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everyone. "I'm Jeffrey. You know me." Because he was afraid of losing his name, and with it the only thing he had left from his mother and father.
    Mrs. Beale smiled. "Yeah, I know you all right. You'll be nothing but Jeffrey in here. But ---" she nodded to the door --- "out there, I don't know."
    She was right, of course. Inside his house, a kid gets one name, but on the other side of the door, it's whatever the rest of the world wants to call him.
     
    *¤* nihua *¤*

 
     
    Chapter 15
 
    Maniac's fame spread all over the East End.
    The new white kid.
    Who lived with the Beales at 728 Sycamore.
    Who ran the streets before the fathers went out.
    Who could poleax a stickball like a twelfth-grader and catch a football like Hands Down.
    Who was allergic to pizza.
    Who jumped up in Bethany Church and shouted, "Hallelujah! A-men!"
    Little kids, especially preschoolers, came from all over, bringing him their knots. They had heard about him from Hester and Lester. They had heard he could untie a sneaker knot quicker than a kid could spend a quarter.
    The bigger kids came around too, for other reasons. From Moore Street and Arch Street and Chestnut and Green. Heading for the vacant lot to check out the new kid. To test him. To see if everything they'd heard was true. To see how good he really was. And how bad.
    They found out he could do more with a football than just catch it. He could run like a squirrel. He juked and jived and spun and danced and darted, and he left them squeezing handfuls of air. Pretty soon the vacant lot was littered with blown sneakers and broken hearts.
    He didn't do much talking, but he didn't have to. Hands Down did it for him.
    Every time he scored a TD or cracked a home run, Hands was bent over in his face, talking trash. "Do it, man! Smoke them suckas! Poke 'em! Joke 'em! You bad-dudin' it! You the baddest! Five me, jude!"
    And they high-fived and low-fived and back-fived, and Hands Down would laugh and laugh.
    Maniac loved trash talk. The words were different, but in some strange way they reminded him of church. It had spirit, it had what they called soul. Pretty soon he was talking trash with the rest of them.
    And pretty soon he brought it home.
    Mrs. Beale was pressing her famous meatloaf into a baking pan one day, when Maniac started talking his trash to her. Her eyes shot open. She straightened up. "Wha'd you say?"
    He said some more.
    At first she couldn't believe her ears. When she did believe them, she didn't like it. She didn't like this boy bringing the vacant lot into her kitchen; and she didn't like how it fit his mouth. So she put a stop to it right then and there and slapped that trash-talking mouth.
    Her lip started to quiver before his, but before she could say "I'm sorry," he was hugging and squeezing her and burying his face in her chest and sobbing, "I love you... I love you..."
    And he loved the quiet times after Hester and Lester went to bed. That's when he read Amanda's books. When he had gone through about half of them, he figured it was time to tackle the encyclopedia A.
    Problem was, Amanda was always reading it. And she vowed she wasn't giving it up, not even to Maniac, till she read everything from Aardvark to Aztec. To make matters worse, the supermarket offer had expired, so there were no other volumes.
    The more Amanda would not let go of the A, the more Maniac wanted it. It reached the point where she had to hide it whenever she wasn't reading it. Unbeknownst to her, Maniac always found it. He would get up even earlier in the morning, read it by flashlight for a while, sneak it back, and go trotting with Bow Wow.
    And sometimes Maniac just sat at the front window, being on the inside.
    Maniac loved almost everything about his new life.
    But everything did not love him back.
     
    *¤* nihua *¤*

 
     
    Chapter 16
 
    Maniac Magee was blind. Sort of.
    Oh, he could see objects, all right. He could see a flying football or a John McNab fastball better than