Wishin' and Hopin' Read Online Free PDF Page B

Madame was working on her “needs improvement”s….
    I had a pet once, two Easters ago. Not a fawn like Flag or some big-shotty pet like Rosalie’s stupid Shetland pony, Ginger Gal, that she’s always bragging about. My pet was this little baby chick we got at Thompson’s Feed and Grain store. It was purple,on account of they dyed all the chicks for Easter. Popeye, I named him, because I liked Popeye cartoons and because he kind of had these poppy-outy black eyes. He got sick after about a week and started losing his balance and closing his eyes. (I hadn’t realized before that chickens had eyelids.) Then he kind of curled up in a corner of the shoebox I was keeping him in and, at night while I was sleeping, he croaked. Frances and I buried him in our backyard, near where Ma’s rose bushes are—or, as Pop called Ma’s rose bushes, her restaurant for Japanese beetles. I made a cross for Popeye out of two popsicle sticks and some glue and stuck it on top of his grave, and then Frances and I said the Our Father. I asked Fran if she thought there was a different Heaven for animals, and she said, how should she know because, first of all, she wasn’t an animal and second, she’d never been dead.
    Ca-chunk.
    When were they going to call us fifth graders over there? Next year? Not that I really wanted to goover, with what I had to confess. Oscar Landry’s already on page 42 and all’s I’m on is page 37. There’s an illustration on page 40 and Oscar’s way past that and I won’t even get to it until three more pages….
    After Popeye died, I didn’t even want any other pets because I was sad. And I was kind of sad and kind of glad that Ma was going on her California trip. Sad because she had never gone away before and I was probably going to miss her, but glad because Pop said if Ma won the grand prize, we could buy a brand new car, either a Cadillac or a Buick Riviera, and it was going to have air-conditioning, no matter which one we got. I was hoping we’d get the Riviera because the ’65s had concealed headlights that you could only see when you put the headlights on, and when you turned them off again, these doors came down over them, kind of like eyelids. Me and Pop and Frances seen one in the showroom at Broadway Buick and the guy demonstrated the headlights for us. Royal Blue, the showroom Riviera was, which was the color I wanted. Fran wanted Country ClubRed. Pop said Ma would be the one who got to pick the color out because—
    Click, click . “The fifth graders may now pass.” Click .
    Before any of us kids could stand up, Madame sprang from her seat, clapping her hands. “Dépêchez-vous, mes enfants! No dawdling, now. Hurry, hurry!” Everyone was looking at each other, wondering why she was having a nervous breakdown about us going over to the church, but once again, I knew that it was because of her “needs improvement”s.
    And you know how I knew? Because the day before, out on the playground at recess, Ronald Kubiak had fired the dodge ball and hit me on the shoulder, tagging me out third to last. (In dodge ball, the Kubiak twins always started the game as “ends” and often kept those positions until recess was over.) As I waited on the sideline to see if Rosalie or Johnny Bartlett would survive or get nailed by a Kubiak, Madame had approached me. Would I please be un bon garçon and run up to our room and fetch her sunglasses, heh heh heh? (That was one of the weirdthings about Madame: she was always chuckling at things that weren’t funny.) “ Oui , Madame,” I’d said, aware that Rosalie was watching us when she should have been watching out for the dodge ball, because Roland Kubiak fired it at her and got her in the small of her back, which threw Johnny into “sudden death.” Rosalie started crabbing that it wasn’t fair because she hadn’t been ready yet. But she would have been ready if she wasn’t always minding everyone else’s business.
    Back in the building, I’d