Help! Somebody Get Me Out of Fourth Grade by Henry Winkler Read Free Book Online Page B

Emily’s room and flopped down on her bed like it was something I did every day.
    â€œGet your dirty sneakers off my bedspread,” she said.
    That wasn’t exactly the Hi-Hank-Welcome-to-My-Room kind of greeting I was hoping for, but I could make it work. Trying to be nice, I gave Katherine a smile as if I really liked her. She was crawling across the room, hissing at a pair of Emily’s soccer socks. Then I picked up Emily’s pillow and propped it under my head. It was stiff and made a crinkling sound when I put my head on it, not like my pillow, which is soft and fluffy.
    â€œYour pillow feels like it’s stuffed with saltine crackers,” I said.
    â€œThat shows what you know,” Emily said, looking up.
    She was sitting at her desk, painting every fingernail in a different color nail polish. “It’s filled with synthetic fibers that keep my allergies from flaring up. It’s called hypoallergenic.”
    â€œWell, if you ask me, it’s hypo-annoying,” I said.
    â€œWhy don’t you make like a tree and leaf,” Emily said.
    She laughed her little nerd laugh. Ordinarily, I would have pointed out that only kids in first grade think that joke is funny, but since I was about to ask a favor, I decided to laugh as if I hadn’t heard that joke a hundred million times. She looked a little surprised when I held my sides and gave out an earsplitting hoot.
    â€œYou’re funny, Emily,” I said, crossing my fingers and toes and anything else you could possibly cross. That girl is about as funny as a cow with gas, and we all know there’s nothing funny about that.
    I guess Emily didn’t buy my attempt to be charming, because she just stared at me and said, “What do you want, Hank?”
    â€œI want Mom and Dad to miss my parent-teacher conference on Friday.”
    Emily didn’t even answer me. Instead, she looked at Katherine and talked to her like she was a person and not a lower life-form.
    â€œGet it, Kathy? Hank wants Mom and Dad to go to the concert instead of his teacher conference.”
    Katherine looked back at Emily and hissed. Emily took that for some kind of answer, because she went on talking to Katherine like I wasn’t even in the room.
    â€œI know, Kathy. Parent-teacher conferences are no big deal for some people. Mom and Dad went to mine last week, and my teacher told them I was getting all As and that I’m highly gifted.”
    I may not be highly gifted like my sister, but at least I don’t have long conversations with hissing reptiles.
    â€œEmily, I’m over here,” I said. “Could you maybe talk to me, since I’m the only other human in the room?”
    Emily put some hot pink polish on her thumbnail, held it out, and looked at it like she was Pablo Picasso. He was a famous artist who was this really cool guy, because he walked around in shorts and no shirt even when he was eighty years old. Mr. Rock, the music teacher at my school, has told me all about him.
    â€œMom and Dad wouldn’t miss your parent-teacher conference, Hank,” Emily said in her goody-goody, know-it-all voice.
    â€œThey don’t know about it, Smarty-Pants,” I answered. “It’s not on the calendar. I moved the waxed paper and the aluminum foil and guess what? The whole month of May is blank. Plus, I’ve still got the sign-up slip in my backpack. They haven’t seen it yet.”
    Emily blew on her fingernails to dry the polish.
    â€œSo, great,” she said. “You’ve got a plan. Now can you leave my room?”
    â€œThere’s one problem, though. Dad said no to Philadelphia.”
    Katherine snapped her sticky gray tongue out at me, just missing my ankle by an inch. She had made it across the room and was lying on some soccer shorts next to the bed, her snout resting on Emily’s pile of lavender vocabulary flash cards. Boy, if that wasn’t a cover shot for Geek World