Chapter 22 - If A Body Meet A Body Comin' Through The Rye

When I got back Phoebe had took the pillow of the head alright but she still wouldn’t look at me. I started to explain why I had been kicked out again and why I was failing in all my subjects. She said it was because I hate everything. I told her I didn’t hate everything so 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 bullies were forcing him to take back something he had said and he wouldn’t, so they did something terrible to him. Which forced him to plummet to his own death.

Anyway I told Phoebe that I liked Allie. She reminded me that he was dead thought, and she really started to get sore about it. 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 of rye. 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. 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. Then I got up to make a phone call to Mr Antolini, my English teacher at Elkton Hills. He lived in New York now because he took a new job at N.Y.U. As I left the room she shouted me back to tell me that she was having belching lessons from this girl at school.