Mrs. Lumpkin called roll and Daniel Wilkinson was the last name called. “Here,” he said. Twenty-four pairs of eyes looked over. Mrs. Lumpkin, who was skinny despite her name, double-checked the roster.
At P.S. 33 there’d been thirty-two kids in his homeroom, but at Ridgeborough Middle, there were only fifty kids in the whole sixth grade. Deming sat through History and Science and Language Arts. Alone at a cafeteria table, he ate the turkey sandwich, celery sticks, and hard, crisp apple Kay had packed. Everyone he saw was the same color except for him, and their silence seeped into the air like a threat.
At home after school, Deming stared at the noiseless street, heard the same blank buzz, and felt a sickening loss. He punched the wall as hard as he could—You call that a punch? That’s a handshake!—until his knuckles were screaming and he was screaming, too. The house was empty; Peter and Kay were at work. When they were home, he was forced to keep a straight face, but it felt like he was being skinned alive.
On the second day of school, Deming decided he had been imported from another planet to come to Planet Ridgeborough. He was not aware of the length of his assignment, only that one day, he would be sent home. This was how he got himself through the hours. He studied Amber Bitburger, who sat in front of him in Homeroom and whose long blonde hair had white strands interspersed throughout, a yellow-brown closer to the scalp that lightened progressively toward the ends, her skin visible beneath, pink and soft, like a baby animal before the fur comes in. Her eyes were a gray-green, her face a range of hills—nose, chin, cheekbones.
They were big. Deming was big, too, he’d been one of the biggest Asian kids at P.S. 33, but they were different, had never noticed the way they looked to other people, because there were no other people present. Here, they paid too much attention to him (at first) and later, they would pay no attention to him. It was that kind of mindfuck: to be too visible and invisible at the same time, in the ways it mattered the most. Too obvious to the boys who wanted to mock him, yet girls would only notice him when he was walking around with his fly down.
He studied their noses. Some were pointy, others drooping like overripe fruit. Some nostrils flared up and out, while others were pinched and narrow. The boys and girls separated into distinct clusters at recess, with the crumbs, the leftover kids who didn’t belong to any group, scattered along the margins of the playground. Deming could see he was a crumb. Crumbs didn’t want to be noticed but were as noticeable as an open sore, tucking themselves away to avoid the places of highest concentration: the jungle gym, the corners of the blacktop where girls congregated, the basketball court and soccer field that were home to boys who were good at sports.
If the crumbs were successful at hiding from others they weren’t fooling each other. They lashed out at the nearest targets, happy to train that spotlight two feet over to the left. But Deming did not want to hide. Three Alley and the Bronx had prepped him, and Planet Ridgeborough was the ultimate test. He had been specifically placed on this mission by his superiors to test his strength and patience. When he fulfilled his mission he would be reunited with his real family. Who were his supervisors? He had that figured out, too. They communicated, telepathically, in Fuzhounese, the language he didn’t have to try to hear. This mission made him brave. So he got out on the blacktop at recess, out there in the open, daring anyone to mess with him.
On the third day, a girl stopped at Deming’s table in the cafeteria, clutching a box of apple juice with a scrawny straw, teeth marks flattening the tip. Her dark hair was pulled into a stubby ponytail. Her glasses had bright red frames.
“Where are you from?”
Deming cleared his throat. “The Bronx. Where are you from?”
“I’m from here,” she said, and walked away.
On the fourth day, there was gym. In Ridgeborough, kids played sports. Football, soccer, basketball, swimming, baseball, tennis, volleyball, hockey. Ridgeborough boys were supposed to charge and ram. Deming observed the youth of Planet Ridgeborough in the boys’ locker room as they changed into gym clothes, from the unformed baby limbs of short kids like Shawn Wecker, the crumbiest of crumbs, to the meaty paws and Frankenhead of Cody Campbell. He studied Cody’s plump hands, thighs like pork roasts, the waggle and sweat of Cody’s chins.
He took off his shoes, took off the athletic shorts Kay had bought. The crumbs stayed on the edges of rows, scuttling to change without being noticed, but the other boys joked and yelled out to their friends.
Shawn Wecker, his foot tangled in the fabric of his shorts, stumbled into a locker. He was a small boy with a shriveled face, so pale he’d been nicknamed Ghost. “Fag,” one of the other boys said. “Ghost is a fag.”
“Fuck you!” Shawn yelled back. “Fuck! You!” The locker room’s collective response was laughter, so much worse than anger, and Shawn slunk away. Then Deming felt the shove, a blow between his shoulder blades. He tipped forward.
It was Cody. “What are you looking at? Chinese retard.” On the side of his face was a flying saucer–shaped mole. He pushed Deming again, but this time Deming charged Cody and knocked him backwards. Cody stumbled, making a sound like oofaa. He was less graceful than even Travis Bhopa; he was big but lacked balance. This struck Deming as both comic and predictable.
There was a weight on him, a jab in his side. One elbow, then another. Deming cried out and the weight rolled off. Cody collected himself. Deming stood up. “What the hell?”
The weight was Shawn Wecker, his face snarled.
Deming walked away. “Retard,” Cody repeated. “Chinese retard.” It sounded like a bawl, fleshy and raw, an animal turned inside out.
In gym they played kickball, a sport Deming had never played before. When it was his turn to kick, he heard a snicker and a voice go, “Nice shoes.” He looked down at his new Nikes and the ball socked him in the gut. When he whirled around he saw a row of boys trying not to laugh.
After school, he walked home by himself. It wasn’t that far, only a half hour, but the view was relentlessly unchanging, house after house, tree after tree. The tight streets unrolled into mini-fields, so vast that looking at them made him dizzy, frightened at the unendingness. As he got farther from school, the spaces between houses were bigger than the biggest houses themselves. He had grown so unaccustomed to hearing cars that when one drove past, he jumped.
Passing the railroad tracks, he heard footsteps behind him and tightened his stance, anticipating Cody and his friends.