Sons of Liberty Read Online Free

in his shiny new birthday-present Sunfish, but too scared to take it out on the real water. The unfairness had just about killed Liza, it really had.
    Anyhow, making Briggsie cry was all part of the weekday morning. Regular as brushing your teeth.
    “Yo, Briggsie! Beware the Detonay-tor!” Rock steeled his eyes to watch the Detonator as it left his hand, plunging through the air to where it clocked its moony-faced target neat in the forehead. He allowed himself the moment’s satisfaction of watching Briggsie’s face crumple before he took off his glasses and stuffed them into his jacket pocket.
    “Hey—Rock—you scuz!” Briggsie yelled. Then, as he touched his fingers to his head, his mouth erupted in a horror-movie scream that stopped the game completely. Kids dropped their weapons and gaped at Briggsie. Rock squinted to see the bright shock of blood trickling from the torn skin just beneath Briggsie’s hairline.
    “Rock, you totally—” Cliff sprinted to Briggsie in a flash, tugging off his wool scarf, which he then began to wrap like a tourniquet around Briggsie’s forehead.
    “It’s all my fault!” Liza squealed happily, jumping up and down as kids began to lump around Briggsie and Cliff. “I did it, I invented the Detonator.”
    “Bus!” shouted one of the younger kids, pointing down the road.
    “Come on, Cliff.” Rock could barely believe it. “That was Mom who hand-made you that scarf.”
    “Stuff it why don’tcha, Rock.” Cliff lifted his eyes to glower at his brother before returning to his task.
    “He’s gonna need stitches, maybe,” someone advised. “He should go home.”
    “I don’t need to go home,” Briggsie sniffled. “I’m okay.” Rock was almost impressed. Maybe Briggsie wasn’t so much of a wimp after all.
    “Yeah, you don’t need to go home,” Liza agreed. “Sorry about that, Briggsie.”
    Rock stubbed the toe of his boot in a snowbank and said nothing.
    “You’re a dirty player.” A third-grader, Carleen Kirschner, flapped her scarf fringes at Rock as kids began shuffling into the bus line. “In the end, it’s always you who plays dirty.”
    Rock felt the muscles of his face go stiff under her frank gaze, and he turned to look down the road, observing the bus’s labored progress down Carpenter Drive.
    “I invented the Detonator, anyway,” Liza said loudly, to nobody in particular. “So it’s mostly my fault, actually.”
    “Yeah, but I’ll be the one ends up in Mr. Faella’s office,” Rock grumbled.
    “Home away from home,” Liza said, and despite Briggsie’s whimpering and Cliff’s scowling and Carleen Kirschner’s needling words, the two of them started cracking up. Rock could sense how their laughter made other kids uneasy, so he laughed even harder, taking a strange comfort in the sound. Everyone just needs to loosen up, he thought, annoyed. It’s not like Briggsie had to be rushed to the hospital.
    The collar of Mr. Faella’s snowflake sweater was beginning to unravel. Rock knew that his wife had knitted it for him a couple years ago, when she was in the hospital getting her chemotherapy treatments—some way-too-personal information Rock had accidentally overheard from the secretaries’ gossip during one of his routine trips to office detention. Now Mrs. Faella was dead and her husband’s snowflake sweater was falling apart. Two crummy and depressing facts Rock wished weren’t permanently stored in his brain.
    He studied the principal’s desk objects. They’d become pretty familiar to him: the sparkling purple geode paperweight, the miniature plastic figurine of Fozzie Bear riding a skateboard, the glass block filled with colorful paperclips.
    Mr. Faella’s office, and it wasn’t even eight thirty.
    “I’m a prince, and I’m your pal,” Mr. Faella said every year to every class, squeaking the word principal onto the blackboard. “If you can’t remember anything all year, at least remember that.” It hadn’t made sense,