The Story of Owen Read Online Free PDF

experiments if you will, to see what you will do, what you can think of when you’re in a tight spot. Although I must admit that I hadn’t expected anyone to light themselves on fire the first week.”
    â€œYou mean we get to do this again?” Alex said, excited.
    â€œIt is called Offense/Defense Friday,” Mr. Huffman said. “I imagine there will be a Friday at the end of most weeks.”
    There was generalized laughter at that, and we moved the desks back into place.
    â€œI’m sorry I took your seat,” Sadie said to me, her voice low enough that no one else could hear her over the scraping of the desks against the linoleum floor. There was something about her tone that made me doubt her sincerity.
    â€œI think it turned out okay,” I told her, and smiled. She smiled back as the bell rang.
    It wasn’t until halfway through lunchtime, in the middle of a particularly intricate section of music, that I realized the cafeteria was probably abuzz with stories about the girl who lit herself on fire to save Owen Thorskard.

FIREPROOFING AND PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
    Everything in Trondheim is fireproof, or at least as close to being fireproof as it can possibly be. Special care is, of course, taken around buildings like the hospital, the schools, and the hockey arena. Never let it be said that here in Canada we do not have our priorities in order. Most of the houses are made of brick with glass windowpanes fitted tightly against the frames for maximum heat retention. Stone houses with heavy slate roof slabs or stainless steel panels instead of shingles are becoming more common, but the expense is more than average people can afford. Most families in Trondheim just cover the chimney, block the fireplace, install gas heating, and hope for the best.
    Saltrock Collegiate Institute had been an older school than Trondheim SS, with grounds that backed onto the bluffs along the shore of Lake Huron. It wasn’t less safe than Trondheim Secondary was, but given the choice between a school that looked like something out of a Viking dare and a school thatlooked like a fortress, even the most loyal Saltrock alumni had admitted that if we were going to amalgamate, it was better to do so in Trondheim. It was worth pointing out that Trondheim was much more central, and therefore busing students to it would be cheaper, but both of those factors were mere footnotes in the final recommendation made by the Board of Education.
    The high school in Trondheim had been built three times, not because parts of it had been burned, but because as more and more people moved to the area, the school required more physical space. The oldest part of the school was the most heavily fortified, three stories built of red brick, with the entrance-way flanked by two guard towers. It had narrow windows and thick walls, and it housed the more flammable aspects of the high school environment, like the library and the art room. The second phase of building added the quad, four long hallways around a central courtyard that was mostly used to demonstrate to grade nine students how
not
to act during a dragon attack. These hallways were mainly for big classrooms: music, drama, and the various shop classes, along with the cafeteria and the administrative offices. The final phase of building had resulted in a second, slightly smaller, gymnasium that was mostly used for badminton and volleyball, as it tended to echo a lot, making basketball or floor hockey something of an exercise in auditory torture.
    The population surge that had resulted in the building of all these extra hallways had more or less waned by the time I started grade nine, and that’s when the whispers of amalgamation first started. Two years later, we were all one big happy family, and the Board of Education had moved into the old Saltrock CI building, where they could be attacked bydragons on a weekly basis, for reasons that were still unclear. The consensus,