A voice came from the corner of the room. It was Ben. I hadn’t even noticed him come in. He has this way of being sort of invisible in class.

“Why don’t you just mind your own business, Lallie?”

Everyone stared, mouths open. Ben never talks in class.

Lallie’s mouth snapped shut and she glared at him.

“Why don’t you shut up, you illegal.”

People all over class made a gasping noise like they just got hit in the back at the same time.

“Maybe I should get my mom to call immigration on you,” she continued, looking at Ben and a bunch of kids in the back row.

“Go ahead,” said Ben. “My dad has work papers.”

“Not for long,” said Lallie.

“You don’t have to win the nastiest person prize every day, Lallie,” said Rigmor. Her pale face was all splotchy like Nils’s had been when he told me what happened to him.

Lallie shut up. Rigmor is like Ben. She doesn’t talk much, but when she does people listen.

And after that, people stopped whispering and staring at me and instead went sort of back to normal. The teacher still hadn’t shown up. Maybe she fell asleep in the staff room.

Not for me, though. Nothing felt normal to me.

Dave was waiting for me outside after math was over, right before lunch.

“The principal and school security made the reporters leave,” he said.

“Oh,” I said.

“I stayed out there and watched. After Chum picked you up.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Coming to the benches for lunch?”

I didn’t answer.

“Rodney?” asked Dave. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, because I couldn’t think what else to say.

We were almost at the hallway when Dave stopped and looked at me. “Do you want to talk about what happened? Is it true about your dad? And that song Van Johnson did. Is that real?”

I realized right then that I’d been thinking that if I just ignored it, everything would go away. I thought about trying to use my dad’s Rules to Live a Lucky Life. But they weren’t going to fix this. Because I wasn’t lucky. Neither was my dad, at least not right now. What if my dad couldn’t prove the people who were accusing him were lying?

“I gotta go,” I said and walked away from Dave and away from Stony Butte Elementary. I went out the side door again, just in case the reporters were still hanging around the front. I walked across the playing field, then headed for home on a strange street. I found myself wishing Ben would show up on his bike. I bet he wouldn’t have asked me any questions. He would just ask me if I wanted to do some dangerous activity. That would have been okay with me, because I would have preferred to jump into the gorge again than talk.