Tall boy

I spotted him by lunchtime, and I took my meal at a table set aside for faculty and staff in one corner of the cafeteria as the kids ate.
Bigfoot Irwin was one of the tallest boys in sight, and he hadn’t even hit puberty yet. He was all skin and bones—and I recognized something else about him at once. He was a loner.
He didn’t look like an unpleasant kid or anything, but he carried himself in a fashion that suggested that he was apart from the other children; not aloof, simply separate. His expression was distracted, and his mind was clearly a million miles away. He had a double-sized lunch and a paperback book crowding his tray, and he headed for one end of a lunch table. He sat down, opened the book with one hand, and started eating with the other, reading as he went.
The trouble seemed obvious. A group of five or six boys occupied the other end of his lunch table, and they leaned their heads closer together and started muttering to one another and casting covert glances at Irwin.
I winced. I knew where this was going. I’d seen it before, when it had been me with the book and the lunch tray.
Two of the boys stood up, and they looked enough alike to make me think that they either had been born very close together or else were fraternal twins. They both had messy, sandy brown hair, long, narrow faces, and pointed chins. They might have been a year or two ahead of Irwin, though they were both shorter than the lanky boy.


Brief Cases, B is for Bigfoot, Page 39-40