A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries Read Online Free PDF

I waited for the light. The water had a current in it and was ice-cold and I wiggled my toes inside the blue loafers. I sneezed three times, a good sign.
    Madame Beauvier, the directrice , had called me down to her office in the middle of class. In the middle of class! The teacher and all of my classmates had turned in silence and stared at me as I left the room. I felt all their eyes on my back as I went through the door; it sent a shiver up my spine.
    I knew exactly why I was being sent down to Madame Beauvier and fear forced me to grip the banister as I descended the wide, vinyl-covered stairs. They would probably expel me for what I’d done. There was no feeling left in my knees. I had never been in trouble before and had always gotten on perfectly politely with Madame Beauvier. But Madame Beauvier’s anger terrified everybody because it was so calm and expressed itself in such odd ways. Once, I’d seen her take an enormous pair of scissors out of her pocket and snip off a loudmouth’s bangs, right in the middle of the crowded hallway. “I told you last week, Antoine, to get a haircut,” Madame Beauvier said. She had not raised her high voice or even frowned.
    Madame Beauvier was waiting for me behind her tall desk. She was a short woman with small, hunched shoulders and a tight, pale face. She had the longest and most beautiful bright red nails I had ever seen. They were so long she used the eraser end of a pencil to dial the phone.
    “ Bonjour, Mademoiselle Charlotte-Anne !” she said energetically in a voice that sounded like a violin off key, as though she were thrilled to see me, who stood paralyzed two feet from the desk.
    Oh boy, I thought, this is it. No one called me by my full name anymore: Charlotte-Anne, I’d learned on my first day of kindergarten, sounded in French almost exactly like “charlatan.” It was a word I’d never heard before that day, but it suddenly appeared everywhere—in poems, songs; and even teachers could not resist making a little joke about it.
    I asked them to write Channe, my nickname at home, on everything, even my report cards. At first they’d refused, claiming that it was improper and against the rules, but my father backed me up. He called Madame Beauvier and told her that if they would not write my name the way I wanted it written, he supposed he’d just have to find me another school that would. Then he threatened to send me to their rival, the American Middle School, which he never would have done because the Middle School, in his opinion, was much too narrow-mindedly American.

    Madame Beauvier leaned forward and crossed her long, delicate fingers on the desktop.
    “Tell me, Mademoiselle Charlotte-Anne,” she said in French in a confidential tone, “how do you spell gymnastics?”
    I stared at Madame Beauvier’s hands and did not respond. The hands slid below the desktop and opened a drawer, withdrawing a little folded paper from it. They carefully unfolded the paper and spread it out flat on the desk.
    “This is your excuse from gymnastics class…” She waited a bit. “Your father is a successful American writer, is he not? Your father, it seems to me, would know how to spell gym? Yet—” she slid the paper toward me with the tips of the nails, turning it around. “Here gym is spelled J-I-M. This is your father’s signature, is it not?”
    “No,” I mumbled. “I did it, Madame. I didn’t feel well.”
    “We have an infirmary.” Her voice went terribly high then, but remained calm. “I have telephoned your father. Normally, you would be expelled for this.” She picked up one of her fresh yellow pencils and tapped its eraser against the desktop. I thought, I’m going to have to run away from home.
    “Considering you have never been in trouble with us before, and that you are not a terrible student and have been with us since the jardin d’enfants —four years, isn’t it? We have decided to give you a chance. We have left it up to your