Read Online Jumping the Scratch by Sarah Weeks - Free Book Online

into the air, but Arthur’s back was to the class as hewrote on the board, so he couldn’t see her. Finally, unable to contain herself, she blurted out, “I know! I know! Those are the five senses.”
    â€œYes,” Arthur said, putting down the chalk and turning around to face us again. “And they are your five best friends when it comes to descriptive writing. If you’re writing about your grandmother’s kitchen, don’t just tell us what it looks like; use some of your other senses too. Tell us what it smells like when you walk into the room or what the countertop feels like when you run your hand over it. What sound do her shoes make when she walks across the floor to hug you hello? Using as many of your senses as you can will help make your writing come alive.”
    He gave us ten minutes to write about our special place. I spent the whole time thinking about my room back in Battle Creek.
    I thought about lying in my bed in the dark, talking to Mister. In summertime at night with the windows open it smelled like…cut grass and charcoal from the barbecue grill. Some of the older boys from the neighborhood called out to each other, laughing as they played Capture the Flag inthe moonlight. I heard the sound of my parents’ voices downstairs, talking back and forth in the kitchen, water running, and the clinking of dinner dishes being washed. The warm breeze made the curtains pouf out like those skirts ballerinas wear, and crickets made the air buzz. I’d hold my fingers against Mister’s throat and feel him purring steadily like the old treadle sewing machine my mother kept up in the attic. I ticked off the senses on my fingers: one, two, three, four. Which one had I left out? Oh, right: taste. If a room could taste of something, what would mine have tasted of? Chocolate pudding and cinnamon toast, blue raspberry ice pops from the Good Humor truck, and my mother’s lipsticky good-night kisses when she and my father got dressed up and went out to cocktail parties and special anniversary dinners together.
    â€œOkay. Time’s up. Anybody want to volunteer to read what they wrote?” Arthur asked, looking out expectantly over the class sitting before him on the floor.
    Mary Lynne was the only one with her hand up.
    â€œHow about someone we haven’t heard fromyet this morning?” Arthur said, looking around.
    Audrey Krouch pulled at her collar and tentatively raised her hand. She had written a description of riding in her father’s car. She said that he always let her sit in the front and pick out the radio stations, and that she liked to look at the maps he kept folded up under the front seat. She said she especially liked the way it smelled like her father inside the car when you first got in. I thought it was pretty good, what she wrote, but Larry made a rude comment about how her dad must have bad BO to be able to stink up a whole car that way, and Miss Miller gave him the big fisheye for a change.
    A few other kids read, and finally Arthur called on Mary Lynne, who looked as if she might explode if she didn’t get to go next. Hers was lame. She had tried to suck up by using Arthur’s idea of writing about her grandmother’s kitchen, but she said the countertop felt like Formica and it sounded like shoes on the floor when her grandma ran over to hug her hello. I looked over at Audrey to see if she was having the same reaction I was, but she was still busy scowling atLarry Baywood for what he’d said about her dad’s having BO.
    No matter how bad any of the descriptions were, after each person read, Arthur said something encouraging. “Nice work.” “Good effort.” “Interesting choice.”
    Once they realized they weren’t going to get slammed even if what they wrote stank, they all wanted to “share,” as Miss Miller insisted on calling it. Larry Baywood hammed it up when he read his, adding stuff