Truly and indubitably, Richie Opula was having one of the top five worst weeks of his life. On Monday, he crashed his bike into a parked Lincoln Continental. The car’s owner, a real estate agent named Terry Howell, Jr., was sitting in it at the time. He exited the vehicle wearing a big sweatshirt from the gym and bike shorts. His thighs jiggled angrily, and in the span of a few seconds he called Richie every cuss word the boy knew and half a dozen brand new ones. Compounding Richie’s unease was the fact that Mr. Howell was a black man and the only other black person he’d ever known was Gina, who he used to work with at Baskin-Robbins, and they never talked to each other.

Mr. Howell called Richie’s dad up on his HO-scale cell phone and cussed him out too, and told him to get his ass downtown to pick up his son and exchange insurance information. Richie had to sit in the back seat while they waited, because Mr. Howell thought he’d try to run off. If this series of events was a big, gross sundae, the cherry on its sour cream crown would have to be the Smooth Jazz Mr. Howell played loud enough to shake the plate glass windows on the Florsheim shoe store.

Then on Tuesday, perhaps due to the stresses of Monday, Richie totally bombed his tests in Econ and Geometry. His mom was really pissed off and made him put his PJ’s on early and wash the dishes. Then he dropped a glass and cut his finger, requiring twenty stitches. The wound was sewn shut by a nurse whose lack of manual dexterity resulted in a poor stitch-job and a lifelong scar. Worse than that, she was surly and rude and called Richie a prick when he cried. Also, there were cheerleaders in the waiting room who made fun of him for wearing dinosaur pajamas.

     Wednesday was just about as bad. Everyone at school was going crazy over the internet. When Richie admitted that he didn’t have it at home, Harvey Koch called him a pathetic cave-man and all the boys laughed and chided Richie for being “a slowcoach on the cyberspeedway.” The regional art show was being judged that day in the gymnasium, and the blue ribbon was awarded to Harvey’s completely awesome clay replica of his webcam. The judges ran out of honorable mention ribbons just before they got to Richie’s watercolor painting of Gamera the Turtle, but they weren’t concerned because the consensus was that if the work deserved any mention at all, it certainly wouldn’t be an honorable one.

     “This looks like a kindergartener painted it,” said one of the judges, the banker George Holman.

     “Let’s go grab a seven layer burrito,” replied his colleague, Jane Dickson, a local businesswoman.

Later in the day, since the gym was being used for the art show, Coach Hobart held P.E. class outside and Richie got a big grass stain on his slacks, despite the fact that he wasn’t even participating because of his finger. The kickball took a glancing blow from Marie Coggler’s shiny pink sneaker, and sailed directly towards Richie. He wasn’t hit, but he fell when he dodged, thus acquiring the big unsightly blemish on the right knee of his kiddie Dockers.

     But on Thursday, everything turned around for Richie. That’s because it was the day that he met former president Bill Clinton.