what made it even worse during his first year in middle school was one time his Italian teacher Professoressa Minimo was talking to the class about fashion and young people and she explained to the class that jeans are a magnificent item of clothing because they are convenient and comfortable you can wear them every day and in all occasions but people who still wear old fashioned trousers are pathetic because they fool themselves into believing that they are superior to people dressed in jeans and quite to the contrary they are just sad people and while she was talking he looked around him he was sitting in the front row and he saw that all the boys and girls in the class were wearing jeans he was the only one wearing old style pleated trousers and he felt like a complete piece of shit who was practically being pilloried by Professoressa Minimo a neurotic anorexic left wing Catholic with a pair of enormous eyeglasses who always wanted everyone to think she was super modern and super up to date

the boys and girls in Aversa considered people from my town to be pieces of shit they made them feel like outsiders and once or twice they even threw bags of garbage at us when we were leaving on our bus and things like that when after all the distance between the town and Aversa was only six miles it’s not like the difference between Trent in the north and Calabria in the south aside from the kids from Aversa for the boy there was a second group of enemies none other than the kids from his town his compatriots who came to Aversa with him there weren’t many like him who came from not particularly well to do farming families instead most of them were the children of the so called respectable townspeople who sent their children to Aversa not merely to put them into a better environment but also to give them a better shot at enrolling in college because back then the middle schools in the town were like something out of A Clockwork Orange that is the kids insulted the teachers threw chairs out the windows and things of that sort which made it impossible to study or to learn

also riding the school bus was Gianni the one who had explained to him who had murdered Simeone and why also there were the sons of the clan bosses in particular the two sons of Ernesto Bardellino he was on terrible terms with them because of the way they behaved they had a way of treating everyone that was not merely arrogant it deserved a thorough and well administered beating and what bothered him most was the system of subjugation that they had created and imposed on all the kids who rode the school bus so that the kids who didn’t want to become slavish lackeys and who didn’t want to have problems never spoke and if someone bothered them anything short of physical violence they would do their best not to react that is for instance if they annoyed him on the school bus if they offended him he wouldn’t open his mouth he wouldn’t react it was only if someone laid hands on him then he’d react and this was because he wanted to avoid trouble because that’s what his mother his father his priest had taught him everyone had always taught him to behave that way