Strays Read Online Free Page B

thing you do is find some punk, kick his ass, and that’s that.”
    “When were you in jail?”
    “I wasn’t, but I know guys who were.” He looks me up and down. “Why’d you wear those stupid pants? You gonna be the guy in the stupid pants forever, you know that, don’t you?”
    “These are old, but they’re Ralph Lauren cords, okay?”
    “Now you’re fuckin’ gay. Get away from me.”
    We stand in the quadrangle and turn the map in my orientation packet upside down, then right side up, then upside down again. C.W. hails a couple of guys who are wearing the same Kobe tank top he is, but — believe it or not — bigger. All three of them have on yellow work shoes like the bulldogs who run steam shovels in cartoons.
    “Where’s the administration building?” C.W. asks.
    They fool around with their shades. They look at me, then at each other. One leans north, the other south. Then they stagger off, laughing.
    “A hundred brothers to choose from,” C.W. says, “and I get a couple of wankstas.”
    My parents wouldn’t know what to make of King/Chavez. It’s too much like downtown Los Angeles: graffiti, trash, drug dealers, criminals around every corner. My mother couldn’t get over this story about some woman in New York named Kitty who was beaten and raped while people — neighbors, some of them — watched and didn’t do anything.
    Just then a scuffle breaks out twenty yards away, and nobody pays any attention. At Santa Mira High somebody would have yelled, “Fight! Fight!” Not here.
    C.W. points to the kid on the ground. “Maybe he knows where the fuckin’ administration building is.”
    I ask a couple of skateboarders. But young ones, not the really scary kind who stick up 7-Elevens on their way to empty somebody’s pool.
    They size me up. The one with porcupine hair and an eye Bic-ed on his wrist answers, “Bungalow with the A on it about two over from here.”
    “You transfer in?” asks his friend, who’s got music coming out of him from who-knows-where.
    I nod.
    “Well, don’t leave your luggage unattended.”
    They crack up and roll away, already buzzed on something at seven forty-five in the morning.
    I look down at my feet. Sometimes I get this feeling about the ground I’m standing on. About what it knows. All the things it’s seen and been through. And it’s still here, anyway.
    That always makes me feel a little better. There were horses and wagons once. People worked hard and were nice. If somebody’s parents died, the nearest neighbors took him in.
    Ms. Ervin said she would fax things over and she did, so we okay some paperwork, fill out some more, and then find the counseling center, which is enormous. Rows and rows of orange chairs — the plastic, easy-to-keep-clean kind for the bleeders and the weepers. Doors all around like some nightmare version of
Let’s Make a Deal.
Every now and then, one of the doors opens and a counselor with a manila folder in his or her hand butchers the next name.
    C.W. gets called right away: “D.W. Potter?”
    I sit down a couple of seats away from a girl with twenty or so piercings in each eyebrow. Silver rings like the kind that hold up shower curtains, but a lot smaller. She’s wearing a white long-sleeved top and an all-the-way-down-to-her-ankles blue skirt. It’s like her head goes to raves and her body goes to church.
    Pretty soon a guy whose blond hair is starting to turn green settles down between us.
    “Hey, man,” he says.
    “Yeah, hi.”
    He leans in and kind of points with the cast on his broken hand. “You know this girl over here?”
    “No, I’m afraid not. I just moved here so —”
    “What are you reading?” he asks her, turning his back on me.
    She holds up the paperback in her lap.
    He scoots closer. “What class is that?”
    “It’s just for fun.”
    “Wow. Far out. What’re you here for? I gotta clear a few things up. I used my computer to enroll in summer school and got three English classes, one of