…Her shirt read, “tease me to death” with a bleeding heart speared through the center by an ornate dagger. On her left wrist, a simple spider tattoo. She meant business. He just wasn’t sure what kind…

From “The Other Side of Hello”

…The class passed around the dime that Ramona had kept inside her belly button all week. “I woulda thought it’d smelled worse,” said Robert, puzzled…

From “Every Day in Pre-K”

…Steve had gone to his happy place, which, coincidentally, looked and smelled a lot like an Arby’s…

From “Keep Calm and Drive Forward”

…Most kids have an imaginary friend. Randy Ruferson had an imaginary enemy. But that’s just they way Randy rolled. Oh, he had plenty of real enemies too, but it was the imaginary one that troubled him the most…

From “Showdown: K-12”

…All those years as friend to the gerbil went out the window the second the tail came off in his hand. And Danny didn’t know what to do about it. Tell his parents, and he’d surely be grounded. He had to hide it, so he slipped the tail skin back over the stump and hoped for the best…

From “Danny McGill, Boy Wonder”

…It was odd for Harold to address her in that manner, Harold being dead and all. Anyway, what gives him the right to just waltz back into her life after all these years of being dead and buried? If he had the power to haunt, why’d he wait so long to do it?…

From “Remembrances”

…As juvenile as the comment was, it still made her laugh. “Your epidermis is showing.” That was Bobby’s knock ‘em dead opener. She laughed and laughed and laughed until milk shot out of her nose. She was, after all, only seven…

From “The Lunchroom Diaries”

…As the clock tocked on, Eric continued to balance 47 nickels on his chin. 47 towering nickels—one for each day of his sobriety, and (not coincidentally) one more than the current bar record of 46. In twelve glorious seconds that record would be Eric’s to hold, along with a modest trophy and an oversized belt buckle…

From “The Happiest Hours”

…One eyebrow is never as good as two. Unibrows are bad enough, but what’s worse is when two becomes one—by razor (or in this case, Epilady). Well, Jim made one too many cracks about Rachel’s “overly chiseled” eyebrows, prompting him to lose one of his own. And now neither of them is happy. Especially not Jim…

From “The Opposite of Sex”