Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli

Author:Jerry Spinelli [SPINELLI, JERRY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV007000
ISBN: 9780316045742
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2008-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

It was October. The trees rimming the outfield were flaunting their colors. The kid and the geezer base-balled their lunchtimes away, and the after-dinner-times and weekends.

And every night, as the old man left for his room at the Y, he would grouse, “You oughta go to school.” And one night, the kid said back, “I do.”

And that’s how the old man found out what the kid was doing with his mornings.

He had noticed the books before, rows and piles of them that kept growing; but their being books, he didn’t think much of it. Now, the kid tells him, “You know the money you give me” — each morning he gave the kid fifty cents or a dollar to get himself some Krimpets — “well, I take it up to the library. Right inside the door they have these books they’re selling, cases of them, old books they don’t want anymore. They only cost five or ten cents apiece.” He pointed to the piles. “I buy them.”

He showed them to the old man. Ancient, back-broken math books, flaking travel books, warped spellers, mangled mysteries, biographies, music books, astronomy books, cookbooks.

“What’s the matter?” said the old man. “Can’t you make up your mind what kind you want?”

The kid laughed. “I want them all.” He threw his hands out. “I’m learning everything!”

He opened one of the books. “Look … geometry … triangles … okay, isosceles triangles. These two legs, they look equal to you?”

The old man squinted. He nodded.

“Okay, but can you prove it?”

The old man studied the triangle for a full minute. “If I had a ruler maybe —”

“No ruler.”

The old man sighed. “Guess I give up.”

So the kid proved it — absolutely, dead-center proved it.

Two days later, while playing pepper in the Legion infield, the old man said to the kid, “So why don’t you go ahead and teach me how to read?”

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