Read Online A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries by Kaylie Jones - Free Book Online Page B

is in Vienna training to become an opera singer. People who have heard her sing say she has a strong voice. Gillis, the Princess Child, is still a princess child. She married a very rich and very old film producer and lives in Beverly Hills with his two daughters who are at least five years her senior. Fortunately, none of the Smith girls are readers of fiction, or it would never have occurred to me to write this story.

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
    Riding home on the public bus on the first Friday of the first week of 7 ème , fifth grade, I came to a stupefying realization: There wasn’t a teacher in the school or a student in my class who liked me.
    It was a long bus ride home; usually Candida came to get me in the car but today she had an appointment with people from the government about her working papers, and my mother had an important tea. I was relieved to be alone, and sat on the quiet, not-so-crowded bus, pondering my realization for a long time.
    It had been apparent since the first day of school that my reputation among the teachers had preceded me. But I asked myself, was I really all that bad? All that much worse than anybody else?
    I figured I’d made one huge mistake with a teacher, and that had been in last year’s history class.
    We were studying ancient Greece for half the year. I already knew more than anybody about ancient Greece because the previous summer my father had taken the family to a tiny, hot Greek island. Since there was nothing to do on the island at night, he had read us the entire Iliad and Odyssey during the two-and-a-half-month vacation.
    It seemed incredible and wonderful to me that my brother and I could understand every word our father read out of the huge, leather-bound book he’d brought from Paris. One night I peeked over his shoulder as he was reading and saw that the words he said weren’t always the ones written down. I remembered seeing, for example, “Exclaimed Ulysses” when he read “Ulysses cried out.”
    I became so enthralled by the gods and heroes that I wrote my favorite ones letters. My father ceremoniously burned the notes on a small pyre on the beach, to ensure that the messages would reach their destination.
    “Dere Athena,” I wrote, “I am youre friend. I am so happie you like the Greeks and not the Trojans. Please send me a signe—Channe Willis.”
    Or, “Dere Achilles, My daddie says demi-gods are not imortelle but I am writing you any way. Will you merry me if I die and go to Hadies?—Channe Willis.”

    Last year’s history teacher had been very young and nervous, and boring. She had red hair tied in a large knot at the back of her head and a face so pale she almost disappeared when she stood against the white wall. Her voice was flat and quiet, even when she described battles. Then one day she made a terrible mistake while drawing the battle of Troy on the blackboard with colored chalk. She said that Athena whisked Paris away and saved his life as Agamemnon was about to slaughter him in front of the gates of Troy.
    “It wasn’t Athena,” I yelled out, “it was Aphrodite!” The teacher turned as red as her chignon and mumbled, “ Et bien , Mademoiselle , maybe you would like to instruct the class, since you obviously find me unfit for the task.”
    I felt terrible and wanted to apologize (even though I was right), but it was too late. After that I tried to be polite and apply myself, but between us it was war.
    When I discussed this with my father, he explained that not all grown-ups behaved like grown-ups. The bigger you got, he said, the bigger your ego got.
    “Try to be nice to her,” he suggested, “let her feel she knows more than you.”
    But the teacher continued to give me five out of tens on all my tests and projects no matter how hard I tried.

    So—this year they had been ready for me—they chided me for my big, bad mouth, my bossiness, my pushiness, and my flirtatious nature (no one knew the extent of my flirtatious nature, thank God).