Read Online The Revealing by Suzanne Woods Fisher - Free Book Online

she could back toward Eagle Hill, reading the newspaper, admiring the Mrs. Miracle column. It was well written, and she tried not to feel proud, but she did. When she had nearly reached the driveway to Eagle Hill, she felt someone over her shoulder.
    “My sisters love that column too. They fight over who gets to read it aloud.”
    Jesse Stoltzfus, of all people! Mim snapped the paper shut and tucked it under her arm. “Mrs. Miracle would say that it’s only good manners for a person to let another person know that the person is there.”
    Jesse was staring at her with his mouth open, as if he didn’t hear her properly. He thumped the side of his head with the palm of his hand, like he was shaking water from his ear. “But . . . I did.” He tipped his felt hat back on his forehead. “Good thing you’re not writing a newspaper column. That was the most confusing sentence a person ever said to another person.” He grinned and took off his hat, bowing and sweeping his hat in a big arc. “This person needs to be on his way, if the other person will excuse this person.”
    Jackanapes! That boy always tried to best her. It irked her that Danny—who used to be her special friend before he got so high and mighty and puffed up—he only encouraged Jesse Stoltzfus’s gargantuan ego. Just this afternoon, he had read Jesse’s composition aloud. “I am sure,” Danny told the class, “that all of you were as impressed as I was by Jesse’s exciting essay.”
    Impressed? Mim was dumbfounded. Jesse wrote a heartstopping composition about a time when he was lost in a snowstorm and had to make a snow cave to survive the night. Jesse described the sound of the wind and the bite of the cold so clearly she felt right there with him, in the middle of the blizzard, gasping for breath, trying to push down panic as he dug a snow cave deep down in a world of no light and little air.
    How could she be all in a tremble just listening to Danny read about it? It actually hurt to listen—she was that jealous of Jesse’s writing ability. Mim labored painfully over her writing, every single sentence; Jesse scribbled things down and turned them in before school or during recess. She had seen him! He had forgotten the essay that was due today and dashed it off during lunch.
    On the other hand, Danny always caught Mim when her mind was on vacation, though he never suspected Jesse of not paying attention. Danny had one of those tricky voices. It would buzz along for several minutes quite comfortably, then bang! he was focused in and asking you a question.
    Earlier in the week, Danny had cornered Mim with a question out of the blue, when she was a million miles away. Her mind went completely blank. Throughout the classroom she heard a shuffling of feet and paper, waiting for her to answer him. She could feel everyone’s eyes boring into her. Mose Blank was staring at her so intently she thought his crossed eyes might switch sockets. “Parakeets can live nearly twenty years,” she blurted out and the class roared with laughter. Turned out Danny had asked her the names of the different kinds of cloud formations in the sky.
    Dumb, dumb, dumb.
    Then he asked Jesse the names of clouds and of coursehe knew the answers, including the Latin translations of the words: cumulus , heap; stratus , layer; nimbus , rain; cirrus , curl of hair. Wasn’t that just like Jesse, to answer more than the teacher had asked for? Danny was delighted. Mim thought Jesse was showing off.
    Jesse was one of those boys who sat quietly at his desk doing beautiful schoolwork, never daydreaming or shooting spit wads or chewing gum, and yet he was so full of shenanigans that if Teacher Danny could have once known what was running through that carrot-red-sticky-up-haired head, he would have thrown him out of the schoolhouse in horror.
    She sneaked a glance over at Jesse. He was totally absorbed in his geography book, or so it would appear to anyone who didn’t know. He must