Jack Templar Monster Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page A

of burning rubber.
    And she wasn’t a stickler for the rules. Who am I kidding? She thought all rules were ridiculous. As long as Ms. Hester liked you and no one else was looking, we all knew that a tardy slip sent to the office was just as likely to end up in the trash can as it was to get put into our record. You could chew gum around her. Run in the hallways. Throw food in the lunchroom. Anything you wanted.
    With Ms. Hester, there was always a little rebellion just under the surface. Even in school assemblies where the teachers got on their soap boxes about the importance of wearing helmets, or eating right, or respecting school property, we would catch her rolling her eyes as if she thought the whole thing was stupid. Kind of like we did.
    The only hot-button issue she had was if boys were rude to girls. If she saw that kind of behavior, all bets were off. She’d haul you into the office as if you had just tried to set fire to the place. I heard about one boy who was calling a girl names until she cried. Suddenly, he started to get detention slips from the front office for being late. Only, he wasn’t ever late. When he complained, the detention slips came twice as fast. Each and every week for two months, he had detention. It was only after he apologized to the girl that the detention slips stopped.
    “Hey Jack,” Ms. Hester said when I walked in. “Heard about what happened.” She lowered her voice and winked at me. “Wish I could have been there to see it.”
    I smiled, but not for long. From the back office came the shrill voice of the principal, Mrs. Fitcher.
    “Is that the Smith boy? Send him in. Now.”
    I’m sure everyone feels like the principal at their school is the scariest, most intense person they’ve ever met. I can pretty much guarantee that none of them even comes close to Mrs. Fitcher.
    An ancient woman, Mrs. Fitcher was one of the most wrinkly people I’d ever seen. She reminded me of one of those squishy-faced dogs with too much skin for the tininess of their little faces, so the skin just kind of rolls up on itself. She was skinny, so skinny that it was easy to make the mistake of thinking that she was frail. In fact, Ms. Fitcher was not only strong, she was weirdly strong. We once saw her drag Mr. Deek across campus by his ear for some wrong that he had committed.
    But the scariest thing about Ms. Fitcher was her eyes. Those cold, steel-grey eyes that didn’t seem to really look at you, so much as cut into your body and suck out your soul.
    OK, so maybe that’s a little much. Still, she was pretty creepy.
    “What’s this I hear about a fight, Mr. Smith?” Mrs. Fitcher asked.
    I was sitting in a wooden chair in front of the principal’s desk. She leaned forward, her elbows on the table, giving me the full staring treatment with those eyes.
    “Uh, yeah,” I mumbled. “Just a little misunderstanding.”
    “This is quite a serious issue, young man. I expect that you will—“
    Mrs. Fitcher lost her train of thought, looked behind me and gave a short wave. I turned and saw Dirk Riggle walk past with his mother, still holding a bloody napkin to his nose. He must have seen me out of the corner of his eye, because he turned his head just enough so that he looked in my direction.
    I just couldn’t help myself. I broke out into a huge smile and wiggled my nose at him. Dirk quickly turned away and let his mother walk him out of the building.
    I turned back and saw the most remarkable thing. Mrs. Fitcher’s overly wrinkly face was pulled back in what could only be described as a smile. It was fleeting, gone the second I turned around, but I saw it. For the first time since I had gotten the call to the principal’s office, I thought things might actually work out OK.
    “You have left me no choice but to issue you a one-day suspension.”
    My heart sank. Aunt Sophie would be beside herself when she found out. And it meant that I would be suspended from school on my birthday. I wasn’t