The Glass Cafe by Gary Paulsen Page B

probably move on to the plot, where the characters have what she calls “conflict,” and we would work through the “conflict” to some “form of resolution.”
    And I would like to do that, I really would except that I think it would leave out the most important thing which is that if we jump right to the conflict part where we try for a resolution you would miss most of my life which is really maybe the most important part because that’s the part the state just couldn’t understand and was why Al got mad and made them mad and that brought in the cops which freaked out the biker who became a one-man “armed camp” according to the
Los Angeles Times
which made a SWAT team Respond and React which destroyed a perfectly good door belonging to Juan Gomez who was only a little bit illegal involving the immigration aspect of life.
    But all that’s for later when we get to the part about conflict and plot resolution.
    For now I think I should maybe talk about my day. On school days I get up at seven o’clock and Al gets up and we have pancakes. Every school morning. Al is there every morning when I go to school and every afternoon when I come home. Sometimes in the mornings she’s a little slow waking up because she works so late. We make pancakes from a mix and I have three cakes and she has one because, as she says, her figure is important to our livelihood, with light maple syrup except they call it “Lite Surrupp” on the bottle which is just wrong, just plain wrong even if they’re trying to be cute. Then I sip a juice while she drinks a cup of coffee, black of course because of calories which she thinks of as a kind of bug that can kill you, as if calories were hiding there in food to get you and not just a measurement of heat. We talk about school and how I can improve my math grades and she gives me money for the day, bus money and lunch money, and I take the bus to school. I have small jobs I do for money but she won’t let me spend that on lunch or the bus to school because she says that’s her responsibility. It seems like a fuzzy line to me and I think I should pay my way and she says I do just by being a kid and shouldn’t have to worry about other things and I say that’s all right but I’m growing fast and going to be a man someday and should be learning about responsibility myself. She says don’t hurry it up it will come soon enough and do I want her to be a grandmother already? I stop arguing then. But I still think I’m right.
    I read somewhere that the city doesn’t have a good bus system which is why everybody drives all the time which causes all the traffic jams. But the buses are almost always on time and except for a druggie or a jerk now and then there isn’t any trouble riding them.
    School is like, you know, well, everybody has school so it isn’t necessary to get into it too much except to say that there are jocks and jerks and dweebs and geeks and cool people and not cool people and some good teachers and some not so good and the principal is a retired army colonel named Armstrong who at first thought he was still in the army and wanted people to call him Colonel Armstrong, but mellowed out when one morning all the kids stood in formation in the halls and slow-marched one . . . step . . . at . . . a . . . time all in perfect formation from first- to second-period class.
    I guess we’re about like all middle schools except we have a drama teacher named Miles who gets so intense sometimes he practically faints when he reads Shakespeare and we have to dab his face with damp paper towels and pretend to help him to his desk so he can recover. Miles works really hard and does a lot of small parts on television. Waylon says he sees him all the time in commercials and used car ads and he doesn’t need to teach, but he really likes kids. He comes once a week to teach drama in case anybody wants to be an