The Glass Cafe Read Online Free PDF

little pump motor in the fish tank in the biology lab at school, which is called a simile, and Mrs. Preston grabbed me and fumbled for a little radio in her purse and yelled the address and then screamed:
    â€œSend backup! She’s evading! She’s evading!” But I really think what she meant was that Al was resisting because in no way did Al try to evade anything or anybody but instead when she saw that Mrs. Preston was trying to pull me out of the room, she dropped the lamp and came toward us like a tiger except she didn’t growl but said another word that I’d heard the biker use. Mrs. Preston was digging in her purse again and brought out a Mace sprayer.
    For a second there was some struggling and some more bad language, surprisingly enough from Mrs. Preston this time and then Mrs. Preston leaped back and said, “I’ve got you now!” and cut loose with the Mace except that it had gotten turned around and she sprayed herself in the face.
    Mace smells pretty bad if you’re just in the room with it and what with Mrs. Preston taking a full dose in the face and now rolling around on the floor I thought it might be a good time to take Al by the arm and lead her outside for a breath of fresh air.
    Just for the record we did not evade arrest as the paper said later. When backup came it was a SWAT team and we were sitting on the front steps of the apartment and moved over nice as could be so the SWAT team could get by and I think it would all have settled down then except the biker came out of his apartment just as he saw the SWAT team come into the courtyard and he yelled something about black helicopters and ran back into his apartment and came out with a very realistic-looking but plastic toy M-16 which he aimed at the SWAT team and pulled the trigger so the toy made a popping sound and sprayed a plume of water.
    I’ve done some research since and those SWAT men are trained in RR (Rapid Response) and TR (Target Recognition). I think there were just six or seven SWAT team members but it seemed like a couple of hundred and what’s amazing is that in all the confusion only one of the policemen didn’t instantly realize it was a squirt gun and, in his defense, he only shot Mr. Gomez’s door which was next to the biker but did you know—this is an aside—that they don’t have to buy you a new door when they shoot one off your house?
    Even though the biker was fine and, to be fair, he started it, he started screaming about police brutality and how when he was a baby somebody put a chip in his butt so he could be tracked by satellite wherever he went because they always wanted to know where he was except he never said who “they” was except that they all seem to have black helicopters.
    We were sitting there by the side of the entry when they led him out, chained with his hands to his waist and down to his legs, and I was sort of thinking it was all over when Mrs. Preston came stumbling out of our apartment, rubbed the last of the Mace from her eyes, pointed at Al and me and yelled:
    â€œThere they are! It’s those two. Assault and resisting arrest. Get them!”
    Which is how I came to be arrested and ride in the back of a patrol car with handcuffs and spend the night in a green room with boogers on the wall and a ten-year-old boy named Benny who said he was trying for the world record in stolen bicycles and was over two hundred and fourteen and had only been caught sixty-four times.

CHAPTER SIX
    A ll right so now there has been some character development and a lot of conflict if you consider the cop hitting me and Mrs. Preston pulling me and freaking out Al and the SWAT team shooting Mr. Gomez’s door next to the biker but none of that explains how I might come to be the youngest person in America to own a Corvette if I can talk Al into it, which is giving something away but is done in the interest, as Ms. Providge would say, of “further plot