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me.
    “Shh, here she comes” is what I hear when I come through the door of Miss Hall’s room. Nothing like hearing that when you’re about to go somewhere you don’t want to be in the first place.
    “You better sit quick, Carrie Parker,” Luanne Kibley says, “or Mommy’ll send you to your room without supper.” The class erupts like a volcano; they’ve been waiting for me.
    “Did you and Daddy have a nice talk?” Mary Sellers sings to me from over the din.
    “Who’s your uncle?” Tommy Bucksmith shouts. “Mr.treng. 9” Mr. Streng is our principal. Everyone hates Mr. Streng except maybe Daisy, his one-eyed dachshund who sleeps on a checkered cushion in the corner of his office.
    Where is Miss Hall?
    The skies have turned black outside—the clouds are ready to break open with water, I can just feel it. I hope it waits till after we’ve gotten home. I know I’m just trying to come up with things to think

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    about other than where I am right now, but can you blame me? When I’m a teacher I’ll show up to class on time, that’s for sure.
    “All right, people,” Miss Hall says before she even shuts the door. “Everyone please get out your social studies workbooks and turn to
    page nineteen. I hope y’all remembered to read this over last night “

    I didn’t. I don’t even remember her telling us to. What else is new?

THREE
    iht now I’m in our room with the ceiling that leans in like it’s protecting our beds from the sky. Our room is the best part of the house, but Richard thinks it’s the worst. I suppose I can see his point, because even though it’s only May, it’s hotter than Hades in July and the only window up here has a fan in it that only sucks the air out of the room. When Richard moved in, he stomped up through the house with the boxes from the back of his truck and told us we’d better get on up the stairs with the string that pulls them down from the ceiling. No one’s gonna build our nest for us anymore, he said, so we better start getting used to it. Ever since he called our room the nest, that’s what we call it, too. I didn’t know what was up his sleeve but I went up the stairs first, which is surprising considering how Emma’s normally the brave one. Once we were at the top he pushed the stairs back up–something he still does to this day. Because it’s summer, the hot 44

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    air in the Nest hits you in the face like the cloud of smelly smoke that shoots out from behind Richard’s truck every time he pulls out from the side of the house. There’s only that one side that you cain’t stand up straight in and that’s where our bed is. Our quilt on the bed we share is patchwork and reminds me of Little House on the Prairie.
    The ceiling has a lot of cobwebs and all I can think of is Charlotte and Wilbur in one of my all-time favorite stories about the pig and the spider who get to be friends. I wonder if spiders can really spell like that in their webs. And since these webs are on the high side of the ceiling that’s not where the bed is, I let them stay…until I see a spider dropping down. Emma loves it up here. She knows now that you can’t jump up and down on the bed and it only took her three bruises to figure it out. She likes to put the window fan on and talk into it really slowly, and to tell you the truth I like that, too. At first she wouldn’t go near it because she thought her hair would get pulled off her head, but now she knows to put it in a ponytail and then there’s no risk. She says things like “I hate you, Richard” and “You will die” and “Leave us alone” right into the fan, knowing he cain’t hear a thing because the fan blades chop the air into little pieces and carry her words out and away from the house. I don’t think she cares if he does hear her, anyway, since sometimes, when he lays into Momma real bad, she shouts right into it before it gets itself up to speed.
    I can hear Richard right