My Miserable Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

in class.”
    Serena Perl looked back at me and flashed her little fangs with a worried look in her eyes before she disappeared into the fog that had crept up like a ghost.
    I ran into the bathroom and looked at myself. My eyes showed through the mask. The eyeliner Angelina had applied to make me look scarier was streaked from my tears. And Serena Perl had seen.
    *   *   *
    My mom tried to talk to me while I lay in bed with the sheet over my face.
    â€œAre you a ghost?” she said.
    I didn’t answer.
    â€œShould we cut out some eyes so you can be a ghost?”
    I threw the sheet off. “I told you I’m not five years old anymore, Mom.”
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re too old to believe in the Halloween Fairy. That’s why I dressed up as her, because it’s part of the joke. And I’m sorry I gave out apples, too. I promise I won’t do that again.”
    I didn’t say anything back to her.
    â€œBut I still don’t want you to eat too much candy.”
    Now I really wasn’t going to speak.
    In the morning there was a piece of paper under my pillow. Guess what it was? A gift certificate to the Lurning Bush school-supply store. There were a few pigeon feathers scattered on the sheet beside it.

 
    NOVEMBER

    MY MISSION STATEMENT
    by Ben Hunter
    Did you know that early Californians lived in mud huts and that missions were their first real buildings? Missions are interesting to me for several reasons.
    Since building my own mission, I’ve learned how difficult they must have been to build. My mom took me to the Lurning Bush, and we bought Popsicle sticks and sticky white clay. The clay kept sticking to my fingers and not the Popsicle sticks. I wonder if the people who built the missions had this much trouble.
    Another reason missions are interesting is that the people who built them wanted to be self-sufficient. They had to produce crops and maintain livestock and develop their own water systems.
    For me, being self-sufficient is serving myself cold cereal and milk when my mom has an early-morning meeting and can’t force me to eat oatmeal. So I think self-sufficiency is good. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to run away and be entirely self-sufficient. I would eat candy on weekdays, run through sprinklers in the morning instead of taking showers, and hang out with stray cats if I needed company. But I guess I would miss my mom and my sister and especially my dog, even though he gets demon eyes.
    A third reason missions are interesting is that they were built close enough together so people could use them as rest stops on long trips. My family and I went on a long camping trip two summers ago, and we had to stop at rest stops. When you have one mom, two kids, and a dog, someone has to pee pretty often. Bathrooms at rest stops usually smell bad. My sister complained that there weren’t any mirrors for her to look at herself or hot water to wash with or paper towels to dry her hands. My sister would not have done very well in mission days.

 
    CHAPTER 6
    AN IMPOSSIBLE MISSION
    After I turned in my report, I learned more about missions. I learned from Ms. Washington that the Native Americans didn’t just learn how to build big fancy whitewashed adobe buildings with tiled roofs overnight. They were conquered by the Spanish, who then tried to convert them to Christianity and made them work really hard at the missions.
    My mission didn’t come out very well, but I was still proud of it, since I made it without a kit. Angelina had told me that when she was in fifth grade, her class had to make missions and every-one except her used a kit. She got the best grade because hers was handmade.
    When I arrived at school, I saw a playhouse-sized building standing in the middle of the class-room. It had a red roof, real glass windows, and a bell tower.
    Rocko Hoggen stood at the entrance, ushering people inside.