Brian was never late for lunch. Lunch was his reward for everything else he had to do at school. Sometimes he’d name his food after particularly annoying class incidents. Like his french fries would be called “Ms. Danbury’s geography pop quiz,” and his ice-cream sandwich would be called “Ms. Collins’s Indian-camp diorama assignment.” Then he’d eat them with a big smile, as if devouring his problems. Theo was sitting at their usual lunch spot, anxiously looking all around. He’d just seen Brian at the school assembly, an intense hour about the horrors of bullying with a bunch of reformed bullies and formerly bullied recounting their experiences. One redheaded girl who had been cyber-bullied (a bunch of girls at her school had started a Facebook campaign to destroy her because she had red hair—they called her “Ginger-vitus”) actually broke into tears and had to be escorted from the podium. That got most of the students’ attention. One “former” bully recounted all the different ways he’d bullied kids, from stealing their backpacks to smacking them in the back of the head with a textbook.
