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card and the next thing I know Modo is leaping over the line of boys and smacking my face and giving me detention.
We’re supposed to be silent in here. If you get caught whispering to anyone, you get more detention. Sometimes we have to write a sentence in Latin about five hundred times in perfect penmanship. Last week we were writing, Omnia vincit amor, which is a laugh. Today, being Friday, Father Shrimp is letting us off easy: we’re allowed to do our weekend homework. Can you imagine doing homework on a Friday afternoon? This guy knows as much about youth as my mother, which is another story. Anyhow, I decided, instead of homework, to start this journal. Don’t ask me why. I like doing it with Father Crookback sitting a few feet in front of me reading from his little black prayer book, his lips moving as he reads.
I usually only write poems, but I’ve been getting a little restless only writing poetry. Talk about confinement. Poetry is like trying to get the whole ocean into a tiny hole in the sand. It drives you nuts sometimes. I tried keeping a diary once when I was in the seventh grade, but gave it up. It turned into a Last Will and Testament, which is pretty ridiculous when you’re only twelve. My mother says I’m morbid. She’s got something there, I have to admit. My notebooks have drawings of people hanging from trees and gallows. I can’t draw worth a damn, but for some reason I like making these pictures of hanging men. It’s pretty ironic that my mother worries about me being morbid when she sends me to this Catholic school with bloody crucifixes hanging all over the place. It looks like Attila the Hun did the decorations.
As I was saying, I write poetry. Last year, I got my first poem published in the school literary magazine. The advisor, Father Mahon, is very cool. I had him for Freshman English. You could tell he hated it, and who could blame him. He’s got a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, in England, and still they stuck him into a freshman class full of morons. He thought my writing was all over the place, but still pretty good. Then I showed him some of my poems after class one day. He read them very quietly, then looked up at me without saying a word for a minute, like he was seeing me for the first time. Then he told me that there was a lot of emotion in the poems, and that with some work on the “form,“ I might be a decent writer some day. I nearly fell over when he said that.
And then last year he published one of my poems. Usually only juniors and seniors get their stuff published.
Quasimodo couldn’t believe it when he saw it. I love it that these pallbearers can’t figure me out. Just when they’re sure I’m nothing but a