"You're bad, aren't you?" is what the boy with the glasses and the always-runny nose said. 

"What're you talking about?" is what I said. 

What I didn't say was, "I'm here, aren't I?  I'm in this gifted class, aren't I?  I'm in seventh grade and reading Dostoyevsky and I've got an IQ of 156, don't I?"  But that didn't matter.  There was talk.  There was talk about the boy with the mohawk that used to hang around the parking lot, that used to drive me away after school.  There was the green-haired girl in the other classes, the normal classes, the kids we weren't supposed to talk to, the mohawk boy's sister.  She talked to me first.  That's how it went.  Then she brought me to him.  We talked.  We did other things. That's how it went.