Jack's New Power by Jack Gantos Page B

than flies.
    As quickly as they had all come out of the hole, they returned into it, like the smoke sucking back into Aladdin’s lamp. I waited a few minutes for them to settle down, then picked up a brick.
    â€œIf their radar is so good,” I said to BoBo II, “then they can dodge rocks in their sleep.” I dropped the brick down into the hole. Nothing happened. I chucked a few more pieces of brick into the hole.
    A single bat came out of the well and dove at my head. It startled me and I yelled and tripped backward over BoBo II. My feet went up over my head and the bat zoomed in on my sneaker and bit it on the rubber tip. I
didn’t know what bat teeth looked like, but they went through my tennis shoe and missed my toe. If it’s a vampire bat, I thought, I’m a quarter-inch from being turned into a vampire and living with Dracula for the rest of time. I had seen the movie.
    I pumped my foot up and down, but I couldn’t shake it off. I threw a rock up at it, but missed and hit my ankle. I picked up another rock and whipped it at the bat. I missed, but I heard the sound of breaking glass. Oh crap! I thought. What had I hit?
    But I still had the bat to deal with. I used the toe of my good shoe to wedge the heel off my bat shoe. It fell to the ground, but the bat hung on. I jumped up and hobbled off to find what I broke.
    It couldn’t have been worse. It was Dad’s office window. “ Ay, chihuahua,” I moaned. “Now I’ve done it.”
    This was the second time I’d broken Dad’s office window. The first time, I hit it with a tennis ball. I was playing by myself against the garage door when I smacked the ball right through the pane. It was an accident.
    Dad gave me a warning which basically went: “If it happens again, I’m going to use my belt.” He meant business.
    I wanted to run but knew hiding would just make it worse. As Dad would say, “Take your punishment like a man.” He was right. I couldn’t act like a boy forever. I was already thirteen. I squatted down and picked up all the glass shards. When I was little, I always called broken glass “ghost’s teeth.” That seemed like a thousand years ago. This was just broken glass, plain and simple
    After I cleaned up, I wrote a note and taped it on his office door. I didn’t tell him about the bat. One thing at a
time, I cautioned myself. Then I returned to my room to wait. Maybe he would just come in and tell me one of his lesson stories. I flipped through the section of my diary where I wrote them down. There wasn’t one for my particular problem.
    â€œOnce upon a time,” I wrote, “there was a son who didn’t listen to his father. He repeatedly screwed up. But the father was patient. And eventually the son figured out how not to get into trouble every day of the week. Eventually he thanked his father for his patience.”
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    But that evening, when he opened my bedroom door, his belt was already off. I didn’t even get a chance to explain my side of the story.
    â€œYou know the rules,” he said.
    â€œIt was an accident,” I replied, lowering my eyes.
    â€œThere is no such thing as an accident,” he said, quoting himself. “There is right and there is wrong. There is thoughtful thinking and thoughtless thinking. Your thinking today was thoughtless and what you did was wrong. That is not an accident.”
    I felt trapped by his thinking. “It was an accident,” I said weakly. “Don’t you get it?”
    â€œChildren have accidents. Men make choices. Just do as you’re told,” he replied impatiently.
    I put my hands out and leaned against the wall. He reached into my back pocket, removed my wallet, and flicked it onto the bed. Then he reared back and gave me five cracks in a row.
    When he finished he slid the belt through the loops of his pants. It looked like a snake curling around his