The Boy Who Failed Show and Tell by Jordan Sonnenblick

Author:Jordan Sonnenblick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

* * *

For the next few days, I feel like I am having an asthma attack every second. I am in such a panic that I can’t breathe right. I have a bald spot! It’s on the left side of my head, above and just in front of my ear. Every morning when I wake up, I rush to the bathroom and twist my head to the side to look at it. The hair doesn’t show any signs of growing back.

Now I am not just an obstreperous boy who can’t pay attention in class, or a terrible pet owner who lets all his snake’s babies die, or the third-shortest kid in my grade. Now I am the first kid ever to go bald before his tenth birthday. And I did this to myself. I am a freak.

Forget about sending me to a different school. My parents should probably just ship me off to the circus.

At school, I keep holding my breath, waiting for somebody to say something about the baldness. The only thing in the world I have to be thankful for is that the spot is on the left side of my head, and Britt Stone sits on my right side.

Things have gotten as bad as they possibly can with Mrs. Fisher, too. Now that I am not allowed to read comics, I am even more bored. I finish reading the last of the dark purple SRA cards, and then I have absolutely nothing to do, so I begin to find little art projects to keep me busy.

Basically, this consists of making little glue men inside my desk.

It’s easy and fun! Here’s how it works: First, I take my container of Elmer’s Glue-All and carefully make a glue outline of a man on the metal bottom of my desk drawer. In about ten minutes, when the outline is dry enough that I don’t get any glue on me if I poke it, I fill in the middle by pouring a puddle of glue until the whole inside of the man is covered. About half an hour after that, when the middle is dry enough to touch, but not dry enough to get stiff or brittle, I carefully peel the glue man up off the bottom of the drawer.

If everything goes right, he’s like a stretchy little puppet and I can use him to play superheroes in my desk until Mrs. Fisher is finally done with the slow readers at the back table.

Robert starts a glue man factory inside his desk, too, and this is even better. Now we can have superhero battles in our laps! If he holds his glue men down between his knees, I can see them from across the room.

Unfortunately, we get too involved in the pretend battle one day and don’t notice that Mrs. Fisher has come to stand behind me.

“JORR-dan!” she thunders.

Why is it always JORR-dan? ROBB-ert is sitting ten feet away with his hands covered in Elmer’s—how about yelling at him for a little change of pace?

I look up.

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.