that all you have to say?” Mr Azzaretti looked serious. “Because I’ve got a boy in sick bay right now with a broken nose and he’s saying you did it.”
A broken nose. I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. I broke Jake Mayo’s nose?
Serves him right. I thought, but I didn’t say it. I knitted my fingers together to stop my hands shaking. I was still charged full of adrenaline and my throat hurt from where Jake had held me. He was much stronger than me, a real all-American quarterback in the making. I’d only managed to throw that one punch before he’d lunged at me, locked his arm around my neck and dragged me to the ground. That was how the teachers had found us, squirming around on the asphalt, red-faced and sweaty with a circle of kids all around us chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Mr Azzaretti waited for me to say something while I looked down at my hands. There was a long silence between us and then he gave a sigh and pushed his chair away and stood up. He came right around and perched on the edge of the desk beside me. He was a tall, angular man. He always wore a shirt and tie, but he kept his sleeves rolled up as if he had proper manual work to do, like a groom at the stables instead of a middle-school principal.
“Lola.” He said my name, and my heart sank. It was the softness of the word, the kindness in his voice, that made me realise I was in real trouble. “Do you know how much it concerns me to see the smartest kid in this school, a student I consider to be scholarship material, being called in because of this sort of behaviour?”
I could feel my eyes getting teary. “I’m sorry, Mr Azzaretti.” I wiped them with my sleeve, noticing the bloodstain as I did so. That blood wasn’t mine.
“You know I’m going to have to call this boy’s parents?” Mr Azzaretti said. “And your dad too, obviously?”
I felt a flush of pleasure at the idea of Jake Mayo having to explain to his dad that a girl had broken his nose. It almost made it all worth it.
“My dad’s asleep. He turns his phone off in the afternoons.”
“All right,” Mr Azzaretti said. “Then you’ll give him this as soon as you get home and ask him to call me, OK?” He handed me an envelope. “Tell him you’ve been suspended from school until further notice.”
It was fourth period and everyone else was in math. I cut around the back of the science block and across the playground at the back of the school. I squeezed through the gap in the mesh fence and out onto Sutter Avenue. Usually I turned left here, towards Rockaway, but I could feel the weight of that note from Mr Azzaretti in my backpack. So I headed right instead, following the green mesh fence line behind the houses, making my way towards the Aqueduct grandstands.
My problems with Jake Mayo had started at the beginning of the term. Before then, I don’t think he even knew my name. He hung out with the populars – Tori and Jessa and Ty and Leona - and I hung out with no one. Weird Lola Campione, the brainiac girl always with her nose in a book. Because if you have no one to hang out with in middle school then you need a book to read, because it stops you looking so lonely. I sound like I feel sorry for myself, but I don’t really. I don’t know why but I don’t make friends easy. I’m shy, I guess, and I never know what to talk about with other kids because my life is all about horses.
Our family, we’re “Backstretchers”. That’s what they call us on account of the fact that we spend our whole lives at the racetrack in the backstretch, the underground neighbourhood behind the grandstands at Aqueduct.
There are some backstretchers who actually live right there at the track twenty-four seven. They sleep in hammocks slung up in the loose boxes and eat all their meals in the bodega.
We don’t live far from the track, just on the other side of Rockaway Boulevard in Ozone Park. Our house has four bedrooms, one each for Dad and Nonna and another for my two brothers, Johnny and Vincent. I share the downstairs bedroom with my big sister, Donna. She’s nineteen and a total pain in the neck. She’s got Dad wrapped around her little finger, so he treats her like a princess even though she is the only one who does nothing to help out with the family business. Johnny and Vincent both dropped out of school the day they turned sixteen to ride trackwork. So I only have four years to go. Except Dad won’t let me quit school.
“Sweetheart,” he says. “A clever girl like you, you could be a doctor or a lawyer or anything you want. You’re going to stay in school and get a scholarship and go to college, Lola. There ain’t no way you’re gonna wind up like me.”
Except I wasn’t going to get a scholarship now, was I? Even Donna, who was always in trouble, had never actually been suspended. I didn’t know how I was going to explain this to my dad. He was gonna hit the roof.
That morning I’d gone to Aqueduct as usual. I earn pocket money cleaning out the stalls. I stayed longer than I should have done because Fernando was settling in a new horse so I had to do his mucking out too. I was going to go home and get dressed for school, but I had no time, so I just changed my T-shirt, which was sweaty, and kept the same jeans and boots. I figured that was OK. The boots were my riding boots, scuffed brown leather, which I wore every day at the track. I gave them a wipe on the straw before I left the loose box to clean them off a bit and then ran the whole way to school.
By the time I got to the gates I was sweaty again and the bell had already rung. I like to arrive at class early because I have this favourite desk in the front row, but on this day all the desks up front were filled and the only spare seat left was near the back next to Jake Mayo.
I would have done anything to find another seat. Jake was in all my classes, but we’d never spoken, not once. Due to my terminal uncoolness I guess.
I excused my lateness to Miss Gilmore, flung myself down into my seat and opened my textbook as she began writing up stuff on the white board.
Jake was looking at me funny.
“Hey!” he hissed.
I ignored him.
“Hey, Campione!”
I looked up. “Yeah?”
“Where’s your horse?”
There was laughter from Tori and Jessa who sat in the row behind us.
“Hey, Campione!” Jake leaned over towards me. “You know you smell of manure, right?”
I looked down at my boots. They were dirty from the stables I guess, but I hadn’t really noticed. I would have changed them if I had time. Anyway, there was nothing I could do about it now. I pretended I hadn’t heard him and began furiously copying down the lesson from the board.
Then suddenly, in front of everyone, Jake flung himself across his desk and began convulsing, coughing and spluttering like he was going to die or something. The whole class was watching him and Miss Gilmore stopped writing on the board.
“Are you all right, Jake?” she asked, looking concerned.
Jake stopped performing and sat up.
“Sorry, miss,” he smirked. “It’s like I can hardly breathe in here because of Campione! She stinks of horse poo!”
The whole class fell apart laughing at this and Jake gave me a look of satisfaction. His humiliation of me was complete.
I thought it would end there, but it didn’t.
