Waiting For Sarah Read Online Free Page B

yesterday’s notes. If you forgot to memorize the notes you lost the fifteen marks. When the quiz was over it was note-taking from the overhead projector for tomorrow’s quiz. Notes and quizzes, always notes, one mind-numbing page after another. In addition to all this, Dorfman expected him to hand in two lengthy essays on eleventh grade topics, ones he had missed.
    Dorfman stood at the front of the room, behind his overhead projector, the classroom lights out. Exceptfor the windows, most of the light came from the projector’s 300 watts of non-enlightenment thrown onto the wall-screen behind and over Dorfman’s glittering baldness, poorly covered by a phony comb-over. Whenever Dorfman leaned into the projector to operate the roller, the light reflected off his thick-lensed glasses, hiding his usually magnified eyes and shining up under his face, accentuating the thick wet lips and flat nose, twisting his features into a Halloween fright mask.
    Mike sat at the back near the window. He’d had Dorfman before, in tenth grade, and used to copy his notes religiously, never missing a word. Now he didn’t care about taking notes. Instead, he simply scanned them idly as they came up on the screen, and then went back to his book,
The History of Flight
, always handy in his packsack slung behind his wheelchair, glancing up again only when he heard the squeak of the rollers.
    In his first class, when Dorfman had caught him reading his book instead of furiously scribbling history notes like the other kids, he’d threatened to have him expelled. Mike had shrugged. “So expel me.”
    Dorfman had stared at him angrily through lenses like the bottoms of pop bottles. No more was said about expulsion. Besides, Mike always managed to pass the daily quiz. And he was in a wheelchair; what kind of teacher would expel a kid in a wheelchair?

11 ... the dead are everywhere
    Robbie’s two small cousins were visiting for Halloween and Robbie had agreed to take them on a trick-or-treat tour of his neighborhood. “Why don’t you join us?” he said to Mike. “Should be fun. Jimmy and Sharon are going as aliens, so I’m gonna join them in a Boba Fett bounty hunter mask.”
    â€œNo, thanks. I’m too old for that stuff.”
    â€œYou don’t have to dress up. Just come as you are.”
    â€œMeaning what? I look like a natural freak?”
    â€œAw, come on, Mike. You always liked Halloween, remember?”
    â€œHow old are your cousins?”
    â€œJimmy’s eight, Sharon’s six.”
    In the end he agreed to go. Robbie was like a little kid, eager and excited over the smallest thing, like wearing a mask and shepherding his little cousins around. It was the least Mike could do; Robbie was always there when Mike needed him. Easy-going and good-natured, he never expected anything in return.
    The weather cooperated. The day had beensunny and cold. In the late afternoon a mist had descended, making it the perfect evening for a haunting. Robbie wore his Boba Fett mask just as he had threatened, and his excited young cousins were dressed as Martians.
    â€œThis time last year you were in Rehab,” said Robbie.
    He didn’t answer. He was looking at Jimmy and Sharon, so thrilled to be out in the dark, and thinking of Becky who would be eleven if she ...
    He thought about his dad and his own feelings of — what? Inadequacy? Inferiority? How he’d never seemed to please his father, not that his dad ever complained or criticized. It didn’t seem to matter whether it was school grades or basketball or track, nothing Mike ever did drew praise from his dad. “Running is okay,” he would say to his son. “And basketball’s okay too. But the bike is where it’s really at.” Will Scott had been a competitive cyclist when he was young, and had plenty of racing medals to show for it. Mike knew that his dad wished he would take up cycling, but he