Class Favorite by Taylor Morris

still the school’s official biggest loser.”
    He shrugged his shoulders, keeping his eyes on the ground. “You ain’t that bad.”
    The sun was beginning its descent over the maple trees on the other side of the field, and I realized we’d been sitting for a while. I wanted to get going before school let out.
    â€œWell,” I said, standing up and dusting off my butt, “I guess I better go.” I started walking back toward the school, but stopped after just a few steps. I turned back to Shiner. “You know what?” I said to him. “You’re not that bad either.”

9
    Are you overly emotional?
    The guy you’ve been crushing on just said your new haircut is “really interesting.” How do you react?
    a) By faking cramps and going home to cry in bed for the next two days. You knew you looked like a freak!
    b) You tell him, “Thank you,” and agree that the new style is interesting and unique.
    c) By demanding to know exactly what he means by “interesting”? Is he insulting you?!
    Â 
    I pounded across our front yard through crabgrass and sprouting daffodils, and immediately noticed our Texas flag jerking in the wind. It hadn’t been hung since Dad left a few months ago. He used to put it up every morning on his way to work and take it down after dark. Sometimes I’d help hold the flag, being extra careful that it didn’t touch the ground. Once, when I waslittle, I let the corner touch the grass, and I was sure we were going to have to burn the whole thing. But Dad had only winked at me and said, “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
    I knew no one would be home—Mom was still at the bank, and Elisabeth was running somewhere like she did every day after school. I was looking forward to crawling in my bed, shutting the blinds, pulling the comforter up over my head, and hiding there for the rest of the evening.
    I pushed open our ancient oak front door and immediately noticed something was different. For as long as I could remember, that door had always made a ruckus when we opened it. In the months before Dad moved out, Mom had nagged him every week to oil it, but he never got around to it. He always said he would, but then he’d concentrate on other things like the loose brick we always tripped over on the front steps, the starter on the lawnmower, or the latch on Mom’s bedroom window. It wasn’t like he wasn’t fixing anything—in fact, he loved repairing things. It just seemed like he fixed everything but . Dad even told Mom where the WD-40 was so she could fix it herself. It became such a big deal that I even offered to do it. Elisabeth called me a brownnoser, but it seemed easy to do. Mom told me not to bother. A couple of days later, Dad was gone, and Mom hadn’t mentioned it since.
    Even though I never paid attention anymore to the squeak, I knew instinctively that it was there. But when I opened thedoor that day, the silence of it was louder than the squeak. And that could only mean one thing:
    Dad was home.
    He hadn’t been there since before Christmas; our yard was still covered in traces of brown leaves that weren’t raked for the first fall since I could remember.
    Mom and Dad never fought in front of us, not once. It was always in their room, door closed. For the longest time I didn’t know what was going on. One evening, when they first started going in there a lot, I searched for Mom. I had a whim to bake cookies, and only she knew where the vanilla extract was. I tried the closed bedroom door, but it was locked.
    â€œWhere’s Mom?” I’d asked Elisabeth.
    â€œWhere do you think?” she had responded mindlessly, stretched across the living room floor. The reflection of MTV images danced across her glazed eyes.
    â€œTheir bedroom door is locked,” I’d said. Then it hit me, and my first thought was, Gross! “You mean they’re . .