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school programs, and I’d never heard anybody talking about going over to her house. Amber only mentioned her family in theselittle bulletins about what they were going to do or buy.
    “Your dad is so nice,” Rose said.
    “Yeah.” I bet he would look good to someone who didn’t have a dad at all.
    And Amber seemed to like him, although I didn’t know what she was comparing him to.
    But how would he look to someone like Orin who had a dad? A big strong one?
    Suddenly, between the swing and thinking about Amber and remembering how Dad planned to dress up for the Halloween party, my stomach felt funny. Before, I always felt kind of proud when he would come in a costume and make everyone laugh.
    But now I had to think: What kind of grief would Orin give me when he saw my dad wearing a rubber pig snout?
    And what would Mrs. Van Gent say about a grown man with a curly pig tail attached to the seat of his jeans?

  5  

On the Hot Seat Again
    Mrs. Perkins’s timing was perfect. I was right in the middle of working on my diorama the next Monday when she motioned me up to her desk.
    “It’s time for your appointment with Mrs. Van Gent,” she said when I got there.
    I stared at her. “But I talked to her
last
week.”
    “Come along,” she said, and I had to follow her out into the hall.
    “Robert, you have to see the counselor more than once to get anything out of it.”
    “But I don’t have anything to say to her. And anyway, I already got the message about not reading so much.”
    “I’m not sure it sank in. Mrs. Elliot saw you pulling a paperback out of your pocket on the playground yesterday.”
    “Oh.” For Pete’s sake, this school was a spy network.
    “Besides, all this reading is just a symptom. We think maybe Mrs. Van Gent can get at your deeper problem.”
    My deeper problem. That sounded so gloomy.
    “Now run along.” She glanced at her watch. “She’ll be waiting for you.”
    I trudged down the hall. My feet felt so heavy I almost thought I
was
lugging some big problem. Good grief, how could this be happening to me?
Me
, Robby Hummer, who used to be known (I thought) as a pretty good kid.
    The door to the little room was open and Mrs. Van Gent was already sitting in there.
    “Come on in, Robby. How’s it going?”
    I gave her a bleak look. How could things be good if I was here?
    But at first it wasn’t so bad. She started making chitchat about things. I sort of liked it, her asking my opinion about a new movie and if I could tell her the best bookstore in Douglas Bay. She got me talking about a book I was reading. In fact, she seemed so interested I laid out the whole plot for her. I even got up to act out a couple of scenes. That made her smile, and she really did have a nice smile.
    Her laugh was even better. She loved the part where I showed how the hero wrestled the python—I was down on the floor—and how it got himaround the neck and he started to choke … “Argh argh argh!!!”

    “Everything okay in here?”
    I opened my eyes and saw Mr. DeWeese, the principal, staring at me. I let go of my neck. I sat up.
    “Yes, fine, fine,” Mrs. Van Gent said. She cleared her throat. “Robby was just … ah … demonstrating something for me.”
    “Oh, I see.” I don’t think Mr. DeWeese saw at all. He looked at her. He looked at me. Then he pulled his head back into his office and closed the door.
    “Well,” Mrs. Van Gent said as I crawled back up into my chair. “Well.” Her lips pressed together, but her eyes were still smiling. “Maybe we’d better get down to business.”
    Now things started going downhill. First she went over what we’d talked about the week before—me reading so much, me avoiding sports, how I had to get used to not being an only child anymore …
    Then she brought up something new—Dad being unemployed.
    “That’s correct, isn’t it?” she said. “He doesn’t have a job right now?”
    “He has a job. He takes care of the twins.”
    “Of