Stanley returned to his hole. It wasn’t fair. Mr. Pendanski had even said his fossil was interesting. He slammed his shovel into the ground and pried up another piece of earth.
After a while, he noticed X-Ray had come by and was watching him dig.
“Hey, Caveman, let me talk to you a second,” X-Ray said. Stanley put down his shovel and stepped up out of his hole.
“Say, listen,” said X-Ray. “If you find something else, give it to me, okay?”
Stanley wasn’t sure what to say. X-Ray was clearly the leader of the group, and Stanley didn’t want to get on his bad side.
“You’re new here, right?” said X-Ray. “I’ve been here for almost a year. I’ve never found anything. You know, my eyesight’s not so good. No one knows this, but you know why my name’s X-Ray?”
Stanley shrugged one shoulder.
“It’s pig latin for Rex. That’s all. I’m too blind to find anything.” Stanley tried to remember how pig latin worked.
“I mean,” X-Ray went on, “why should you get a day off when you’ve only been here a couple of days? If anybody gets a day off, it should be me. That’s only fair, right?”
“I guess,” Stanley agreed.
X-Ray smiled. “You’re a good guy, Caveman.” Stanley picked up his shovel.
The more he thought about it, the more he was glad that he agreed to let X-Ray have anything he might find. If he was going to survive at Camp Green Lake, it was far more important that X-Ray think he was a good guy than it was for him to get one day off. Besides, he didn’t expect to find anything anyway. There probably wasn’t anything “of interest” out there, and even if there was, he’d never been what you could call lucky.
He slammed his blade into the ground, then dumped out another shovelful of dirt. It was a little surprising, he thought, that X-Ray was the leader of the group, since he obviously wasn’t the biggest or the toughest. In fact, except for Zero, X-Ray was the smallest. Armpit was the biggest. Zigzag may have been taller than Armpit, but that was only because of his neck. Yet Armpit, and all the others, seemed to be willing to do whatever X-Ray asked of them.
As Stanley dug up another shovelful of dirt, it occurred to him that Armpit wasn’t the biggest. He, the Caveman, was bigger.
He was glad they called him Caveman. It meant they accepted him as a member of the group. He would have been glad even if they’d called him Barf Bag.
It was really quite remarkable to him. At school, bullies like Derrick Dunne used to pick on him. Yet Derrick Dunne would be scared senseless by any of the boys here.
As he dug his hole, Stanley thought about what it would be like if Derrick Dunne had to fight Armpit or Squid. Derrick wouldn’t stand a chance.
He imagined what it would be like if he became good friends with all of them, and then for some reason they all went with him to his school, and then Derrick Dunne tried to steal his notebook…
“Just what do you think you’re doing?” asks Squid, as he slams his hands into Derrick Dunne’s smug face.
“Caveman’s our friend,” says Armpit, grabbing him by the shirt collar. Stanley played the scene over and over again in his mind, each time watching another boy from Group D beat up Derrick Dunne. It helped him dig his hole and ease his own suffering. Whatever pain
he felt was being felt ten times worse by Derrick.
