Wishin' and Hopin' Read Online Free PDF

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    MaryAnn Haywood guessed Ireland, Arthur Coté Japan. Eugene Bowen thought either Africa or South America. “Non, non, et non,” Madame said.“Zhenya is une jeune fille russe —a Russian girl. She and her family have moved here from the Soviet Union.” My classmates and I looked at each other, aghast. Rosalie’s hand shot back up and Madame nodded.
    “Is she a Communist?”
    Madame frowned a little and shrugged, palms out. “Perhaps oui , perhaps non . Whatever she is, we shall show her what a friendly class we are when she arrives. N’est-ce pas? A few of us nodded cautiously; most remained noncommittal. “ Et bien . Now please take out your copies of The Yearling and read the next chapter en silence until we are called over.”
    Called over to Final Friday confessions, Madame meant. On the last Friday of each month, St. Aloysius Gonzaga students in grades three through eight went next door, class by class, to come clean about their sins and receive penance and absolution.
    Final Fridays were kinda good and kinda bad. Yes, you got out of doing work for an hour or so, but only so you could go to church. It was a far cry from a field trip to the Peabody Museum, say, where therewere dinosaurs, or to Channel 3 in Hartford, where we were going next month in Junior Midshipmen so’s we could be on Ranger Andy . Final Fridays could be good or bad, too, depending on who you got for a priest. It could either be Father Hanrahan, who gave cinchy penances (and who rode a motorcycle and could make outside shots on the basketball court, plus he liked the Beatles)—or Monsignor Muldoon, who was about 500 years old and kind of like Phineas T. Bluster, Crabby Appleton, and clueless Mister Magoo, all rolled into one.
    I opened my copy of The Yearling . In the chapter we’d read the day before, Jody’s father Penny had survived his rattlesnake bite. The problem—the “conflict,” it was called—was that the deer Jody’s father had had to kill to make the poultice that drew out the venom and saved his life had been a mother deer. A doe. So now her fawn was an orphan. I knew that Jody was going to adopt it for a pet and name it Flag because I’d peeked at some of the later chapters, even though we weren’t supposed to read ahead, and if wedid anyways, we were supposed to keep what happened to ourselves and not tell our neighbors…. In my opinion, silent reading kinda stunk because, even though I was the second smartest kid in our class, everyone around me read faster than me, even Lonny, except he was probably skipping paragraphs or even whole pages….
    The wall clock’s minute hand reared back, then lunged forward with an audible ca-chunk ….
    The thing I didn’t get was how, first we had to practice our duck-and-cover exercises all last year because the Soviet Union was our enemy and now we were going to have a girl from there right in our class, and we were going to have to be nice to her, and I didn’t know if anyone else had thought about this, but maybe she was a spy ….
    The P.A. box click-clicked . “The sixth graders may now pass,” Mother Filomina’s voice said. Click . That was the way they called us over to confession: they started with the eighth graders and counted backwards, which meant, if sixth grade was going, thenour grade was getting called next. Soon, I hoped, because silent reading was so boring ….
    You know what would be cool? If, the day God the Father came back to earth for Judgment Day, it was just his voice on every single P.A. in the whole wide world. Except then, how could poor people in places like China and Africa hear him, because there probably weren’t many P.A.s there, right?…
    Ca-chunk.
    Earlier that day? You know what Madame Marguerite told us? That from now on, we couldn’t call her Madame Marguerite anymore. Now we had to call her Madame Frechette, or simply Madame. All the other kids had looked at each other like huh? I was the only one who knew what was going on.