Most of the kids were my size or smaller, but there were ten or twelve monster dudes. Giant white guys. They looked like men, not boys. They had to be seniors. Some of them looked like they had to shave two or three times a day.

They stared at me, the Indian boy with the black eye and swollen nose, my going-away gifts from Rowdy. Those white kids couldn't believe their eyes. They stared at me like I was Bigfoot or a UFO. What was I doing at Reardan, whose mascot was an Indian, thereby making me the only other Indian in town?

So what was I doing in racist Reardan, where more than half of every graduating class went to college? Nobody in my family had ever gone near a college.

Reardan was the opposite of the rez. It was the opposite of my family. It was the opposite of me. I didn't deserve to be there. I knew it; all of those kids knew it. Indians don't deserve shit.

 

So, feeling worthless and stupid, I just waited. And pretty soon, a janitor opened the front door and all of the other kids strolled inside. 

"Okay," I said to myself. "Here I go." 

I walked into the school, made my way to the front office, and told them who I was. 

"Oh, you're the one from the reservation," the secretary said. 

"Yeah," I said. 

I couldn't tell if she thought the reservation was a good or bad thing. 

"My name is Melinda," she said. "Welcome to Reardan High School. Here's your schedule. We've got you assigned to Mr. Grant for homeroom. You better hustle on down there. You're late." 

"Ah, where is that?' I asked. 

'We've only got one hallway here," she said and smiled. "It's all the way down on the left." 

I shoved the paperwork into my backpack and hustled down to my homeroom. 

I paused a second at the door and then walked inside. 

Everybody, all of the students and the teacher, stopped to stare at me. 

They stared hard. 

Like I was bad weather.