

He walked funny, like every step hurt him, but don’t let that fool you. He had a note excusing him from PE for the rest of his life because he had some kind of muscular disease in his legs. He must’ve been held back several grades, because he was the only sixth grader with acne and the start of a wispy beard on his chin. And the time before that… Well, you get the idea.Īll the way into the city, I put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly red-headed kleptomaniac girl, hitting my best friend, Grover, in the back of the head with chunks of peanut butter-and-ketchup sandwich. And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, I sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk and our class took an unplanned swim. I wasn’t aiming for the school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway. Like at my fifth-grade school, when we went to the Saratoga battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. See, bad things happen to me on field trips. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn’t get in trouble. He also had this awesome collection of Roman armour and weapons, so he was the only teacher whose class didn’t put me to sleep. You wouldn’t think he’d be cool, but he told stories and jokes and let us play games in class. He had thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled like coffee. Mr Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. Most Yancy field trips were.īut Mr Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so I had hopes.

I could start at any point in my short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad last May, when our sixth-grade class took a field trip to Manhattan – twenty-eight mental-case kids and two teachers on a yellow school bus, heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman stuff. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York.
