Chapters 9-12 Summary

Gurion oversleeps and his mother drives him to school, cigarette in hand. When they approach the building, a student stops them and asks Mrs. Maccabee to extinguish her cigarette, according to school rules. She insults him and continues to smoke until the cigarette is finished. With Gurion in tow, she storms into Principal Brodsky's office and demands that Gurion not be placed in isolation the next day. As Gurion waits outside Brodsky's office, he watches the Shovers coming and going. The Shovers think of themselves as bad-ass gang members, but Gurion sees them differently. In an interesting play on the names Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, Gurion thinks: "So while the main hall Shovers thought themselves defiant, like some paddling gang of finns on the foamy rapids, they were just a bunch of sawyers in school-colored scarves eating candy in a...