Read Wonder for Free Online Page B

His skin gets all shriveled up and his whole face just kind of melts.
    I peeked at Julian and he was looking at me. Yeah, he knew what he was saying.

Choose Kind
    There was a lot of shuffling around when the bell rang and everybody got up to leave. I checked my schedule and it said my next class was English, room 321. I didn’t stop to see if anyone else from my homeroom was going my way: I just zoomed out of the class and down the hall and sat down as far from the front as possible. The teacher, a really tall man with a yellow beard, was writing on the chalkboard.
    Kids came in laughing and talking in little groups but I didn’t look up. Basically, the same thing that happened in homeroom happened again: no one sat next to me except for Jack, who was joking around with some kids who weren’t in our homeroom. I could tell Jack was the kind of kid other kids like. He had a lot of friends. He made people laugh.
    When the second bell rang, everyone got quiet and the teacher turned around and faced us. He said his name was Mr. Browne, and then he started talking about what we would be doing this semester. At a certain point, somewhere between
A Wrinkle in Time
and
Shen of the Sea
, he noticed me but kept right on talking.
    I was mostly doodling in my notebook while he talked, but every once in a while I would sneak a look at the other students. Charlotte was in this class. So were Julian and Henry. Miles wasn’t.
    Mr. Browne had written on the chalkboard in big block letters:
    P-R-E-C-E-P-T!
    “Okay, everybody write this down at the very top of the very first page in your English notebook.”
    As we did what he told us to do, he said: “Okay, so who can tell me what a precept is? Does anyone know?”
    No one raised their hands.
    Mr. Browne smiled, nodded, and turned around to write on the chalkboard again:
    PRECEPTS = RULES ABOUT REALLY IMPORTANT THINGS!
    “Like a motto?” someone called out.
    “Like a motto!” said Mr. Browne, nodding as he continued writing on the board. “Like a famous quote. Like a line from a fortune cookie. Any saying or ground rule that can motivate you. Basically, a precept is anything that helps guide us when making decisions about really important things.”
    He wrote all that on the chalkboard and then turned around and faced us.
    “So, what are some
really important
things?” he asked us.
    A few kids raised their hands, and as he pointed at them, they gave their answers, which he wrote on the chalkboard in really, really sloppy handwriting:
    RULES. SCHOOLWORK. HOMEWORK.
    “What else?” he said as he wrote, not even turning around. “Just call things out!” He wrote everything everyone called out.
    FAMILY. PARENTS. PETS.
    One girl called out: “The environment!”
    THE ENVIRONMENT.
    he wrote on the chalkboard, and added:
    OUR WORLD!
    “Sharks, because they eat dead things in the ocean!” said one of the boys, a kid named Reid, and Mr. Browne wrote down
    SHARKS.
    “Bees!” “Seatbelts!” “Recycling!” “Friends!”
    “Okay,” said Mr. Browne, writing all those things down. He turned around when he finished writing to face us again. “But no one’s named the most important thing of all.”
    We all looked at him, out of ideas.
    “God?” said one kid, and I could tell that even though Mr. Browne wrote “God” down, that wasn’t the answer he was looking for. Without saying anything else, he wrote down:
    WHO WE ARE!
    “Who we are,” he said, underlining each word as he said it. “Who we are! Us! Right? What kind of people are we? What kind of person are you? Isn’t that the most important thing of all? Isn’t that the kind of question we should be asking ourselves all the time? “What kind of person am I?
    “Did anyone happen to notice the plaque next to the door of this school? Anyone read what it says? Anyone?”
    He looked around but no one knew the answer.
    “It says: ‘Know Thyself,’ ” he said, smiling and nodding. “And learning who you are is what