Tell Me a Secret Read Online Free PDF

windows, paint-splattered sinks, drawers of possibilities, all of it seemed to sigh that yes, I belonged here. I found a seat by the window, nodding at familiar faces.
    Our teacher, Mrs. Crooker, had a legendary personality at Elna Mead. There were the fat years and the lean years. In the fat years, she was in an excellent mood, letting us do whatever we wanted and usually working on some wild, colorful thing herself. In the lean years, she subsisted on diet sodas and 800 calories a day and morphed into a grouchy tyrant. In the lean years, she had patience as long as an oil pastel and gaveassignments involving rigid architectural perspective and golden means. No cubism or impressionism in the lean years. My labyrinths barely slid under the radar as a loving tribute to Escher and da Vinci.
    Thankfully, this was a fat year. She was already munching cheerfully on a package of molasses cookies.
    Our first assignment was to create a double-sided collage of ourselves—one side our external selves, the other our secret, inner lives. “I want you to reach deep and come up with something fresh. It doesn’t have to be good. I want it to be true. Have fun with it.”
    “No labyrinths this year,” Mrs. Crooker said as she swept past me in a tiered cotton skirt. “I picked this assignment especially for you.”
    She proceeded to dump a shoebox full of magazine clippings, photocopies, engravings, fabric swatches, and handmade paper onto a table in the center of the room. “Have at it.”
    Students got up tentatively at first, then faster as they realized their true selves might be lurking somewhere in that pile of scraps. I held back, waiting, until a tiny black-and-white engraving of a medieval pregnant woman fluttered to the floor—the cap binding her hair in strange contrast to the way she gently held her belly.
    There was no way I would be taking that piece.
    Instead, I grabbed my stuff and dashed to the front desk.
    “Somewhere to go?” The last of the molasses cookie poppedinto Mrs. Crooker’s mouth while she thumbed through her sketchbook, and I suddenly realized I was starving. Again.
    “I’m not feeling so good. Could I get a hall pass?”
    Her eyes never strayed from the book as she handed me a pass. “I want you to do this assignment at some point, Rand. You’re not going to get away from faces this year.”
    I shrugged and made tracks for the nearest bathroom.
    My hands trembled as I opened the package, so much that I almost dropped it onto the tiny beige floor tiles. I stripped the foil down to just the white plastic stick.
    Place the absorbent tip in your urine stream for five seconds only, commanded the instructions. One. Two. Three. Four. Five .
    After two perilous minutes, I peered at the little window. One pinkish-purple line was strong. I looked closer for a second line—so faint it seemed to shadow the first. I read the directions again, to be sure. Lines may not be the same strength of color , it taunted. Over 99% accurate , proclaimed the bold letters. And as I watched, the line darkened to a grim pink. My stomach was the first to respond.

Six
    My mother couldn’t control the weather in Seattle, but she could predict it. She picked one of the last sunny Sunday afternoons to keep us in a dim, hundred-year-old church for Christmas montage tryouts. The only hope streamed in through the enormous stained-glass windows, painting shards of colored light across the pews.
    Mom wore her hair in a ponytail with a pen tucked behind her ear, looking like the hip director in a white tee and Editor pants. Everything was drawn on, from her eyebrows and plum-colored eyes to her mouth, as if a perfect exterior could mask a woman capable of spawning one hellion after another.
    Everybody showed up to read for various parts, but Momalready had her people staked out. Mrs. Hayes, the Kindly Old Woman (sorry, Mrs. Vandermar). Mr. Arthur would play the wise father. And I would be good old Brenda, the female lead. Which made