LUCAS TURNED HIS OPEN textbook vertical long enough to flip the page of his comic book, then lay the math-text horizontal and continued reading Spiderman. He’d been held after school for not paying attention, yet there he was, lost in his own thoughts, not understanding anything the teacher was saying and already thinking of the excuses he could give his mother as to why he was so late getting home. It was bullies, he decided. Never mind that most his bullies were right there in the same room, doing penance just as he was. And never mind that his mother had heard it all before, or that, at this rate, he almost certainly wouldn’t be graduating 6th grade. The ugly truth was that the numbers on the chalkboard—having failed to engage his imagination—were as good as invisible to him. And so he
