An Excerpt

Sometimes when there’s no one else home I stand in front of Mum's long mirror and stare at my reflection for a while. People say I’m a stocky little bloke. There's a dent in the middle of my chin and I've got dark sandy hair and brown eyes and freckles on the bridge of my nose. When I grin, my teeth are crooked. My writing is crooked. I stumble over my words when I read, cause that’s crooked too. And after I broke my leg last year, they set it crooked. I’ve got a funny way of walking now, and I can’t run cross country or play football like I used to, so when they do sport at school I sit out and watch. If I go to school, that is. I skip it when I can, and Mum and Dad and even Steve give me stern talks about it, but they just don’t see. Everything about me is crooked. I'm Harvey Jason and I'm the only kid in my school with a limp. I can solve maths problems faster than my principal but that kind of brightness gets swallowed up if you can’t kick a ball like everyone else can. I feel the tears behind my eyes, but they stay there, because when you’re twelve you don’t cry about being crooked. You suck it up. You pick up stones from the gravel road and throw them as far as you can and the anger sort of seems to grow small as you watch them bounce off the dust and roll til they’re still. But you never cry.