6 Ch6-The Truth About Miss Small

Chapter 6 The Truth About Miss Small At our school the cafeteria and the audi- torium are the same room, so it's called the cafetorium. But all the kids call it the vomitorium ever since some kinder- garten kid barfed in there last year. I sit at a lunch table with Ryan and Michael and a few other boys. Andrea

and Emily and some of their friends sit at the table next to ours. Sometimes for fun we peel the paper off our straws and shoot them at the girls. They usually laugh, except for the time I hit Emily in the face and she cried. I gave my tuna sandwich to Ryan, and he gave me his Scooter Pie. Ryan will eat anything, even disgusting vegetables. One time me and Michael mixed up some milk and ketchup and mayonnaise in a cup. It was really gross, and I thought I was gonna throw up just looking at it. Ryan said he would drink it if we gave him a pack of baseball cards. So we gave him a pack of baseball cards and he

drank it (the drink, not the baseball cards). Ryan is weird. "That Miss Small must be seven feet tall," Ryan said. "If I was as tall as she is," Michael said, "I wouldn't be a gym teacher. I'd be a professional basketball player." "I would be a weatherman," Ryan said.

"Why?" I asked. "Because when you're that tall, you can tell it's raining before anybody else. So you can predict the weather." "Tall people can reach stuff on the top shelf without even having to stand on a chair, too," Michael said. "But I guess it must be really hard to tie your shoes

when you're so tall." "She should tie her shoes first and then put them on," Ryan said. At the table next to ours, Andrea Young turned around with her big dumb face. "You can't tie your shoes and then put them on," she said. "Can too," I said, and I shot my straw wrapper at Andrea. "I only tie my shoes once— the day my mom buys them. What's the point of untieing a shoe if you're just gonna have to tie it all over again the next day?" "Yeah," Ryan and Michael agreed. Girls just don't have common sense. "Boys are dumbheads," Andrea said,

giggling, and then she turned back to her own table. I wish a basketball backboard would crush her. "I thought we were gonna be playing sports in Fizz Ed," Ryan complained. "When I saw how tall Miss Small was, I was sure she was gonna let us play basketball." "Maybe she's not our Fizz Ed teacher at all," Michael said. "Did you ever think of that? Maybe she's a mutant alien freak from another planet where everybody is tall." "Yeah," Ryan said. "Maybe she's a fake. Maybe she came to earth to kidnap our real Fizz Ed teacher and bring her back to her planet."