GLASS SOUP by Jonathan Carroll (funny books to read .txt) 📕

that school year ended and report cards were sent home, Cliff became frantic that he wasn’t going to pass because he had failed too many spelling tests. He worried so much and so vocally about it that an exasperated Haden finally urged his friend to go see their teacher after class and just ask. After much hemming and hawing, Snatzke agreed to do it—if his friend would wait for him outside the school building. Although Haden had ten other things he wanted to do at that time, he agreed. What were friends for?

Not much in life bothered Clifford Snatzke and his face showed it. Usually he wore a slight smile or else a pleasant blankness that said he wasn’t thinking about anything special and everything was okay.

But when he emerged from the school half an hour later, his cheeks were the red that accompanies great humiliation or a bad cry. Seeing him like that, Haden eagerly asked what had happened inside. At first Cliff wouldn’t even make eye contact with his friend, much less tell the story. But eventually he did.

Mrs. Dugdale was sitting at her desk looking out the window when he entered her classroom. Always one to mind his manners, Cliff waited until he was noticed. When the teacher asked what he wanted, he told her in as few words as possible because all of her students knew that Mrs. Dugdale liked a person to get right to the point.

But instead of looking in her grade book or giving him a lecture on how to improve his spelling, his teacher asked what kind of name Snatzke was. He didn’t know what she was talking about but said only that he didn’t know. She asked if he thought Snatzke was a very American name. He said he didn’t know what she meant. She looked out the window again and didn’t say anything for a long time. After a while he gently repeated his question about his grade in spelling.

Who knows why, who knows where such a thing came from in the woman, but Mrs. Dugdale then turned to this little boy and said, “Get down on your knees and ask me, Clifford. Get on your knees and ask for your spelling grade.”

Kids are dumb. They’re trusting and they have faith in what adults tell them because adults are the only authorities they have ever known. But the moment he heard this order, even dumb Clifford Snatzke knew that what Mrs. Dugdale was telling him to do was both wrong and extraordinary. But he did it anyway. He got down on his knees as quickly as he could and just as quickly asked for his grade. His teacher looked at him for a few seconds and then told him to get out of her room.

That was the story. If Haden hadn’t known his friend so well, he would have thought Snatzke made the whole thing up. But he hadn’t. Before there was a chance to say or do anything, the front door of the school opened and Mrs. Dugdale emerged carrying her familiar brown leather briefcase. She saw the two students, gave them a fake smile and moved off.

Both boys stared at the ground for a long time. They couldn’t look at each other until she was gone because of their shared knowledge of what she had just done.

Simon knew he had to act. Mrs. Dugdale had done a very bad thing to his friend. But Cliff would let it slide because he didn’t have the guts to face her.

Haden did and for one of the only times in his life, he decided on the spot to do a genuinely selfless thing and right the wrong that had been done to his friend. Throwing Cliff a reassuring look, Simon trotted off in the direction of the faculty parking lot.

When he got there, Mrs. Dugdale was already in her beige Volkswagen and the engine was running. When she saw him coming toward her car she rolled the window down halfway. He would always remember that—the window went down only halfway; as if whatever he had to say was not important enough for her to make the effort to lower it further.

Moving toward the VW, he felt as confident as a god about to fling a flaming lightning bolt at a sinful mortal. He was going to let her have it because boy, did she deserve it.

“Yes, Simon? What do you want?”

He looked at her and panicked. Whatever godlike courage he had brought to that moment fled. He could almost see it running crazily away in a zigzag across the parking lot, its ass on fire like Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon. Haden loved cartoons.

“Why—” he managed to squeeze out of his terrified lungs before starting to hyperventilate. He thought he was going to have a heart attack.

“Yes, Simon? Why what?” Her first two words were friendly; the second two were a steel trap snapping shut.

“Why—” He couldn’t breathe. His tongue had turned to stone.

“Yes, Simon?” He saw her right hand release the emergency brake. Her mouth tightened and her eyes flared when she realized he wasn’t going to say anything more and that he had delayed her unnecessarily. Desperate and terrified, he did the only thing his body could manage at that moment—he shrugged. Mrs. Dugdale would have said something nasty if she hadn’t seen Clifford Snatzke walking toward them.

She didn’t even bother to roll up the window. Putting the little car in gear, she shook her head and gunning the engine, pulled away from Haden.

On and off for the rest of his life he thought about that moment and what he should have said and done. It haunted him, as childhood memories so often do. He even dreamt about it at night sometimes. But always, even in those dreams when his big Cinerama, Dolby surround-sound moment came to be valiant, he chickened out.

Well not this time, by God! He had been having a rough go of