The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell Read Online Free Page B

got messy, as they inevitably did. “Miss Oldenburg!” wailed Sharon, running over from the strip of green, her legs pumping wildly as they ate up the distance. “Mikey pushed Emily down and said girls can’t play kickball and you have to come tell him he’s in trouble now! He should be in trouble! He pushed her down !” Sharon mimed a pushing motion, just in case her teacher didn’t understand.
    Elaine sighed, dropping her arms to her sides and pulling the mantle of “teacher” back over herself like a cloak of assumed authority and vague disapproval. “All right, Sharon, take me to him.”
    They hustled across the playground, not quite as fast as Sharon’s angry run of the moment before, but faster than Miss Oldenburg’s usual calm stroll. All the students who saw them pass knew that someone was about to be in trouble, and a few of them fell in behind the pair, ready to watch punishments rain down. It was a rare treat, really, at least for the students who knew they weren’t the ones in trouble.
    Scott watched his teacher and classmate hustle past and jumped to his feet, abandoning the piece of grass he’d been slowly shredding as he seized this rare opportunity and ran for the base of the slide. The playground equipment was all mounted on a soft, spongy material made from recycled tires and guaranteed to minimize accidents; it wasn’t quite like falling on a trampoline, but it was softer than the pavement and more hygienic than sand, and it didn’t rip up student knees and elbows like tanbark did. It was the perfect solution in a world where blood was the enemy, but where little kids still needed the freedom to run off their excess energy.
    There was just one problem with this wonderful material: it was made of rubber, and like all things that were made of rubber, it could rip.
    Scott’s rock collection was the center of his world. He was a quiet, inquisitive child who enjoyed spending time in his room, playing with his toys and enjoying his solitary activities. He didn’t have many friends, and he didn’t feel like he was missing anything. But oh, how he wanted a piece of his playground. He understood dimly, from listening to his mother and father at the dinner table, that there were adults who wanted to take the playground away; they thought that it was dangerous to have children running around outside like wild things, no matter how closely supervised they were, and would replace all outdoor play areas with enclosed, padded, safe equivalents, ones where there was no sky, or grass…or rocks. Scott thought this was just about the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. He also knew that no one was going to listen to him. People barely listened to him about things that were facts, like how many kinds of quartz there were or why you shouldn’t play with mercury. They sure weren’t going to listen to him about things that were opinions , like “Skies and grass and rocks are important, and you should let us keep having them.”
    If the playground was going to go away, he was going to save a piece of it first, so that he could look at it forever, even when everything else was gone. He’d spent months trying to figure out how he could steal a piece of playground. It was solid around the edges, fresh and square and not given to breaking off when someone tried to bend it. He couldn’t bring a hammer or anything like that to school; he’d get caught and he’d get stopped and then Miss Oldenburg would take whatever he’d brought away from him. Then—worst of all, worse than anything else in the world—she would look at him sadly, shake her head, and say, “I’m disappointed in you, Scott. I thought better of you.”
    No. That wouldn’t work. But there were other ways, and after searching all the way up into November, he’d finally found one: the plastic under the slide was starting to crack. It