A Week in the Woods Read Online Free Page A

wouldn’t have helped him much. Mark could only recall the names of two kids. Two names in ten days—that’s pathetic! Mark gave a mental shrug. But so what? It’s not like it matters.
    * * *
    When Mark had arrived for his first day in the middle of February in the middle of fifth grade, he decided the place didn’t need him any more than he needed it. In four months fifth grade would be over, and he’d be gone for good. And these kids? Were any of them looking for a new friend? Why would they be?
    The way it looked to Mark, most of the kids at his new school had been together since kindergarten. Hardy Elementary School was an old school to them, and they were the old kids. And by the middle of February in the middle of fifth grade, they had themselves pretty well sorted out into pairs and sets and groups of friends. Mark had no place in their universe, so he kept to his own little orbit.
    By the middle of February in the middle of fifth grade, the old kids at the old school had also gotten themselves sorted out academically—and in just about every other way possible. They knew who the best students were and which of their friends were going to be in the accelerated math group or the lowEnglish group at the middle school. And they also knew which girls and boys would probably make the basketball teams and the soccer teams, and who was the best artist in the fifth grade.
    They knew these things because most of the old kids had been looking at each other and listening to each other for years. And they had been watching as the teachers looked and listened too. Suddenly all that information felt like it was important, so the old kids were getting things figured out.
    By the middle of February in the middle of fifth grade, it was starting to feel like elementary school was ending. The old kids were looking ahead to sixth grade at the middle school. Big brothers and sisters had told them who the nice teachers were, and also which ones to watch out for. So the old kids had begun to talk about stuff like that at lunch and recess, and when they walked home after school with their friends.
    But Mark? That kid who moved into that huge house out west of town in the middle of February? Mark didn’t know a thing about this school or the kids in it. He didn’t even know the name of the middle school.
    After a week or two most new kids would have found someone who was halfway friendly, an old kid who didn’t mind answering a lot of questions. Because most kids would have wanted to figure out what was going on.
    But Mark Robert Chelmsley hadn’t done that. He wasn’t like most kids, and especially not like most kids in Whitson, New Hampshire. That’s why the other fifth-graders left him pretty much to himself, which seemed to suit Mark just fine.
    Even Jason Frazier left him alone, and Jason rarely missed a chance to bully someone. In this case Jason had made a good decision. Mark had taken private karate lessons three afternoons a week since he was six. He knew self-defense. Jason would have learned quickly that Mark Robert Chelmsley was not a boy to be bullied.
    During fourth and fifth grades in Scarsdale, Mark had also had math and English tutors come to his home two afternoons a week, and a month before moving to Whitson, he had taken his private-school entrance exams. He’d done well, and that’s why he was already accepted into Runyon Academy. Next year he’d be going to one of the most exclusive prep schools in America, the kind of school attended by presidents and senators and their children and grandchildren.
    â€œNothing but the best for you, Mark. Nothing but the best.” That’s what his dad had said.
    A week before the move his mom had said, “Now, Mark, I want you to make the most of these few months up in Whitson. This school will be a nice little break before you get down to some serious work next year at Runyon.”
    That’s what she’d