Mrs. Mantei said that our assignment would be to memorize these lists for the next day, when Mr. Hi­bler would certainly return and test us on our knowledge. 

"She was always right! She told the truth!"

I made my way toward Wayne, pushing myself past two girls from another class. He was watching me with his little pinhead eyes.

"What about this one?" Wayne pointed to the Death card. 

"I do not see much higher education. Probably an early marriage. Many children. There's something bleak and dreary here, but I can't tell what. Per­haps just the tasks of a housewife life. I think you'll do very well, for the most part."  She smiled at Carol, a smile with a certain lack of interest.

tarot pack.

nce again, she was different: this time, her hair hung straight down and seemed hardly to have been combed.

sumac

"No," she said, "not until you've gone out to the vegetable garden and picked me a few tomatoes." She glanced at the sky. "I think it's going to rain. Skedaddle and do it now. Then you come back inside and watch your brother for a few minutes while I go upstairs. I need to clean up before dinner."

"She's tellin' the truth

"I know you children like to hear these things," she said, "these secrets, and that is why I am telling you all this." We nodded. It was better than doing comprehension questions for the readings in Broad Horizons.  "I will tell you one more story," she said, "and then we will have to do arithmetic."

No one even went to the bathroom. 

But right now you have some work to do." 

"Listen, Tommy," she said, "go upstairs and pick your clothes off the bathroom floor, then go outside to the shed and put the shovel and ax away that your father left outside this morning." 

"It could happen," I said. I had to improvise, to outrage him. "I read in this news, paper my mom bought in the IGA about this scientist, this mad scientist in the Swiss Alps, and he's been putting genes and chromosomes and stuff together in test tubes, and he combined a human being and a hamster." I waited, for effect. "It's called a humster." 

after losing everything in China:

"She lies." 

She said that this monster was called a gryphon

Without glancing down at the book, she began to talk about the movement of souls in Egyptian religion. She said that when people die, their souls return to Earth in the form of carpenter ants or walnut trees, depending on how they behaved­"well or ill"-in life.

You wouldn't want your house at home to look like your desk at school, now, would you?" She didn't wait for an answer. "I should think not. A house at home  should be as neat as human hands can make it.

aultless brown-noser

fossicking

Too many people eat ... well, never mind." 

"There was a great rattling of the words for the fewness of ideas. I didn't care for their brand of hilarity. I don't like ditto machine jokes." 

Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.  "I don't like that word either," Miss Ferenczi whispered, bent over, her mouth near my ear. "It's ugly. My feeling is, if you don't like a word, you don't have to use it." She straightened up, leaving behind a slight odor of Clarets

Janice Weber

You are free to think what you like. When your teacher, Mr. Hibler, returns, six times eleven will be sixty-six again, you can rest as­sured. And it will be that for the rest of your lives in Five Oaks. Too bad, eh?"

comer

the lazy autumn sunlight dazzled its way through ribbons of clouds past the windows on the east side of the classroom, and crept across the linoleum floor.

"it would be better for you to think that six times eleven is sixty-eight only when I am in the room." 

She disappointed us by giving us an ordinary lesson, complete with vocabulary word drills, comprehension questions, and recitation.

":'as

Furthermore, her tree was out­sized, disproportionate, for some reason. 

For reasons that I shall not go into, my family's fortunes took us to Detroit, then north to dreadful Saginaw, and now here I am in Five Oaks, as your substitute teacher, for today, Thursday, October the eleventh. I believe it will be a good day: All the forecasts coincide. We shall start with your reading lesson. Take out your reading book. I believe it is called Broad Horizons, or something along those lines.

I knew where I had seen those lines before: Pinocchio. They were marionette lines.

cabals

Therefore it was a surprise when a woman we had never seen came into the class the next day, carrying a purple purse, a checkerboard lunchbox, and a few books.

Twice he bent over, and his loose tie, like a plumb line, hung down straight from his neck as he exploded himself into a Kleenex.

And after I had played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.

You have natural talent. You could be a genius if you want to." 

I could only be me.

t was as if I had said magic words. Alakazam!-her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless.

This wasn't China.

"You aren't a genius like me," she said matter-of-factly. And if I hadn't felt so bad, I would have pulled her braids and punched her stomach.

I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly through the rest of the show.

I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I p

For the talent show I was to play a piece called "Pleading Child,"

And my mother squared her shoulders and bragged: "our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It's like you can't stop this natural talent." 

Old Chong would smile and applaud and say Very good! But now you must learn to keep time!"

he had a peculiar smell, like a baby that had done something in its pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person's, like an old peach I once found in the back of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off the flesh when I picked it up.

"So ungrateful," I heard her mutter in Chinese, "If she had as much talent as she has temper, she'd be famous now."

I knew almost immediately that I would be sorry I had said that.

actually look forward to my future fame.