Dave at Night Read Online Free Page B

Dave at Night
Book: Dave at Night Read Online Free
Author: Gail Carson Levine
Pages:
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reach it. If I could get it, I’d swing it into him. I’d knock him over and run.
    â€œStay still, you brat,” he panted.
    I fought harder, but he held on. I couldn’t get away.
    â€œNow come.” He walked me to my shoes and waited while I put them on. Then he walked me to the suitcase. “Pick it up.” He held my shoulders and eased me down to it without letting go for a second.
    He marched me back up the corridor to a door at the end. It opened onto an ordinary wooden staircase, not marble like the one in the lobby. We climbed up to the top floor, the third. It was slightly warmer up here, but the echoing silence was the same, and so was the ugly gray-green paint job on the walls.
    Mr. Meltzer stopped in front of a door and opened it while holding on to me. Inside was a nurse’s office with a scale and a cot and the nurse’s desk, which had a telephone on it. The nurse said hello and smiled like there was something to smile about. She weighed me, listened to my heart, and looked in my ears. When she riffled through my hair for lice, she said, “I wish I had curls like yours.” She asked me if I’d had the mumps, measles, chicken pox. I told her no, but I’d had hoof-and-mouth disease when I was eight. She laughed, which surprised me. Mr. Meltzer didn’t, which didn’t.
    She asked me if I had any brothers or sisters. I told her my brother had died in the same accident that killed Papa.
    When she finished examining me, she told me not to put my clothes back on. “How old are you? Nine?”
    I said I was fourteen. Mr. Meltzer said I was eleven.
    â€œSmall for your age.” She went to a closet and came back carrying a pile of clothes and a pair of low boots. “A new wardrobe.”
    â€œI like the clothes I came in with.”
    â€œPut on the uniform.” Mr. Meltzer folded my old things and put them in my suitcase.
    â€œWe all wear uniforms here,” the nurse said.
    Yeah, but her uniform showed she was a nurse. Mine would show I was an orphan.
    The yellowy-white shirt was too big. I wondered if the kid who’d had it before me was still alive.
    The tie had gray-green and purple stripes. The gray knickers were too big. I had to buckle the belt on the last hole to keep them up. The gray jacket was too big and it had no pockets. The knickers and the jacket were stiff enough for a coat of armor. Scratchy too. The heels of the white socks came up to my ankles. Only the shoes fit.
    â€œOrphans may come and orphans may go,” the nurse said, “but their clothing lasts forever.”
    Mr. Meltzer picked up my suitcase and we left the nurse’s office. In the hall, he said he was going to take me to meet Superintendent Bloom, who was in charge of the whole orphanage. “Call him sir . He’s not as nice as I am.”
    Back downstairs, Mr. Meltzer knocked on the first door to the right of the lobby.
    â€œCome in,” a rumbly voice called.
    It was warm in his office. Not hot. Just right.
    Mr. Bloom was huge. His chest and head loomed over his desk like the Hebrew Home for Boys loomed over Broadway. He pushed back his chair and stood up. Scraping against the wall on the way, he walked around to my side of his desk and bent down to inspect me through thick spectacles. He smiled, showing a million teeth.
    He looked up at Mr. Meltzer, who was leaning against the door so I couldn’t get out. “What’s his name?”
    He could have asked me. Didn’t he think I knew my own name?
    â€œDave Caros,” Mr. Meltzer said.
    â€œDave, you have my sympathy for your loss.”
    What did I lose? Oh. Papa.
    â€œBut no loss comes without gain. I like my boys to think of me as their papa.” Mr. Bloom’s smile disappeared. “A stern papa, because all good fathers are stern.”
    I’d never think of this gorilla as my papa.
    â€œLook around this office,” Mr. Bloom went on. “Take a good
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