The Redemption Read Online Free PDF Page B

in America if people like Mr. Santorini didn’t fight for us. I listen carefully to everything she says. I like the sound of her soft voice. She smells good, too. I especially like her neck. She wears a little gold cross around it and I can’t stop looking at it—her neck, not the cross. But I pretend I’m looking at the cross just in case I’m not supposed to look at her neck so much.
    On the fourth day, Miss Westbrook sits me down at one of the desks even before I get started with my work. “I have a little present for you,” she says. She puts a gigantic cookie on the desk in front of me. “I baked it for you last night.”
    It’s a huge chocolate chip cookie with M&Ms in it—the biggest cookie I’ve ever seen—and the M&Ms are in the shape of a heart.
    For some reason, I feel my bottom lip shaking when I look at that M&M heart.
    Miss Westbrook doesn’t talk for a really long time. “Go ahead, Jonas,” she finally says. “Try it.”
    I take a tiny bite. It’s the best cookie I’ve ever had.
    “Jonas,” she says softly. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine. But sometimes I get kind of lonely in the classroom and I’d love a little conversation. Do you think maybe you could talk to me? You wouldn’t have to talk outside this classroom if you didn’t want to—and you wouldn’t have to talk when the other kids are here. But when it’s just the two of us here after school, maybe this could be our little cocoon—a cocoon built for two—a magical place where you’re allowed to talk, just to me.”
    We’ve been learning about how caterpillars turn into butterflies for the last month—we’ve even got a whole bunch of chrysalises hanging in a big box and we’re waiting for them to hatch any day now. We’ve been learning that a caterpillar has a special kind of magic inside him right from the beginning, but he has to go inside a cocoon for his magic to work.
     Maybe talking to Miss Westbrook in our little cocoon-built-for-two could be another exception to the rule? Like how speaking to Mariela in Spanish didn’t break the rule, either? Maybe, even if I talk to Miss Westbrook inside our magical cocoon, my last official words in the real world would still be “I love you, Mommy.”
    “Can I still call you Miss Westbrook after you get married?” I ask. They’re the first words I’ve spoken since way before I turned eight—since the day Mommy went away all that time ago. I forgot how my voice sounds. I don’t even sound like me anymore.
    Miss Westbrook’s face looks really surprised. She clears her throat. “Of course, you can, Jonas. I’d love that.”
    For the next week, I chat up a storm with my pretty Miss Westbrook every single day. I tell her about how much I hate seeing Dr. Silverman, except for the fact that he plays music that sometimes makes me feel better. I tell her about how Josh sometimes slaps his own face when I’m feeling sad, just to make me laugh, and that it always works. I tell her about a book on Greek mythology I just read and about how the Greek gods and goddesses are called the Twelve Olympians and they live on Mount Olympus. And, finally, on the tenth day of me being Miss Westbrook’s special helper, I tell her about how I’m going to climb the highest mountain in the whole world one day.
    “Really?” she asks. “That’s exciting.”
    “Yeah, Mount Everest,” I say, standing on a stool so I can reach the farthest corner of the whiteboard. “Because that’s the highest one. I’m going to climb to the tippy-top of it and reach my hands up in the air and touch my mommy in the clouds. And she’s going to reach down and pull me up and up and up, and then we’ll lie down together on one of the puffy clouds like it’s a hammock and I’ll rub her temples and take all her pain away like I always used to do.”
    Miss Westbrook has been sitting at her desk while I’ve been erasing the whiteboard and talking nonstop, and when I look over at her, she’s