SAL
On the second day of sixth grade, as Sal expected, there was no chair for him with the boys at the back table, so he sat with the misfits: Sylvana Eggers, who sang to herself under her breath; Ronnie Triplett, who picked his nose and wiped the dirt on his jeans; and Seventeen Jones, whose real name nobody had used since Rudy Gonzalez shoved his face into the sandbox seventeen times in first grade. None of them looked at Sal when he sat down.
By the end of the first week it was obvious the boys at the back table didn’t like Mr Merkel. They didn’t like any of the teachers except Miss Wilson, the pretty P.E. teacher, but Mr Merkel’s halting first-day speech seemed to have earned him a special disdain. Whenever he turned to the whiteboard they hunched their backs in mockery while the res
