Jumping the Scratch by Sarah Weeks Page A

stack of books, which he placed on the corner of Miss Miller’s desk. Slips of pink paper stuck out from between the pages like little tongues marking the passages he’d chosen to read to us. I hated read aloud. Miss Miller always picked boring books,and she’d make up squeaky little voices for each character in the story, which made listening to her read unbearable. I leaned forward, putting my elbows on my knees and resting my chin on my fists, thumbs out and ready to slip over my ears the minute I needed to escape.
    â€œAnybody here ever read Old Yeller? ” Arthur asked.
    I had—twice, actually—but I didn’t raise my hand. I never did.
    Arthur opened the book to one of the paper tongues near the beginning and began to read a passage describing the boy, Travis, building a split-rail fence. It wasn’t the part I would have chosen to read. The best part of the book comes later, after Yeller fights with the mad wolf and gets rabies, but at least Arthur’s voice didn’t irritate me the way Miss Miller’s did. He read everything in a normal tone, with no squeaky character voices.
    â€œI’ve never built a fence in my life,” he said when he had finished reading and laid the book down, “but I almost feel as though I could after reading that, don’t you?”
    The next book he read from was another one of my favorites, My Side of the Mountain . It’s allabout this boy, Sam, who goes off to live in the woods on his own. The part he read was a description of how Sam scrapes the flesh off a deer hide and chews and rubs it to make it soft and pliable enough to serve as a door for the hollowed-out tree he lives in.
    Mary Lynne raised her hand right in the middle of it and waved it around so much, Arthur had no choice but to stop reading and call on her.
    â€œWouldn’t it be dangerous to chew on an animal’s skin without cooking it first?” she asked. “My mother says you can die from touching raw chicken.”
    â€œI wouldn’t worry about it,” said Arthur with a little smile. “I’ve read this book a dozen times, and Sam always comes through it just fine.”
    Finally, he read us a chapter from a book that he had written himself called Losing Perfect . It was about a kid who gets up one morning and comes downstairs to find that there’s nobody home. At first he thinks his parents are probably out taking a walk or something, but when he goes to look for them, he finds that all the other houses in the neighborhood are empty too. There are no kids riding bikes in the street, no dogs in the yards, orbirds in the trees. There’s nobody left in the world but him.
    As Arthur read to us, his soft voice wrapped itself around each word like the tissue paper we used and reused each year to wrap up the Christmas ornaments and keep them from bumping against each other in the boxes when we put them away at the end of the season. We had always made such a big deal out of Christmas in Battle Creek. It was my favorite time of year. Considering everything that had happened that year, though, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when my mother told me we weren’t going to have a tree at Wondrous Acres.
    â€œWhat have we got to celebrate?” she said.
    Maybe if I had begged her for a tree instead of just sulking about it, she might have changed her mind. We would have gone out together and picked out a nice big fat one and brought it home strapped to the roof of the car the way we always had before. She would have made hot chocolate and sugar cookies shaped like bells and holly leaves, and we would have carefully unwrapped all the ornaments and hung them one by one onthe tree. If only we’d had a tree of our own to decorate, things would have been different. I wouldn’t have needed to go to Old Gray’s office on Christmas Eve, and if I hadn’t gone there—But there was no point in going down this road