Gib Rides Home by Zilpha Keatley Snyder Read Free Book Online Page B

huh?”
    Jacob laughed and poked back, and all the other shovelers stopped to look at Gib and Jacob expectantly. So they both did their famous dumb-but-happy faces that everybody looked for whenever anybody mentioned the word lucky . Looked and fell apart laughing, or, when the situation made laughing too dangerous, tried their best not to look.
    The situation at that particular moment hadn’t seemed especially dangerous. Except for the six of them, Gib, Jacob, Luke, Frankie, Abner, and Fred, no one else was in sight and the front windows of Lovell House were a long way away and pretty well frosted over. But the way it turned out, somebody must have been looking, because an hour or so later, when the six of them were in the coatroom cleaning up, Buster came in and handed Gib and Jacob report slips.
    “Report?” Jacob squealed. “Where? To who?”
    Buster sighed and shook his head. “Harding,” he said. “Harding’s classroom. Soon as you get cleaned up.”
    That was the day Gib and Jacob made the acquaintance of Mr. Paddle. On their way upstairs they tried to reassure each other that they had nothing to worry about.
    “What did we do, for heaven’s sake?” Jacob said. “I mean, we did the lucky face thing and everybody laughed some, but there was no way anyone could’ve seen that. Was there? You see how anybody could have seen us, Gib?”
    Gib agreed. “Leastways not unless they rubbed some frost off a window first.” He put an evil expression on his face and pantomimed the rubbing and peering, and Jacob did manage a weak grin. But when they reached the senior classroom they could tell immediately that they had nothing to grin about. When they walked into the classroom Mr. Harding was in his shirtsleeves, and Mr. Paddle was lying right there on his desk.
    “Sir,” Gib said hurriedly when, without a word, Mr. Harding picked up the paddle and headed in his direction. “Sir, could you tell us what we did? I mean, so we’ll know not to do it again.”
    Afterward, back in the dorm, Gib and Jacob told an audience of eight or ten other seniors about what happened. “And then old Harding kind of chuckled in that nasty way of his,” Jacob said. “‘Huh! Huh! Huh!’ And he pushed Gib down across a desk and lit into him with the paddle. ‘I—think—you—know.’” Jacob went on being Mr. Harding, showing how he swatted with every word. “‘And if—you—don’t—Mr. Paddle will—teach you.’”
    Frankie Elsworth’s face was screwed up like something was hitting him too. “Did it hurt real bad?” he asked in a jittery voice.
    Gib was easing himself down onto his cot at the moment and trying not to let his face show what his backside still felt like. But once he was flat down it wasn’t too bad. “Naw,” he said, grinning at Frankie. “It wasn’t too bad.”
    “It was bad !” Jacob shouted. “Real bad. And badder for Gib than for me. Gib got ten whacks and I only got five.”
    “Why? Why was that, Gib?” Frankie’s eyes had the same kind of shamefaced eagerness that he got when people talked dirty. “Why’d you get ten, Gib?”
    Gib had to think about that. “I dunno,” he said finally. “Probably because I asked what we’d done. Guess that was it.” He managed the beginning of a grin. “Yep. I guess that’s what Mr. Paddle taught me today. Don’t ever ask questions.”
    But a little later, when they thought Gib had gone to sleep, Jacob told Bobby and Luke something different. “It was because Gib wasn’t looking scared enough,” Jacob whispered, pulling the other boys away from Gib’s cot. “That’s what I think, anyway. What I think is, it made old Harding mad when Gib acted so kind of ... calm and collected like.”
    “Collected? What you mean by collected, Jacob?”
    Jacob sighed impatiently. Impatient with Bobby for asking such a hard question, and impatient with himself for not being able to come up with a better way of explaining what he meant. “You know, dummy,”