Altemonte watched me unpack my stuff on the top bunk which was now my bunk, which all it was was my ElfQuest comic books. Real casual and cool, like maybe I didn’t even care, I asked him, Have you read ElfQuest? No, he said, and so I Frisbeed one down onto the lower bunk which was his bunk. I flicked him one that had an album at the back where you can look at all of the elves up close in totally saturated full color. Skywise, Pike, Cutter, Strongbow, Redlance, Leetah, Nightfall, Moonshade, and he looked at it, he inspected every page. This is pretty sweet, he said. Then I told him about my house, about THE MCCANN’S: STEP AWA. I said, Me and my Mama K built it up with all the top furniture like a total bunk bed and even a table and chairs and we’re going to make a porch swing even though it doesn’t have a porch and I’m pretty good with tools, plus no one knows who the McCanns are or what AWA means, it’s a mystery that plagues us from basically ancient times. And he said, I know what AWA means, AWA stands for All Worship Altemonte, and I was like, You wish. Then Altemonte looked at my comic book again and he said, Who do you think would win between a flaming arrow and a flaming axe I mean if an elf was shooting it or a dwarf was throwing it? I felt bad for him, but I had to say, You can’t be an elf you’re too chubby. And also, they don’t have elves that are African-American, which is what Ms. Carroll said to call him. He asked, Are the elves American? Which I had to admit I didn’t know so I said, Am I American? And he said, I don’t know are you? And I said, Are you? And he said, I’m not sure but I don’t think so, and I said, Why not? And he said, Because I’ve never voted for the president. And I said, Me neither. Then he said, You think I even want to be an elf? And I said, What else would anyone want to be, unless it was a wolf? And he said, I could be a dwarf which can make things out of metal while what can an elf do but be all graceful. I said, But who even cares about dwarves? So he showed me this book he had called The Hobbit that didn’t have any pictures and that never exactly said if the dwarves were chubby or African or American it just said that they lived in Middle-earth and that they had these toxic axes and other sweet fighting skills and they liked treasure which me and Altemonte totally did, too. Flaming arrows, I said. Flaming axes, he said, so we stuck with that and played double-crossing pretend where none of the other kids could tell we were playing pretend which they would not allow us to do without creaming us.