Jack Adrift Read Online Free

She’d wake up confused and stare out at us with eyeballs as murky as peeled grapes. She seemed not to know where she was. It was like having class in a very sad retirement home. For extra credit we could rub her feet. She had corns and bunions that were as big as the knobs on an old radio. She gave us a tool that looked something like a cheese grater and we scratched it back and forth over the knobs and shaved them down a bit like you would a radish. At the end of the year we chipped in and bought her an automatic foot massager.
    But my new teacher was like a college girl. I stared up at her dreamily all day long and did everything she
asked. And when she needed a volunteer I alertly raised my hand before I even knew what she required. If she had said, “I need a body to dissect,” I would have thrown myself across her desk with a scalpel between my teeth. I dreamed she would carve her initials into my shoulder. If she needed a kidney I’d donate one of mine. In a very rare operation we could switch beating hearts. She called on me a lot, and I was certain she thought I was the special one in class, even though my mind drifted a bit.
    After about a week Miss Noelle stood thoughtfully in front of us and slowly rolled up her shirtsleeves. She looked us up and down one by one, as if we were slabs of stone she was about to carve. “I have a great desire to get to know you all better,” she announced. “So I’ve come up with a fun writing assignment. First, I want each of you to write the story of your life exactly as it is. No exaggerations. No stretching the truth. Then, I want you to write a second biography which is the story of your life as you wish it to be.”
    I loved the idea. She was so inventive .
    â€œI need a volunteer,” she called out.
    Reflexively my hand shot up, and without hesitation she called on me. “Pass out one of these composition books to every student,” she instructed. “They’ll be your ungraded, write-whatever-you-want journals. Anything goes! Shoot for the moon!”

    I leaped out of my seat and grabbed a stack of black-and-white composition books off her desk. I passed them out with my head held high as if I were a priest delivering communion.
    Soon, we all picked up our pens and bent our heads and got busy. It didn’t take long to write the basics of my real life—where I was born, the names of my family members, and the few exciting things that had happened to me—all written in detail just as honestly as my mom would have told it.
    But when it came to writing about my life as I wished it would be, I found it a bit more difficult because I could hear my dad’s voice in the back of my head saying, “Tell her what she wants to hear.” I just didn’t know yet if she wanted to hear that I was madly in love with her.
    I was sucking on the tip of my pen and turning my tongue blue when over the loudspeaker the secretary’s voice burst in. “Excuse me, Miss Noelle. Could you send Jack Henry down to the principal’s office?”
    I glanced over at Miss Noelle with an alarmed look on my face.
    She winked at me, then nodded toward the classroom door. “Chin up,” she said.
    But as I meandered down to the principal’s office I was nervous. The office secretary spotted the panicky look on my face. “Don’t worry,” she assured me. “Mrs.
Nivlash won’t bite. She’s simply lovely.” I had been bitten by a lot of lovely dogs that were not supposed to bite. As the secretary opened the principal’s office door she announced my name and with her hip nudged me forward.
    Mrs. Nivlash was wearing a bright yellow suit that my mom would describe as a businesswoman’s mannish suit. She had been out in the sun a lot. She looked like well-dressed beef jerky. An orange scarf twisted around her neck gave her shiny face a devilish glow. I squinted at her as if looking into a ring