Rabble Starkey by Lois Lowry Page A

Taurus," Roger said. Everybody screamed with laughing. Dumb old Roger. That big old Taurus, he was the meanest thing. Once he bashed a dent in Roger's daddy's pickup; of course it was stupid as anything that Mr. Watkins drove the pickup right into the pasture where Taurus was laying in wait.
    Mrs. Hindler nodded politely. "Quiet, people," she said. "Roger, you weren't listening carefully. Class, what did I say?"
    Everybody called out different stuff. "Thossrus!" someone called, like a rhyme with rhinoceros. "Thorrus!" "Trocerus!" "Triceratops!" someone yelled, and we all laughed, because we remembered triceratops from third grade when we all studied dinosaurs.
    She wrote it on the board in her neat printing. "Thesaurus." She pronounced it slowly and we all said it after her.
    Then she explained how it worked. I was some startled that I never knew about a thesaurus before, because I've always been interested in words. I was only nine the year that I told Sweet-Ho the only thing I wanted for Christmas was a dictionary, and I wasn't showing off, either. She gave me a good one and I keep it right there on the table beside my bed, and consult it from time to time, or sometimes just read through it a bit for extra knowledge.
    But I have to confess that a thesaurus beats a dictionary, and now I know for sure that I want one of my own, to keep. Mrs. Hindler passed them out to the
class, but just old cheap paperback ones, and we would have to give them back after we got finished with learning about them.
    Then, holding hers up with her pointy fingernails, she showed us how we could choose a word—almost any word—and look it up, and find all the other words we could use in its place.
    "Who would like to choose a word?" she asked, and lots of hands shot up, including mine and Veronica's. Mrs. Hindler called on Corrine Foster.
    "Love," Corrine said, and everybody laughed. Corrine blushed. She blushes real easy.
    Mrs. Hindler told us all to turn to the index in the back and look up "love".
    Right away I could see that it was an amazing thing, because I could see that there are all kinds of love.
    Desire.
    Courtesy.
    Affection.
    Those were just some.
    "Let's look at 'affection', class," Mrs. Hindler said. And she showed us how to find the number, and turn there in the thesaurus.
    Well, that was even more amazing. There was a
whole page.
You could hear everybody in the class murmuring out loud, reading all the words.
    Not me. I read them to myself, feeling something like a shiver up my back at all the affection on that page.
    Fondness. Tenderness. Regard. Admiration. Devotion. Infatuation. Rapture. And those were only a few.
    Brotherly love. Maternal love. All different kinds.
    I felt a real true fondness and devotion to Mrs. Hindler for showing me this.
    We did a couple more words—though none was as exciting as love and affection—and then she gave us an assignment for homework. She handed back the compositions that we wrote last week. She had given us a choice for that assignment, and it had been a hard choice, at least for me. "My Ambition." Or "My Home."
    Veronica had chosen "My Ambition" and had written her two pages about ballet dancing. She had confided to me that she wasn't real entirely sure that ballet dancing was her ambition, even though she went to Miss Charisse Balfour's classes every Thursday after school for four years, and had done a solo called "Sleeping Beauty Awakes" at the recital last spring. She didn't say so in her composition, but Veronica had told me that the toe shoes hurt and she didn't really think she wanted to spend her whole entire adult life with mashed-in toes.
    Me, I have some ambitions, but they're all private ones, not things I want to tell the whole entire sixth grade. I was tempted to make one up, like "Female Spy" or maybe "Lady-in-waiting to the Queen of England." But I didn't want to appear foolish. So I wrote about "My Home," which was tough since my home was somewhat unusual,