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that involved too much thinking. He had little intellectual curiosity. But the two had known each other since first grade.

    Most people tend to drift away from their childhood pals as they de- velop new interests and new friends. But Coke and Jimmy never did. There was a comfort level there. It’s easy to trust somebody you’ve known all your life.
    “Later,” Coke replied, and headed down the hall to the health room.
    The health teacher, Mrs. Audrey Higgins, had that look on her face. It was the look that said she hated her job, she hated her life, and she hated the kids she had to teach. And they hated her right back.
    “Today we’re going to learn how to brush our teeth, correctly ,” Mrs. Higgins informed the class.
    Coke groaned, and Mrs. Higgins probably heard it. He found it inconceivable that sixth graders had to be taught how to brush their teeth or that precious class time would be wasted on something so commonsensical. He looked around to see if anybody else in the class saw the ridiculousness of it all. They just stared back at him blankly. Zombies .
    Mrs. Higgins was a tall woman with short hair. She squirted a dollop of hand sanitizer, which she always kept on her desk, and rubbed the stuff into her palms. Then she picked up a toothbrush.
    “Grasp the handle firmly,” Mrs. Higgins told the class, “and always brush up and down. Never side to side.”
    Coke had no real problem with Mrs. Higgins’s tooth-brushing technique. But he did have an interest in busting chops, especially when it came to grown-ups.
    “What’s wrong with brushing from side to side, Mrs. Higgins?” he asked politely.
    Mrs. Higgins stopped for a moment to look at Coke. She was used to kids like him: bored, supersmart know-it-alls who amused themselves by asking dumb questions.
    “If you brush from side to side,” she explained slowly, as if he was developmentally challenged, “your teeth will grow in crooked. That should be self-evident, Mr. McDonald.”
    It also should have been the end of the discussion, but Coke couldn’t let it drop.
    “Why would they grow in crooked?” Coke asked. “If you put an equal amount of pressure on the teeth as you brush to the left and an equal amount of pressure as you brush to the right, the pressure on both sides would be equal; and the teeth would have no reason to grow in anything but straight. Unless, of course, you’re claiming that Newton’s third law of motion is incorrect. That is, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
    A few of the boys in the back snickered. They had no idea what Coke was talking about, but they could tell he was giving Mrs. Higgins a hard time. She looked at Coke wearily. She’d had enough of him and his attention-getting devices.
    “That’s detention for you, McDonald.”
    “What?” Coke shouted. “What did I do? You’re gonna give me detention because I questioned you about how to brush teeth ? Are you kidding me? It’s the last day of school! I was just exercising my freedom of speech.”
    “Your freedom of speech ends at my ears,” Mrs. Higgins said.
    “This is child abuse; that’s what it is!”
    She ignored him. The bell rang, and everybody pushed through the front door chanting the chorus of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out.” Coke trudged to the detention room.
    It was a depressing, windowless room in the basement of the school. On the whiteboard, somebody had scrawled: PAY ATTENTION AND AVOID DETENTION . Coke was surprised to see one other student in the room, sitting in the second row: his sister.
    “What are you in for?” she asked Coke. “Armed robbery?”
    “I questioned the philosophy behind Mrs. Higgins’s tooth-brushing technique,” he replied. “And you?”
    “Chewing gum,” Pep said.
    “Nice move,” Coke said. “Got a piece for me?”
    Pep opened her mouth to show him the only piece of gum she had.
    It just might be a long afternoon. Coke took a seat and opened his dog-eared copy of The