Ellie Makes Her Move by Marilyn Kaye

Author:Marilyn Kaye [Kaye, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Holiday House
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

I DIDN’T WORK ON MY ROBERT FROST POEM Saturday night. After my encounter with Mike Twersky that afternoon, I had absolutely no desire to concentrate on poetic words and try to figure out their inner meaning. Maybe if it had been a love poem, I would have found it more interesting.

Fortunately, my parents were going out, so I didn’t have to hide in my room and pretend to be working. As soon as they left, I went into a certain closet where Mom and Dad had tossed a lot of stuff they never used anymore, like their skis and old DVDs. It was so weird to think they had been young once, but these DVDs were evidence of that. I picked out two with covers I liked—The Breakfast Club and Grease.

In the end, I had a very nice evening stuffing my face with popcorn and zoning out, but that meant I had to attack Robert Frost on Sunday. Late in the morning, I opened the book I’d checked out of the library and found the poem I’d been assigned.

It was called “Fire and Ice,” and I was very pleased to see that it wasn’t long at all. How much symbolism and inner meaning could be packed into nine short lines? I was even more pleased when I read it through and found it easy to understand. It was all about how the world could end, in fire or in ice. Robert Frost says he’d go with fire, but then he says ice would work too.

Not a complicated poem, but my heart sank. I could sum it up in three seconds. How was I going to talk about it for five full minutes?

Ms. Gonzalez said we had to relate the poem to our own lives. So I figured I should talk about how I thought the world would end. Which was not something I’d ever thought about.

Now I tried to think about it. I saw a movie once where an atomic bomb fell and everyone was slowly dying of radiation poisoning. Radiation—that would be sort of like fire.

I groaned aloud at the idea. This was so depressing! Here I was, finally feeling sort of okay about life—this poem was going to really bring me down. I put the book aside and went downstairs to see what we were having for lunch.

“Cold roast beef,” my father informed me as he perused the refrigerator contents. “Leftover chicken.”

“And there’s coleslaw and veggies,” my mother added. Then, to me, she said, “Did you finish your homework?”

“Just about,” l lied. And then I had an inspiration. “You know, this English thing we have to do is an oral report. Could I ask Alyssa and Rachel to come over after lunch so we can practice the reports on each other?”

I got permission and ran upstairs to retrieve my cell phone. Then I remembered—I didn’t have their phone numbers. I went back downstairs.

My mother was putting platters of food on the kitchen table. “Are they coming?”

“I couldn’t call them, I don’t have their numbers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.