“Peter Miller, you talk a lot of nonsense. Sit down, Ben. Don’t listen to him.”

“I’m telling you,” Pete says. “He’s a danger to society. It’s like bags are his superhero weapon. They call him Bagman.”

“I don’t like lockers,” I say, feeling stupid.

“Lockers are like kryptonite to Bagman,” Pete says.

“Peter Miller, stop it,” Mabley tells him, but you can tell they’re friends.

“I’m just messing with him,” Pete says, and looks at me. “You don’t mind, right? What’s your name?”

“Ben.”

“Ben doesn’t mind,” he says.

But that’s what it’s like all lunch. There are other kids at the table, including a boy called Jeff who wears his outdoor jacket inside. He gets pack lunches, too, and his mom always gives him a bag of Goldfish crackers. Sometimes he takes a handful and puts them in the pages of an open textbook. Then he smashes the book shut and pours the cracker dust into his mouth. It’s kind of disgusting. Mabley seems to collect these people; they all seem to know each other from the school marching band. Jeff plays the snare drum, and there’s a girl named Natasha who puts her tuba on the seat next to her and pretends to give it lunch. Mabley plays tenor sax. But mostly what they talk about is normal stuff, like teachers and tryouts. Pete keeps coming up with new superhero names for me. Like Mr. Two Bags or Backpackman.

“Don’t listen to him,” Mabley says. “Peter’s just a jock. This is how jocks talk to each other—they don’t know any better. This is how they try to make friends.”

I look over at Pete. He has freckles and the kind of hair that comes out over his forehead and you can’t quite tell how it stays in place. For some reason, even though I don’t like him, he reminds me of Jake. They are both the kind of kid who thinks that if something seems funny to them that means everybody else is having a good time, too.

After school, I catch the bus home. Some kids walk, but not many; others get rides. It’s stopped raining by this point, but the grass is still wet and the sidewalks are still dark. The ground sort of steams up; the sun looks hazy. There are kids everywhere, standing in different groups, talking. All these buses come and go and I look out for Mabley, because I don’t know which bus is mine.

When it comes, we sit together on one of the bench seats. “Your friends seem nice,” I say, just to say something, and she kind of laughs.

“Don’t worry about Peter, he just likes playing the clown. He’s a good kid,” she says, like she’s older than he is. For some reason, I feel jealous of him. I feel jealous of Mabley, too. She acts like she’s known him for years, which I guess she has.

The bus ride lasts twenty minutes, and we get off just over the road from where it picks us up. Then we cross the street and walk home together. We pass the house with the refrigerator on the front porch, and I point it out to Mabley. “Wouldn’t it be great?” I say. “I want to have refrigerators everywhere. That way you can always get a cold Coke or a bowl of ice cream.”