Red Clover Read Online Free

It helped.
    “What about school?”
    “I can’t go. What if I get a panic attack there?”
    “You’ll take the paper bag out of your briefcase and slowly breathe into it, like Dr. Jerry demonstrated for you. Then you’ll ask to be excused to go to the nurse’s office.”
    “It feels like I’m going to die when I have one of these, Mother. It feels like someone is choking me. I’m cold, and then I’m hot. It’s horrible. I don’t want to go through it again, not two days in a row.” He couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. “You have no idea how scary it is. I’m not going to school.”
    “Lee, we’ve been over this numerous times. You have to go to school. It’s not a choice for either of us. The law requires it.”
    “I don’t see why I can’t continue to be home-schooled.”
    “We’ll discuss it further after dinner...when your father gets home.”
    When his father arrived, his parents talked behind closed doors. Thirty minutes later, they summoned him.
    “Lee, we have agreed to allow you to continue being home-schooled,” his mother said.
    His father stood across the room, staring out the window while she talked, his stony profile telling Lee he wasn’t happy with the decision.
    “But here is the arrangement. We think you need social interaction with other children, so you must spend some time with children your own age doing something outside of your regular school work.”
    “Like what?”
    His father was quick to respond. “Sports. Just pick a sport,” he said, as if it was a no-brainer.
    “You’ve got to be kidding. I throw like a girl. When I run, I usually end up twisting an ankle. I can’t stand up on ice skates, and I’m deathly afraid of water. What do you expect me to do?”
    “Anything, boy. Just pick something .” His father’s voice tightened.
    “How about karate?” Lee said without thinking. The previous month, Lee had snuck out of the house on a Sunday afternoon when his parents weren’t home and had gone to see Enter the Dragon with Bruce Lee, a movie his parents would not have allowed him to see due to his age.
    His parents looked at him in disbelief.
    “What’s wrong with that?” Lee asked.
    “What’s right with it?” his father asked.
    “It’s a sport. It involves interaction with other children my own age. Isn’t that what you want?”
    “Karate is—”
    “Henry, wait a minute. He does have a point, we must admit.”
    “Not karate.”
    “Why not?” she asked.
    His father’s twisted face said it all. To him, the only sports worth anything were traditional team sports, like football, basketball, baseball, and soccer. He walked away mumbling.
    Lee signed up for karate classes with nine other twelve- to fourteen-year-olds. Neither of his parents attended his first lesson, for which Lee was grateful. When he came home, they asked him how it had gone.
    “It was okay, I guess. We didn’t really do anything but listen to Sensei Kim talk. Living in harmony. Spiritual awakening. You know...all that kind of stuff.”
    “Really. And what do you think about ‘all that stuff,’ as you so eloquently put it?” his father asked without looking up from his newspaper.
    “I like it.”
    “That’s just great,” his father said.
    He went to the class three times a week and enjoyed it. During down time, the other boys talked about cutting lawns and shoveling sidewalks to earn spending money, watching television shows like Chico and the Man and Happy Days, and playing Pac-Man in the arcade at the local roller rink. Lee was curious about the cassette-tape players they all said they had in their bedrooms where they listened to popular musicians Lee had never heard of, like Bob Dylan, Queen, and Steppenwolf. The only music allowed in his home was classical, played from stereo components housed in a floor-to-ceiling entertainment center his father had custom-built in his den.
    After several weeks of classes, Lee overheard his mother talking on the phone with