Kick Me Read Online Free PDF

was mine. I’d been waiting all day to show this baby off. “No. My mother just bought it for me.”
    “Aw, c’mon. I don’t have anything to show. My family can’t buy me anything. We’re poor.”
    For a kid who was poor, he sure said it a lot. I’d always heard that poor people were proud, but the only thing Chris was proud of was telling you how poor he was. He was always talking about how his family lived in a shack, how they didn’t have any clothes, and how they had to eat birds in order to keep from starving. I never knew if I believed him or not. I couldn’t imagine anyone’s family sitting around naked eating robins and sparrows. But my mother had always drilled into my head that I had to be nice to people who were less fortunate than we were because we, too, might be poor someday. Did she know something I didn’t? I would wonder. Were we on the verge of bankruptcy? Because I was terrified of the thought of having to walk around in front of my parents naked.
    I stared at Chris for a few seconds, deliberating. He stared back at me with a pathetic look on his face. I stared at his hands. They were filthy. His clothes had food stains down the front. His hair was dirty and looked like it hadn’t been combed in days. I wasn’t sure if this meant that he was poor or if it was simply proof that the guy was a slob. However, my Sunday school teacher’s voice rang out in my head: “Do unto others as . . .” Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. I get it. Stupid Bible.
    “Well . . . okay. Here. But be
careful
with it.”
    Fortunately, I had brought along one of my less cool Hot Wheels cars and I figured I could show it instead. I don’t know why I didn’t give Chris the less cool car, but I didn’t. I guess I wasn’t good at thinking on my feet when I was seven.
    Miss Drulk came back into the room. I had a huge crush on Miss Drulk. She was beautiful. She always wore short dresses and her hair was done up in that 1960s straight-down-to-the-shoulders-then-flipped-up-at-the-ends style that I thought was just the most feminine thing imaginable back then. Simply put, she had blond
That Girl
hair. And she was always extra nice to me, too. Miss Drulk knew that the other kids picked on me and she always seemed to be coming to my defense. Once, when some third graders made a dog pile on top of me at recess, Miss Drulk came running over and made everyone get off. I was crying, as usual, and so she took me into the teacher’s lounge and gave me carrot sticks out of her lunch. I really fell in love with her that day. Even now, when I eat carrot sticks, I occasionally think about Miss Drulk. Her or Carl Slanowski, who used to secretly shove carrot sticks up his nose, then give them out to teachers.
    Anyway, Miss Drulk came into the room and announced that it was time for show-and tell. When she said it I felt a twinge of excitement. But then I quickly remembered that it was going to be the poverty-stricken Chris Davis, and not myself who would be showing off the brand-new Hot Wheels fire truck. I immediately felt mad at the guy for guilting me out of my first moment ever of potential coolness.
    And then suddenly, out of nowhere, I heard it.
    SPLAT.
    Oh, no, I thought. It couldn’t be.
    I turned around to see Chris Davis sitting behind his desk, which was now covered with throw-up. COVERED. For a poor kid, he sure had a lot in his stomach. And what was buried under the lake of vomit?
    My fire truck.
    Chris had barf running down his chin and was about to start crying. Kids always cried after they threw up. Probably because throwing up was so disgusting, there was nothing else to do
but
cry. And if you cried, the odds were you didn’t have to clean it up yourself. But when I saw Chris about to start bawling, I just wanted to slug him. I mean, if anyone had the right to cry, it was me. Couldn’t he have pushed my fire truck out of the way when he felt the vomit coming? I mean, throw-up gives you a couple seconds of warning