This is John Munich. John is an average eleven-year-old boy,
four and a half feet tall. He has brown hair that sticks to his forehead when
he’s hot, and gets in his eyes if he leaves it untrimmed for too long. Like the
other boys in his grade, he doesn’t care much for school, and C’s and B’s don’t
seem terrible to him.
John’s family is a simple one, nothing special, but they’re
keepers. He has a mum and a dad and a little brother whom he couldn’t care less
about. His parents both work: his dad is a lawyer, and his mum works part-time
at the pharmacy down the block. The part of the day when she’s not working is
spent picking up and dropping off John and his brother at school and packing
lunches.
It’s always the same lunch in a brown paper bag: a turkey
sandwich, an apple, a pouch of yogurt, and two lackluster quarters from the
change basket above the washing machine in the basement. The quarters, which
are spare change from John’s father’s fancy lawyer pants, are to be used to buy
a carton of milk. Sometimes on Friday’s, John’s mum will slip in an extra
nickel, so John can splurge on chocolate milk.
At school John eats lunch with the other fourth grade boys.
They sit at one of the long orange tables in the middle of the cafeteria, right
in the middle of all of the other cafeteria tables, in alternating orange and
brown. The topic of conversation nearly always surrounds sports or video games,
and John actively participates because sports and video games excite him.
When the lunch bell rings, there is a loud clattering of
lunch trays smacking against the tables and the screeching of chairs as
students scoot to be the first out of the cafeteria even though the thought of
returning to math class isn’t the most interesting thought. Every day John
gathers up his eaten sack lunch and races toward the metal trash cans that line
the far wall of the cafeteria. Behind the trashcans is a mural of hands from
students long since graduated and forgotten by the teachers that still reside
in the school.
When John gets home from school—his mum drives him, then
leaves to pick up John’s little brother from the elementary school—he usually
drags his backpack to the living room, turns on the television, and if he’s
feeling particularly productive, he might start working on his homework. But
the living room in which he does his homework is distracting, there’s a pretty
painting on the wall, it always smells just cleaned, and the window behind the
green couch John sits on gives a perfect view of his neighbor’s new pool. All
these things plus the noises and bright colors emanating from the TV usually
prevent him from doing homework.
This is a typical day for John, a typical boy.
Lately though, things have been different. There is a new
boy in school, amusingly he lives next door and has a new pool that John likes
to admire after school some days. The new boy is tall and twelve, older then most
of the boys in the sixth grade.
The new boy likes to prey on the other kids in school,
stealing their lunch money to buy a slice of pizza and a soda every day at
lunch. Pizza and soda are the most expensive things a student can buy in the
cafeteria. The new boy says he needs to borrow money because his parents are
poor and can’t afford to pay for his lunch. John knows this information is
false because the new boy’s parents bought a new house and just installed the
new pool that sometimes distracts John after school. But John, being somewhat
afraid of bullies like most eleven-year-old boys, doesn’t say anything and
willingly gives up his two dull quarters and occasional nickel to the new boy.
The process of giving up his milk money persists for a week.
John hopes that eventually the new kid will give up the stealing, but he
doesn’t. The new kid steals money from all the sixth grade boys for the entire
week. The weeks turn to months, and pretty, soon the end of the year nears.
John is really craving a nice cold carton of milk from the metal refrigerator
by the lunch lady with the curly hair, but he has no change, so he cannot.
Summer comes and goes, and John nearly forgets about the
milk money thief—he can’t quite be called the new kid anymore, for he is no
longer new. During the summer, while John plays outside with his little
brother, the milk money thief stays inside, playing the video games that John
used to talk about in the lunchroom with his friends.
The milk money thief continues to steal John’s and the other
kids’ milk money all through seventh grade and then eighth grade. John doesn’t
do anything about it because, even though he hates to admit it, the bully still
scares him. The milk money thief enjoys his feast of a slice of pizza and a soda
every day for nearly three years. John begins to notice a gradual change in the
thief. His pants seem to be growing tighter and the lump of fat that used to be
the size of a butterball turkey has increased massively.
On the first day of ninth grade, the students are assigned
lockers and schedules. John goes through his average schedule—because of his
average grades he didn’t have the opportunity to take any more than the average
classes—until third period gym class.
In gym, the coach, whom they called “coach,” let them try on
gym uniforms until they found a fit. John finds a match almost immediately:
medium shirt and large shorts, because boys generally wore their shorts larger.
Almost everyone is done choosing a uniform. Everyone except for milk money
thief. He tries to contort himself to squeeze into the largest pair of pants
and the largest shirt that Brown High School has to offer. The fact of the
matter is that the thief has gained at least sixty pounds since sixth grade and
just can’t squeeze into the XXXL’s.
Sometime in the next week, the coach chats with the thief’s
parents and they decide to put him on a diet. For the next four years of high
school, the thief eats lunch next to the coach. Incidentally it’s the same
lunch that John eats: a turkey sandwich, an apple, a pouch of yogurt, and a
carton of milk. The only difference is that the thief doesn’t get the
occasional nickel for chocolate milk on Fridays.
I wrote this piece for English yesterday. It's supposed to allude to a realist piece, but I don't know.
There are plenty of little twists and surprises sprinkled throughout the story to keep anyone satisfied, ones that aren't overused and are nearly impossible to see coming. I felt good about the end of the book, and I know there's a sequel—which I'll definitely pick up eventually—but I'm not sure it was necessary. I would have been happy with just the first book, but I look forward to reading more from Maureen in the future.
