On the Other Side of the Bridge by Ray Villareal

to him.
    Now, Yvette was easily the hottest girl at Wyatt Middle School. Only this time, she was the one who avoided Lonnie. He couldn’t blame her, really. Why would she bother to pay attention to him when she had so many guys hitting on her? Maybe he’d tell her he had seen Mr. Treviño. He figured she might enjoy hearing that bit of news.
    Yvette was standing by the window chatting with Megan Patterson and Lisa Yarbrough. Lonnie waited nearby for an opening. When the girls noticed him, they stopped talking. Unfortunately, all he managed to say to Yvette was, “Hey, you’ll never guess who I ran into at the grocery store the other day,” when the bell rang, and everyone took their seats. Mr. Arrington entered the classroom, reached inside his costume box and pulled out a long, priest’s robe and a wooden cross.
    After class, Lonnie tried to catch up with Yvette, but she disappeared into a crowd of students before he could reach her.
    He headed to Mrs. Ridley’s for math, a class he absolutely hated. They had been studying how to multiply and divide fractions, something Lonnie still couldn’tfigure out how to do. As it was, he could barely multiply and divide whole numbers.
    Next was science, with probably the oldest living teacher in the world, Mr. Malone, a frail man with a gaunt face and a bony body. The kids joked that Mr. Malone taught science with his identical twin brother, the life-size skeleton he kept in his room. Lonnie’s mind drifted as Mr. Malone, in a quivery voice, rattled off something about ecosystems.
    By lunchtime, Lonnie’s brain felt like mush. After he bought his food, he looked around for a place to sit and noticed a bunch of kids huddled around Slurpee.
    â€œIt was freaking awesome!” he heard Slurpee tell the guys. “The guard pulls out his gun and fires at me. Bam! But I duck. Then I shoot back with both fingers. Pow! Pow!” Slurpee demonstrated how he did it, which made the guys burst with laughter.
    José Castillo called Lonnie over. “Did the guard really shoot at you guys?”
    Lonnie sat his tray down at their table and glowered at Slurpee. “Nobody shot at us,” he said.
    â€œThe guard didn’t shoot at them,” Slurpee told the guys, holding onto his fantasy. “He shot at me. Lonnie and Axel had their heads covered up, so they couldn’t hear or see nothing. But that bullet flew right by my ear.”
    Lonnie realized he used to tell crazy stories like that when he was little, but he was seven years old at the time, not fourteen.
    Axel entered the cafeteria. When José saw him, he motioned for him to join them.
    â€œDid the security guard at the paper company really shoot at you guys when you broke into the warehouseyesterday?” José asked. “’Cause that’s what Slurpee’s saying, but Lonnie says he didn’t.”
    Axel’s face grew chalky, and he stared at Lonnie, speechless.
    â€œHerman’s just messing with you,” Lonnie said, referring to Slurpee by his real name. After what his mother had told him, he thought it would be best if they ditched the Slurpee nickname. “We went to the paper company to look for comic books and stuff, but a guard chased us out of there. That’s all that happened.” Lonnie gave Herman a dead-level stare, letting him know he wasn’t going to back him up. “Let’s go out in the hallway real quick,” he told him and Axel. “I need to talk to you about something.”
    By calling them away, Lonnie was certain the guys at the table suspected there might be some truth to Herman’s story, but he couldn’t worry about it. Outside the cafeteria, he shared what his mother had said with them.
    â€œFrom now on, you can’t let anybody call you Slurpee,” he told Herman. “And you can’t tell anybody else about what happened at the warehouse.”
    â€œBut everybody already