Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates Read Online Free Page A

world is going to end tomorrow and expects a lot from his kids.
    Then she stops at P.E. and says, “Whoa, you have Mrs. Yates.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Get in shape, girl,” Jenna says. “She’s a drill sergeant.”
    A bell rings, and Jenna curses. The halls are mostly empty.
    “We’re late,” she says. “I gotta go that way.”
    She points behind us.
    “And you go three doors down. You can’t miss it.”
    I thank her, head three doors down, and see two doors across the hall from each other. If one wasn’t labeled Journalism Lab, I would’ve missed it altogether. As it is, I have to shove the door open—late again—and everyone looks at me—again.
    The man up front is skinny and he has glasses and he’s balding too. He takes my schedule slip without comment, and then he smiles at me, and except for Jenna, he’s the first person who makes me feel welcome.
    “Well, this class’ll be quite the education for you, Ms. VanDerHoven. Does your family subscribe to a newspaper?”
    I shrug. I don’t even know what one is.
    “Do you have cable?”
    I shrug again.
    “Internet?”
    “Yeah,” I say because I’m forbidden to be on the Internet without Mom around. I’m too naïve, she says.
    “Okay, then. Find out about the other two. We’re studying how the mass media affects our perceptions of the world. I also need to know how well you write. So if you can write a short bio for me by tomorrow—”
    “In English?” I ask. I’ve never written in English. I can read it, and stuff, but mostly I’ve been writing in Greek (and not modern Greek either).
    “Yes,” he says, sounding surprised. “We do all our work in English here.”
    I’m so screwed. I’m not sure I can do any of this stuff. And, I have a hunch, I can’t blow off the short bio like I supposedly can the forty pages.
    “You can write in English, can’t you?” he asks.
    “I dunno,” I say. “I’ve never done it.”
    Everyone is staring at me. I mean, like I’m a thing that’s crawled out of the woodwork staring.
    “Well, give it a shot,” he says. “We’ll see how it goes.”
    “What’s short?” I ask.
    For a minute, I think he’s going to give me a definition of the word, then he says, “A full page.”
    I nod like I can do this.
    I’m not sure I can do any of it.
    And by the time I go through two more classes, I’m convinced I can’t.

 
     
     
     
    THREE
     
     
    HERE’RE MY ASSIGNMENTS by the end of the day:
     
    1) I have to read forty pages for American History, twenty pages for American Government, and a bunch of dumb poems by someone named Shakespeare.
    2) I have to write a short bio for Journalism, a book report on those dumb poems (by the end of the week), and an analysis of the Greek government for Comparative World Studies.
    3) I have to complete fifteen arithmetic problems by tomorrow and show the work so that the teacher knows I didn’t use a calculator (which I can’t use since I don’t know what one is).
    4) I have to take pictures of the plants around my house and label them by the end of the week (Internet okay for this); this for my science class, which supposedly covers biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy. I’m not sure what category this assignment falls under.
     
    And I don’t even know what the drill sergeant who runs P.E. has in store for me tomorrow.
    I tell all this to Mom when I get home, but I don’t tell her about lunch.
    I can’t talk about lunch. Not yet anyway.
    You see, I knew lunch would be an issue. Anyone who watches teen movies or teen TV knows that. Lunch has its own arcane rituals, like who sits where, and who gets what. And it’s no different here. Except that these arcane rituals somehow never made it into any sort of on-screen life.
    Here, the kids with money go to the burger joints at the strip mall a block or two away from school property. (When I blushed at the word “strip,” someone else giggled and said, “Not that kind of strip.” I’m beginning to think