Excerpt: Brin Friesen's Sic.

That whole morning I couldn’t find my favorite coat. I looked
everywhere for it and even got my mom on the case but no matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t find it. The trouble is I have all my stuff inside it. I have a lot of pockets. I got the coat last Christmas and it’s even got secret pockets. Not just one or two either––it’s got a bunch. It’s one of those Vietnam fatigue jackets. I don’t know if it’s from there, but it has that same olive-green color you see those sour run-down crippled Vets in the movies wearing when they’ve come back from Nam and are shouting and yelling at anti-war rallies with handlebar mustaches and long hair. I loved that coat. What’s worse I knew I was missing twice as much stuff as I could remember missing. That coat’s got me out of more than a few jams and I just felt sorta naked without the damn thing.

I was excited walking to school. Fridays were always good. The weekend was right around the corner and there were the fights. Fights on Fridays were pretty common. Once a month there was a good scrap between seventh graders, either on the grass field or in the woods. Mainly the whole build up and story leading up to fights was the good stuff. The actual scrap was usually pretty forgettable really because most of the time teachers broke them up. Somebody always ratted them out. But during the lead up kids came up with all kinds of possibilities and reasons why one of the kids involved in the fight might lose something during the fight he’d never get back. In a dirty way, we loved the idea of that. Battle wounds. Scars. Witnesses. Besides who’d win or lose the fight, I guess it was the chance we’d see somebody lose something for keeps that made it so fascinating.