He didn't turn around right away. He stood there with the strap of the knapsack in his fist and felt his face go hot from the neck up. There were things he could say. He knew things about Travis Kolb, about his father and about the police car that had been outside their house in July. Everybody on Polish Hill knew things about everybody. He could say one, and it would land, and Travis's friends would laugh at Travis instead, for a second, the way they laughed at anybody.
He turned around.
"It was hers," he said. "When she was a kid. It's older than you."
Travis opened his mouth and then didn't seem to know what to do with it. It wasn't the kind of answer that gave you anything to push against.
"It's ugly," Travis said finally.
"Yeah," Cal said. "Probably." And he went inside.
In homeroom Mr. Haddad was writing the date on the board in his tall slanting letters, Monday, October 14, 1985, and underneath it the Word of the Day, which was magnanimous. Mr. Haddad had come from Lebanon when he was a boy and spoke four languages and wore the same brown corduroy jacket every day, and he believed in vocabulary the way Sister Agnes believed in the rosary.
"Magnanimous," he said, tapping it. "Who can tell me? Anyone? It comes from the Latin. Magnus, great, and animus, soul. A great soul." He looked around the room. "It means generous. It means forgiving, especially toward a rival or someone less powerful than yourself. The magnanimous man, the magnanimous woman, does not hold a grudge. Use it in a sentence, someone. Mr. Dunn."
Cal, who had been looking out the window at the river, looked up.
"Um," he said. "The king was magnanimous to the—the guy he beat."
"The guy he beat." Mr. Haddad smiled. "Good enough. Kings are always being magnanimous in sentences. I would like to hear about someone who was magnanimous who was not a king. That is harder. Think about it."
At lunch Cal handed the lunch lady his ticket, which was blue. Everybody else's was white. The blue ones meant free, and everybody knew it, and nobody said anything about it most days, which was almost worse than if they had. He took his tray to the end of the table by the radiator and ate his sloppy joe and his tater tots and his canned peaches, and he wrapped the peanut butter sandwich back up in its bread bag and put it in the knapsack for later, because later was always longer than you thought.
Across the table, a new kid was sitting by himself. Cal had seen him in the hall—a skinny Vietnamese kid named Minh who'd come in September and who mostly said nothing because he mostly didn't know how to say it yet. Minh had a Garbage Pail Kids sticker on his folder, Adam Bomb, and a lunch in a margarine tub, rice and something that smelled strong, and Travis's friends at the next table had been holding their noses at it for a week.
Cal slid his milk carton across the table.