Read The 10 P.M. Question for Free Online Page B

11. Most of the girls in room 11 stuck to a narrow range of hairstyles, strictly no dreads. Apparently there was a rule somewhere — probably in Bronwyn Baxter’s head — which decreed a girl couldn’t get dreads till she was in high school.
    Sydney seemed oblivious to rules of the Bronwyn Baxter sort. She marched to a different drum, as Uncle George liked to say about people. She was an independent operator (another Uncle George-ism). Independent operations, Sydney-style, apparently meant making friends with a boy in the class rather than all the other girls. This really was very interesting, Frankie thought. He’d never seen it before. When a new girl arrived, she was usually swallowed up by the phalanx of room 11 girls, just as a new boy was somehow magnetically pulled toward the cricket game at lunchtime, or the clusters of other boys wandering around the grounds, chucking balls or wrestling one another to the ground.
    Not Sydney. She’d ignored most of the girls and they’d ignored her right back. At lunchtime on her second day she’d followed Frankie over to the cricket pitch. He really didn’t know how to tell her that no
girl
ever played cricket at lunchtime; it was strictly boy territory. But, no problem. Gigs did that for him, anyway.
    “I can bowl, you know,” said Sydney.
    “Yeah,” said Gigs derisively. He was tossing the ball high, over and over, and catching it with increasingly wristy flourish. Frankie felt small prickles of tension starting on his arms.
    “I was strike bowler for my school team in Australia,” said Sydney.
    “You lived in Australia?” said Frankie, blushing at the question as soon as he’d uttered it, since she’d just said so. But diversionary tactics seemed necessary.
    “Girls can’t bowl,” said Gigs. “They’ve got stupid elbows.” Frankie and Gigs had privately concluded this some time ago, but Frankie wished now it wasn’t so.
    “My sister can bowl,” said David Robinson. “And she’s fast.” Frankie and Gigs had also privately admitted that David Robinson’s sister, Julie, was the exception to the otherwise iron-clad girls-can’t-bowl law. But Gigs rightly said this was because Julie Robinson was practically a man; she was big and fierce and had a six-pack where other girls had breasts.
    “I’m fast, too,” said Sydney, at which moment she darted sideways and upward and expertly intercepted Gigs’s ball on its downward trajectory. She ran to the other end of the pitch and proceeded to send down a ball of excellent line and length. Seventy ks, Frankie reckoned, giving it a practiced assessment.
    “Boy!” he said, stealing a look at Gigs.
    Frankie particularly enjoyed reliving that ball of Sydney’s. He dug deep now into the vanilla ice cream and added two scoops to the blender. He considered the height of the mixture for a moment, then added a third scoop.
    “Hey!” said Ma.
    “It’s a three-scoop kind of day,” said Frankie. He stabbed the blender button and watched the banana, milk, eggs, and ice cream bump and bounce and transform themselves into his smoothie.
    Gigs certainly had his blind spots, Frankie thought — his little brothers and sister being three of them. But the good thing about him was his basically fair-minded nature. He always gave skill its due. And cricket skill was particularly high on Gigs’s priority list for a perfect human being.
    After Sydney had bowled that ball and David Robinson had fielded it and the guys had gathered around, all grinning, Sydney had stood, hands on hips, bulging her eyes at Gigs, and Gigs had stared back and Frankie had held his breath for what seemed an entire historic era.
    “Not bad,” said Gigs, finally. “Can you bat, too?”
    Frankie had felt like bursting into song.
    Right now, he decided to drink straight from the blender. No point in making extra dishes. He took two straws from the cupboard and headed for the stairs.
    “We’re going to Upham’s. I can get anything you need,” he