Galosh was small as cities went, with not too many high-rises and quite a few parks. Summer days could be spent at Feylawn, the rambling family property across town where his grandpa Jack lived. The rains, which fell in Galosh with little interruption from October to May, were done.
Which might not have been Fatal if Tyler Zamboski, who sat behind him in Math, hadn’t yelled, “Barefooted poopy!” And at that moment, Rufus had understood that his best choice-his only choice-was to become invisible and stay that way.īut now it was June and the school year was over. And even that might not have been Fatal, except that Aidan Renks had yelled, “Oh my God, look! It’s a barefooted booby!” and suddenly the whole booby thing from September was back in play.įatal Error Number Three: In November, he forgot to clean out his pockets before coming to school, and when he sat down at his desk, a clump of unusual berries he’d collected in the woods had gotten squished and left a purplish-brown stain on the seat of his pants. Which might not have been Fatal if he hadn’t then taken off his left shoe and put the salamander inside so it wouldn’t get squashed. The few that didn’t found as many ways as possible to remind him of the three fatal errors he had made during his sixth-grade year.įatal Error Number One: In September, on a field trip to Crescent Cove, he had noticed an unusual shorebird and said-maybe a little too loudly-“That’s a masked booby!” Which might not have been Fatal if he hadn’t tried to explain how rare it was to see one on this side of the Pacific and if Aidan Renks hadn’t stared right at him and said in a high, too-enthusiastic voice, “I know! It’s crazy! I can’t believe I’m looking at one now!”įatal Error Number Two: In October, during recess, he had stopped in the middle of a basketball game because there was a salamander under the hoop. Most of the other kids at Galosh Middle School ignored Rufus. He had one friend, Xander, who had spent all of sixth grade trying-without much success-to get him interested in an obscure collectible-card game called Marshannyx.
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He was not brainy like his father or athletic like his mother, and while he liked talking to people when he had the opportunity, he never knew exactly how to get the conversation started. Rufus did not hate school, he just hated who he was when he was there. But even if his lips weren’t moving, even if he managed, through sheer force of will, to stay completely silent, his heart was singing, his bones were singing, his skin, warm in the sunshine, was singing: Goodbye, sixth grade. Of course Rufus knew better than to actually sing out loud, because people already thought he was weird, and also, the song didn’t have much of a tune. The leaves rustled in the trees, the seeds rattled in the grass, and twelve-year-old Rufus Takada Collins, walking home with nothing in his backpack but the sweatshirt he’d found at the bottom of his locker, sang to himself: Summer, summer, summer. The bugs were buzzing and humming and chirping. The birds were peeping and trilling and cooing.
It was the last day of school and everything was singing.
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