True Colors by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock Read Free Book Online

one of the magazines, an old
Reader’s Digest
.
    “We can play school,” Nadine said. “I’ll be the teacher and see how many of the words you know from ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.’ ”
    I stared at her in disbelief. The old Nadine would never have suggested that; she knew how much I hated school, especially vocabulary tests.
    I never did well on Miss Paisley’s vocabulary tests. We had to give both the correct spelling
and
the definition, so I was pretty much doomed from the start. I was always getting mixed up on words like
receive, niece
, and
sleigh
and all those rules to follow like “
i
before
e
except after
c
,” and those were easy compared to the ones Miss Paisley gaveus, words like
propitious
and
pernicious
and
perspicacious
, which doesn’t have anything to do with perspiration, but it should. That word made me sweat just
hearing
it!
Perspicacious
means “having keen judgment or understanding,” but I couldn’t figure out why we needed to know words like
perspicacious
. I’d never heard
anyone
use that word, and it seemed to me that if you
had
keen judgment, you wouldn’t be throwing around a word like
perspicacious
, which probably gave you a good chance of getting a knuckle sandwich. I mean, I couldn’t exactly see myself saying to Dennis or Wesley Wright, “It would not be perspicacious of you to steal my lunchbox.”
    Perspicacious
had thrown me into such a panic that when I remembered how Sally Morley’s nosebleed had made Robert Perkins faint dead away and Miss Paisley had been so busy tending to both of them that she’d given us recess the rest of the afternoon, I figured I had nothing to lose and closed my eyes, leaned sideways, and landed with a thud on the floor.
    Sally gasped, and little Mary Richardson started crying, but Miss Paisley didn’t even look up from her desk.
    “We can do without your histrionics, Blue,” she said.
    Apparently, I had not been perspicacious enough to realize Miss Paisley wouldn’t fall for that. At least she didn’t put
histrionics
on the test, but I got a C– anyway.
    Miss Paisley also threw words like
ptarmigan
at us. How’s a body to know that
ptarmigan
has a silent
p
at thestart? After that, when she said
tolerant
, I thought, Aha! She’s trying to fool us. It must have a silent
p
, too.
    It doesn’t. I got a D+ on that test.
    I thought Miss Paisley should be more tolerant about letting me spell words the way I wanted. If the English could throw in extra letters, why couldn’t I?
    So you can see why I was
not
interested in “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.”
    “Crepuscular
,
”
Nadine said. “Does it mean (a) having to do with an infection, (b) pertaining to the abdomen, (c) happening at twilight, or (d) absorbent?”
    It sounded like a word Miss Paisley would give us, but I couldn’t remember ever hearing it, so I chose (a).
    “Nope,” said Nadine. “Twilight. Fireflies are crepuscular insects, for example.”
    The only person I could imagine
using
a word like
crepuscular
was Miss Paisley. Or Nadine. Or Mr. Gilpin.
    “Okay, how about
auspicious
?” Nadine said.
    I was pretty sure Miss Paisley
had
put
auspicious
on a vocabulary test, but I couldn’t remember what it meant.
    “Somebody who’s guilty?” I said.
    “Wrong,” said Nadine. “You’re thinking
suspicious. Auspicious
means ‘promising’ or ‘encouraging,’ like an auspicious beginning.”
    “Beginning of what?” I muttered, but Nadine ignored me.
    I found out that
avuncular
meant “being like an uncle,”
cantankerous
was another word for “crabby” or “cranky,” and
filch
meant “to steal something of little value.”
    “Wow,” said Nadine. “I can’t believe you haven’t gotten a single one right.”
    I was beginning to feel cantankerous with both
Reader’s Digest
and Nadine and didn’t want to play the game anymore, but Nadine was just getting started.
    “For Christmas, I got a book on phobias,” Nadine said. “Do you know