Arville Hickerson was the rich boy, and he was all the time trying to make friends with Leroy Tarvish and his bunch of rough kids. Leroy all the time shoved Arville and told him:
“G’wan, you skinny piece’a dog-pee,” and that made Arville madder and madder, until he would give anything to kill Leroy Tarvish.
Even his Mickey Mantle baseball card from the bubble gum. And that was hard to get, because they only packed maybe one of that kind of card in a box, and nobody else in the whole neighborhood had it but Arville Hickerson, and that was only because he had a rich old man.
So Rodney Parish made it known to Arville that he was available. For a price.
With the Mickey Mantle card safe inside the stack of pictures, the rubber band holding it snugly between Johnny Logan and Roy McMillan, Rodney waited for his time. He had become an expert, in his way. He was the smartest kid in the block, no matter what that snotty old Miss Dexter said!
The time came.
Leroy Tarvish had to wait for his older sister Sophie one afternoon. All the rest of his gang had gone home, and he was just sitting around the schoolyard, doing nothing very much, just waiting for his old sister to come on out so he could go home and watch TV for a while.
“Hey, Leroy!”
Leroy looked up from his game of mumbledy-peg and saw that old Owl Eyes coming across the schoolyard. Leroy didn’t like Owl Eyes; he gave him the scrimmies, somehow. There was something real-whatchamacallitqueer about Owl Eyes. He was all the time collectin’ something.