Luke really didn’t know. He knew how his family would act — Mother and Dad, Matthew and Mark. Mother and Dad would never kick him, and his older brothers would be poking him now, taunting him, ‘Want us to kick you again?”

The only other people Luke had ever met before today were Jen’s dad — who was practically as big a mystery as the boys sitting beside him now — and Jen. And Jen would…

Luke couldn’t bear to think about Jen.

A bell rang suddenly and it was such an alarming sound that Luke’s heart set to pounding again.

“Remember! Chapter twelve!” the teacher called as all the boys scrambled up.

Luke meant to go see the teacher, as he’d been instructed. This had to be the end of the class. But the tide of boys swept him out the back door of the classroom before he quite knew what was happening. By the time he got his feet firmly on the ground, and felt like he might be able to break away he was around a corner and down another hall. He fought his way back to what he thought was the original hallway But then he couldn’t figure out which way to turn. He looked all around, frantically searching for either the teacher or Rolly — as nasty as he’d been, Rolly was at least sort of familiar. But all the faces that flowed past him were strangers’s.

Of course, the way Luke’s mind was working, both Rolly and the teacher could have paraded past Luke five times and he might not have even recognized them.

The crowd in the hall was thinning out. Luke began to panic again.

‘Get to class,” an older boy standing nearby ordered him.

“Where?” Luke said. “Where’s my class?”