Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) by Brad Whittington Page A

was sprawled on the worn floorboards. Judging by the laughter, I was a hit.
    Not that it was much of a consolation. As I brushed the dust from my bell-bottoms, the red in my face definitely clashed with the outfit.
    A hush fell on the room as the dust I had raised drifted lazily through the beams of sunlight streaming through the ten-foot windows toward the fifteen-foot ceiling. The teacher directed me to a seat in the back.
    I walked through bands of dark and light and the smell of dust, pencil shavings, hair oil, grass stains on denim, and sweat. The shoes chosen for their aesthetic qualities creaked ominously in the silence as every eye followed The-Creature-from-the-North-at-Large-in-Fred-Texas. In an attempt to mitigate the interminable walk, I feigned indifference. I flipped the perennially troublesome shock of hair from my eyes with a toss of my head and glanced impassively around the room at the regulation crew cuts. The scarred wooden desk I slid into had a hole in the upper-right corner for an inkwell. I felt like I had stepped through a time warp.
    Evidently everyone else felt the same way. They peered at me as if I were Buck Rogers from the twenty-fifth century. Turning heads rippled through the room like wind through a cornfield. I didn’t meet the gazes; I was too busy in a mental comparison with the Ohio schoolroom I had left behind—visions of metal, Formica, and tile contrasted with wood, wood, and . . . wood. Snow-covered skeletons of trees loomed outside the window in my mind’s eye; the green of pine that had yet to know a coating of snow towered outside the windows of my new world.
    It appeared that I was the advance guard of the Cultural Revolution. Or more like a lone scout lost deep in enemy territory. The indigenous population eyed me with the same mixture of fear, curiosity, and distrust as I did them. On the surface I wasn’t that remarkable. Granted, the dishwater-blond hair that hung over my collar and into my eyes didn’t conform to the prevailing tonsorial whim. Granted, my skeletal frame made me seem a walking science project. The true source of their morbid fascination was clear: one didn’t see olive-green shirts and white bell-bottoms every day in Fred. Or ever, until my arrival.
    I was startled from my reflections on the vagaries of fate by the kid sitting to my right.
    “Hey.”
    I flinched and jerked my head toward him. He had a burr haircut, round eyes, and a curved nose. If imitation be the sincerest form of flattery, somewhere in these piney woods lumbered a very proud turtle. “Yeah?”
    “Hey,” he repeated, slightly confused.
    “Hey, what?”
    He looked at me, seeming to search for a sign of something. “Just hey, that’s all.” He turned back to face the front of the room.
    I shrugged. “OK.”
    I suddenly had an image of Andy Griffith saying, “Hey, Barney,” and a response of, “Hey, Andy.” It had always struck me as odd because everybody I knew greeted each other with “Hi” or “Hello.” So Turtle-Head was just trying to be nice. So much for first impressions. Or maybe third or fourth impressions by this stage.
    During recess, while the other boys stood around eyeing me like I was just visiting this planet, Turtle-Head walked up.
    “Hey.”
    I was granted a second chance. I used it wisely. “Hey.”
    Turtle-Head took in the totality of my ensemble, an expression of confused wonderment on his face, as if he were looking at a sequence of hieroglyphics on the wall of a pyramid, trying to cipher the story. He glanced at my eyes and looked away, his expression changing instantly to studied indifference. He spat in the dirt.
    “So, this is yer first day.”
    “Yeah.”
    “What wuz your name again?”
    “Mark.”
    “Yeah, that’s right—Mark. I knowed the other preacher’s kids, the Pricharts. Did you know ’em?”
    “No, I’ve never met them.”
    “Oh, that’s right. You’re from Ohio, ain’t ya?” When he said “Ohio,” his eyes got harder