Jimmy Stone's Ghost Town Read Online Free

in my hand or the radio on (yeah, imagine that,
radio is okay with Dad for some reason - "Radio's been around
forever, Jimmy, and it's not going to disappear anytime soon," is
what he'd say). There's just no possible way that I can live
through another year of that.
    Maybe if Mom was still around and
almost-Charlotte had come home to live with us things would be
different. Maybe Grandma would still be around, and maybe Dad
wouldn't be working (or drinking his beer) all the time. Maybe I'd
have made some friends in my old school and started hanging out
with the "cool crowd." And maybe we would never have had to move to
this horrible place.
    But I guess there's no use in wondering
about all that stuff, right? I mean, we're here now and we've been
here for over a year. It's a new school year and this is going to
be the one where everything changes. I can feel it already.
    "You can feel it too," I say, "right,
Trex?"
    He lifts his furry head to look up at me and
yaps quickly to show that he obviously agrees with me.
    "Yeah, me too," I say and
scratch behind Trex's floppy ears. "I can just feel it."
     

Chapter Six
     
     
    So my plan was for this school year to start
off on a different foot. Remember how I told you that I just felt
like this year was going to be different? Well, it's been two weeks
and I'd say that where I'm sitting right now probably tells you
everything you need to know about how the year's going so far.
    I'm squatting over the toilet in the very
last stall of my tiny school's only boy's bathroom, and my feet are
starting to get numb. I've been in this same position for almost
the entire recess break and, if it doesn't end soon, my teacher
might need to come in here and oil me up like the Tin Man just so I
can move my legs ever again. If I stay in this exact spot, and be
as quiet as I possibly can, no one can even tell there's someone in
the bathroom. Sure, if they tried to open the stall, they'd find it
locked from the inside, but how many kids my age are gonna do
that?
    If you're wondering why I'm squatting over
the toilet and being all super quiet, it's really not that
complicated. I'm hiding from Billy Coogan and his buddies. I
figured that this was one of the last places they'd look for me,
and by the time they thought about it as a hiding place, asked the
lunch aide for permission to go inside to the bathroom, and made it
all the way across the halls to the Boy's Room recess should be
ending.
    From what I've overheard from the other
kids, Billy Coogan - his buddies call him Coog - and his group of
bullies choose at least one sorry-looking boy every year to pick
on.
    Billy's version of "picking on" consists of
(but is definitely not limited to) the following forms of
humiliation: giving their chosen target wedgies in front of as many
people as possible ("atomic wedgies" are permitted but only for
special occasions), shooting spitballs across the lunch room at
target (extra points for hitting the face or for actually sinking a
shot into the target's chocolate milk or lunch of choice), various
verbal assaults on target (including calling the target names such
as "fartface," "butthole breath," and "stinky mcstinkerson"), and
various physical assaults on target which, if executed correctly,
are the deadliest of the bunch. You have no idea what a few good
trippings can do to your reputation, especially if they get you to
drop all your books at the same time. Not to mention the most awful
and humiliating of all the Coogan Boys attacks: the dreaded
pantsings. If they manage to pants you in front of the other kids
(especially the girls), you might as well just quit school, move to
Idaho, and grow potatoes for the rest of your life because there's
no way you're ever going to have friends again.
    Only being in Boredsylvania Elementary for a
year and two weeks, I've personally never seen them pants anyone,
but I've overheard a few horror stories. This one kid, Ryan
Clevgraft (everyone calls him Clev), somehow