The Crazy School Read Online Free Page B

beer.
    I had unfurled one of those giant window-shade world maps from above the blackboard. Probably yanked it down so far that I’d have to get up on a chair and tweak it massively before coaxing the thing to reroll, especially now that I’d whacked a fi st under the Crimea so many times, hoping to make something stick in our collective unconscious.
    Yalta, for chrissake—stupid pick, but I was in too deep to give up now.
    “So these guys agree to send out an invitation to anyone who might want to join the United Nations,” I said, then started reading from the textbook: “ ‘The Government of the United States of America, on behalf of itself and of the Governments of the United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Republic of China and of the Provisional Government of the French Republic invite the Government of blank to send representatives to a conference to be held on 25 April, 1945, or soon thereafter, at San Francisco. . . . ’ ”
    Sam Sitzman raised his hand. “Um, excuse me, Madeline?”
    I liked him. He had this curly-headed Saint-Bernard-with-an-old-soul vibe. You knew right away there was a kind and wise and forgiving heart under the shaggy bits and the glasses.
    Especially for a seventeen-year-old from Manhattan.
    Especially here.
    “Would it be okay if I stand up for a while?” he asked. “This is all really interesting and stuff. It’s just sometimes my meds 2 4
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    make me tired, and I don’t want you to think I’m bored if I yawn or anything.”
    “No problem, Sitzman. Yalta is not exactly a thrill a minute, here.”
    He thanked me and got up, shaking out his legs.
    Mooney LeChance cleared his throat. “Hey, isn’t the UN in New York?”
    LeChance was normally sparing with the classroom partici-pation. A decent kid, just not hugely invested in scholarship.
    He would have been homecoming king anywhere else.
    “Yeah,” I said, “the fi rst meeting was the only one they did in San Francisco.”
    “Does any of this really matter ?” asked Wiesner. “I mean, Madeline, do you actually wander around thinking about Yalta or why they picked San Francisco or whatever?”
    I got up to open a window while considering my answer. “I think it’s hard to know what will matter, Wiesner.” The window crank didn’t want to budge even after I tried hitting it a couple of times with the side of my fi st to loosen it up.
    “Stuff like this is all layers and layers, and most of it you’ll forget, but maybe down the line you’ll fi nd what matters to you. Probably not Yalta specifi cally, just some wayward little snack-o’-trivia you won’t even remember having fi led away.”
    The crank gave suddenly, pinching my knuckles against the window’s metal frame hard enough that I wanted to stick them in my mouth to quiet the sting.
    The fresh air was worth it. Crisp, even bracing.
    I looked over at Wiesner. “Dude, I don’t have a damn clue what the Taft-Hartley Act was about anymore, or which numbers match most of the amendments to the Constitution.”
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    “So can’t we blow that stuff off ?” he asked. “The teacher-geek trivia?”
    “But you never know what won’t matter.” I fl opped into my chair. “Like, here’s the kind of thing I remember if someone talks about the UN: It’s on top of the FDR Drive, on the East River.”
    “That’s just near where I live,” said Sitzman.
    “Lucky ducky,” I replied. “Anyone know what’s under the FDR Drive?”
    No takers.
    “Rubble from London,” I said. “Chunks of all those buildings the Germans bombed to shit in the war—”
    “Heinkels and Junkers and Messerschmitts,” said Sitzman, suddenly looking all blissed out and dreamy.
    “Rubble that was dumped into the holds of U.S. Navy ships for ballast on the way home,” I continued.
    “Why did they need ballast?” I said looking at Wiesner.
    He shrugged, but he