In chapter 23, Grayson asks Maniac Magee, "What about school?" Magee's reply is quite defensive and macho, telling Grayson that he's not going and that they can't make him go if they can't find him. In reality, however, his reasons for not going are more based on insecurity:

It had to do with homes and families and schools.

In his view, school is more like a day home that empties out at night, and all the kids go back to what Maniac calls their night homes—their address where they don't have to knock on the door and "everybody talks to each other." As an orphan on the run, he doesn't feel he has this privilege, and as he says, "He was not going to have one without the other."

When Grayson asked Maniac Magee about his going to school, the boy was hesitant.  Maniac had his own ideas about school.  His opinion was that he would not go to school until he had a real home of his own.  To Maniac, school was "sort of like a big home."  It was a sort of home for the students while they were there during the day, in his opinion.  However, he reasoned, it was not like a real home.  The address of the school could not be claimed as the home address of the students there.  He believed that one's address was a place "where you walk right in the front door without knocking, where everybody talks to each other and uses the same toaster."  Maniac knew that after the school bell rang, all the students would exit the building and scatter, each heading to their own home.  Maniac knew that "he was not going to have one without the other."