Urbassik Eamon Barkhordarian

English 9/27/07
3rd period
Endgame
By Nancy Garden
Genre: Juvenile fiction
2006, Harcourt Inc.

It’s gonna be better, gonna be better here, fourteen-year-old Gray Wilton chants as

he takes his first steps into Greenford High. But every since the first week of school,

Gray becomes a bully magnet. For no apparent reason, the bullies push Gray around and

cuss at him every time they pass him in the halls. Zorro, the captain of the varsity football

team, was one of the main bullies who picked on Gray Wilton. Once in football practice

Zorro called to Gray and cussed “Throw it-faggot.” One intense event was when Gray

bumped into Zorro in the locker room. “Zorro and his friend Johnson cornered me

between two rows of lockers. They started pushing me into the lockers and keeping me

from leaving. The two continued yelling stuff like ‘crater face’ at me because of my zits.”

The book describes how each day Gray bumps into Zorro and his friends resulting

with his life becoming worse every day. Not only do the problems at school wreck Gray

Wilton’s life, but so do the ones at home. Gray’s brother, Peter, who Gray nicknamed

“Perfect Pete,” is like the perfect son in the family, and so his father treats Gray as

inferior. Gray’s only enjoyable activity to relieve him of his problems is to play his

drums. It takes away all the stress on him and makes him feel alive again, but his father

wants him to become something more than a just drummer. Soon, all the problems he

encounters add up. His dog gets run over by a mysterious car, but he knows its Zorro, his

girlfriend dumps him and is going out with a brother of Zorro’s friend, he continues to get

bullied at school, and he feels his father wishes Gray never existed. Finally, Gray had

taken enough and decided that he only way to overlook his problems was to do a
Urbassik Eamon Barkhordarian
English 9/27/07
3rd period
atrocious thing: take his fathers semiautomatic to school. In the end he killed 4 people

including his only friend. After going through court, he expected a couple years in prison

and would finally be released, but the sentence he received was not what he expected: life

without parole.

The theme in the book EndGame, describes that if someone is pushed far enough,

they have the potential to do disastrous things. Many people have heard of the Golden

Rule, “Treat others as you would like to be treated,” and that’s exactly what Gray thought

he did. He endured being yelled at by his father day after day, knowing there was no love

for him left in the family, his drums being taken away, and getting bullied every day at

school. But finally what caused him to break was when Zorro turned his best friend

against him, and thought he was cornered into a situation with no way out. The teachers

wouldn’t do anything about him being bullied, and he would have been beat up if he told

anyone anyway. No one would listen to his complaints and he was so confused he didn’t

know what do to anymore. One time in the book, when he was in this state it described,

“The black cloud came over me like it had done times before.” Back to the Golden Rule,

Gray followed it perfectly, or so he thought. In the end, he returned all the pain and

sorrow he received from everyone, into the form of energy it took to pull the trigger on

his father’s semiautomatic.