Read Online Don't Care High by Gordon Korman - Free Book Online

digestive system. He sat down heavily at the kitchen table and noticed that Sheldon had left Mike’s confidential file sitting there. Curiosity overcoming heartburn, he began to study it.
    OTIS, MICHAEL
BORN: APRIL 1, 1968
PLACE: FINCH, OKLAHOMA
    An odd feeling came over Paul, one that had nothing to do with the Ton-o’-Fries, and he all but ran to his room for the large family atlas.
    â€œNorth Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma… Finch… aha!” There
was
no Finch, Oklahoma. Paul was not surprised.
    Replacing the atlas, he wandered to the window. Well, this certainly was a situation. Raincoat and safety pins notwithstanding, Mike Otis didn’t seem to exist. Out of a school of twenty-six hundred students, Sheldon had picked at random the only one with no past and no present. As for the future, Paul could only shrug out the open window. It boggled the imagination.
    * * *
    A burst of flame caught his eye, and he squinted into a window of the building across the street. It was a fire-eater, getting in a little extra practice at homße. Paul found it pretty mundane, actually, when compared to Mike Otis’s uncanny ability to disappear off the face of the earth.
    It was as though the fire-eater had guessed Paul’s thoughts and was insulted, because he stuck his head out the window and blew a fireball at Paul. Involuntarily, Paul jumped back.
    Flash Flood’s voice reached him from the living room. “It’s seven forty-six in the greatest city in the world. The late traffic is a mess in the tunnels, and the weather is going to be lousy. Face it, the world’s too complicated to try and figure out tonight, so stay home and stay tuned to the old Double 9.”
    Paul smiled in spite of himself. Flash Flood was no dummy.

5
    R olling into the third week of school, a number of things changed. The weather went from insufferably hot to unseasonably cold, and naturally, the climate control system that governed the air inside Don Carey High School was taken completely by surprise. The school staff apparently gave up trying to meet with student body president Mike Otis, as he was no longer mentioned in morning announcements. And Paul Abrams became the first student ever to understand fully the system employed by the LaPaz triplets.
    Lucy, Shirley and Rose LaPaz, identical in every way, were in Paul’s math class, his second-to-last class of the day. Only one of the LaPazes was registered for the course, and therefore only one would attend any given math class. However, Paul had begun to notice he would be in class with a different LaPaz every day. They were quite open about their respective identities, and did not mind Paul’s leading questions, but they would not reveal to anyone the secret and purpose of their system.
    Through careful observation, though, Paul had worked it out. Each girl would receive her schedule of six courses, and would immediately request that she be changed out of any course she might share with a sister. Mr. Morrison, ecstatic over students showing an interest in the curriculum, would be only too happy to oblige. This left the sisters with a total of eighteen courses, through which they rotated in turn. Come exam time, there was a great pooling of information, and finals would be divided up, six apiece, each test to be written by the most capable in the subject.
    â€œWow!” exclaimed Sheldon when Paul let him in on his findings. “Ambition, you never cease to amaze me.”
    When they confronted Rose LaPaz with the theory, she seemed pleasantly surprised. “That’s quite a piece of detective work.”
    â€œOh, we never would have figured it out,” said Sheldon modestly. “But Mike Otis knew it for a long time.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œMike Otis, our student body president. He’s unbeatable.”
    Rose looked impressed and went off to tell her sisters.
    That was the way it was becoming with Sheldon, Paul