Jack on the Tracks Read Online Free PDF

it to play dead?” she continued.
    “I never meant to hurt that cat,” I replied, defending myself.
    “Hey,” Betsy said, as she returned to her crossword puzzle. “What’s a four-letter word for cat killer?”
    I couldn’t think of one.
    "J-a-c-k,” she spelled out.
    “I’ll get you,” I said. “Cross my heart, I’ll get you back.”
    “Sorry to burst your bubble, feline felon,” Betsy said. “You couldn’t get me back in ten lifetimes.”
    I had an awful feeling she was right. But it was okay. Because now I had the best cat in the world. I let out a sharp whistle. “Come on, Miss Kitty the Second,” I commanded, and my dog-cat dutifully followed me up the hall to my room.



The Sixth Sense
    O n the first day of class, our fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Pierre, met each one of us at the door.
“Bonjour,”
she said enthusiastically, and shook each of our hands as we entered the classroom. “I look forward to a bea-u-ti-ful year with you.
Bonjour.
We are at the beginning of a new adventure.
Bonjour.”
It didn’t take me long to figure out she was head-over-heels in love with everything French.
    It was already hot at eight in the morning and her shiny red lipstick had begun to spread into the tiny cracks above and below her lips. It gave them a furry look, and each time she sang
“Bonjour,”
they moved like two caterpillars.
    “Bonjour,”
I said in return to her greeting. She smiled at me and this made me decide immediately that I liked her, and so I planned to sit as close to her desk as possible.
    But she didn’t allow us to choose our own seats, and instead made us gather in the front of the room. “Clap, clap,” she said as she clapped her hands to get our attention. “I’ve arranged the seating chart according to gender. I find it best when boys and girls don’t mix and distract one another. Boys are snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails and need to fight among themselves. And girls are sugar and spice and everything nice and need their own
milieu.”
    She had me confused. Did she really mean that all boys were disgusting and all girls were charming? Even my sister didn’t believe that. The last time someone gave Betsy pink-colored clothes she cut them into strips and we used them for kite tails.
    Down the middle of the room Mrs. Pierre had positioned tall bookshelves filled with books. I guessed that the boys’ and girls’ sides wouldn’t be able to see each other except through the peeking spaces between the top of the books on one shelf and the bottom of the next shelf.
    She began to assign all the girls to desks on the right side of the room and all the boys to the left. I ended up in a seat close to the back and next to the bookshelves. When she finished, she stood on an X-mark I had seen taped to the floor. The X was directly in line with the end of the bookshelves and just in front of the blackboard. In that one perfect spot all the boys could clearly see her, and so could all the girls. When she stood on the X and looked at the entire class her left eye was pulled way over toward the girls and her right eye was pulled way over toward the boys. It gave her the look of a hammerhead shark. Suddenly the red lipstick looked like the blood of her victims and I began to change my mind about liking her. I put her on “wait and see” status, which is what my mom does with people who she isn’t sure of right away.
    While I was thinking about the mysterious differences between boys and girls, Mrs. Pierre turned her back toward us and faced the blackboard. Above the alphabet letters on top of the board she had mounted a rearview mirror from a car so she could keep her eyes on us even as she wrote, and when she did write it was amazing. She put a piece of chalk in each hand and stretched them out as far as she could. Then she started writing with both hands at the same time. Her left hand wrote normally from the beginning of the sentence to the right. Her right hand was incredible. She