Molly McGinty Has a Really Good Day Read Online Free PDF

will never
stop
happening to her.” She paused, looking miserable. “I just want things to be quiet and normal and organized. Do you remember when she insisted that we eat organic vegetarian food, when we were being friends of the environment? And then she didn't have time to get to the health-food store? All we had to eat for a week was free-range soy or whatever that lumpy white stuff was, and the squash your mother sent over from her garden.”
    “I'd never eaten soy enchiladas before, much less squash pâté, and those soy-squash sloppy joes were wild,” Mary Margaret said. “But that's what makes her so neat. My great-uncle Charlie says Mrs. Flynn has moxie.”
    “I don't even know what moxie is.”
    “A plucky attitude, a good sense of humor and a great ra— Well, never mind, that's just what Great-uncle Charlie says.”
    “And that's all well and good, but everything about Irene is always so … disorganized. I hate that, Mary Margaret. I really do. Irene is so dramatic and unpredictable.”
    At that very instant, the other Marys burst into the library and in one voice screeched, “Molly, your grandmother just got busted for smoking in the girls’ bathroom!”

“Lamb, what happened to you?” Irene looked up from the bench outside the principal's office to see Molly standing in the doorway, seething and dripping ink on the floor.
    “Michael Parady was so excited to hear that you'd gotten in trouble that he accidentally dumped a bottle of ink on me. I warned him about that silly fountain pen, but oh, no, he
had
to bring it to the library.”
    “He's a sweet boy. But why are you here? Don't you have class?”
    “Irene.” Molly looked around. The Trouble Bench, as it was popularly known, was actually two benches full of students waiting to be talked to by Monsignor Murphy, and Irene was sitting contentedly, surrounded by what Molly had always regarded as the dregs of the entire school. “The Marys told me—actually, they told the entire library and most of the third floor—that you had been sent to the principal's office for smoking. What were you thinking?”
    “The kindergarteners had snack time, and since I don't like graham crackers, I wandered over to the teachers’ lounge. But I got very bored there— everyone was so quiet and the coffee was terrible. So then I went for a walk and ran into Carly here.” Irene draped a chummy arm around the girl sitting next to her, who glared sullenly at Molly.
    “She was on her way to the ladies’ room,” Irene continued, “so I thought I'd go with her and powder my nose. Erica and Chloe”—she nodded toward two terrifying-looking girls who were picking black polish off their fingernails—“were smoking in one of the stalls when we arrived.”
    “Fine. So why are you and, uh, Carly here if you were just powdering your nose?”
    “As much as I personally disapprove of smoking, I didn't understand why that hall monitor creature had to be so nasty to the girls. She walked in, caught them and proceeded to give them de-whatsit.”
    “Detention.”
    “Yes, detention. Well, I don't know what that is, but it sounded bad, dear. I wouldn't have been so upset had I not, with my very eyes, seen that—what did you call her, Erica? hall Nazi?—smoking in the teachers’ lounge just moments before. It was the hypocrisy more than the punishment against which I had to take a stand.”
    “Yeah. Freaking authority figures think they can boss us around,” Chloe snarled. Erica raised a clenched fist in a gesture of solidarity as Irene and Carly high-fived.
    “So then what happened? How did you wind up here?”
    “Mrs. Flynn was awesome.” Erica jumped to her feet. “She tried to get us off the hook, but the hall monster told her to mind her own business.”
    “Yeah, and then the hall witch grabbed our arms and started to pull us into the hall with her,” Chloe added.
    “Then Mrs. Flynn told the hall hag to remove her hands from them,” Carly explained,