Wingshooters Read Online Free PDF

firm teachers at the English-language school. Miss Anderson always seemed nervous, starting to venture one way in conversation or movement, and then pausing and changing direction. She had a way of half-laughing that made it hard to believe she was really amused; her anger, usually accompanied by an almost comically furrowed brow, was equally unconvincing. Miss Anderson’s one distinguishing feature was her beautiful voice. She sang in the church choir, and even when she yelled at you, it sounded like a lullaby. Often, in the mornings, she lingered at her doorway on the chance that the principal, Mr. Baker, would pass by. Everyone knew that Mr. Baker and Miss Anderson were boyfriend and girlfriend, even though he had a wife.
    That morning, though, when I entered the classroom, Miss Anderson was sitting at her desk looking troubled. I wondered if Mr. Baker was absent this morning, but as all the children settled into their seats for roll call, the usual morning jokes and light chatter that went on before the bell rang were replaced by a strange and different murmur.
    “He’s supposed to come tomorrow? But my mom said Mr. Baker wouldn’t let him.”
    “My dad said he’d come over himself, if that’s what it took to stop it.”
    “I’ve never seen one before, have you? What do they look like?”
    “I’m glad I’m not in fifth grade,” said Brady Grimson, whose parents ran a diner on Route 5.
    “Yeah,” said Tommy Fry, the pharmacist’s son, “and you’ll never get there, either.”
    Finally, the bell rang and Miss Anderson stood up. “All right, children. Settle down. Did you have a good weekend? What did you do?”
    Everyone went silent and rapt with attention, and this, more than anything, made me realize that something was wrong.
    “Well, what did you all do?” Miss Anderson asked again. “Did anyone go on a car trip?”
    Slowly, tentatively, Missy Calloway raised her hand. She was the smartest girl in class, a no-nonsense, stocky, bespectacled child whose farm parents treated her with bewildered respect, as if she were a visiting alien. Missy didn’t waste her time on the childish topics that occupied most of our classmates, and I always listened to what she had to say. “Miss Anderson,” she said, after the teacher acknowledged her, “is it true we have a Negro teacher coming?”
    Miss Anderson started to draw herself up straight, and then fell back into a tired slouch.
    “Yes, Missy, it’s true,” she answered, and the room exploded into chaos, thirty voices speaking all at once. Miss Anderson put her hands up to call for silence and the noise subsided a little. “The teacher’s name is Mr. Garrett, and he’s going to be substituting in Mrs. Hebig’s class until after she has her baby.”
    Now everyone was silent. Finally, Brady Grimson spoke without raising his hand. “But … why is he coming?”
    “I just told you. Mrs. Hebig is out because she’s having a baby, and—”
    “No, I mean, why is he coming to Deerhorn?”
    Everyone looked at Miss Anderson, waiting, more interested and attentive than they ever were when she was talking about biology or math.
    “I’m not sure, Brady. But I hear that his wife is a nurse over at the clinic.”
    The room was quiet while we digested this information. The one other time the classroom felt this way—tense, strange, uncertain, unbelieving—was when we heard that Mr. Greene, our P.E. teacher, had been paralyzed in a boating accident.
    Miss Anderson tried to teach that morning, covering a lesson on plants and oxygen, but no one was paying attention. My classmates whispered to each other when her back was turned, and for once she didn’t really seem to care. Finally, at ten-thirty, she let us out for recess, and while the other kids all shifted easily into their out-of-class selves—chasing each other and yelling, jumping on the monkey bars and swing sets—I was still thinking about what Miss Anderson had told us.
    A Negro teacher was coming