare, dysentery, or a wayward tank, the computer would calmly announce “Casualty.” This way, Len knew there was one less soldier out there warring for the world.

I sat on the living room sofa, next to where Len was playing at the computer desk Mom scored at some consignment shop.

For your information, this means that it took a can and a half of Febreeze before the thing smelled like furniture instead of an ashtray. But Mom says five dollars worth of air freshener on a used computer desk costs a lot less than buying a new one at Havershams. I like Havershams. I’ll buy all my furniture there when I grow up and get out of here. I’ve been in Havershams with Mom twice, and every time I go I dream about hiding under one of the bed displays until they turn the lights off and close the store. I think it would be fun to live there all quiet and secret like. I wouldn’t have to go to school if I ran away and lived in the Havershams. But Gran Rice says some day I’d probably get too big to hide under the bed and by that time I’d be too old to go to school and I’d be a dumb bunny forever.

Gran Rice is my grandmother. She doesn’t have a name like Meemaw or Peepaw or anything because she says she isn’t a bodily function. I like her as Gran Rice though. It sounds like I’m saying Grand Rice, and she is pretty grand. Gran Rice went to college in the twenties. She’s real short, and she’s got gray, old-lady hair now, but sometimes I think about what she must have been like when she was in college. I like to think of her as a flapper girl with feathers all over her like the picture on the F. Scott Fitgerald page in my literature book at Haywood.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The Great Gatsby.” I think it has lots of flapper girls in it, but I don’t know because I’ve never read it.

English is my favorite subject. It was the only part of my day at Haywood that made me a little less mad. Please note that I did not say “happy.” It seemed like nothing at Haywood ever made me happy. In fact, I’d gotten so sick of Haywood that I went through my days like Len goes through War for the World.

“Get out your History books and turn to page 157. We’ll be learning about the Holocaust for the next three weeks.”
As I scribbled little hate messages in my notebook, loony Mrs. Raines started raining on my parade.
“Oh, please put that away, dear, it isn’t school related.”
Oh, it’s school related all right, I thought. Mrs. Raines might enjoy a Holocaust of my creative mind.
Casualty.

“That test gave me the worst hand cramp!”
My best friend Amanda didn’t have any classes with me.
“I wouldn’t know,” I replied.
Casualty.

“Hey, nerd. Guess what? Your mom’s so fat she has to iron her pants on the driveway!”
At lunch I got to sit alphabetically with the other people in my small group. All were boys. All were lame. And gross.
Casualty.
And stupid.
Casualty, casualty.

Its like every day Haywood Middle found a new way to defeat me. Sure, there weren’t any tanks rolling over me, and I wasn't contracting dysentery by eating the caf’s two-day-old chicken tetrazzini, but I sure as anything was not winning the War for my World lately.

I’d like to say it was all Haywood’s fault, too. But it wasn't. It was a little bit my fault and a lot a bit Haywood’s fault. In the sixth grade, I was an imaginative kid, you know. Not like now. I’m a realist now. But in the sixth grade, when Mrs. Moran told us to take our time on the standardized state achievement test, I didn’t do it. I wanted to finish really fast so I could use the rest of the time to write imaginative love stories about Todd Crews while I stared at him across the classroom.

I guess you could blame things on Todd too.

But you couldn’t do that for too long, because he’s too beautiful to blame anything on for too long. That’s probably why he sucks. Because he can get away with anything. Plus, his mom named him Todd Crews which sounds like Tom Cruise, so when rumors started going around the school that some boy named Todd Crews was transferring in to Haywood Elementary, all the girls already thought he was cute subconsciously, you know.

So anyway, I stared at Todd Crews while everyone else was carefully finishing their state achievement tests, and I wrote a love story about us going to the sixth grade social together. It was a good story, and I had time to read it over to myself before the bell for the end of the test rang.

I guess I didn’t score so good on that test.

But I didn’t know that the test scores were going to determine where everybody got placed in the seventh grade! I mean, how was I supposed to know that! Teachers never tell kids the important stuff.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a womanizer, which means that he slept around a lot and cheated on his wife. She went crazy and died in a mental institution. Nobody ever tells you that when you’re reading excerpts from The Great Gatsby.

So nobody told me that my story about Todd Crews would cost me my best friends the next year, and any hope I ever had of pretending I was cool, unique, exceptional, distinctive, incomparable, or any other synonym Haywood seemed to think I didn’t know.

No one told me that seventh grade at Haywood would change my life forever.