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OTHER YEARLING BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY
MR. TUCKET
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TROUBLE DON'T LAST
Shelley Pearsall
THEN AGAIN, MAYBE I WON'T
Judy Blume
ME, MOP, AND THE MOONDANCE KID
Walter Dean Myers
LAST SUMMER WITH MAIZON
Jacqueline Woodson
BETWEEN MADISON AND PALMETTO
Jacqueline Woodson
MAIZON AT BLUE HILL
Jacqueline Woodson
THE DIAMOND WAR
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
JACKSON JONES AND MISSION GREENTOP
Mary Quattlebaum
JACKSON JONES AND THE PUDDLE OF THORNS
Mary Quattlebaum
To the Corner Crew
Charles Culler Middle School
in Lincoln, Nebraska
ONE
“Yo! You're changing the channels so fast I can't see what's on!” Thirteen-year-old Darnell Rock was lying on the sofa, looking over his twin sister's shoulder.
“Yo yourself!” said Tamika. She kept the remote control just out of her brother's reach as she raced through the channels. “If you want to see what's on, you got to look faster.”
“How can you look faster?”
“I don't know, but it's not my problem,” Tamika said. “And didn't Mama tell you to clean the living room?”
“It's already clean,” Darnell said. From where he lay on the couch, he straightened out the magazines in the rack and turned the carved mahogany elephant that sat in the middle of the coffee table so that it faced the television.
“I know you didn't dust.” Tamika had sparkling white teeth and a wide smile that brightened her whole face. Her dark eyes twinkled. She knew that Darnell had not even thought about dusting.
“You got it made with putting the garbage out,” Darnell said.
“That's life, baby.” Tamika laughed. It was her job to separate the family's garbage, to drop the regular garbage down the garbage chute in the hallway of their apartment building, and to put out the recyclables in the hallway on Mondays and Wednesdays.
Darnell looked a lot like his sister, except that he was just a little lighter in complexion. He was the same coffee-brown tone as his mother, while Tamika was dark, like their father. Another difference was that Tamika had the fastest smile in the entire city of Oakdale. If she wasn't really mad or feeling terrible, she would find something to smile about. Darnell, on the other hand, didn't smile unless something was really funny or at least made him feel good.
“I bet you were adopted,” Darnell said. “I can't figure you to be anybody's natural sister.”
“Oh, shut up, Darnell.”
“That's why our names are so different. If we were really twins they would have named us something like Darnell and Donna, or Darnell and Darnellette.”
“In the first place, I never heard of anybody named Darnellette,” Tamika said. “And you heard Mommy say a hundred times that she didn't want to hook us up with those stupid twin names.”
“I still think they either adopted you or won you in one of those games where you break a balloon and get a prize.”
Tamika pointed the remote at her brother and clicked the channel changer.
“What's all this noise going on in here?” Sidney Rock came into the living room, pushed Darnell's legs off the couch, and sat down heavily. He ran his fingers along the side of his head through what was left of his hair and tried to push it toward the bald spot on top of his head.
“Your youngest child has got a problem because I won't let him hold the remote control,” Tamika said. She was always reminding Darnell that he had been born six minutes after her.
“FU settle it,” Mr. Rock said. “Give me the changer.”
“You're as bad as she is,” Darnell said. “You keep switching channels, too.”
“Watch your mouth, boy.” Mr. Rock eased off his shoes and put his feet up on the coffee table.
“You work hard today, Daddy?” Tamika asked.
“Always working hard,” Mr. Rock said. “Why don't you either put the news on or give me the remote.”
Tamika flipped the remote to her father. He caught it in midair with one hand. “How was school?” he said to no one in particular as he started clicking the remote.
“Okay except for the mass murders and the kangaroo in the lunchroom,” Tamika said.
“That's good,” Mr. Rock said.
“Yo, Daddy, she's messing with you again,” Darnell said. “You didn't hear what she said.”
Mr. Rock looked at Tamika and asked her when she was going to grow up. “You're almost—”
“Fourteen,” Tamika added. “In February.”
“Yeah,” Mr. Rock said as he changed channels. “You got to be acting more mature.”
“She's always messing with somebody,” Darnell said. “This guy got arrested in the supermarket today and she had to mess with him.”
“What was he arrested for?”
“He was trying to shoplift a potato,” Darnell said. “They had him in handcuffs and Tamika went up to the guy and asked him if he was going to jail.”
“A potato?” Sidney Rock put the television on mute.
“Yeah, he was one of those homeless guys that hang out on McGinley Square,” Darnell said.
“He shouldn't have been shoplifting,” Tamika said. “I'm glad they caught him. Then he had the nerve to get nasty, too.”
“What did he say?” Mr. Rock asked.
“Said we were rich kids who forgot what it was like being colored,” Tamika said. “I told him at least we didn't steal potatoes.”
“You shouldn't have been talking to him at all,” Mr. Rock said. “He could have been dangerous.”
Darnell thought of the man. He had two jackets under the dark overcoat he wore. Standing in front of the cat food display, his hands cuffed behind his back, he had looked more uncomfortable than dangerous. He had kept looking up at the ceiling, and his mouth opened and closed as if he were just ready to say something, but nothing had come out until Tamika had spoken to him.
“How long do you think he'll stay in jail?” Darnell asked.
“Probably just overnight/' his father said, still looking at the television screen. “They don't have room in the jails for people stealing potatoes. He might have got caught on purpose to have someplace to stay. People do things like that.”
It was Darnell's mother who had decided to have leftovers on Mondays. It was a way not to waste food, she said. When she called them to the table it was full of small dishes, including fried chicken and collard greens from Sunday dinner, tuna salad from Saturday lunch, meatballs, and an assortment of vegetables.
“Eat what you want, but make sure you eat something green.” Linda Rock walked for an hour at the mall three days a week and was in great shape. Her face was round, with large eyes that were spaced wide apart, and full lips that she touched lightly with lip gloss.
“I can see this little traffic cop in your stomach telling the food where to go,” Tamika said. “Green to the left, orange to the right. What other color is food?”
“How much is a potato, anyway?” Darnell asked.
&n
bsp; “How many calories?” his mother asked.
“No. How much money?”
“One medium potato should weigh about a third of a pound,” his mother said. “So if a pound of potatoes costs sixty cents, then one potato would cost about twenty cents.”
“Then we saw somebody going to jail over less than a quarter,” Darnell said.
“You saw somebody going to jail over stealing something from the supermarket/' Mr. Rock said. “The cost doesn't mean anything.”
It was Tamika who jumped in with the entire story, including the part about the man saying that they were rich kids who had forgotten how to be colored.
Darnell didn't think that the man really thought that he and Tamika were rich. He was embarrassed, that was all. He had an old-looking face, but Darnell had the impression that the man wasn't that old, not really.
“Compared to some people,” his mother was saying, “we are rich. Your father has a good job at the post office and I do all right at the department store.”
“Two people willing to work,” his father said. “You want that meatball?”
His father was pointing at the last meatball with his pointer finger, which was short and stumpy.
“No, I don't want it,” Darnell said.
“He thinks if he eats too many meatballs he's going to get fat,” Tamika said. “Then Paula Snow won't like him.”
“What do I care if she likes me?” Darnell said. “I don't like her!”
“The only reason you joined the school newspaper is so you could be next to her and her greasy sandwiches,” Tamika went on. “She brings these greasy sandwiches in an old paper bag every day, but Darnell is in love with her so he don't mind.”
“You need to be punched right in your nose,” Darnell said.
“You're going to be on the newspaper?” Mrs. Rock asked, surprised. “That's very nice, Darnell.”
“Maybe,” Darnell said. “I'll check it out.”
“And check out Paula Snow,” Tamika said.
“Yo, Tamika, why don't you do something creative, you know, like shutting up?”
“That's enough fighting at the dinner table,” Mrs. Rock said, wiping her hands with a paper towel. “Now, Tamika, apologize to your brother.”
“Oh, Darnell, I'm sooo sorry,” Tamika said in a way that nobody in the whole world would believe that she was sorry.
“And Darnell”—Mrs. Rock put her elbows on the table, leaned forward, and placed her chin on her fists—”tell me about this new girlfriend.”
“Mom!”
Darnell was glad that his mother was kidding him about Paula Snow. It was better than having her asking him about the newspaper. He hadn't done his homework last week and was sitting in the principal's office when Mr. Baker had said he was disgusted with him.
“Can't you spend one day without getting into trouble?” the principal asked him.
Darnell had put his head down and shrugged, hoping that Mr. Baker wouldn't tell him to bring his parents in again.
“If you can't do anything positive, why are you coming to school?”
“To learn,” Darnell had answered.
“To learn? To learn what? Your grades are terrible, your behavior is terrible, and you don't do one thing for this school!”
“I was thinking of joining the school newspaper,” he had said, remembering the announcement they had made over the loudspeaker that morning.
“You?” Mr. Baker looked at him with his head to one side. “Am I hearing right?”
“Yes, sir.” Darnell tried to remember the whole announcement, but couldn't think of anything more than that it was being run by Mr. Derby.
“Okay, Darnell,” Mr. Baker said. “I'm going to see if you do anything on the school paper. But if you don't get yourself straight soon, I'm going to have to speak to your parents and maybe even suggest they try another school for you.”
He hadn't told anybody what Mr. Baker had said, not even Tamika, and surely not his parents.
Before it became a middle school, South Oakdale was the town's oldest high school. Larry Keyes, Darnell's best friend, said that the red brick building was so old that George Washington once dropped by and borrowed an ax from the shop class to cut down a cherry tree.
“They made it a prison for a little while,” Larry said. “That's why the windows are so small, so the prisoners can't get out. Then once they were sure that the building wasn't fit for kids, they made it into a middle school.”
It was September, and there were a lot of new kids at South Oakdale, so there was a lot to look at as Larry and Darnell headed toward the corner near the gym. Larry was exactly the same height as Darnell but looked a lot bigger because he was heavy and had shoulders that were straight and wide. He looked like a tough kid, but he had a little high voice that reminded everybody of the Chipmunks. He was funny, too. At least he was funny most of the time. His parents were divorced, and when he thought about that he wasn't funny at all.
“I heard that if you go down in the basement/' Larry went on, bobbing his head as he walked, “you can still find the bodies of some high school kids who were on detention/'
“What gets me about detention/' Darnell said, “is that you can't do anything when you get it. You just have to sit there.”
“I don't like it at all,” Larry said. They were approaching the school from the rear. There was a basketball game going on, and they changed their direction to get a better look.
“Did I say I liked it?” Darnell asked. “Did I say I liked it? All I said was that it is even worse because you can't do anything except sit there and be stupid.”
“If they had you doing something it would probably be something like breaking up rocks or something like you were on a chain gang,” Larry said.
“Here comes Freddy,” Darnell said. “I didn't think he was going to South Oakdale.”
“They letting anybody in now,” Larry said.
They watched as Freddy Haskell cut across the lawn toward them. The collar of the white shirt he wore was crumpled, the way his collars always were, and the tie was off to one side.
“Hi, Larry. Hi, Darnell,” Freddy said with a wave of his hand. He stopped a few feet in front of Larry and Darnell.
“You talking to seventh-graders, man,” Larry said. “When a sixth-grader speaks to a seventh-grader he's supposed to say Mister. You can call us Mister Larry and Mister Darnell.”
“Aw, man …” Freddy smiled.
“What you mean, ‘Aw, man’!” Darnell tried to lower his voice but it just sounded a little hoarse. “He said you got to call us Mister. He didn't say anything about no ‘Aw, man.’ “
Freddy waved his hand and started away.
“Next time you see us you better call us Mister,” Larry yelled at him.
“He's so neat I bet his mama irons his underwear,” Darnell said.
“He's okay, though,” Larry said. “Just too neat.”
“That's catchy, too,” Darnell said. “You hang around him for a few hours and you find yourself wanting to get neat. One day he walked me all the way down to Terry Street and I got this urge to go in and put on a tie.”
“I got to stay away from him, then,” Larry said. “Hey, you want to play basketball after school?”
“Can't,” Darnell said. “Got a meeting of the newspaper people.”
“You like that newspaper stuff?” Larry asked.
“How do I know?” Darnell asked. “They're just having their first meeting today. I'll tell you one thing, though. If it's like homework, or something like that, I'm quitting.”
“If it was me,” Larry said, rubbing the end of his nose with his palm, “I'd quit right away.”
TWO
“South Oakdale has had a newspaper just about every other year,” Mr. Derby said. “It all depends on how many kids are really interested in the paper at the beginning of the school year and how many stay with it. We really need at least eight people to put out a decent paper.”
“We got ten!”
said Tony O'Casio. He had dark eyes and heavy eyebrows that moved up and down as he spoke. Everything in the school seemed to excite him.
Darnell looked around as Mr. Derby counted the kids. There were ten, as Tony had said. There were two kids Darnell had never seen before, and he figured them to be sixth-graders.
“Okay, we're going to meet two days a week, Wednesdays and Fridays,” Mr. Derby went on. The history teacher was tall, with almost white hair even though he was one of the younger teachers. “If you can't make a meeting, please call someone and find out what happened. What I want you to do is to think of the Gazette staff as a team. Every time we put out a good newspaper, we win.”
“We're going to use the computer?” one of the kids Darnell didn't know asked.
“Yes, but first I want everyone to introduce themselves,” Mr. Derby said. “And if you think you know what you would like to do on the paper, now would be a good time to bring it up. We'll start with Tony.”
“Okay.” Tony's fingers were drumming nervously on the desk as he spoke. “My name is Tony O'Casio, but everyone calls me Tony ‘O,’ and that's the name I'm going to have on my column. Mostly I'm interested in sports.”
“I never heard anyone call you Tony ‘O,’ “ Paula said.
“Who asked you?” Tony asked.
“Go on, Paula.”
“My name is Paula Snow, I'm in the seventh grade, and I'm interested in being a reporter,” Paula said. Paula was dark and pretty and got the best grades in the school.
Kitty Gates was next. She was the second-tallest girl in the school, and some of the guys used to call her Skinny Minny because she was so thin. You could always tell how she felt because when she was happy she had a very wide smile and when she was sad she looked as if she was just about ready to cry.
“My name is Eddie Latimer, I'm in the seventh grade, and I want to take pictures.”
“You have a camera, don't you, Eddie?” Mr. Derby asked.
“He's got three cameras,” Mark volunteered.
“Yo, man, I don't need you to answer my questions,” Eddie said. Eddie was shorter than most of the guys in the school, but he had enormous eyes and he could draw as well as take pictures. “I have four cameras/' he said. “But one of them is broken. I got sand in it.”