Text Leveling System

Al Capone Does My Shirts

RDQ:	3084	Max Word/Sent	48	Total Words	5380		Diff Words	1314
Lex	1080	Ave Word/.Sent	8	Hi Freq occurs	4210	78.3%	Hi freq	582	44.3%
AR	9.0	Long Sentences	5.7	Low Freq occurs	244	4.5%	Low freq	192	14.6%

Today I moved to a twelve-acre rock covered with cement, topped with bird turd and surrounded by water. Alcatraz sits smack in the middle of the bay-so close to the city of San Francisco, I can hear them call the score on a baseball game on Marina Green. Okay, not that close. But still.
I'm not the only kid who lives here. There's my sister, Natalie, except she doesn't count. And there are twenty-three other kids who live on the island because their dads work as guards or cooks or doctors or electricians for the prison like my dad does. Plus there are a ton of murderers, rapists, hit men, con men, stickup men, embezzlers, connivers, burglars, kidnappers and maybe even an innocent man or two, though I doubt it.
The convicts we have are the kind other prisons don't want. I never knew prisons could be picky, but I guess they can. You get to Alcatraz by being the worst of the worst. Unless you're me. I came here because my mother said I had to.
I want to be here like I want poison oak on my private parts. But apparently nobody cares, because now I'm Moose Flanagan, Alcatraz Island Boy-all so my sister can go to the Esther P Marinoff School, where kids have macaroni salad in their hair and wear their clothes inside out and there isn't a chalkboard or
a book in sight. Not that I've ever been to the Esther P Marinoff. But all of Natalie's schools are like this.
I peek out the front window of our new apartment and look up to see a little glass room lit bright in the dark night. This is the dock guard tower, a popcorn stand on stilts where somebody's dad sits with enough firepower to blow us all to smithereens. The only guns on the island are up high in the towers or the catwalks, because one flick of the wrist and a gun carried by a guard is a gun carried by a criminal. The keys to all the boats are kept up there for the same reason. They even have a crapper in each tower so the guards don't have to come down to take a leak.
Besides the guard tower, there's water all around, black and shiny like tar. A full moon cuts a white path across the bay while the wind blows, making something creak and a buoy clang in the distance.
My dad is out there too. He has guard duty in another tower somewhere on the island. My dad's an electrician, for Pete's sake. What's he doing playing prison guard?
My mom is in her room unpacking and Natalie's sitting on the kitchen floor, running her hands through her button box. She knows more about those buttons than it seems possible to know. If I hide one behind my back, she can take one look at her box and name the exact button I have.
"Nat, you okay?" I sit down on the floor next to her. "Moose and Natalie go on a train. Moose and Natalie eat meat loaf sandwich. Moose and Natalie look out the window" "Yeah, we did all that. And now we're here with some swell fellows like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly."
"Natalie Flanagan's whole family."
"Well, I wouldn't exactly say they're family. More like next door neighbors, I guess."
"Moose and Natalie go to school," she says.
"Yep, but not the same school, remember? You're going to this nice place called the Esther P Marinoff." I try to sound sincere.
"Nice place," she repeats, stacking one button on top of another.
I've never been good at fooling Natalie. She knows me too well. When I was five, I was kind of a runt. Smallest kid of all my cousins, shortest kid in my kindergarten class and on my block too. Back then people called me by my real name, Matthew. Natalie was the first person to call me "Moose." I swear I started growing to fit the name that very day. Now I'm five foot eleven and a half inches-as tall as my mom and a good two inches taller than my dad. My father tells people I've grown so much, he's going to put my supper into pickle jars and sell it under the name Incredible Growth Formula.
I think about going in my room now, butt smells like the inside of an old lunch bag in there. My bed's a squeaky old army cot. When I sit down, it sounds like dozens of mice are dying an ugly death. There's no phonograph in this apartment. No washing machine. No phone. There's a radio cabinet, but someone yanked the workings out. Who gutted the radio, anyway? They don't let the criminals in here ... do they?
So, I'm a little jumpy. But anybody would be. Even the silence here is strange. It's quiet like something you can't hear is happening.
I think about telling my best friend, Pete, about this place. "It's the Devil's Island ... doo, doo, doo." Pete would say in a deep
spooky voice like they do on the radio. "Devil's Island ... doo, doo, doo," I whisper just like Pete. But without him it doesn't seem funny. Not funny at all.
Okay, that's it. I'm sleeping with my clothes on. Who wants to face a convicted felon in your pajamas?
When I wake up, I feel kinda foolish, having slept with my shoes on and my baseball bat under the covers with me. My mom's banging around in the tiny hall outside my room. I stick the bat under my bed.
"Where's Dad?" I ask.
"Right here," my dad answers from the living room. He's sitting on the floor with Natalie, holding a pile of buttons in each hand.
"Dad! Could you show me the cell house, and then maybe could we play ball?" I sound like I'm six and a half now, but I can't help it. He's been gone forever and I hardly got to see him at all yesterday. It's lonely in my family when he's not around.
His smile seems to lose its pink. He puts Natalie's buttons down in two careful piles, gets up and brushes his uniform off. I follow him into the kitchen. "You're not working today, are you?"
"I'm having a devil of a time setting up extra circuits in the laundry."
"Yeah, but you worked last night."
My mom squeezes by to run her hands under the tap. "Your father has two jobs here, Moose. Electrician and guard."
"Two," Natalie calls from the living room. "Two jobs. Two." Doesn't anyone in this family believe in private conversations?
"I could help you . . . ," I offer.
He shakes his head. "You're not allowed in there. Convict areas are off limits to you kids," he says.
"I'm not a kid. I'm taller than you are."
"Go ahead, rub it in." He laughs. "But at least I don't have those big feet either. They're an affliction, those feet." He grabs my head and knocks on it.
"I haven't seen you for three whole months," I say.
"Two months, twenty-two days, twenty-two days," Natalie calls out.
"That's right, sweet pea. You tell him!" my father calls back. "I'll bet you took Natalie out this morning, didn't you?" The question comes shooting out before I can stop it.
"Oh, for goodness' sake, Moose." My mother looks up from where she's jammed in the corner, scrubbing the icebox. "You weren't even up."
"That isn't fair," I say, though I know better.
"Don't talk to me about fair, young man. Don't get me started on that one." My mother glares at me.
"I'm sorry, Moose," my father says. He reaches for his officer's hat and settles it on his head. "There's nothing I'd like better than to spend the day with you. You know that." His eyes look at me, then quick away.
"Wait, wait, wait ... you're leaving now?" I ask.
He groans. "Afraid so. But there will be plenty of time to spend together. I promise, buddy, okay?" He smiles, kisses my mom and Nat good-bye and heads for the door.
I watch him walk by the front window, his head bobbing like his foot hurts.
My mom glances at her watch. "My goodness, is it that time already? Moose, I need you to watch Natalie while I take the boat to the city. I have to get groceries and arrange an ice delivery" my mother says.
"Ice?" I ask.
"We can't afford an electric refrigerator. We got to keep this one." She taps the old icebox.
"They have a grocery downstairs, though, right?"
"Doesn't have much. Try to do some unpacking while I'm gone. Eleven, twelve and thirteen are all your stuff." My mother points to the crates, each numbered by Natalie. She takes off her apron and puts on her coat, her gloves and her hat.
"You're leaving now too?" I ask.
"I'll be back as soon as I can. Take good care of her, okay?" My mom grabs my arm and squeezes it.
I know she's thinking about what happened on the train yesterday. I had gone to take a leak, and when I came back, Nat was kicking and screaming. She pulled a curtain off the rod and sent her button box flying down the aisle. My mom had her arms around Nat, trying to keep her from hurting anyone. The conductor and the motorman were yelling. People were staring. One lady was taking pictures.
My mom finally got her calmed down by sitting on her right in the middle of the train aisle. I don't know which was more embarrassing, Natalie's behavior or my mother's.
Sometimes Nat's tantrums go on and on for days and nothing makes them stop. It's impossible to know what will set her off. She looks pretty peaceful now, though.
"sure, Mom." I follow her to the door. "I didn't really mean what I said about it not being fair that Natalie got to go out with Dad this morning. I didn't. You know I didn't.... Mom?"
She sighs. "All right, Moose. Just keep your eye on Natalie okay.
I watch her leave. A haze rises from the bay like a wall of gray closing me off from everything.
In the kitchen, I find a casserole dish I don't recognize. Thought you might enjoy some manicotti. Looking forward to meeting you. Bea Trixie, the card says.
The manicotti tastes like big fat spaghetti with pizza inside. I'm going for fourths or maybe it's fifths when I hear the knock.
"Don't answer it," I yell to Natalie as I wade through the boxes to the front door. The last thing I want is to meet new kids when Natalie's around. New people don't understand about her. They just don't.
"Open up!" a girl cries. It's a little kid-a short person, anyway. That's all I can make out through the window.
"No!" I call back. But too late. Natalie is already there. She has both hands on the knob and all her weight rocked back on her heels, trying to get the door open.
"Don't open it!" I shove my weight against the door. "Come on, you know you're gonna!" the girl outside says. Oh, great. I have little Eleanor Roosevelt on one side of the door and Natalie-the-screamer on the other. What they say about females being the weaker sex is the biggest lie in the world.
It doesn't matter that I weigh more than both of them put together. I know when I'm beat. I let Natalie open the door. The girl outside has black curly hair that's flat on one side, as if she slept on it. She's missing half of her teeth. The ones she has seem either too large or too small for her mouth.
"How old are you?" she demands. "Twelve."
	"No, you're not!" she says, walking right in without bothering to ask.
"Why would I lie about how old I am?"
She bites her lip, like she's thinking about this. "You got a big neck."
"You're supposed to get a long nose if you lie, not a big neck."
"No." She shakes her head as if she's absolutely certain I'm wrong.
"And you're what ... seven?"
"Seven and one quarter. Hello, Natalie." The girl smiles her big tooth, little tooth, gap tooth smile. "Your dad told me all about her," she whispers.
We both look at Natalie. Her hair is like mine-brown and blonde all mixed up like birdseed. Different eyes, though. Mine are brown. Hers are green like the marbles nobody likes to trade away. But the way she holds her mouth too open and her shoulders uneven and one hand clamps down the other ... people know. They always know.
"How old is she?" the girl whispers.
"Ten," I answer. Natalie's age is always ten. Every year my mom has a party for her and she turns ten again. My mom
started counting Nat's age this screwy way a long time ago. It was just easier to have her younger than me. Then my mother could be happy for each new thing I did, without it being another thing Natalie couldn't do.
"What's your name, anyway?" I ask.
"Theresa Mattaman. I'm supposed to show you around. You haven't seen anything yet, have you?"
"We just got here last night."
"Natalie, come on! We're going now! Run get her coat!" Theresa orders.
I'm big as a linebacker, and a seven-year-old girl treats me like her errand boy. Does she smell weakness on me?
Still, I want to get a look at this weird little island. And what do I care what a bunch of criminals think, anyway? I scribble a note to my mom to tell her we've gone out and prop the paper between the ketchup and the cod-liver oil.
"Come on, Nat. It's not everybody who gets to live down the street from thieves and murderers, you know."
The first thing I see when I walk out the door is the guard tower. I wonder what you're supposed to do here. Should I wave? Theresa pays no attention. The tower might as well be a tree for all she cares.
She leads us to the stairwell. Natalie's walking behind us with her head down, dragging her left foot on the edge of every step as if she's marking it with her toe. I want to take her hand to make sure she keeps up, but nobody touches Natalie.
"First, we're going to the morgue," Theresa announces with a little skip.
Sure. I've been to hundreds of morgues. Thousands of them, in fact. "Dead criminals ... don't I get to meet any live ones" I ask.
"We're not really supposed to talk to the alive ones, but looking for dead guys is my job. Piper said."
"Dead-criminal checker. Sounds like an important position to me. And who is Piper, anyway?" I ask.
"Piper? She's Warden Williams's daughter. She's bossy." Just what I need, another bossy girl.
"Oh, no, I almost forgot." Theresa claps her hands, then digs in her pocket for a card folded in fours. "I made this for you. Annie did the words. I made the map all by myself!"
"And who is Annie?"
"Annie's Annie. She's twelve. She helps me with stuff." "Are there any boys on this island?"
"Jimmy and"-she counts on her fingers-"eleven little boys who are five, four, three, one and zero."
"Zero?"
"Not one year yet. Do you want to know their names?"
I shake my head, but too late. Theresa is already rattling off the name of every little boy here.
"Thanks, Theresa." I cram the card in my pocket.
"Hey," she hollers in my face, "you didn't read it!" She holds out her hand and wiggles her fingers. "Give."
I hand the card back and Theresa reads it to me. Alphonse Capone AKA: Scarface,
Big Al, SnorKey.
ore 10: New YorK, January 17,1899.
Family: Wife named Mae. Son named Sonny.
Theresa reads really well for a little kid, except it doesn't seem like she can walk and read at the same time. Now we're at a complete standstill on the steep road that leads to the top of the island. "Couldn't we do this after the morgue?" I ask.
She ignores me. Clearly there's no stopping her until she's read every last word.
Business- Bootlegging gangster mob boss. Favorite colors: Canary yellow and pea green. Favorite jewelry: $50,000 diamond pinkie ring. Favorite weapon: Thompson machine gun.
Favorite crime: Dinner party of death! Invites lieutenants in his organization Known to have double-crossed him to a party. After dessert, Al's men JOCK the doors and Capone beats the traitors to death with a baseball bat.
A baseball bat?
Favorite word for murder: "Rub-out"---often in front of many witnesses who then develop "gangster amnesia."
gent to jail for: Tax evasion.
Other stuff: 'Rigged elections. Opened first soup Kitchen in Chicago. Likes silk underwear.
What is this guy ... nuts? Current home: Alcatraz Island.
"And that's not all we have here either," Theresa says when I look up. "There's Machine Gun Kelly, who happens to be 'a world-famous kidnapper, and Roy Gardner, who has escaped 110 times, but not from Alcatraz-not yet, anyway. Oh, we have everyone who is bad. Except Bonnie and Clyde on account of their being dead," she says.
A truck horn beeps and we move off the road. A guard in a dark gray uniform like my dad's is behind the wheel. He brings the truck to a squeaky halt and cranks down the window.
I glance back at Natalie, who has been so quiet, I almost forgot she was there. She's looking at the ground as if she lost
something. Her arms are down at her sides, not up high like a chipmunk's the way they usually are.
"They Cam Flanagan's kids?" the guard asks Theresa. Theresa nods. "Yes, sir, Mr. Trixle," she says. "Where you headed?"
"Piper's house, sir."
Mr. Trixle nods. "Make a beeline there, Theresa. You know the rules."
"Yes, sir."
The guard's eyes scan me and Nat. If he gets there's anything different about her, he doesn't let on. The brakes squeal as the truck inches down the steep road.
Now, the cell house is looming over us like the world's biggest school for bad boys-the kind of place where guys go in and never come out. I wish Pete were here. Pete would love this.
Theresa chatters on about why she thinks Capone will really like her when she meets him, which clearly she hasn't done, yet. The road cuts back away from the water tower. We follow it a short way up to a little cottage. It looks cute, almost like a playhouse. The sign above the glass door reads MORGUE. Inside, there's a bucket on the floor and a metal box. What do they do in morgues, anyway? Are they like bread boxes for dead bodies? Or do they label stuff in special compartments ... baskets for fingers? Drawers for toes?
"So, this is it," Theresa says. "Only they keep it locked." She pulls on the door handle to show me.
"Yeah, I see. Maybe we should, uh, move on. Didn't you tell the guard guy we were going to Piper's house?" I don't like getting in trouble. I was born responsible. It's a curse.
Then another girl's crusty voice comes out from the shadows behind the morgue. "What's the matter with your sister?" My chest gets tight. The blood rushes to my head.
The girl comes around the side of the building, flipping a flat yellow hat on her finger like a pizza. My face turns red just seeing her. She's a looker. If Pete were here, he'd whistle.
"She retarded?" the girl asks. "None of your business," I tell her.
The girl has freckles and full lips like a movie star. She winds her long dark hair around her finger and looks at me through half-shut eyelids. Something about the way she does this makes me glance down to make sure my fly is buttoned. When I look up again, she's staring at Natalie.
"Stop looking at her like that!" I say.
"That's Piper. Remember? I told you about her!" Theresa says.
"So, not retarded. Stupid, then?" Piper asks. "Look, could we drop this already?"
"I'm just asking a simple question," Piper says. "Not in front of Natalie," I whisper.
She shrugs and walks behind the morgue. Theresa and I follow. Nat stays put.
"How would you like it if I asked, are you stupid?"
"I would just say no." Piper flips her hair behind her shoulder.
"No, she's not stupid," I say. "Prove it."
"Uhhh." I clench my fists. I'd really like to give this Piper girl a pounding.
"See, I knew she was retarded," Piper tells Theresa.
"Will you kindly just shut up!" I roar louder than I intend. They both stare at me.
"Follow me." I walk back around to the front of the morgue. "When's your birthday, Piper?" I ask.
"November sixteenth." "1922?"
"Yep."
"Natalie, what day of the week was Piper born?" "Thursday," Nat says without looking up. "That right?" I ask Piper.
Piper doesn't answer, but her eyes open wider. She chews at her bottom lip. "What else can she do?" she asks.
"She's not a trick monkey."
"She'd never make it as a trick monkey. She only has one trick," Piper says.
"487 times 6,421 is 3,127,027," Nat says.
Everything is quiet except the sound of gulls squawking overhead and wind rattling a window somewhere. Natalie inspects the ground. It's almost as if she hasn't said anything. "How much is 28 times 478?" Piper asks. "13,384," Nat answers.
"Okay, so she's good in math. But something is wrong with her," Piper says.
"WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?" I shout. Theresa motions for us to step away from Natalie. "Natalie lives in her own world. That's what Mr. Flanagan said," Theresa whispers. She takes ajar of jam from her pocket, unscrews the lid and offers us some. We shake our heads no
and she dips an already purple-stained finger inside. "Sometimes it's a good world and sometimes it's a bad world. And sometimes she can get out and sometimes she can't."
Piper snorts. "Sounds to me like she's just plain crazy," she says in a low voice. "My dad isn't going to like this. He's not going to like it one bit. He always says the cons in the bug cage are the scariest ones, because you never know what they'll do." I get a sinking feeling in my gut. There were 237 electricians who applied for the job my dad got. If it were me, I'd have kept my mouth shut about having a daughter like Natalie. What if the warden doesn't know about her?
"She's leaving in a week or two. Going to boarding school. She won't be around here at all. You probably won't ever see her again," I say quickly.
Piper raises her eyebrows. "I'm expected to tell him stuff like this. He depends on me to find out things." She places her flat hat on her head and begins hiking up the steep road toward the cell house.
"Wait! Can we come? Can we?" Theresa calls after her. "Good idea," Piper calls over her shoulder. "Then my father can meet Natalie himself."'
My stomach sinks. How am I supposed to know if Nat's a big secret or not? Nobody tells me anything.
"Natalie," Piper calls out sweetly, "would you like to meet the warden?"
Nat says nothing.
"Hey! Come on!" Theresa motions with her whole arm. "Piper said it was okay!"
"I'm going back, Theresa. My mom will be home soon."
"Oh, no!" Theresa cries. "You haven't seen anything yet!" I shake my head. "Maybe tomorrow"
Theresa stamps her foot.
I can't help smiling at this. "I'm sorry, Theresa." "Ohhhhkay. We'll finish tomorrow," Theresa says in a small voice.
"We gotta go back," I tell Natalie. She doesn't look up, doesn't seem to hear.
"This way." I motion for her to follow. She ignores me. Oh, swell. Now Nat's acting up.
"Come on, Nat." I try walking down the hill, hoping she'll follow.
She doesn't.
I walk back up to the morgue and sit down on the cement slab by a little dab of something red. Blood? Or is it Theresa's jam?
I figure I'll just wait Nat out when I hear footsteps on the road. "Natalie, come on," I plead.
"Moose!" My mom's voice. She's half running in her high heels. "What in heaven's name are you doing out here?" My mom stops, her chest heaving from the climb. She looks at me, then Nat, then me again. "What happened?" she asks.
"It's okay, Mom. Nat's fine."
"I didn't know where you were." Her voice goes up and down like hiccups. She grips her arms like if she doesn't they won't stay on. "It scared me when you were gone like that."
"I left a note."
She nods. I don't know if this is because she saw my note or because she didn't.
I touch her elbow and try to sound like Dad. "Everything is going to be all right."
My mother nods short and fast. She pushes at the corner of first one eye, then the other, and keeps nodding. Nodding and nodding and nodding.
The next morning when I get up, I'm happy to find my father at the table, reading the paper.
I can feel how pleased he is to see me. This isn't something you can fake. "Hey," he says.
My mother is checking my sister's suitcase. I can't believe she's going today. I thought it was a week away at least.
Nat has the kitchen chair pulled into the living room, wedged between three crates. "Hey, Natalie, the sun get up okay this morning?" I ask like I do every morning.
She never answers, which used to really bug me. I hate being the brother of a stone. One day last year, I got so mad, I just walked right by her, didn't say anything. Not one word.
That day, after I left for school, my mom said Natalie sat outside my room and cried for two straight hours. Natalie isn't a crier, she's a screamer. You never see her cry for plain old hurt. I'd say my mom made it all up, but she didn't know I'd snubbed Natalie. My mom had no idea why Natalie had cried.
Now I ask Natalie about the sun every morning and it only bothers me a little when she doesn't answer.
"So, what would you like for breakfast on this very special day?" my mother asks her.
"Lemon cake," Natalie says. She says this every day too.
And every day, my mom says, "Silly sweet pea, you can't have lemon cake for breakfast."
"Why not? On a special day like today, lemon cake sounds like a fine idea. What d'ya think, Moose?" my mom asks. "Sure," I say. My voice comes out high like a girl's. I never know whether I'm going to sound like Mickey Mouse or the giant on top of the beanstalk.
Natalie turns all the way around and looks me straight in the eye in that weird way she has of suddenly being present after weeks of being somewhere else.
"Don't look at me, this wasn't my idea. If it were up to me, we'd be in Santa Monica right this very minute," I say under my breath.
My father reads Natalie headlines from the newspaper, adding numbers to every one. "Work resumes on the Golden Gate Bridge. 103 men are put back to work, two quit seven scratch their heads, five have their feet up, two eat sausages for supper, three do not. . ."
"Breakfast!" my mother calls.
Natalie holds her face two inches from the plate. She eats so fast, it gives me a stomachache. When my dad's not around, I don't eat with her.
"Natalie Flanagan's whole family," Nat says when I sit down. I wonder if she knows what's happening. We've built the Esther I? Marinoff up like it's quite the place, like maybe the king and queen of England are sending their kids there too. But somehow in all this talking, we ignored the major thing.
You don't come home from the Esther P Marinoff. Every morning when the sun comes up, that's where Natalie will be.
My father wipes his wide mouth with his napkin. "What fun you're going to have, Natalie, with kids your own age." What age is that, I wonder. But I know what he means. Maybe she'll meet other kids like her. Maybe they'll recognize each other and communicate in their own peculiar way. When my mom has Nat ready to go, my father picks up her suitcase, hands Natalie her button box and opens the door. "Moose," my mom says as if she's just now noticed I'm here. "I don't think you need to come along."
"Fine with me. I don't want to go, anyway." I don't look at her, or my dad or Natalie.
"Helen!" My father's voice has a sting to it.
"I just didn't think he'd want to, Cam," my mother says. "Of course Moose is coming." He hands Nat's suitcase to me and pats me on the back. "We can't do this without him." This reminds me of the time when I was six and my mom shipped me off to live at Gram's. She packed every pair of underwear I owned and she made it all seem like a big treat. When we got there, my gram had an awful scowl on her face. She gave me a big hug and glared at my mother like I'd never seen her do. When my mom left, I heard Gram and Ed talking. "Some cockamamie psychiatrist decides the problem is Natalie doesn't get enough attention, and Helen ships him off! Our Matthew! I'm happy as a pig in mud to have him here, but it's a darn fool thing. What child doesn't have a brother or sister? Half the world has seven or eight. Having a brother didn't make Natalie the way she is. One look at the two of them together and that big-shot psychiatrist would have known that. He's the one ought to have his head examined. It's going to make Nat sicker just having Moose gone."
Early the next morning my father woke me. "Get your pillow, Moose," he said, snapping the buckles on my suitcase. "We're going home."
We're walking down to the dock now. Natalie is going extra slow. I worry we'll miss the boat, but maybe that's her plan.
I like to think all these years have been part of her plan too. And one day Nat will tell me it's all a crazy game she made up to see if we really loved her.
My father jogs ahead. Yesterday the boatman told us, "We don't wait for nobody. Even God himself has to get down here on time." But somehow the big ex-army steamship called the Frank M. Coxe is still there.
My mother walks through the snitch box-a metal detector designed to make sure no one is bringing guns on the island. "This new school is a good opportunity for you, Natalie," my mother tells her as I watch the boat guy unwind a rope, as thick as my arm, from the cleat. "You are such a lucky girl to have this chance."
Natalie says nothing. Her eyes are trained on a gull wiggling a potato chip out from the wood slat bench. I look up at another bird high in the blue sky. And another skimming low over the green blue sea.
My father has a book with him, McGregor's Illustrated Animal Book. He's brought it because it has a good index. Nothing pleases Natalie more than having him read the index of a book to her.
"American Leaf-Nosed Bat, page 48," my father reads. "American Quail, page 232, American Spiny Rat, page 188 . . ." Tons of gulls are flying above our boat. We watch them,

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: No support

Dialog: Multiple speakers

Dialog: Broken dialogue

Dialog: Unlabeled Speaker

Vocabulary: Many difficult words

Language: Many descriptive words

Sentences: Some Long/Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Several Implications

Complexity: Several unrelated ideas

Concepts: Abstract/Complex Social

Chapters

Headings

Prior Knowledge: Familiarity

Sequence of Events: Chronological

Mature Concepts: With some uncommon experiences

Features

Character traits

Complex character relationships

Integral Setting - Historical

Complex Problem/Solution

Complex plot

First Person

Present Tense

Topic

Challenges

Love

Behaviors

Sisters

*Human Body & Health

*Family & Friends

*Feelings, Behaviors

Responsibility

Low Frequency Words

absolutely	account	acre	aisle	ajar
aka	alphonse	amnesia	announces	apparently
applied	bootlegging	buoy	cabinet	calmed
casserole	catwalks	chalkboard	circuits	cleat
communicate	compartments	conductor	connivers	cons
conversations	convict	convicted	convicts	cousins
coxe	cranks	crapper	crier	current
curse	curtain	d'ya	designed	devil's
diamond	doubt	drawers	eleanor	elections
electrician	electricians	embarrassing	embezzlers	errand
escaped	esther	evasion	fellows	felon
fifths	firepower	flanagan	formula	fourths
freckles	gangster	gent	glance	glances
glared	glares	gonna	gotta	groceries
grocery	growth	guard's	gull	gulls
gutted	halt	haze	headlines	heaving
hollers	hoping	ignored	ignores	illustrated
incredible	innocent	inspects	intend	january
jewelry	jock	kidnapper	kidnappers	kinda
kindergarten	kindly	knob	knocks	label
laundry	lieutenants	limits	linebacker	liver
looker	macaroni	major	manicotti	marina
mcgregor's	monica	morgue	morgues	motion
motions	motorman	murder	murderers	natalie
neighbors	nosed	numbered	ohhhhkay	opportunity
organization	ought	peaceful	peculiar	phonograph
piper	piper's	playhouse	prison	prisons
private	prove	psychiatrist	raises	rapists
rattling	recognize	refrigerator	responsible	resumes
retarded	runt	sake	sausages	scarface
scowl	screamer	screwy	shove	sincere
sixteenth	skimming	slat	smithereens	snorkey
snubbed	sonny	spiny	squawking	stairwell
standstill	steamship	stickup	stilts	surrounded
swear	tantrums	theresa	thieves	thompson
traitors	trixle	turd	uhhh	underwear
unscrews	warden	weakness	weird	whisper
whispers	williams's	witnesses	workings	wrist
yanked	younger