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Show 14 smaller kids across the street, making sure they walked their bikes instead of riding them. His book reports were about microbe hunters and undersea explorers, making Lorin contemptuous of everyone else, who gave reports on football stories or stories about rescue dogs on battlefields, and making him also a little embarrassed that so many of his own were stories about people who built strange machines and disappeared into other dimensions, which Mrs. Ferguson consistently gave him low marks for. It was always Dick's drawings that were thumbtacked to the wall on parents' night, too, and Dick's posters in the hallways that advertised the school's Thanksgiving and Christmas programs, even though Dick was planning to be a scientist, not an artist. He also wrote the cleverest skits for the last Friday of each month. He also went ice skating at Hygeia on Saturday mornings with Nina Kilham, whom Lorin had been in love with since third grade. He seemed to have no special friend; he even ate lunch with whoever caught up with him first on the way to the cafeteria. He was not very big, but people like Jimmy Vialpando never threatened him, and people like Tim Sanders, who could scarcely read and who had already been taken home by the police after a fight in Liberty Park, had made it clear that they would pound anybody who did. Dick had always been pleasant to Lorin--even eating lunch with him once, in the company of other people--but Lorin was aware that Dick scarcely knew he existed. As he watched now, not quite believing it was happening, he saw Dick grab Jimmy by the shoulder. Jimmy turned around, surprised, and Dick hit him in the stomach so hard that they both fell down. They rolled on the asphalt, their faces streaked and dirty, while a circle formed around them, until Mr. Sieffert, the fifth-grade teacher, came running over from the volleyball court and marched them both off to the principal's office. Lorin had seen the whole thing. Jimmy had not even landed on the base, |