A Week in the Woods Read Online Free

and a host of others. And everyone who was hired had to agree to one condition: All the work had to be finished by February first. The contractor was offering top wages and plenty of overtime, so people signed on and went right to work.
    One team began restoring and remodeling the original farmhouse. An even larger group began building a new addition that was almost triple the size of the original house.
    At one point more than sixty men and women were hard at work out at the Fawcett place. The tight deadlines meant that crews were working day and night. Near the end, some of the workers from distant towns even parked their RVs in the pasture in front ofthe house and lived on the site until the job was finished.
    And the job did get finished. By comparing notes, the local people figured out that the materials and labor for the work must have cost the owners at least another million dollars—not to mention the new furnishings.
    There’s nothing that attracts quite as much attention as large amounts of money. So it would be fair to say that in the modest little town of Whitson, almost everyone was curious about these new neighbors. After all, any people who had a few million bucks to throw around were bound to be interesting. Might be a movie star! Or even two movie stars!
    When Mrs. Stearns told Mr. Maxwell the news, his attitude toward this new boy changed instantly. But it didn’t change for the better.
    Because the only kind of people Mr. Maxwell disliked more than slackers were environmentally insensitive, buy-the-whole-world rich folks.
    And the only people he disliked more than rich folks were their lazy, spoiled kids.

Five
Zero Pressure
    George Washington and Abraham Lincoln stared at Mark from the calendar that was thumbtacked next to the chalkboard. Mark stared back and forced his mind to work. Friday, February 27th , he thought. It’s Friday, February 27th. So that means I’ve been at this school . . . exactly ten days. Feels like ten years.
    Mark was having trouble staying awake. He propped up his head and chewed on the end of his pencil. Anything to keep his eyes open. The teacher—was it Miss Longhorn? or maybe Mrs. Lego?—whatever her name was, Mark thought she was a lousy math teacher.
    In fact, the moment Mark had walked in the front door of Hardy Elementary School, he’d decided that the whole place was lousy.
    Before Monday, February sixteenth, Mark hadnever set foot inside a public school. He’d had third grade, fourth grade, and half of fifth at Lawton Country Day School in Scarsdale. The two years before that he’d been at the American School in Paris. Before Paris it was kindergarten at the Hames School in New York City, and before that he’d gone to a Montessori school in Santa Fe.
    He glanced at the fraction problems on the chalkboard, and fought back a yawn. He thought, I learned all that stuff ages ago.
    Mark shifted in his chair and looked out the window. More snow. For the past week, at least two inches of snow had fallen every day. And Mark was glad. The snow was like a layer of soundproofing. It made everything quiet, and quiet was something Mark had begun to appreciate.
    A stretch and a yawn earned Mark a disapproving scowl from the teacher. He straightened up in his chair, but slumped down again as soon as she looked back at the chalkboard. He thought, At least I get to sit in the back of the room at this school. So I guess that’s one good thing about the place.
    Mark also liked that there were so many kids in every class. At Lawton Country Day School Mark’s classes had been small, no more than twelve students, sometimes as few as five. In classes like that there was no escape, no chance to slack off. Never. But here, there were twenty-four other kids. Zero pressure.
    Scanning the room, Mark looked over his classmates. He stared at the backs of their heads and tried to remember some names. But even a clear look at their faces