The Get Over Read Online Free
Author: Walter Dean Myers
into a dive as I fold my wings. I am a streak across the gray Andes skies. I am a black dart screaming to the earth. I am death.
And now I strike. My talons just behind the head, crushing the flesh within them. I lift my wings and rise as the snake thrashes wildly, its tail swinging around my legs. I strike the head, pulling the flesh away from the small skull.
We go up and down, no higher than the height of the paca that stands transfixed against the high grass. I tear away more flesh, this time from the eyes.
This time from the skull that breaks beneath my beak.
The grip around my talons eases. It is over. I have my meal.
All is well.
I am living on the dark side of the moon. Pretending to be in another place, sometimes another time, and always in another light, I walk among my friends and the people I know as if everything is as it should be. Nothing is as it should be.
One of the things that scare me, that wake me up in the middle of the night, is that I am too conscious of my thoughts. Itâs as if there is a talk show in my head that Iâm constantly watching. I wonder if everyone has a talk show in their head. Or if they have voices laying out their future.
Never mind my address. Never mind that my mail comes to 145th Street, or that I live in a place called Harlem. It is really the dark side of the moon. In the mornings, I walk past guys a little older than I am. They stand on street corners or fill up the old gray stoops on my block and watch the world go by.
âTheyâre not smart,â Twig said when I mentioned them. âHalf of them didnât even finish high school.â
What I know is that it doesnât matter if they did or didnât finish. High school doesnât mean anything anymore. If you want to invent your own life, you need to have more than a high school diploma.
The school I go to, Phoenix, is the old Powell School at 128th and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. Red bricks are piled on top of red bricks to make an old New York building. Behind us, on what was once called Old Broadway, an overhead train whines and creaks its way through Harlem. A short distance away, the George Bruce branch of the New York Public Library squats like a homeless woman with many stories to tell and few ears to give them to.
The library is where I live, really live. On 145th Street, I eat and sleep and go to the toilet, but it is only in that library, among the books, that I feel comfortable. I go inside, climb the steep steps, find a book, and lose myself for hours. I feel safeâas when I imagine myself flying over the square and rectangular Harlem rooftops, a predator looking for something evil to consume. But if the demons have been too much with me, even the books canât shelter me completely and I stop my reading to fight against them. It is always the same fight: I am the predator, they are the lowly tormentors, and in the end, I destroy them.
Sitting in Mr. Rameyâs office, knowing what he was going to say long before the words fell between us, I could feel my balls shrivel up and my throat go dry. I wanted to plead my case to him, to say that if I didnât get a scholarship, it would mean taking my place with all the other guys on the block who look like me. Young, black, dangerous unless proven otherwise.
Twig rarely reads. But he told me that when the demons bother him, he puts them on a track. He watches them run ahead of him and then slowly and surely runs them down, catches up with them, and then speeds past, imagining how they feel knowing that they are losers. I think Twig is at his best when he is running, when he is dreaming of being in races, when he dreams of winning, when he dreams of holding a trophy above his head.
In a sane world, we would be heroes. Teachers would applaud as we walked into the school. There is the smart one, the one who wants to be a writer. And there is the runner.
But we have enemies. In our separate ways, we have moved away from the
And now I strike. My talons just behind the head, crushing the flesh within them. I lift my wings and rise as the snake thrashes wildly, its tail swinging around my legs. I strike the head, pulling the flesh away from the small skull.
We go up and down, no higher than the height of the paca that stands transfixed against the high grass. I tear away more flesh, this time from the eyes.
This time from the skull that breaks beneath my beak.
The grip around my talons eases. It is over. I have my meal.
All is well.
I am living on the dark side of the moon. Pretending to be in another place, sometimes another time, and always in another light, I walk among my friends and the people I know as if everything is as it should be. Nothing is as it should be.
One of the things that scare me, that wake me up in the middle of the night, is that I am too conscious of my thoughts. Itâs as if there is a talk show in my head that Iâm constantly watching. I wonder if everyone has a talk show in their head. Or if they have voices laying out their future.
Never mind my address. Never mind that my mail comes to 145th Street, or that I live in a place called Harlem. It is really the dark side of the moon. In the mornings, I walk past guys a little older than I am. They stand on street corners or fill up the old gray stoops on my block and watch the world go by.
âTheyâre not smart,â Twig said when I mentioned them. âHalf of them didnât even finish high school.â
What I know is that it doesnât matter if they did or didnât finish. High school doesnât mean anything anymore. If you want to invent your own life, you need to have more than a high school diploma.
The school I go to, Phoenix, is the old Powell School at 128th and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. Red bricks are piled on top of red bricks to make an old New York building. Behind us, on what was once called Old Broadway, an overhead train whines and creaks its way through Harlem. A short distance away, the George Bruce branch of the New York Public Library squats like a homeless woman with many stories to tell and few ears to give them to.
The library is where I live, really live. On 145th Street, I eat and sleep and go to the toilet, but it is only in that library, among the books, that I feel comfortable. I go inside, climb the steep steps, find a book, and lose myself for hours. I feel safeâas when I imagine myself flying over the square and rectangular Harlem rooftops, a predator looking for something evil to consume. But if the demons have been too much with me, even the books canât shelter me completely and I stop my reading to fight against them. It is always the same fight: I am the predator, they are the lowly tormentors, and in the end, I destroy them.
Sitting in Mr. Rameyâs office, knowing what he was going to say long before the words fell between us, I could feel my balls shrivel up and my throat go dry. I wanted to plead my case to him, to say that if I didnât get a scholarship, it would mean taking my place with all the other guys on the block who look like me. Young, black, dangerous unless proven otherwise.
Twig rarely reads. But he told me that when the demons bother him, he puts them on a track. He watches them run ahead of him and then slowly and surely runs them down, catches up with them, and then speeds past, imagining how they feel knowing that they are losers. I think Twig is at his best when he is running, when he is dreaming of being in races, when he dreams of winning, when he dreams of holding a trophy above his head.
In a sane world, we would be heroes. Teachers would applaud as we walked into the school. There is the smart one, the one who wants to be a writer. And there is the runner.
But we have enemies. In our separate ways, we have moved away from the
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