Leandro approaches me in the street, holding his skateboard. I want to avoid him. He is a bully. Bullies aren’t human. “What’s up, man?” says Leandro. “How are things going in school?” I shrug. He is different. “Nobody calls me since the nuns expelled me from school.” His lips are trembling. He, like me, is twelve. “I just hang around.” He talks and I listen. Later that week, Leandro fell off his skateboard while holding the rear bumper of a moving bus. It dragged him for three blocks. I was the last person in our class to talk to him.
Matt Ferraz is a Brazilian writer with works released in English, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish. His middle-grade books are very successful in Bolivia.