Lost in the Sun by Lisa Graff Read Free Book Online Page A

a book. And now that I’d seen what the last line was, I was desperate to find out how the story started. It was only natural to wonder about a thing like that.
    Still, for some reason I couldn’t quite explain, I felt like a real jerk for wondering it.

FOUR
    My first clue that sixth grade was going to suck worse than Mom had predicted was when I walked into my homeroom, Room C-78: Ms. Emerson.
    Ms. Emerson was a wrinkled old crone. You could tell, as soon as you looked at her, that she’d been teaching for about a million years, and she’d hated every second of it, and that she was most definitely going to hate
you.
Her room, too, was like a wrinkled old crone’s lair. Instead of desks, the room was filled with long rows of tables with stools in front of them. And the rows, no joke, had
ovens
inside them. Real ovens, like if you got mouthy, the wrinkled old crone would turn up the heat and shove you inside and roast you. (The knobs on the ovens had been pulled off, and the doors were sealed shut with duct tape, I guess so no sixth graders could roast each other. But I had a feeling the wrinkled old crone knew a way around that trick.) At the very front of the classroom, where there should be the big teacher’sdesk, was a huge bank with a long row of stovetops (knobs removed there, too), and a giant industrial sink.
    It was weird.
    Anyway, I was standing in the doorway, staring at the creepy homeroom with the ovens, when somebody—turned out it was Sarah Delfino—knocked past me into the room and said, “Hey, move it already. Some of us are trying to sit down.” And when she knocked me, my elbow rammed into the shelf beside the door, which just happened to be holding an enormous potted plant, and the thing started sliding off the shelf and probably would’ve crashed to the floor and smashed into a thousand pieces, but thankfully I’m pretty fast and I caught it.
    Ms. Emerson, that wrinkled old crone, she saw the whole thing. She snapped to attention at the front of the room. “Hey, there!” she called over to me. And I knew, I just
knew,
she wasn’t going to thank me for my super-fast plant-catching moves, or ask me if my elbow was okay. And I was right. Because instead she shouted at me, “You be careful with that plant! It’s very special to me.” Which was idiotic, because how could a plant be special? And also, once I looked around the room, I realized that she had about four bajillion potted plants, stuck on shelves along every wall, against the windows in the back, even tall ones up front. So what was this stupid plant so special for?
    I didn’t ask, obviously. I shoved the plant back in place, where it wouldn’t smash to the ground and shatter (even though I sort of wanted to watch that happen, just to see the old crone’s face), and found a stool no one was sitting on yet. And I sat.
    Well, I’d never had a homeroom before, so I didn’t know what to expect. But it turned out it was about as exciting as every other class I’d had in my whole life, which is to say, not very. Ms. Emerson took roll and then went over the rules with us (the usual: No hitting, no talking out of turn, show respect, blah blah blah). And I stared at the wrinkled old crone and pictured how I’d draw her in my Book of Thoughts, if I ever felt like doing that. She’d have bat wings, like the bat she was, and an old-lady cane, and a speech bubble coming out of her mouth that said, “Potted plants are my very best friends!”
    Okay, it needed a little work.
    I was tired, anyway, because Doug and his stupid friend Annie Richards had tried to pull their alarm clock prank the night before. Too bad for them Aaron figured out what they were up to before he went to sleep (probably because they didn’t hide the clocks in his room very well—I would’ve given them plenty of good places to hide them if I’d been helping, but I