Dear Opl Read Online Free

and gives her opinion on everything whether you asked for it or not. She told me once that I make her laugh, and since she thinks the English are the funniest people in the world, and because she misses home, I’m her substitute. Apparently, my sense of humor must be growing just as much as my body.
    â€œI think it’s a good idea to have someone be the voice for eighth graders,” she said in her perfect English lilt after reading my blog post.
    I looked at her sideways. “I’m not the voice of our grade.” I hopped from foot to foot. I had to use the bathroom.
    â€œSure you are. Don’t you think we’re all a little nervous about choking on Tylenol tablets? And that everyone in history class wishes they had a pillow for a desktop?”
    I shrugged. “I suppose.” The bathroom prayed on my mind a lot lately. For some wonky reason, I had to use it all the time. It was hard to concentrate on what people were saying when you needed to pee.
    â€œAnd everyone’s wound up about the new milk menu. I think you speak for us all.”
    â€œHuh,” I said, nodding and pulling her toward the girl’s room. “Glad I could do my part.” I used to have a big mouth, back before the rest of me got big, but not a big mouth large enough to cover the entire grade. Now I did a lot less chatting, mostly because I was too busy chewing. Okay, and maybe because talking meant eye contact, and I know from experience that other people’s eyes rarely stayed glued to mine. They wandered to places I didn’t want them staring at. Better to keep quiet and keep chewing. But maybe I would try round two of wind-bagging on my blog tonight after supper.
    On my way home from school, I thought a lot about what to write. It helped to keep my mind off the fact that I had to pass the soup kitchen. Well, the soup kitchen wasn’t really on my route home, but passing by it was the zippiest path to Diggerman’s Mom and Pop Sweetshop and that was a necessary stop between my classroom and my bedroom. Actually, I’ve never seen a Mrs. Diggerman. Maybe she only works in the back and doesn’t know how to handle customers. Or maybe Pop Diggerman thought it necessary to add a female to the sweetshop’s name, because otherwise, it’s just some old guy selling candy to little kids.
    The red-and-white gingham awning was like a giant, colorful eyelid winking at every kid who passed by. It flapped an encrypted message, like G-pa’s old Morse code machine, naming everything inside: candy bars, licorice, gum, sodas, and chips. Exactly what I needed to absorb the prickly bits of the day. Pop Diggerman liked to say he understood how times were tough for kids and he hoped to make life’s bitter medicine go down a little sweeter.
    Mom doesn’t know about Diggerman’s, and she has no idea that’s where I spend every penny of my weekly allowance, but she’s warned me plenty of times about the soup kitchen and to stay far away. She said the people there are rough and dangerous. So each time I’ve passed, I zip on by. But there’s a hitch in my zip. Every day I saw the same man out front, sitting on one of the four steps up to the building’s entrance. His clothes were dirty, his beard bristly, and his hair was tied back with a twist tie. He holds the same ragged Styrofoam cup and has a cardboard sign perched at his feet. It says, “Will work for food.”
    I hated that sign. It made me feel like I had rocks in my stomach. And this made zipping a lot harder. I closed my eyes for four steps, opened them for a quick peek at the pavement, and closed them for another four. My breath whooshed out in a big sigh. I’d make it to the other side of the steps and only catch a glimpse of his battered shoe.
    Having gotten my afternoon stash, I made it home and found Ollie at the front door, dressed as Lady Macbeth. He wore my costume from last year’s middle