All the King's Horses by Laura C Stevenson Read Free Book Online Page B

She smiled, showing brown stumps where her teeth should have been. ‘Have a good time,’ she said.
    A good time in Wheelock School – sure. Right after the Pledge of Allegiance, Miss Turner looked at Tiffany’s math worksheets and found that she hadn’t done any of the problems for the last week; so she said Tiffany would have to go ‘Downstairs’. I’d learned by now that meant the Detention Room. I offered to help Tiffany with her math so she wouldn’t have to go, but all that did was make Miss Turner look at my sheets, which meant she saw
My Friend Flicka
on my lap and took it away. Miss Turner went to the front of the room and wrote problems on the board, telling all of us we were falling behind the Russians because they knew more math (as if it was
our
fault that they’d just launched a second Sputnik). I was beginning to glaze over, when suddenly the piece of chalk she’d just put down disappeared. She stared at the tray, then at the floor, but it was totally missing, so she went to her desk and got another piece. Most of the kids didn’t notice (I guess they were glazed over, too), but it cheered me up.
    The next cheering-up thing that happened was that Tiffany sat next to me at lunch, instead of trying to sit at a table all by herself. It was so noisy we couldn’t talk much until most of the kids had left, but then she gave me a Tiffany smile and said, ‘You know Mr Crewes, that teacher I said was really nice? He was Downstairs today, and he told me he’d like to meet you. Would that be OK? He’s over there.’ She pointed across the lunch-room to a man who had one of those faces that would tell you he was a teacher in a line-up of a thousand people. He nodded in a friendly way when he saw us looking at him, but just as he got up, a short, square man teacher hurried up to him and started talking anxiously about something.
    ‘Who’s that?’ I said.
    ‘Mr Stegeth,’ she said, looking surprised I didn’t know. ‘Your brother’s teacher.’
    ‘Oh!’ I said. And right then, I stopped being worried that it was worry about Grandpa that was making Colin be ‘disruptive’ in class. After you’ve been in school awhile, you can tell when a teacher is the kind who teaches only the stuff in the textbook and feels threatened if kids want to know more. It doesn’t always mean the teacher is stupid – but try, just try, to tell Colin that.
    Mr Crewes took care of whatever was both ering Mr Stegeth in a few seconds and walked over to us. Most teachers would have started right in talking to me, but he let Tiffany introduce us, and he shook my hand. ‘Glad to meet you, Sarah,’ he said. ‘Tiffany says you and your brother transferred from Maple Street School. How are you settling in here?’
    ‘I’m settling in fine,’ I said, ‘but my brother—’ Then I remembered that Tiffany had said Mr Crewes had been Downstairs, and I thought,
uh-oh
. ‘Um … have you met him?’
    ‘I met him this morning. Just briefly. We didn’t have time to talk.’
    So they’d sent Colin Downstairs, and Mom couldn’t work things out because she didn’t know. I gulped. ‘Well, my brother is … like our dad – precocious. Is that the word?’
    ‘That depends upon what you need a word for,’ said Mr Crewes.
    ‘Somebody whose mind grows up before the rest of him.’
    He nodded, looking kind of interested.
    ‘It was a problem, even at Maple Street School, because it means he gets bored easily, and then he gets fresh. So last year, they skipped him. He was still way ahead, but it worked, because the classes were small and the teachers were really good – but I guess nobody warned this school, because they put him in Mr Stegeth’s class.’ Suddenly, I realized what I’d said, and I blushed.
    Mr Crewes didn’t seem to notice. ‘So it’s a matter of keeping him interested, is it? I thought so. Let’s see. Would your dad be willing to help him at home if Mr Stegeth assigned him more advanced work?’
    I shook