Reaching Dustin
by vicki grove
"I got you," I croaked to the top of Dustin Groats bent head. My heart was beating in this raggedy way, and my stomach felt...bouncy. Calm down, Carly! I ordered myself.
Dustin didn't look at me. He just scrinched his left ear against his shoulder. Was he trying to signal that he wasn't even going to listen? Before I could chicken out, I crouched down and got right in front of his face. "I said, I got you. I drew your name! To interview!"
As usual, Dustin was slumped in bis chair, staring at his desk in this way that made you wonder if he was actually asleep with his eyes open. His arms were were stretched across a white skull and crossbones on a faded gray T-shirt. The words Harley Davidson showed just below them, and a black motocycle took a bumpy ride over his skinny rib cage. The sweat-strained leather band he always wore across his forehead pushed his grease-spiked hair into unplanned-looking directions, and there was a pool of cloddy mud where his heavy black boots had shed all over the floor.
In fact, a thin trail of that cloddy mud connected his shoved-into-the corner desk to the rectangle of lined-up desks used by all of us regular people in Ms. Aspen's sixth-grade class. There wasn't even a desk nearby for me to sit at to interview him.
Dustin slowly took his hands from his armpits and began picking at a safety pin he had stuck through the crusty skin on the back of one of his knuckles. His light eyes flickered toward me through long, spidery lashes. Then he looked listlessly down at the floor and dropped one arm to scoop up a pencil that was lying in his boot dirt. He stuck the point of that filthy pencil into the ear he'd been scrinching.
"Don't!" It took all my control not to grab his wrist and pull his hand away. "You'll punture your eardrum!"
He closed his eyes and stuck his hands into his armpits again, leaving the pencil poking out of his ear like an arrow shot into his brain.
"Who cares?" He mumbled.
i'll write some more if you like it. i love the book thats why i put it on here. comment or vote.
