3/21/2023 0 Comments Scrawl book![]() ![]() They look about as bored and uninterested as the rest of us. You know, if you put a lefty desk and a righty desk next to each other the right way, the desks really seem like they’re saying I don’t care. Did you know that if you’re strong enough, you can twist the desk part up and around until it looks like an arm shrugging? Somebody has been doing that all over school. ![]() It’s nothing but a slab of plastic connected to my chair by a flimsy metal rod. When I looked up and asked you, What do you want me to write about? you said, About anything.Ībout anything? Okay. My white pad of paper looks a little green, too. The floor is the same sad green as my pants, but my pants are a lot cleaner. I’m a prisoner caught in the fluorescent searchlights, looking pale green while I smudge blue ink in a black-and-white marble composition book. The story begins with me, your humble narrator, alone and stranded after school in a Study Hall the exact same color as puke. I’m doing it so I don’t have to pick up trash in the school courtyard like certain deviant so-called friends of mine who also got caught. Not for history and not for scientific research and definitely not to let out my inner demons. This is my first book, and I’m writing it for one reason only. That’s the first line from Moby Dick, all right? I always wanted to start a book like that. I guess we’ll always call them glasses anyway. But I think it would be mean to crack the lenses. They’re not even really glass, you know, almost never. W., is trembly a word or should I have used trembling?) ![]() Just before I sauntered down the empty hall to class, I pressed the parts straight into his trembly palm. I kept that smile going while I fogged up both halves of his glasses with my breath and wiped away my thick thumbprints. I reached down with my hand thoughtfully, and I smiled, and I pulled Ricardo onto his fat stupid feet. Usually they aren’t so quick to narc if you do something nice, something unexpected just before you walk away. Reaching down and helping Ricardo up would be a good idea. That’s when I noticed the orange peel next to the bright blue can for the first time, close by Ricardo’s tangled hair, but I really had to go. Mostly they looked at Ricardo facedown on the sick green dusty floor next to the overflowing trash can. Kids were starting to walk around us and look, but they steered plenty clear of me. Ricardo was pathetic sprawled on the hall floor, not crying this time but blinking a lot and not talking either, like he was in bed that morning and he didn’t want to get up and go to school for some reason. I got up off Ricardo’s chubby back, peeled myself off that authentic, autographed blue hockey sweatshirt he wears every day with the stupid hole in it, and I wiped off my big old carpenter pants. The bell rang for English class and I’d promised Mr. That’s how it went for fat Ricardo Manzana. Grab the two lenses between your big hands and twist your wrist-just snap the part over the nose-now you can’t see anything for the rest of the day. Change that curve a hair, just a tiny, minuscule difference, and you can see near. Grind the glass this way, put in a slight curve, and you can see far. But definitely they mean you can’t see without them. Little pieces of glass stuck on your face that mean everything. They’re just glass and metal, or glass and plastic. You see them every day but you really don’t think about them, I bet. Think about a pair of glasses for a second. Meanwhile, friction is developing between him and his close friends, which all comes to a head at the end of the novel. She asks if his mother (a seamstress) would create the costumes, and he agrees but creates them himself after stealing from the drop off box for a thrift store. Through the course of the book he becomes intrigued with a girl who's an artist and is putting on a play that she wrote. It's all a little too clean to be believable, and the speed with which he opens up in his journal really doesn't ring true. He's supposedly extremely smart and gets great grades, even though he doesn't seem to do much work and tries hard to look like he doesn't care. Nevertheless, he writes about his bad his home life is but I've read about a lot worse. ![]() While he is obviously quite poor, he doesn't seem abused (maybe somewhat neglected), nor does he seem very angry. He writes about what goes on in school and at home. Tod is a bully in his high school, and has received an unusual detention: he must stay after school with his guidance counselor and write in a journal every day until the counselor agrees his sentence is complete. ![]()
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