6

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Word List

MRS. RAO IS walking up and down between the desks. She is keeping an eye on things.

Just my luck, she catches me sneaking a quick peek into the dove book to see if I can find whatever it is I’m missing.

“Yasmin,” says Mrs. Rao. “Will you please put that book away and work on your word list.”

Are word lists more important than me searching for important clues? More important than reading?

“Mrs. Rao, ma’am,” I say. “I’m just reading.”

“Not now, Yasmin,” she says. “I know you like to read — ”

“I do!” I say. “I’ve read more than four hundred books in the last — ”

But Mrs. Rao does not want to hear about my reading marathon.

“Don’t interrupt me, Yasmin.” She is now interrupting me and how is that all right? “I want you to work on your word list now,” she says. “I want you to use those words in sentences.”

I give up.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, and now I am staring at the word list trying to make sense out of it.

Sometimes the words on Mrs. Rao’s lists share vowels. Ground. Proud. Aloud. Resound. Sometimes they share consonants. Flower. Fleeting. Flamingo.

This is one weird list. These words don’t seem to share anything.

Plan. Election. City. Office.

I stare at the words until they begin to fly around before my eyes as if they are birds flapping their wings.

Reeni nudges me and nearly makes me drop my notebook.

“Write your sentences,” she whispers.

“Okay,” I whisper back. Is school not supposed to be a place where you learn to think? Nobody is letting me think today.

Reeni lets out a hissy sound as if she is — what’s the word?

Exasperated, that’s what. With me.

“Yasmin, Reeni,” says Mrs. Rao, who now looks exasperated with both of us.

“Yes, Mrs. Rao,” we say together.

Reeni starts to write. She writes fast. From the corner of my eye I can see Anil getting to work. He is writing slowly, but he is writing.

I’d better start writing, too. So I do, letting those words fly around my head in circles.

This is how they come out on the paper:

The king of doves and all his subjects are caught in a net. Who will get them out? Quick, make a plan! Call everyone in the city. Don’t sit there in your office. Hold an election. Help!

Mrs. Rao walks between the desks again and now she is looking over our shoulders and she is reading, reading.

“That’s … very interesting,” says Mrs. Rao when she gets to me. “What does it mean?”

How did I know she would ask me that? I have no idea. The words just came out that way.