Why We Took the Car Read Online Free PDF

joke, and since it had been such a success, André repeated it: “Seriously, why is this walking sleeping pill named Psycho?” And ever since then, I’ve been Mike again. And it’s even worse than before.

CHAPTER 8
    There are a lot of things I’m no good at. But if there’s one thing I can do, it’s the high jump. I mean, okay, I’m not an Olympic athlete, but I’m still pretty close to unbeatable at high jump and long jump. Even though I’m one of the shortest kids, I get as high as Olaf, the tallest kid in our class. Early in the year I set a record for our age group, and I was really proud. We were standing at the high jump bar, and the girls were all sitting around on the grass nearby, where Frau Bielcke was giving them a lecture. Frau Bielcke blathers on and the girls just sit there scratching their ankles. They don’t constantly run around the track like we have to with Mr. Wolkow.
    Wolkow is our gym teacher, and he loves to give us lectures too. Every gym teacher I’ve ever had has let the words fly. With Wolkow, Mondays are reserved for the soccer results, pretty much the same on Tuesdays, Wednesdays he talks about the Champions League, and by Friday he’s already looking forward to that weekend’s soccer matches and all the analysis surrounding them. In summer he airs his opinions on the Tour de France, but once he starts talking about doping he quickly comes back around to the much more important topic of soccer and the happy fact that there’s no doping in that sport. Because it’s of no use in soccer. That is Wolkow’s honest opinion. But nobody cares anyway because of one basic problem: Wolkow talks only while we’re running. He’s in insane shape. He must be seventy, and yet he’s always out in front of us, loping comfortably and gabbing on and on. And then he always says, “Men!” Then he’s silent for about ten meters. Then, “Dortmund.” Another ten meters. “Haven’t got a chance.” Ten more meters. “Home field advantage. Am I right or am I right?” Twenty meters. “And that old fox who coaches Bayern Munich. It’s not going to be a walk in the park.” Giddyup, giddyup. “What do you all think?” Thirty seconds of silence. Obviously nobody says anything because we’ve already run like a million loops around the track. Once in a while Hans, the Nazi, who’s a knuckle-dragging soccer fan and who is always lagging behind the rest of us, sweating his ass off, yells, “Hey, ho, let’s go, Hertha Berlin!” And that’s too much even for Wolkow, the old windbag, and he slows down so Hans can catch up, then lifts his pointer finger and yells in a voice quivering with rage, “Joe Simunic! The cardinal sin!” And Hans yells back, “I know, I know.” Then Wolkow speeds up again and mumbles to himself, “Simunic, my God! The foundation of the franchise! Never trade the franchise player! And now they’ve tanked.”
    Just the fact that we’re not forced to listen to him blather is reason enough to get excited about the high jump. Maybe we did the high jump only on days when Wolkow had such a heavy chest cold that he couldn’t run and talk at the same time. When he’s fighting a normal cold, he still manages to babble, just a bit less than usual. When he’s dead, class is canceled. But when he’s really sick, he runs silently around the track.
    During the high jump he jotted down our results in his black notebook and croaked about how we had managed to clear a few centimeters more the previous year. The girls, like I said, were sitting next to the high jump setup listening to Frau Bielcke. In reality, none of them were listening, of course, and were actually looking over at us.
    Tatiana was with her best friend, Natalie, at the outer edge of the group of girls. They crouched down and whispered to each other. It