Chapter 22

Phoebe still wouldn’t look at me, she was mad because I got kicked out at Pencey. I started to explain why I had been kicked out and why I was failing in all my subjects. She said it was because I hate everything. She told me to name one thing that I do like. I couldn’t concentrate though, all kept thinking about was the nuns I had seen at breakfast, and a boy at Elkton Hills called James Castle. He jumped out of the window because some phonies were forcing him to take back something he had said and he wouldn’t, so they did something terrible to him, it was so bad that he jumped out of the window. I told Phoebe that I liked Allie. She reminded me that he was dead though, and she really started to get sore about it. I said just because someone’s dead doesn’t mean you stop liking them. Phoebe then started to talk about what I want to do with my life. I asked her if she knew the song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’. She corrected me and told me that it was ‘If a body meet a body’, a poem by Robert Burns. I kept picturing little kids playing a game in a big field. Thousands of kids, and nobody else around except me, and my job is to save them all from falling of the edge of the cliff. That’s all I’d do all day, save the kids. I know its crazy, but it’s what I’d really like to be. Phoebe didn’t say anything for a while and then when she did it was “Daddy’s going to kill you”. I told her I didn’t give a damn, and I really didn’t anymore. I got up to make a phone call to Mr Antolini, my English teacher at Elkton Hills.