One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy by Stephen Tunney Page A

concerns, like avoiding their abusive stepfather or getting the same pair of massively wicked Chromo-cufflinks that Blonzo Clangfor of Alphatown United wore. But that was not the question.
Would the Loopies stop trusting me if they knew...that I was also...a Topper?
    A Topper. Among other Toppers.
    A dreaded, hated group. Total snobs. Brainy. The polar opposite to the Loopies. Perfect students, extremely adult-like in every way, logical, and not ashamed to quote poetry at the snap of a teacher’s finger. Obedient, but ready to challenge a teacher if the teacher said something stupid. They were loved by the faculty, and the substitutes fought over the rare assignment to teach a Topper class — and indeed, that was a rare thing, because the teachers of Toppers never called in sick.
    They were the Advanced Honors class. Hieronymus was a star among them.
    Mus! Was that you I saw in the auditorium yesterday with all those Toppers?
    I heard that Mus has a twin brother — in the Toppers class! Can you believe that?
    The expression Toppers was not their own invention any more than the moniker Loopies originated from the Loopies. These labels were the work of all those students in the middle, the overwhelming bloc of boys and girls who were neither Toppers nor Loopies. Hieronymus never got to know any of these — he only befriended those on the fringe.

    The kids in the middle, the big fat majority of average Joes and Josephines, had equal contempt for the Toppers and the Loopies. They felt physically threatened by the Loopies and intellectually threatened by the Toppers. To them, Hieronymus Rexaphin was an inexplicable phenomenon — they were not sure if he was even a student. Because of the scheduling of his classes, he often had to run through the crowded halls of Lunar Public 777, his goggles fixed to his face, sprinting from one academic end to the other, from Toppers to Loopies or Loopies to Toppers, dodging all the average kids, the non-crazies, the non-geniuses, the non-criminals, the non-prodigies. They called him names sometimes. They knew all about his extreme schedule simply by watching where he ran to and ran from and he didn’t care if they knew, they all lived in the purgatory of teenage existence. He ran through them every day, several times a day, and they insulted him,
hey goggle-freak are you a Loopie or are you a Topper
, but he smiled and he wore their insults as a badge of honor because he knew their animosities were based on a peculiar kind of jealousy: There was no nickname for those in the forgotten, mediocre middle.

    By the time he was sixteen, after two years of living the
extreme academic schizophrenic
dream, he had accumulated quite a number of friends from both worlds, and among them, he had two absolutely excellent friends. Slue, of course, was his excellent friend from the Toppers, who, like himself, also just happened to bear lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis. On the other end of the spectrum, there was Bruegel, his excellent friend from the Loopies. Bruegel had no idea what lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis was. In fact, it did not even occur to him that Hieronymus wore those goggles for any reason at all except that they looked cool.
    Bruegel was a type of prince among the Loopies. He had as many social problems and family miseries as any of the others in that den of frazzled youth, but, unlike most, he never chose violence as his first or second option to solve anything. Which is not to say he was never kicked in the face after breaking a classmate’s nose with his hammerlike fists — Bruegel never followed violence, but violence had a way of following Bruegel. He was big and burly and with his unkept mop of dirty blond hair, maintained a peculiar joviality among the swirling chaos around him. His expression was always perplexed, amused, and, most of all, innocent. He was dirty, but never in a repulsive way — indeed, his dishevelment was more like that of a knight who fell off his horse and