Kick Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

before it arrives. It doesn’t just appear. You’ve got at least a few solid moments of nausea and tingling in the back of your throat that lets you know you have time to push a brand-new three-inch-long Hot Wheels fire truck that doesn’t belong to you out of the goddamn way. And didn’t the kid even know he was sick? He must have at least felt queasy when he was talking to me. A person just can’t feel great one minute and the lose the entire contents of his stomach the next. I guess he’d had a bad bird for breakfast.
    Chris started crying. Miss Drulk came over and pulled him away from his desk. The massive amount of vomit was starting to migrate down his desktop and spill over the edge onto his seat. It was truly disgusting, but the worst part of it was seeing that faint outline of a fire truck–shaped lump underneath it all. Miss Drulk hustled Chris off to the bathroom. I heard him crying all the way down the hall and even heard his sobs echoing out of the boys’ room. Mr. Carowski, our mysterious janitor, a mountain of a man from some unknown country who spoke to us in an unintelligible mixture of garbled English and rumbling bass tones, came in with the famous red sawdust and dumped it on top of Chris Davis’s desk. All my classmates were over at the window trying to get some fresh air, since the room was now filled with the unmistakable odor of stomach stew. Mr. Carowski then took a hand broom, swept the whole vomity mess into a bucket, and sprayed the desk with disinfectant. The disinfectant smelled even sweeter than the red sawdust, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Mr. Carowski took his bucket, mumbled a few indecipherable words that I think were supposed to convey the warning “Don’t touch his desk until it dries,” and departed. I looked down at where my fire truck had once sat. Nothing was left but the memory.
    I never asked Mr. Carowski about my fire truck, and I never saw it again.
    And I never got over my anger at Chris Davis. Especially when I found out that he lived in a house twice as big and way nicer than mine.

I AM BETRAYED BY A GIRL
    C hildhood is built on bad decision making. In fact, if it weren’t for all the bad decisions we were constantly carrying out as kids, there’s a good chance that none of us would have figured out all the things we weren’t going to do when we became adults.
    A few of the more obvious lessons I learned as a kid were:
    * Don’t ride a bike with no brakes down a very steep street that dead-ends into a feculent, stagnant river.
    * Don’t hold a lit firecracker in your hand to see if it’ll hurt when it explodes.
    * Don’t save your urine in a flowerpot for more than a week in a hot garage if you don’t want your parents to find it.
    All obvious conclusions. All painfully learned.
    The good thing about those epiphanies was that they stuck with me. Once I’d done them and realized how stupid I’d been to do them in the first place, I never did them again.
    Unfortunately, this was not the case with all of my bad decision making. Because there was one area where I just kept making the same mistakes over and over again:
    Girls.
    I know that most people have ill-fated stories concerning their interactions with the opposite sex. But they usually don’t begin to appear until their junior-high or high-school years. For me, my stupidity with girls started as soon as I walked out of my preschool.
    As a kid, I was somewhere around the mean average when it came to emotional maturity and intellect. I wasn’t the dopiest kid in the class but I wasn’t the most advanced, either. The kids who you could tell were going to “go places” were already starting to show the beginnings of leadership qualities even at an early age. While it didn’t manifest itself in anything as overt as some future class president’s jumping up on his third-grade desk and leading us in a revolt against our teacher’s unfair demand that we hang up our coats or organizing a