Jennifer Scales and the Messenger of Light Read Online Free PDF

would stick, I’d color my hair pale green to match these lockers and disappear. I thought freshman year was bad, but in some ways this year is terrifying!”
    The class bell rang. They hurried, falling naturally into step with each other.
    “I know what you mean. Have you seen Bob Jarkmand yet? I hear he’s bigger and uglier than ever. Get the net!”
    Jennifer giggled at her friend’s remark. Bob Jarkmand, a fellow sophomore, had been the class bully in ninth grade last year until a certain girl had laid him out in front of the guidance counselor’s office with a single punch. Now he was reportedly large enough to be a starting offensive lineman for the Winoka varsity football team.
    “In three summer months he converted what was left of his brain into more muscle,” Jennifer commented. “I saw him at the mall a couple of times over the summer. All he does is stare at me now.” She shivered. Bob was much bigger. Jennifer didn’t know many students taller than her, not even juniors or seniors. But this fellow was a tower—a big, unsightly tower (and one missing a few bricks at that). She wondered to herself why she had bothered to pick a fight with Winoka High’s hugest denizen.
    You did it for Skip , she reminded herself warmly. Because he was sticking up for you .
    “What’s that?” Susan sounded amused.
    “What’s what?”
    “That goofy smile on your face.”
    “Eh, nothing.”
    “Sure, right…”
    Well, Jennifer thought as they slipped through the classroom door together, if Bob decides to pick another fight this year, I might at least get some exercise in before he floors me.
    “Ladies. Nice of you to join us.”
    They both flinched. The classroom was incredibly quiet, and they were the only two people standing. Embarrassment clove their feet to the floor.
    Whhhrrrt.
    A slight man dressed in a sharp black shirt and neatly pressed pants rolled up to them in an electronic wheelchair. The polish on his designer shoes was exquisite. His blond hair was swept to one side and stuck there as if ordered. Beneath it, his handsome, tanned smile did not extend to his piercing black eyes.
    His voice was smooth and quick, with a hint of somewhere in eastern Europe. “When Principal Mouton offered me the position of mathematics teacher over the summer, I wasn’t aware that I would have to review curriculum like How to Read Schedules and Tell Time. My naïve hope was that we could skip such harrowing topics and dive right into, oh, say, Euclidean geometry. If you’re willing?”
    “Sorry,” they both mumbled, scampering to their seats through a sea of smirks and titters.
    “As I was saying,” Mr. Slider addressed the entire class, “My name is Edmund Slider. I will be your geometry teacher this year. Geometry has multiple practical applications. It also has some uses that may seem a bit abstract, but help us answer some big questions. Take, for example, the size of the known universe. Most of you have heard of the Big Bang Theory…”
    His chair spun to face the chalkboard, which had been lowered before the school year started so the new instructor could reach it. As he talked, he drew circles within circles, and rays that stretched from the innermost circle outward. Everything was labeled with stuff like z+1B years and such. Jennifer thought herself fairly good at mathematics, but that had been in algebra last year. Her parents had encouraged her to keep pushing herself in advanced classes, but geometry was so different from what she was used to…
    Someone tapped her shoulder. She turned. One of her classmates—a junior girl she didn’t know—was holding out a folded piece of paper, with a mixture of boredom and disdain.
    “Someone back there handed this up. I guess for you.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Eh.” Apparently, this girl wasn’t in the Jennifer Scales Fan Club that Susan was insisting existed.
    Jennifer unfolded the note and read it:
    Will you go to the Halloween dance with me ? I don’t want