Read Online 100 Days and 99 Nights by Alan Madison - Free Book Online Page B

whole. Standing at the door was Principal Pershing calling out my whole first name and sometimes my last name in front of the whole class.
    “Esmerelda. Esmerelda McCarther . . . Esmerelda. Esmerelda McCarther . . .”
    How long had she been standing there? Did she know I wasn’t listening to the tower of tens that Ms. Pitcher properly summed up? How many times had she called my name? I wanted to crawl into my desk and hide behind the ruler, but being too big for that . . .
    “Esmerelda, a moment,” she inchwormed her pointer at me, requesting my immediate attention.
    Slow-rising from my seat, I winced in pain at her continued use of my extended first name. Then I wondered why and then worried why I was being called out of class ten minutes before school was over. Everyone’s eyes grabbed at me, trying to hold me down, but the pull of that inchworming principal’s finger was just too strong. I zigzagged through the desks toward the door and halfway there I thought of why and my knees started to shake. Not me. Please not me. Each classmate I passed looked down at their doodle-filled notebook, as if, like the flu, they could catch whatever the principal was going to give to me. Not me. Please not me. Martina smiled lightly and gave me the ol’ thumbs-up as I exited.
    “Your brother is in my office,” stated the principal plainly when we stepped out into the hall.
    “Ike?” I asked for no particular reason but to fill up the empty hallway air. I didn’t have another brother. Ike it was.
    “He has had a bad day. A scuffle in the yard.”
    My knees gradually stopped their crazy rhythms. My stomach stopped doing gymnastic tumbles and the corners of my mouth turned up away from frown toward a sky-high smile. It wasn’t my nightly nightmare become real in the day. It was okay — only Ike, in a “scuffle.”
    “There is nothing funny about a fight, young lady.”
    “No, ma’am. I’m sure Ike didn’t start . . .”
    But she was down the hall before I could finish.
    In the main office, Ike was perched at the edge of that very same pencil-scarred wooden bench that ran along the faded blue construction-papered bulletin board. The left knee of his pants was ripped and his angry face was finger-painted with streaks of dirty tears.
    “What happened?”
    “I got into a fight with Stony, he . . .”
    “This way, you two.”
    Principal Pershing swung open the heavy wooden door that bore her gold-plaqued name and title. We climbed into the two heavy wooden chairs and stared across the wide expanse of the cluttered, heavy wooden desk at our principal’s creased face.
    “Isaac, would you care to tell your sister what happened?”
    “He said he was going to hit me. . . .”
    Stony and Ike had a history, so the idea that they had an argument did not surprise me. They were what Mom called “light-switch friends” — on again, off again. When they were on they were “thick as a brick and as sweet as honey,” and when they were off . . . But a fistfight . . . Ike, even though his curious Ike Sense often guided his actions, wasn’t like that at all.
    “He’s half your size,” I pointed out.
    “. . . with a stick. He said he was going to hit me with a stick . . . a big one,” he added, and stressed the “big” to help excuse his actions.
    I looked up to see if the “big stick” story held any water with the principal. Not even a teaspoon.
    “Did he hit you with the stick?” she quietly queried.
    I swiveled back to Ike, almost hoping. He sad-shook his head.
    “Did he even have a stick?” she calm-continued.
    “Not that I saw . . . no, but he said . . .”
    Having barely one leg to stand on, his hurt voice limped away. Ike had hit a kid in the playground who was half his size because the kid had threatened to hit him with a stick. This was Ike Sense at its worst! The bell rang, interrupting Ms. Pershing and releasing our classmates for the day. Her mouth twisted in impatient knots as she waited for the clanging