Katie was an avid reader. She didn’t know why people said that. Weren’t avids the little white bugs that ate Mamma’s roses? All she knew was that when people called her one, it meant that she liked to read a lot, and that part was true. She read all the time. She read at the bus stop and on the bus. She read before dinner and before bed. She read during school and she even read during lunch. This was where her problem started. Day after day, Katie read as she stood in the lunch line, waiting to get her lunch ticket punched. She set her book down on the tray long enough to choose her entree and request extra French fries (even on days that they weren’t serving French fries–she figured that if she asked enough times, it would eventually work). After grabbing a chocolate milk, she opened her book and read, carrying her tray one-handed as she had learned from her mother, who was a waitress. As she walked carefully to her table, in would swoop Mrs. Newton. Mrs. Newton was not Katie’s teacher, but she taught another second grade class in the room next to hers. She had bright red hair and a face like a bat. Katie was a little afraid of Mrs. Newton, but refused to show it. It was Mrs. Newton’s job to make sure that the order in the cafeteria was maintained. She took her job very seriously. Everyday, the bat-faced woman yammered at Katie from the time she picked up her book to the moment she sat down at her table that she oughtn’t read and walk at the same time.
On this particular day, Mrs. Newton had been delayed by a boy picking his nose in the lunch line. Stephan, a trouble-maker in Mrs. Newton’s class, saw Katie reading as he stood up from his class’s table and got a mischievous glint in his eye. An observer reading his body language might have said he was winding up for something. Holding his tray in front of him, he ran across the cafeteria and plowed into Katie, knocking them both over and splattering her lunch around a five foot radius. Mrs. Newton hustled over and promptly began yelling at Katie, blaming her for the accident! Stephan told her that I had run into him and that it was his lunch that had been spilt! Poor Katie! She had to buy that wicked boy a new lunch and had no lunch for herself. For the rest of the year, Katie waited until she left the cafeteria to read–well, maybe for a week or two, until she found herself reading another page-turner that she just couldn’t put down.
