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  • • •

  “Amore, come on, cheer up. It’ll be fun,” said Mom as I sulked in the back seat of the car. The car stopped at a red light, and she turned to look at me. “Who knows? Maybe there’ll be some kids your age there.”

  I rolled my eyes and put my hood over my head. Mom sighed.

  Mom is always trying to get me to make friends with other kids. Vito says to chill out about it and that it’s a mom’s job to worry. I get that, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying.

  • • •

  We got to the fund raiser early as Mom told Annie that she’d help set up, even though she didn’t know Slick’s parents.

  “Remember, be polite,” whispered Mom as we walked in to the church hall. “This must be very hard for the family.”

  I nodded. “Okay, okay,” I said.

  “You’re a good boy,” she said. She kissed me on the top of my head and walked over to join a group of adults. As I made my way over to the side of the room to find a spot to hide, I saw Slick. We’d never spoken, but I recognized him—he was the newest kid in my grade. I’d seen him hanging out with Luke and Tyler, which said everything I needed to know about him. I put my hood over my head and went to sit down in a corner, as far away from him as I could.

  I took out my phone to play Land X. I was close to completing the Stone-Cold Slayer quest and had found the last thing I needed that morning—a gold-mirrored shield. Now all I had to do was find Gorgon Gaia and destroy him, but Mom had other ideas.

  “I want you to meet someone,” said Mom, taking the phone out of my hand before I could stop her.

  I was so mad. “MOM! I’m about to kill Gorgon Gaia!”

  “Looks like it’s Gordon’s lucky day, then,” she said. She switched my phone off and handed it back to me.

  “Gorgon, Mom, not Gordon,” I said.

  She ignored me and pointed to Slick on the other side of the room. He was laying a stack of posters onto a table. “His name’s Eric. His mom told me he’s just started at your school. Do you know him?”

  I nodded. “He’s in my grade.” I knew where this was going. “Mom . . . I don’t want to make friends with him. I’m fine. I’m happy. I have friends on here.”

  I held up my phone.

  Mom sighed loudly. “Those are not real friends. Now get up, or I’ll go and get him and bring him over.”

  I knew she’d do it too.

  “You don’t know what he’s like,” I said, but she was already walking away.

  “I’m ignoring you,” she said in a kind of singing voice.

  I kind of hated my mom at that point.

  She was already introducing herself by the time I caught up with her.

  “. . . so lovely to meet you. I’m Maria Lazio, and this is my son, Danny. I think you and Danny are in the same grade at school.”

  “Yes, we are,” said Eric/Slick. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Lazio.” Slick shook my mom’s hand, and then he turned and smiled at me.

  “Hi, Danny.”

  I nodded. “Hey.”

  “I’m so sorry about your sister,” said Mom. Until that point, I hadn’t realized that he was the brother of the girl who had died. I felt kind of bad then.

  Slick smiled. “Thank you,” he said.

  “I was thinking you two might want to hang out today before the fund raiser starts,” said Mom.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to help get things ready,” said Slick.

  “Danny would love to help, wouldn’t you?” said Mom.

  “I have a system,” said Slick. He pointed over to the table.

  “I’m sure Danny can pick it up quickly,” said Mom. “If you don’t mind?”

  “He said he has a system,” I said. I knew that my help wasn’t wanted, but, apparently, my mom didn’t pick up on that.

  “I don’t mind,” said Slick. “I’ll show you, Danny.”

  “What a sweetheart,” said Mom. She put her hands around my face and gave me a loud kiss on the cheek. “Have fun!”

  “Mom!” I said. I couldn’t believe she had kissed me in front of another kid.

  Mom laughed. “I’m going, I’m going,” she said.

  “My mom is so embarrassing,” I said when she was gone. I wiped my cheek. “She always does that.”

  “Does what?” asked Slick.

  “Gives me kisses in front of people.”

  “Oh,” said Slick.

  “It’s an Italian thing,” I explained quickly. “Everybody kisses each other in Italy.”

  Slick nodded. “That makes sense—we’re not Italian, and my parents have never kissed me.”

  • • •

  And that right there is when my weirdo counter started on Slick. It went up pretty quick after that.

  • • •

  Slick showed me his “system” for putting up the posters, which was basically put tape on the four corners of a poster, stick poster on wall. Slick seemed surprised that I picked up how to do it so quickly. It took us about ten minutes. We didn’t talk the whole time, which was just fine by me—I’m not the best at small talk.

  Slick pressed down on the corner of the last poster and then smiled at me. “Cool—that was quick. You can help me with the next job if you want.”

  Mom was watching me from the other side of the room. There was no way I was going to get away with playing Land X while I was here, so I nodded.

  “Awesome,” said Slick.

  I followed him over to a table full of plastic boxes filled with food. Slick grabbed a plastic grocery bag from underneath it and pulled out two large bags of balloons. He handed one to me, and then he walked away. I followed him.

  “What brand are your sneakers?” he asked as we sat down in the same corner I’d been sitting in earlier.

  I looked down at the white sneakers that Mom had bought me over the summer.

  “They’re not any brand,” I said.

  “But you must have gotten them somewhere,” said Slick.

  I didn’t know where this was going, but I knew I didn’t like it. I had a flashback to third grade, when I had come to school wearing a jacket that Mom had been given by someone in the family. I wear a lot of hand-me-downs. Anyway, turns out this jacket was the same one that Luke’s sister had, and he told everyone, so they all started calling me Daniella. I told my teacher, and she laughed. She said it was just a joke and not to take everything so seriously. Easier said than done, in my opinion, and one day—during recess—Tyler Bowdry called me Daniella one too many times and something snapped. I punched him in the face. I was probably as surprised about that as Tyler was. I’d never done anything like that before. It got me suspended, but at least nobody ever called me Daniella again.

  • • •

  “Danny? Where did you get them?” Slick asked again.

  I shook my head to get rid of the memory and glared at Slick. “We’re not all swimming in money,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not everyone’s parents can buy them everything.”

  “My parents don’t buy me everything. My uncle Martin sends me things.”

  It was like talking to a five-year-old. “Fine,” I said. “I don’t have an uncle Martin. Get it?”

  Slick looked at me blankly for a moment.

  “Do you mean you don’t have much money, and you don’t have somebody in your family to send you new sneakers?”

  “Wow. You’re smart,” I said.

  “Thank you,” said Slick. He didn’t look like he was joking. I stared at him. Before I could say anything, though, he changed the subject to another one of my least favorite topics. “Are you on Kudos?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Because I looked everyone up before I started school. You were the only person in the whole grade without an account.”

  “That’s kinda creepy. And maybe I don’t use my real name.”

  “Ohhh,” he said, ignoring the creepy thing. “Do you use
the name Danny?”

  I was confused. “Danny is my real name,” I said.

  “I thought it was Daniel.”

  “Are you serious?”

  There was a long pause. Way too long.

  “So what name do you use on Kudos?” he asked finally.

  “I don’t.”

  “But you said—”

  “I said maybe I don’t use my real name. I didn’t say definitely.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m not on Kudos, okay? Can we leave it now?”

  “I thought everybody was on Kudos.”

  “I’m not. What’s so great about it anyway?”

  “Because you can share things with your friends”—Slick smiled—“like photos and videos, and you can send each other messages. How do you talk to your friends, then?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Oh,” said Slick. “Why? Don’t you have any friends?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was really starting to dislike this kid.

  “But at school, you must have friends there, right?”

  • • •

  Look, I know this whole thing makes me sound like the biggest loser, and I guess I kind of was. I don’t know why things went the way they did at school; I was kinda messed up after my dad left—I was only six. Anyway, I started to worry about stuff—like something happening to Mom, that kind of thing. So I’d try to run out of school to go home, and then cry when the teacher would stop me. Kids made fun of me, I got mad, and so on and so on.

  • • •

  “Are you not saying anything because you don’t have any friends?” asked Slick.

  I know now that Slick wasn’t being mean—just confused—but at the time, I didn’t read it that way.

  “What’s your problem?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  That’s when I decided I was done with the conversation. “You’re an idiot,” I said, and started to walk off.

  I heard Slick running up behind me. I put my hood back up and kept walking.

  “Hey, Danny, I’m sorry.”

  I kept walking. Slick grabbed my shoulder to stop me.

  “Get your hands off—”

  “Wait, Danny. I’m really sorry. Sometimes I say the wrong thing, but I didn’t mean anything.”

  I looked up at Slick, and, as I did, I saw one of the posters of his dead sister over his shoulder, and I suddenly felt really bad. I mean, if I were at my dead sister’s fund raiser, I’d probably act a bit weird too.

  I shrugged. “It’s fine. Whatever.”

  Slick smiled. “Cool. You want to help me with these?”

  He held up the bag of balloons. “We have to blow up three hundred.”

  “Three hundred?!”

  Slick nodded. “We’ll be twice as quick if we do it together.”

  Slick was wrong. I can’t be bothered to work out the math, but I blew up eight in the time it took Slick to blow up the rest of them.

  I stared at Slick. “Don’t you ever run out of breath?”

  Slick shook his head, then began to tie the balloons up with thread. I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing, so I just watched as Slick twisted and tied the balloons together. He worked quickly—not robot quickly, but like somebody who had done this hundreds of times before.

  “Hold this,” said Slick. He passed me the end of the string, then went over to the other end of the balloon pile and called out for me to pull. I pulled back and a loud ooh filled the room as a huge arch of perfectly twisted balloons lifted up into the air. I’m not really a balloon person, but I have to say that this arch thing was kind of awesome.

  I stared up at it. “How did you know how to make it?” I asked.

  Slick took the string from me and tied it to the leg of a nearby table.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve always known.”

  “Always?! You must have been a weird baby.”

  Slick gave me a serious look. “I don’t remember being a baby.”

  “It was a joke,” I said. “A lame one, admittedly,” I added.

  “Oh. Okay. That’s funny.” He pretend smiled.

  “They had jokes back in New York, right?”

  “Sure.”

  I was curious. “Go on then. Hit me.”

  “I don’t want to hit you.”

  “Wow,” I said. I couldn’t work him out at all. “Hit me—as in tell me a joke.”

  “Do you like skateboarding?”

  “That’s your joke?”

  “No. I just . . .”

  “You don’t know any jokes, do you?”

  Slick shook his head. “Do you?”

  I shrugged. “Nah, not really. Not any good ones.”

  “What’s a bad joke?” he asked.

  I thought for a moment. “Okay, but it’s lame—my mom told it to me when I was like four. Ready?”

  Slick nodded.

  “Where do cows like to go on the weekend?”

  “I don’t know,” Slick said.

  “The mooooovies.”

  Slick stared at me for a few seconds, and then he started laughing. Hard.

  “It’s not that funny,” I said.

  Slick was still laughing. “Nah, it’s funny! Because cows say moo. And it’s a movie theater.”

  “You are seriously weird,” I said, but I couldn’t help smiling.

  Slick stopped laughing. “Why do you think I’m weird?”

  I was going to answer, but then I remembered the reason we were here and that I should cut him some slack, so I just shook my head. “Forget it,” I said. “I was just joking. . . . So, do you have anything else you need help with?”

  “No, that’s it.”

  “Okay. Cool. Well, nice to meet you, Eric.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “It’s just that I’m right at the end of a quest in Land X, and I was—”

  “You play Land X?” asked Slick.

  I nodded.

  “I’m level twenty-two. What level are you?”

  “Sixty-four,” I replied.

  Slick’s mouth dropped open. “That’s crazy good. Harry is the highest level of anyone I know, and he’s only level thirty-seven.”

  I shrugged. “What can I say? I put in the hours.”

  “How? Don’t you have to wait twenty-four hours for quartz?”

  Quartz is the stuff you need to travel in Land X. If you can’t travel, you can’t do quests. I smiled.

  “I’ll show you something. What’s your avatar name?”

  “Baltic_Slick. Because I like Baltic skateboards and Slick sneakers.”

  “Right, whatever. I’m Binarius_X. I’ll add you now.”

  Slick and I sat in the corner and took out our cell phones. I showed him how to change the date settings on his phone so he wouldn’t have to wait twenty-four hours to harvest more quartz, and then I took him to where the Harp of Discord was so that he could complete the quest he’d been stuck on.

  Slick and I had found something we had in common.

  • • •

  We played for an hour, until his dad came to get him when the fund raiser was about to start.

  “Thanks, Danny. That was awesome,” said Slick as he stood up. “See you Monday?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  • • •

  I had to admit I was glad Mom had made me come, though maybe not as glad as Mom was. She actually called my aunt and my grandmother to tell them about my new friend when we got home. But whatever, I didn’t make a big deal out of it. Truth was, I liked Slick. I mean, sure, he was weird, but I never did think that was such a bad character trait anyway.

  Slick:

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 22

  Miss Lake asked me to stay after class today. Tyler whispered, “Man, you are so lucky,” and punched me in the arm. It was a friendly punch. I know this because he was smiling when he did it. Tyler said this because he likes Miss Lake, in a girlfriend way. He is not the only one who likes h
er like this—all of my new friends were talking at lunch the other day about how hot she is. It took me a while to figure out that they weren’t talking about her temperature. I don’t understand why a kid would think an adult is hot, but it’s important to agree with your friends, or they may not stay your friends, so I agreed with them.

  After everybody left the classroom, I went up to Miss Lake’s desk. She was wearing a Blise top—that’s my mother’s favorite brand of clothes. My mom only wears Blise clothes, which is how I know the collection so well.

  Miss Lake asked me how it went at the fund raiser. I told her it was fine and that my mother was very pleased with the bids on the Freshen containers.

  “I heard you spent some time with a boy at the fund raiser. Daniel Lazio.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but his name is actually Danny.”

  “Danny is a short way of saying Daniel. It’s called a nickname.”

  “Oh,” I said. This made sense now.

  “Did you make friends with Danny?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think he likes me much.”

  “That’s good. He’s not a very popular child, and you don’t want to associate yourself with the unpopular kids—it wouldn’t make you look good. You should focus your time on making friends like Luke and the other boys you’ve been spending time with at school. Luke in particular.”

  “Yes, Miss Lake.”

  I wasn’t certain why Miss Lake cared who I was friends with, but my guess was that she was looking out for me as I’m a new kid at the school, so this was very nice of her.

  “Also, I think you should consider making friends with Ethan Schwartz. Do you know him?”

  “Yes. But he isn’t that popular.” I was confused. Miss Lake was telling me to make friends with the popular kids, but Ethan only has 135 friends on Kudos, so this makes him average in popularity.

  “That’s true,” said Miss Lake. “But his father is very important and knows a lot of people. I think your parents would like it if you made friends with him.”