Read Online Last Chance by Norah McClintock - Free Book Online Page B

across the lawn to Nick and the rest of the RAD group. They were all facing Mr. Jarvis. All except Nick. He was looking at me. Looking and not smiling. I wasn’t smiling either. I was remembering something that had happened nearly four years ago. It was, as my father would have said, déjà vu all over again.

F our years ago, I attended an alternative junior high school called South Parkside Alternative—SPA, for short. The school was tiny: fifty kids in all, half in grade seven and half in grade eight, crammed into a couple of rooms on the top floor of a regular kindergarten-tograde-eight school. There were always ten times more kids who wanted to go to SPA than there were places, so those of us who got in thought we were special. SPA was more fun than regular school. We went on more field trips and did more activities, which was great but made some kids in the regular school jealous. At SPA we were encouraged to not just study issues but to get involved—for extra credit, of course.
    It was while I was at SPA that I became active in animal rights. Partly I was talked into it by Billy. Partly I was shamed into it by Morgan, who is one of life’s positive thinkers and who believes that the best thing to do when you fall off a horse is to climb right back on. While I wasn’t about to shake paws with the dog that had bitten me, I was (eventually) willing to show no hard feelings by working to defend animal rights. And that’s why Morgan, Billy, and I organized the pet pageant while we were at SPA—to raise money for Billy’s favorite animal rights charity.
    The pageant itself was the main event. We charged kids a dollar to enter their pets. We got pet supply stores and pet trainers in the area to donate items (little packages of dog and cat toys; baskets of dog, cat and hamster treats; and introductory dog training sessions) for prizes and a raffle. Two of the more artistic kids at SPA volunteered to do face painting—animal-themed, of course—for the little kids who attended. I let Morgan rope me into helping her with the cat race—which was pretty funny, because the cats didn’t seem to understand or, more likely, care that they were supposed to be in a race. You know cats. After twenty minutes of trying to herd felines of all ages and sizes in the general direction of the finish line, my eyes were watering, my nose was running, and the audience, especially its younger members, was convulsed with laughter.
    The pageant was a huge success and not just because school was let out early so that everyone could attend. We raised a lot of money.
    At the end of the day, while the rest of the SPA kids were cleaning up, Billy, Morgan, and I took the money inside to be counted. We were going to give it to our teacher to deposit in the bank so that she could send a check to the animal rights group.
    As we climbed the stairs to the top floor of the school, Morgan chattering away about how well everything had gone and Billy speculating about how much money we had raised (and probably wildly overestimating our results), I was still sneezing from exposure to the cats. SPA consisted of two large classrooms, a smaller room that served as a library, a multipurpose room where we held school meetings and ate lunch, and an office. Except for Morgan, Billy, and me, the school seemed deserted. Our teacher, Lois—we called all the teachers at SPA by their first names—said that she would come up after she had supervised the cleanup.
    Morgan unlocked the office door with the key Lois had given her. We put the money—a couple of tin cans filled with coins and a fat envelope stuffed with bills—on Lois’s desk. I pulled up a chair so that we could start counting. So did Morgan. Then Billy said he hadn’t had a chance to eat anything all day, and Morgan, who is one of those skinny girls who is always munching, said that she’d been too busy to eat too. Since they’d