Invaders From Mars Read Online Free PDF

does not cheat. I studied and I think I did very well. I might have missed a couple questions, but overall, it was a success.”
    Pulling the orange apart, David took a bite of a juicy wedge and chewed hungrily. “I still can’t figure out why—”
    “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
    He swallowed and wiped his mouth. “I still can’t figure out why you go to school when you don’t have to anymore.”
    “To learn. I wanted to learn how to keep our books better, so I took a home-economics course. If I wanted to learn how to cook French food, I’d take a French-cooking course. At your age, kids go to school because they have to, so they can learn the things they’ll need to know when they grow up. Adults go to school to improve upon what they already know. Sort of like reading a book to learn something, only you’re getting it from a teacher.”
    “Then you don’t have to go to school—I’ve got lots of books you can read.”
    “I said improve, not derange,” she said and laughed. “How was your day?”
    “Mrs. McKeltch chewed my—I mean, she kept me after class again. ’Cause I was late.”
    “She did, huh? Well, then we’ll just have to try a little harder to get you to class on time.”
    “She’d do it anyway. She doesn’t like me.”
    Mom turned to him and leaned on the dishwasher. “Why do you say that?”
    “Well . . . sometimes it seems like she enjoys it when I do something she can rag me about. She’s just . . .” He thought a moment, then shrugged. “. . . mean, I guess. She likes to get kids in trouble I think.”
    “That’s not the right attitude for a teacher to have,” Mom said, closing the dishwasher and adjusting the dial.
    “She says you’re on her side.”
    “Oh, she does, huh?” Mom came over and took a wedge from his orange, popping it into her mouth. “Well, maybe I’ll have to talk to her after school someday and tell her otherwise.”
    David laughed. “Don’t talk with your mouth full, Mom,” he said.
    Mom tousled his hair as she chewed the orange. “Smartass.”
    Before David could get out of the house, his mom told him that if he had any homework, he should get to it early so he could watch the meteor shower that night. He went upstairs and cleaned up the spilled rocks and pennies, then worked for a while on a history book report. When he was finished, he changed his clothes and got his battery-operated Godzilla from a shelf. Gathering up his toy cars and the little skyscrapers he’d made from cardboard and egg cartons, he went down to the sand pit.
    Godzilla had destroyed the doomed city half a dozen times, his shadow lengthening in the dying sunlight, before David heard the distant sound of his dad’s car driving up over the hill. As he lay on his stomach in the warm sand, watching the monster walk on another building with his fanged mouth opening and closing, David heard the car door slam. He waited several minutes before Dad’s footsteps began crunching and scuffing over the hill.
    “Hey, Champ!” Dad called, appearing on the trail. He stopped at the drop-off, hands in pockets.
    “What’s doin’?” he asked with a grin.
    “I’m trashing Tokyo.”
    “A dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it. Have a good day?”
    “Yeah, it was okay. Mr. Bob swerved the bus all over the place coming home.”
    “He did? What happened?”
    “Doug shot him in the back of the neck with a little rock.”
    Dad stifled a snicker.
    David smirked, half at the memory, half at his dad’s reaction. “It made a little cut right here—” He touched the back of his neck, “—on one of those little fat rolls.”
    Although he never said anything in front of Mom (she didn’t like him to “set a bad example”), Dad had once told David he thought Bob was a slob—“Bob the slob!” they’d laughed—who looked more like a bus than a bus driver.
    Dad cleared his throat and swallowed his laughter. “That wasn’t very nice.”
    Godzilla tripped on a toy Jeep and