Major Crush Read Online Free PDF Page A

for me on a pad printed with a cartoon uterus and the slogan of a menopause drug: “Just like the estrogen she used to make!”
    It meant that boys asked me if they could be my father’s apprentice.
    It meant that dinner table conversation every night was about the fourteen-year-old girls who had come to the hospital that day to have their second babies, and the evils of teen pregnancy. Sometimes I wished my dad worked at the cotton mill like everybody else.
    Finally I turned to Drew and said, “It’s irresponsible of you to start a rumor like that.”
    Score one for me. I was right on target with his responsibility fetish. He looked like I’d slapped him. Then he recovered enough to say—to Mr. Rush, not me—“It’s not a rumor. She did—”
    “Of course I didn’t,” I interrupted him calmly. “Mr. O’Toole is eighty years old.”
    “He’s more like forty-five,” Drew corrected me, as if this were going to sway the jury.
    Sitting down at his desk, Mr. Rush held up one hand for silence. “I don’t know what you’ve been up to,” he said to me. He turned to Drew.
    “But I know you’re acting like a jackass. If the rumor isn’t true, you’re irresponsible for spreading it. A nd if it is true, what do you think you’re doing? Tattling on her for having sex with a teacher?” He looked through some papers.
    I felt redeemed. A nd then, the more I thought about it, not.
    Drew took a deep breath. “Excuse me, but did you say—”
    “Jackass,” Mr. Rush repeated without looking up. “Let’s start again. What happened to O’Toole?”
    “He quit,” I said. “He’d been waiting for a position as a mail carrier for three years, and it finally came through last week.”
    “See,” Drew said, pointing at me. “How does she know that?”
    “Because I asked him,” I said.
    Mr. Rush made a show of stacking his papers, turning them and stacking them on another side, and placing them just so on his desk. “Let me tell you what I know. I’m living in a town that’s so small and remote, it doesn’t have a McDonald’s. I’ve taken a job that’s so bad, the guy before me was dying to break out and start his stellar career as a mailman.”
    His calm voice rose. “I have seventh graders for breakfast, eighth graders for brunch. For lunch, I have a class of a hundred and fifty teenagers and no assistant. A nd the two people I was counting on to help me are petty and immature”—he was looking at me; he turned to Drew—“and irresponsible!” He held up his hands on either side of his head and wiggled his fingers, like he knew irresponsibility was a scary monster for Drew.
    Now he rubbed his temple like he did while talking to me Friday night, as if we were giving him a headache. “Kids, I’m going to have to insist that you cut the crap and help me out. I can’t do this job by myself. I may have had a little argument with the football coach at the faculty meeting on Friday.”
    “Wasn’t that your first day?” Drew asked.
    Mr. Rush winced. “Okay, but that guy is an ass. He may have told me that the band needs to stop trampling ‘his’ football field”—he moved his fingers in quotation marks—“because it’s turning the grass brown. I may have told him where to go. I found out after the meeting that the football coach is quite close with the principal.
    “My contract runs out next summer. I need some leverage when it comes time to renew, or it’s back to Pizza Hut for me. A nd tempting as that sounds right now, I have student loans to pay off.” He shuffled through papers again and looked at some notes. “The two of you got the most votes in this drum major election, but there was a third candidate, right?”
    “Clayton Porridge,” Drew and I said together.
    “Great. The two of you start getting along. You’re dividing the band like East Coast-West Coast, Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. Clean up your act. Make nice with each other. Make sure the band gets high marks at the contest