Read One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy for Free Online Page B

before I really kick the skuk out of you.
    You’re going to kick the skuk out of me? I’m two years older than you, goggle-freak. I’ll wipe the wall with your ugly face.
    Leave me alone.
    Leave you alone? Not till you show us your goddamned eye color, and then you tell me who is going to win tomorrow between Gratons and Wool so I can get my bets right.
    It doesn’t work like that, you fool!
    Oh, no? Show us, then!

    It was never even a scandal because it was so well covered up. No one cared about Lester — not even his own parents, who never bothered to go to the morgue to identify his body. And the other thugs who helped Lester pull the goggles off were too terrified to speak of it, of that color and what it did to them. No charges were pressed against Hieronymus — after all, they had attacked him, and on his first day in remedial math. The teacher was fired because the teacher was responsible, and the teacher had already been driven out of the classroom by the students. Hieronymus was fourteen at the time — he did not know these kids. They were completely out of control; they had already been through a succession of teachers who could not handle them. They, the boys and girls of remedial math, were not really a class of teenage children. They existed as a collective amorphous soup of instability. They were but a constant barrage of physical and verbal tornadoes. They struck without warning, out of boredom, out of malice, out of love. One side of the brain could not talk to the other side. There was only shouting and shouting and shouting. They were full of mockery, and they had lives at home so miserable they loved being in school even more than they hated it. They beat each other up, they beat up kids from other classes, they robbed people, they drank alcohol, they took drugs, they went to jail, they destroyed property, they wrote graffiti, they lied about everything to everyone, they threatened teachers, they were sent to psychiatric hospitals, they became prostitutes, they became pimps, they became gangsters, they became pregnant, they dreamed of expensive consumer items, and they blew whatever money they came by on clothes and shoes and hats and jewelry. They lived deeply, but only in the brief moment that existed during the time it existed. No peripheral vision, no yesterday, and no tomorrow. No attention span. No short-term memory. They discarded everything except whatever was self-destructive; they swam in currents so illogical not a single moment of reason could last before drowning in a violent whirlpool of chaos. Hieronymus was alone in a class full of these kids. They swarmed upon him. They grabbed him, they threatened him, they pulled off his goggles.

    You can’t look at the Devil in the eye. And that boy is a demon who carries the Devil in his eye. All of those Hundred Percent kids are demons. They don’t know it, but they are demons.
    That’s not true. You know, and I know, that Lester was high on Buzz. Him and those other two losers were smoking Buzz in the utility closet and they overdosed and Lester died.
    That’s what the police say, but that’s not what I heard.
    What did you hear?
    That that boy — the one with the goggles — already killed a few kids, and that they put him here with us as punishment.
    I don’t believe that. He probably got sent here because his grades in math really suck. Which is why you and I are here. Because we suck in math.
    I’ll bet he doesn’t suck in math. And what does it matter — those guys with the goggles can kill anyone at will and the police will do nothing about it because the Devil is involved, and the Devil has a way of making things look perfectly fine. And they kill people that no one likes. Skukheads like Lester. Do you think anyone misses that scumbag? I hated him. I’m glad he’s dead, but I stay away from that boy with the goggles anyway because he can kill you and me with just one look from those eyes with the Devil’s color in