Number 8 by Anna Fienberg Page A

makes that remark about crying all the time. Especially to Asim, who does cry a lot. He can’t help it, after what he’s been through. Badman wouldn’t have lasted a minute, I think, in a real war.
    Asim and I get off early, at the next stop, because we want to go to the mall. We wave to Ez and make our way to the front. When we’re standing on the sidewalk, waiting to cross the road, I see Badman doing this girly wave back as he moves into my seat.
    It’s strange, I’m thinking, how Esmerelda acts around Badman. She couldn’t like him, and she’s so—well, queenly—the way she looks down her nose at him and narrows her eyes as if he’s made a bad smell. But she never really lets fly with him the way I’ve seen her do with other boys who annoy her. It’s as if she doesn’t want to
totally
demolish him. There’s something about him she likes, I’m thinking. Something she wants.
    â€œHave you ever wondered why girls seem to like the bad boys?” I ask Asim.
    He frowns at me. “That is not my experience. Are you talking about Badman? It could not be true! Ez likes the Badman?”
    â€œMmm.” I kick an empty can of Coke along as we walk. I’d really love one now, the sun is beating down like a hammer on my back.
    â€œBut he shows no respect to her. And he is cruel.”
    â€œYeah.”
    Badman is a racist bastard. He makes fun of Asim’s accent—not in a well-meaning way, like Ez—but spitefully, watching to see him break. Kids say that once, he shoved a firecracker up a cat’s butt and lit it. Just to see what would happen. “Cry about it,” he said when Asim protested.
    And once, Asim told me, Badman walked out of school, just like that, and rang a neighbor’s doorbell. The neighbor was this old guy, Mr. Wall. Everyone at school knew Mr. Wall had lost it—he was always out roaming the streets, looking for his wife who’d died twenty years ago. Kids often had to bring him back home. He was the type whose short-term memory had grown so bad he wore five shirts, one on top of the other. So when Badman rings the doorbell and Mr. Wall appears, Badman goes like this: Are you Mr. Wall?
    â€œYes, I think so,” says the old man.
    â€œAre there any other walls here?”
    â€œNo,” says Mr. Wall, looking about in a confused way.
    â€œWell, you’d better get out before the roof caves in! Ha ha!” And Badman shoots off, with poor old Mr. Wall running after him, into the traffic. Four cars piled up and the police came and everything.
    Badman got suspended for that. And he already
had
a red card for blowing up the school garbage cans.
    â€œBut Ez has never been to the Badman house, has she?” Asim asked.
    â€œNo, I don’t think so. She told me about his dad going away to New Zealand, but never about his mom or what his house was like.”
    â€œYet she has been to
your
house,” Asim reminds me, smiling.
    â€œYeah,” and I smile back at him. “Three times. If she comes today it’ll be four. Hope so, then it’ll be an even number.”
    We buy a Coke each and some doughnuts. The ones with jelly and cream inside are delicious. We finish them by the time we reach home. I have to say that a really good bakery only five minutes walk from home is one of the better things about living on Valerie Avenue. The
best
thing, though, is eating the cakes with a friend. See, Asim lives just two doors down from Esmerelda, at number sixty-four. How lucky is he? A double whammy of luck. I told him that if he was anyone else, I’d be too mad to even speak to him. As it is, I’m just glad.
    I let Asim and myself in with my key. Mom isn’t home yet; she’s got lunch shift at the pub three days a week, and dinner on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. Lunch shift means cleaning up afterward and driving Polly home—an older waitress whose bad knees, Mom says,