Oddballs by William Sleator

that meant I was (conditionally, at least) accepted by all. In elementary school, it wasn’t social death to be associated with someone, like me, who was a little different.
    But things changed in junior high. Suddenly we were surrounded by older kids, teenagers, who had very rigid rules of dress and speech, which were hopelessly confusing to me. Before we became deliberate nonconformists in high school, Vicky had been on the verge of being accepted by the popular kids in junior high. I, on the other hand, never had a chance with those people; I never had the right clothes, I was lousy at sports, I couldn’t catch on to the slang, and the tuft of hair on the back of my head wouldn’t lie flat. I was always an oddball, a nothing in the eyes of the ruling clique.
    I’ll never forget the time in seventh grade when I was just getting to be friends with a guy named Dave Solomon. He lived in another neighborhood but one day rode home with me on the school bus. A popular kid named Steve Kamen asked Dave what he was doing on this bus. “I’m going over to Bill’s house,” Dave explained. Kamen looked at me, then back to Dave. “You sap,” he told Dave, and walked away.
    But despite Steve Kamen’s disapproval, Dave became my good friend in junior high. Like me, Dave played the piano and was more interested in music and literature than in sports. Unlike me, Dave had a chance to be popular at the beginning of seventh grade—he was naturally better at sports than I was, despite his lack of interest, and at the start of the year a lot of the girls considered him to be very cute. That changed when he was suddenly struck by virulent acne, which persisted throughout his teenage years and left him with scars that were not merely physical.
    I had other friends in junior high, too. We were an extremely disparate group but had certain traits in common that made us comfortable together; we read a lot, we liked being smart, we didn’t fit in with the conventional kids—and gradually began to realize that we didn’t want to fit in with them.
    My best friend was still Nicole, who had painted the Halloween posters. She was now a tall, overweight girl, who was generally recognized as the smartest person in the school. In eighth grade, we had an English teacher who was new to the school, and he gave Nicole an F on her first paper. Nicole, in her quiet, self-effacing way, did not protest or even ask the teacher why he had given her the F, as I urged her to do when she told me about it over the phone. “It doesn’t really matter,” she said, no particular emotion in her voice, as though she accepted such injustice as a normal part of life.
    A few days later, the same teacher had us write an essay in class. When he saw what Nicole came up with, in front of his eyes, he apologized to her privately for giving her the F on her first paper, explaining that it was so well written he had assumed she had copied it word for word from a published article. He changed the original grade, and his opinion of Nicole.
    Though Nicole always got very good grades, she claimed she hardly ever studied. Mom didn’t believe her—she said nobody could do so well without studying. But Nicole was telling the truth, all right. I knew how much of her own study time Nicole spent writing papers for other kids who were not good writers, though of course I couldn’t give this evidence to Mom.
    Mom also didn’t believe what Nicole said about her weight problem. No one ever saw Nicole overeat, and Nicole told me that she really didn’t eat much when she was alone either; she said she was overweight because there was something about her metabolism that turned every morsel of food she put into her mouth into fat. Mom said that was baloney; she was sure Nicole overate in secret. On this issue I had no evidence one way or the other—until many years later.
    Nicole and I had no romantic interest in