The Life and Times of Benny Alvarez Read Online Free

mentioned that to Beanie once, and he said, “You’re not going to start stalking her, are you?”
    Jocko is the one who came up with Ms. Demigoddess. When we first saw her, Beanie said she was “hot,” but that didn’t work for Jocko, so he went to the Book. “Princess,” “prima donna,” and “goddess” didn’t quite fit either, but “demigoddess” did, because a demigoddess is part human and part divine. I know that seems over the top, but then you haven’t seen Ms. D. Even when she does simple things, like emptying her satchel, as she’s doing now, she seems, well, I haven’t found the right word for that yet.
    She addresses the class. “As I told you, besides the usual spelling, writing, and grammar, we’re going to focus on poetry for the month of October.”
    A major guy-groan follows.
    â€œWhy is it that boys hate poetry?” Ms. D says, waiting for a boy to answer, but Claudine beats us to it.
    â€œBecause they think they’re supposed to,” she says.
    â€œInteresting,” Ms. D says, placing her hands palms down on her desk and leaning forward. When she does this, her necklace sways back and forth, kind of hypnotizing me.
    â€œHow about because it’s dumb,” Big Joe says, waiting for kids to laugh, but they don’t, so he tries again. “I mean what good is poetry? No one talks it.”
    Paige Burnett, who’s always writing stuff in her journal, then slamming it shut when you walk by, says, “People ‘talk it’ every day, you big goof.”
    â€œNo name-calling,” Ms. D says, though I can see she’s more amused than angry.
    You don’t want to mess with Paige. She’s smart and knows it. She wears these bright-purple glasses specked with silver, like she’s proud of all the reading she does. She also plays lacrosse, and I get the feeling she could smack you around if you annoyed her. “What I mean,” she says, composing herself, “is that poetry is music, like rap music”—then she gawks momentarily at Big Joe to emphasize his stupidity—“and we listen to it every day. Kids are always singing lyrics,” and she goes on about how “poetry is also found in nature,” followed by a lot of other strange ideas.
    We can tell Ms. D is excited by this turn in the conversation because she’s striding around on her long legs, making sweeping hand gestures. She gets so worked up about literature that she must be pretty pooped by the end of the day.
    â€œNow we’re onto something,” she says. “Let’s ask one of the Word Warriors what he thinks.”
    I’m hoping she’s talking about Beanie, and I wish we had kept the club secret, but why have a club if you can’t exclude people, and kids won’t know they’re excluded unless they know the club exists.
    â€œWhat’s your take on poetry, Benny?” she says.
    My take is that I think less about poetry than I do about the two glands on Spot’s rear end that the vet told us to massage twice a week.
    I go for something simple. “It’s not anything I really think about.”
    â€œBut isn’t the point of the thesaurus and synonyms to help us see the metaphorical implications of words, and isn’t that what poetry is partly about?”
    I can almost hear Claudine’s head nodding crazily from behind.
    â€œHuh?” is the best I can do.
    Ms. D laughs. “Huh?”
    â€œSorry, Ms. Butterfield, but that’s a little heavy for me.” Now everyone’s laughing, and Paige’s face seems frozen between rage and pity for me.
    Ms. D approaches my desk and places her hand on my shoulder. This is the first time she’s ever touched me, and my heart is doing a strange kind of rumba.
    â€œNot to worry, Benny,” she says, then scans the entire class. “Even those of you who think you understand poetry