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Zusatztext 49551104 Informationen zum Autor Kristin Levine Klappentext The newest powerful work of historical fiction from award-winning author of THE LIONS OF LITTLE ROCK Kristin Levine. Though he thinks of himself as a cowboy, Tommy is really a bully. He's always playing cruel jokes on classmates or stealing from the store. But Tommy has a reason: life at home is tough. His abusive mother isn't well; in fact, she may be mentally ill, and his sister, Mary Lou, is in the hospital badly burned from doing a chore it was really Tommy's turn to do. To make amends, Tommy takes over Mary Lou's paper route. But the paper route also becomes the perfect way for Tommy to investigate his neighbors after stumbling across a copy of The Daily Worker , a communist newspaper. Tommy is shocked to learn that one of his neighbors could be a communist, and soon fear of a communist in this tight-knit community takes hold of everyone when Tommy uses the paper to frame a storeowner, Mr. McKenzie. As Mr. McKenzie's business slowly falls apart and Mary Lou doesn't seem to get any better, Tommy's mother's abuse gets worse causing Tommy's bullying to spiral out of control. 1 THE PAPER “Hands up!” My best friend, Eddie Sullivan, had a newspaper rolled and pointed at me like a gun. He was only twelve, but over the summer he’d grown so much, he looked big enough to be in high school. “No way!” I called out. I grabbed the newspaper and tried to wrench it from him. My dog, Boots, started to bark, excited. He was a small, scruffy black mutt, with paws as white as frost on the prairie. “Surrender, you little commie,” Eddie said, “and I might let you live!” “I’m not a communist!” Eddie pretended to shoot me with the newspaper. I fell down, laughing. “Stalin’s dead!” “But the Soviet Union is not giving up. I’m not going to let you take over the world!” We were standing on a mountain of newspapers. To our right, a glass-bottle hill glowed brown and green in the sunlight. A bit farther on loomed a pile of tin cans, ten feet tall, with the labels burned off so that the metal sparkled like the silver on a sheriff’s star. Eddie grabbed one of my shoes and started to pull. I was laughing so hard, I could barely swat him away. “Help, Boots!” My dog jumped into the fray, nipping at Eddie’s ankles. It was the day of our community paper drive, when everyone placed their old papers and magazines by the side of the road. Eddie and I had spent all morning following the collection truck, watching his father swing the piles onto the truck bed. After lunch, we followed the truck on our bikes to the scrap yard. The truck would be driven onto a big scale and the homeowners’ association would receive a certain amount of money for every pound of paper that had been collected. While we were waiting for our turn on the scale, Eddie and I climbed onto our truck and started poking around. “You dirty com—” Eddie’s voice cracked, so high he sounded like my little sister. He cleared his throat. “You dirty commie,” he said, his voice now deep like his father’s. Boots sank his teeth into Eddie’s shirt and pulled him away. But Eddie didn’t let go of my shoe, which came off, and I tumbled down the hill of papers. We were both laughing so hard, it took me a moment to get my breath. Eddie was standing on top of the pile, holding the shoe over his head like a trophy. Boots was chasing him around in circles, barking. “Victory!” yelled Eddie. I was about to scramble up the pile and join back in the fight when a headline caught my eye: THE WAR ENDS! Even though it was now September 13, 1953, finding an old newspaper wasn’t so unusual. No, it was the masthead that intrigued me: The Daily Worker. “Eddie!” I called. “Come quick!” Eddie slid down the hill, loose papers flying around him. “What is it, Tommy?” I hel...
