Thunder on the Plains by Gary Robinson Page A

gray suit, white shirt, and blue tie. He was from another world.
    â€œDid you finish that report?” Mom asked me.
    â€œYeah, it’s done.”
    â€œGood,” my stepfather said. He always seemed angry when he spoke to me. I think Mom said he was “stern,” not angry. He folded the newspaper and picked up his fork.
    â€œWe wouldn’t want a repeat of the problems we had last month, would we?”
    I didn’t answer.
    â€œWant some eggs and bacon?” Mom asked in a cheerful voice. She was always trying to smooth things over between Bill and me.
    I nodded and reached for the pitcher of orange juice. I certainly wished things couldbe like they used to be. My full-blooded Cheyenne father died in an accident at work two years ago. I’m still not over it. I don’t think Mom is either. Really. But she tries to hide her sadness.
    It was right after Dad died that my life began to fall apart. For some reason, things just didn’t go right any more. School was a hassle. Home life was a hassle. I couldn’t stay focused on any one thing. My mind was a mess. How could it be any other way? Dad and I were close.
    But then Mom announced a year later that she was going to get married. This white guy named Bill from the bank where she worked asked her to. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t ready for a replacement father in my life. Especially someone as different from me and Mom as Bill is. Mom said he was good to her. She said he would make our lives a lot more stable.
    This was way too much for a fourteen- year-old boy to handle. First my dad’s gone. Then Mom replaces him with astranger. Pow! Pow! It hit me in the gut like a one-two punch.
    Dad always said I was a pretty smart kid. So why had my grades started dropping? And why was the principal calling me into his office every other week? He’d said I was “acting out,” whatever that means.
    â€œYou need to eat before your food gets cold,” Mom said, putting down the plate in front of me. A smiley face made from two fried eggs and a curled strip of bacon looked up from the plate.
    â€œWathene, we need to leave in ten minutes,” Bill said to my mother.
    The food she had cooked tasted good. As I ate, Mom worked my long black hair into a single braid down my back. I pretended not to like it, but secretly I did. It reminded me of when Dad was alive. Mom would braid his hair like this before he went to work.
    After breakfast, the three of us got into Bill’s car, a shiny new blue Buick. We took our regular route to my school. The busy streets of Los Angeles were crowded withother cars headed to offices and schools. My school, the D. W. Griffith Middle School, was named after some old Hollywood director that I’d never heard of.
    Sitting in back of the Buick gave me more time to think about the past. We had moved into Bill’s house here in the San Fernando Valley when Mom and Bill got married. It was definitely a high-class house in a high- class neighborhood. Especially when you compared it to our old frame house on the east side of L.A.
    Before Bill, we had lived in a mixed neighborhood of African American, Latino, and Native American families. Everyone lived in small homes crammed together. It was sort of like a big tossed salad. Our fancy new neighborhood seemed a lot more like a loaf of bread—white bread.
    I dreaded going to school today. And it wasn’t just because of the math test in third period. Or the quickly written history report. It was mainly because of Willy Phillips. Willywas the blond-haired bully of Griffith Middle School. He had promised to clean my clock this week. But he wasn’t talking about a timepiece. I knew he meant he was going to beat me up.
    â€œGood luck on your math test, dear,” Mom said as I got out of the car in front of the school.
    â€œAnd try to stay out of trouble, okay?” Bill added. “There’s only a month and a half left of