Damaged Read Online Free

resembled a trembling leaf.
    Talk... in front of other people!
    Back in eighth grade, he had to do the same exact thing: take a turn reading aloud. He read only one sentence before he began to stutter like a crazed deaf-mute. The kids busted a gut and the teacher had to hold back his own laughter. Thank God, Adam thought, he never had to do the impossible and actually stand up in front of class to do it.
    "We'll go row by row, each read about a page, and I'll ask you questions about the syntax of what you read."
    Adam's face turned pink. He knew he couldn't do this, and he knew that his every other peer could do it without thinking twice. To them, it was nothing more than eating potatoes; to Adam, it was worse than death.
    "Jim," the teacher said to the boy in the front row, nearest to the door, "will you start us?"
    Jim, a messily-combed nerd with thick-rimmed glasses who actually had a knack for dating attractive Sophomores, opened the book and read without a worry in the world: "It all started on the first day in June, when a young man named George Baashim set out to—"
    Adam looked around. There were twelve other kids lined up before him. That was not enough. She would eventually call his number.
    Only one and a half minutes later, Jim finished the first page. The teacher stopped him. "Okay, Jim, about the first opening paragraph—can you tell me the main phrase there?"
    "Um..." he said, scanning, "hit the ball?"
    "Yes," the teacher said, "usually, class, but not always, the first sentence of the paragraph is saying what we're in store for. It sums the paragraph up.
    “ Okay, Cindy."
    Cindy started reading, and Adam's heart skipped a beat. With every proceeding person Mrs. Steiner called upon, the closer she got to him. He felt like he was walking the plank.
    And there was no way out.
    Ha, ha ha , he heard one of his demonic characters laugh in the back of his mind.
    You're doomed, child .
    Ten minutes passed. The kid sitting to Adam's left was reading page nine now. He was almost done, and Adam could see the teacher getting ready to pop a question. He could not stop swallowing. He licked his lips more times than a hungry bear. His hand, still holding the pencil, beat the eraser off the desk a thousand times a minute. His eyes were glued to the overhead clock. Still thirty minutes to go until the end of class.
    Would she skip him? Would he get lucky and the fire alarm go off? Or would he die from doing something so basic as reading one page in front of a class of people who all probably hated him? Die to death from a heart attack? So many things to go wrong and not one thing to go right.
    Mrs. Steiner asked Tammy, a pretty girl with big braces, some question nouns and pronouns. Tammy's high-pitched, chipmunk-like voice annoyed the hell out of Adam. He soon realized that the teacher was giving everyone progressively less reading time in response to her repetitive questions. He couldn't sit still. He shifted in his seat a dozen times, trying to dull the intense fear by daydreaming about one of his horror story adventures.
    It wasn't helping. He strove to find a way to escape— ask to use the bathroom? Run out of the room?
    Either were a no-go. They each would have embarrassed him just as much. He was fated to make a complete ass of himself.
    The blood really started to pump when Mrs. Steiner got to the second-to-last person in the second row. Adam cracked his knuckles, his neck, his feet, his back, waiting impatiently for the time to come just so he could get this dreadful deed over with.
    "Thank you, John," she said as she walked up an aisle, hands behind her back. "Any pronoun is a standin for a noun. They take the place of a regular noun. So, instead of saying George, you could say he. If this was first person, you'd say I. Or, if talking about someone else—you.
    “ Okay, Mr. Silverly," she said to the last boy in the row, a tubby with bad acne.
    Still more accepted than Adam.
    Adam's heart went into overdrive. He