Text Leveling System

Firegirl

RDQ:	1926	Max Word/Sent	53	Total Words	4567		Diff Words	1082
Lex	890	Ave Word/.Sent	11	Hi Freq occurs	3661	80.2%	Hi freq	500	46.2%
AR	4.9	Long Sentences	15.2	Low Freq occurs	142	3.1%	Low freq	115	10.6%

Chapter I
It wasn't much, really, the whole Jessica Feeney thing. If you look at it, nothing much happened. She was a girl who came into my class after the beginning of the year and was only there for a couple of weeks or so. Stuff did get a little crazy for a while, but it didn't last long, and I think it was mostly in my head anyway. Then she wasn't there anymore.
That was pretty much it.
I had a bunch of things going on then, and she was just one of them. There was the car and the class election and Courtney and Jeff. But there was Jessica, too. If I think about it now, I guess I would say that the Friday before she came was probably the last normal day for a while. As normal as things ever were with me and Jeff.
It was the last week of September. The weather had been warm all the way from the start of school. St. Catherine's has gray blazers, navy blue pants, white
shirts, and blue ties, and it was hot in our uniforms. I sweat most of those days, right through my shirt, making what some of the kids called stink spots under the arms. We weren't allowed to take off our blazers in school, even when it was hot, so mine always got stained from the sweat.
Like most afternoons, I got off the bus at Jeff Hicks's house. We jumped from the top of the bus stairs and hit the front yard running, our blazers flying in our hands.
"You ever smell blood?" he asked, half turning to me. Jeff had been my friend for about three years, since the summer after third grade. As we went up the side steps to his house, I remember thinking that he asked me off-the-wall questions a lot.
"What?" I said.
Jeff always said some strange thing, then waited, and I would ask "what?" so he could say it again and make a thing about it. He reached the door first.
"Did you ever smell blood?" he repeated. "What does that mean?" I asked.
"Sometimes my mom comes home from the hospital all bloody from the emergency room -"
We rushed through the side door, making a lot of noise in the empty kitchen. Jeff's house was always unlocked, even though it had been empty all day.
"- some guy's guts on her shirt," he said. "It's so
gross. It's the coolest thing. So, did you ever smell blood?" He yanked open the refrigerator door.
"I don't know. Maybe. When I cut my finger -" "That's not enough. I mean a lot. A whole glass of the stuff."
I felt my stomach jump a little. "A glass of blood?" I said. "Who has glasses of blood?"
He pulled out a tumbler of red liquid - blood? - from the refrigerator and began drinking. He drank and laughed and drank. I finally realized it was cranberry
juice. The juice sloshed all down his chin and onto the front of his white shirt.
His shirt had little blots of red spreading down the front as he was dripping juice and laughing and watching me, until I laughed, too, at the whole thing.
"Stupid," I breathed. "How long did you have that glass waiting in there?"	
Laughing even harder, he put the dripping glass on the kitchen table and wiped his mouth on his cuff. "By the way, I went for a ride in it last night." He went to the basement door and pulled it open.
I was still looking at the glass on the table. "Huh?" He jumped down the stairs to a room with a TV and paneling. There were dark wooden shelves on the walls piled with stacks of his comic books.
I was right behind him. "You went for a ride in what?"
It was that game again. But I already knew.
"Duh. In your brain," he said. "My uncle's Cobra. I thought it was all you ever thought about."
"Yeah? The Cobra?"
He snickered as he went to the shelves. "The Cobra." A Cobra is a classic sports car from the 1960s. I love Cobras. Not the skinny kind they made for a couple of years, but the fat one. You see them every once in a while. A Cobra is low and all curved and super-fat, like a chunky bug that's pumped up like a balloon. It isn't a family car. It's just two seats, a steering wheel, and pedals on the floor. It's a machine. The racing tires are really fat. The wheel wells over each tire flare out like big, angry lips. The front end of a Cobra looks like a snake, with two headlights like eyes and a big mouth (the radiator hole) that could suck the pavement right up into it. It's the nastiest-looking fast car on the road.
I love Cobras. I've built plastic models of them. I've bought magazines about them. I once went to an auto show with my father, and they had a red racing Cobra
there. The shine was so thick it seemed like if you dipped your finger into it, it would be hot and wet. But they wouldn't let you get near enough to touch it. "As if it's so hot it'll burn you," I remember telling my father. He laughed. Cruise nights at a drive-in restaurant in the next town sometimes had a Cobra, too.
That past spring, Jeff had told me his uncle had an
original Cobra, and I was totally floored. He had restored it from a used one he bought in New York, where he lives. I had never seen the car, but Jeff told me it was a red one. "The kind you like," he had said.
People don't really talk to me much in school or notice me, not even adults. My mother says it's because I don't "get out there." But Jeff and I had been friends for
a long time. We never really said much to each other, but we did stuff almost every day. I always got his jokes, and I think he liked that. I remember feeling it was so cool that he knew I liked red Cobras.
Jeff had said his uncle sometimes brought it up to his house, and he got to ride in it. But I didn't get why I had never seen the car.
"I've never even seen your uncle," I said.
Jeff was flipping through a stack of comics he had taken down from a shelf. He chose one and slumped in a chair with it. He didn't say anything.
"I don't have an uncle," I went on. "I don't get the whole uncle thing. It's just me and my parents. Neither of them had sisters or brothers." He still didn't say anything, so I just kept on babbling. "Uncles always seem like these guys who get to have all the cool stuff fathers never get to have."
Finally, he dropped his comic into his lap and looked at me. "Yeah, well, my Uncle Chuck has a Cobra. And he's coming over next weekend."
I think my heart thumped really loudly. "Saturday? Next Saturday?"
He shook his head. "No, the weekend after. The ninth I think my mother said. Maybe we'll drive over to your house in the car." He pushed the comic book off his lap. "Really?"
He got up. "My mom said she got me two Avengers and a Spawn, the one where he bites through to another world. But she hid them because I yelled at her. Let's find them. I need to get all the school junk out of my head."
"Really? You mean it about the car? The Cobra? You'll come over and we can ride around in it?"
"Sure. Let's check her bedroom."
Chapter 2
Monday morning, I slid into my seat in Mrs. Tracy's classroom.
It seems strange now to think that I didn't know anything about Jessica Feeney then. She was only a few minutes away, and I had no clue that she even existed. I had spent most of Sunday sitting on my bed with my car magazines around me. The window let all the warm air in, and I remember wondering if it would still be warm thirteen days later when the Cobra came.
My seat in class was the first one in the first row by the hall door. It was odd that I was even in the first seat. Where you sat in all the classrooms at St. Catherine's was alphabetical. In every year before, there were kids sitting in front of me. Bender isn't usually the first name. Kids with last names like Anderson or Arnold or Baker were some of the ones who sat in front of me in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade.
Two years ago, a girl named Jennifer Aaron sat at the head of the first row. She probably always had that seat, I thought. But I also thought it was strange because I had
heard that Aaron was a Jewish name from the Bible, and why would a Jewish girl be going to a Catholic school? When I told my mother about her, she said I should just go ask her. But I never did find out. Jennifer transferred to public middle school last year, and two girls from the other class, Tricia Anderson and Cindy Bemioli, were in front of me for sixth.
Jeff hadn't been on the bus that morning, but he was already sitting in his seat next to me at the head of row two.
He didn't say anything when I said "Hey." He just sat there quietly and chewed his fingernails, which he did a lot, without thinking. I guessed his mother had driven him in because he missed the bus. She probably wasn't happy about it and so they probably had a fight. Jeff seemed to get mad a lot more since his father went away. Usually, I just left him alone, and pretty soon he'd be okay.
Right now his head was bent to the side, and he was turning his fingertips in his teeth. His tie was loose around his neck, and his top shirt button was undone. I remember thinking that his mother must have washed his shirt over the weekend, or it was an extra one because there were no spots on it. Maybe they had a fight about the shirt, too.
His legs dangled out into the teacher's area at the front of the classroom. Mrs. Tracy had asked him a couple of times already that year to reel his legs back in under his desk. He was stretching them out when she came n just then.
"Scoot your legs in, Jeff. Your slouching will curve your spine," she said. "You'll be a stooped-over old man by the time you're thirty."
She walked past and set down a pile of papers on the middle of her desk.
"Thirty is an old man!" said Jeff, taking his fingers out of his teeth and half looking around and laughing.
I snickered when I saw him joking. Maybe he was okay again.
Mrs. Tracy narrowed her eyes at him then smiled. "You'll feel different when you're that age. . . ."
"I know," he said. "I'll feel old!"
"All right, all right," she said, but the class cracked up anyway. Another busload of kids came in after the second bell rang. Melissa Mayer, who was sort of chubby
like me, came in laughing with Stephanie Pastor, who looked a little like a boy if you saw her from the right side. Kayla Brown plopped a paper on the teacher's desk then sat behind me. She was freckled and had red hair and was as small as the girls in fifth grade.
Rich Downing came running in and jumped into his seat behind Kayla as if he was trying to win a race. His
jacket was under his arm, and his shirt was coming out in the back. When he tucked it in I saw the same little V -shaped rip at the top of the rear seam of his waist that I had seen for the last couple of weeks. I knew that Rich was trying not to eat as much so his pants wouldn't tear on him, but it was happening anyway. The pants I was wearing that year were ones I had gotten last spring and that weren't too tight, so I wasn't in trouble yet. Like Jeff, Rich liked to crack jokes in class, but he was never as quick or as funny as Jeff.
Samantha Embriano came by and sat in the last seat of my row. She had black hair and a round face and eyebrows that almost met over her nose. She always said her last name together with her first name: Samantha Embriano. Samantha Embriano. It was always like that.
It would be like me calling myself Tom Bender. Hi, I'm Tom Bender. Tom Bender here. You just don't do that. I think at first she said her name like that because there must have been a year or two when she shared the same first name with someone else in her class. Samantha Baker or Samantha Taylor. But she continued to say Samantha Embriano even though that was not true anymore. Now we all called her that. Samantha Embriano.
Just after first prayers, when everybody stood up and held hands together and prayed along with Mrs. Tracy -
"Hold hands? No way," Eric LoBianco said every time - I leaned over to Jeff.
"We're on for next weekend, right?" I asked. "Not this one, but the next one?"
"Next weekend?" he said. "The Cobra," I whispered.
Jeff's face unclouded. He smiled. "Yeah. My uncle's coming over."
I smiled, too. Yeah, he's coming over and yeah, it's going to be awesome. Mrs. Tracy was still fiddling with something, and I scanned the room. I knew that no one else in the class was going to be riding in an awesome red Cobra next weekend. Or probably ever.
As I was thinking this and watching the last of the bus kids get into their seats, my eyes finally came to the last seat of the last row.
Chapter 3
Courtney Zisky sat in the last seat of the last row. She was the girl who I thought could easily be in clothes catalogs. Someone should pick her to be in them, posing with one hand on her waist, which was just the right size, and the other one flung up behind her as she pretended to walk. She'd be wearing all new clothes - a T-shirt never worn until five minutes before and flip flops and shorts with flowers on them. Maybe there would be a breeze blowing through her hair as she tossed her head back but turned just a little to look at you.
Courtney was beautiful. She had dark, almost-black hair and her skin was sort of creamy white. She didn't have freckles or the pimples and blotches that Darlene Roberts had, who was three desks in front of her.
Darlene might even have been pretty good-looking if not for that, but in a different way. Plus, Darlene sometimes squeezed her pimples in the lavatory. You could
tell, because when she came back, the skin around them was suddenly pink, like the spots on Jeff's shirt. You could also tell she was sad about her pimples and mad that she had them.
But Courtney was perfect. When I looked over, she was bending back up from putting something under her seat. A wave of hair went loose at that moment and fell from behind her ear across her cheek. It was like a splash of something. I almost looked away as if it were a private thing, but I didn't. The ceiling light flashed right off her hair and made it shine like a wall of dark water or something. The shine of her hair amazed me, but that was just one thing. I also knew that the smell of it was awesome.
One day, late last year, in Sister Robert Marie's sixth grade, I was able to move up a reading level because some of the books my mother kept pushing on me finally helped. My mom was so glad. And so was 1, mostly because moving up that late in the year meant that no matter how badly I did, there wouldn't be enough time to drop me back down again. I'd begin seventh grade on a pretty good level.
I wasn't a good reader, at least not to begin with. All through first and second grade, and part of third, I was in the lowest group. My brain always used to switch letters around when I tried to read and the whole thing made no sense. And because St. Catherine's classes were small, everybody knew you were in the dumb group. Maybe
Courtney didn't ever call it that, but whenever people moved up, Sister Robert Marie tried to make them feel better by announcing that they were moving up.
"I hope you'll welcome Tom," she said that day. "Tom Bender is moving up -"
"From the dumb group," Jeff whispered loud enough for everyone to hear, because he stayed behind when I moved.
Anyway, last year, for a couple of weeks at least, I was at the same table as Courtney.
The first time, when she took the seat next to me, I caught a little scent of her in the air that moved when she sat down.
That was it. That's what really started it with her. That time she sat down. Gosh! It was like the smell of fruit or something. It must have been the shampoo she used. It was faint, but smelled like peaches and apples. Maybe that's what it was called. Peaches and Apples. Whatever it was, it filled up the space around her. Being so close to her was an unbelievable thing. If I ever sat behind her in class - which I never would at St. Catherine's - I don't know if I could ever get any work done. I would be leaning forward all the time and smelling her hair.
I nearly fell into a trance at the table that day.
But when Courtney began to read parts of the book she had chosen for the group, she spoke so clearly and
with all the ups and downs in her voice that helped you understand what the characters were feeling, that I almost couldn't bear it when she stopped and Kayla began to read. Courtney seemed so excited at the exciting parts, too. It all just blew me away. She really was perfect. She was beautiful, of course. I knew that just by looking at her. But the moment she started to read, I knew she was really smart, too.
Since then, since that afternoon -on the bus, at night before bed - I had begun to think of ways I could save her life.
I couldn't be the only one who did that. I couldn't be. There wouldn't be all those adventure stories and comic books and movies and TV shows with all their action and lifesaving going on if I was the only one, would there?
Maybe it was from reading Jeff's comics in the afternoons or thinking about being in the Cobra or not being out there enough and having too much time alone, but I thought about saving Courtney's life nearly every day.
This is how it worked. It could be just an ordinary day - like today at school with the teachers and books and milk cartons and the smell of lockers and backpacks all around me - and I would suddenly sense that Courtney was in danger and I would have to rescue her.
For instance, Courtney and I would be the only ones at school, left behind because of something with the buses being gone and it was late or we were late. Then I
would see her at her locker, reaching for the top shelf and looking up into the back of it.
Suddenly, the walls would begin to shake. The ceiling would rattle and the floor tiles would start popping up out of the floor. Pop! Pop! You could see them shooting up, silhouetted in the big square of light coming from the end of the hallway. I'd seen that light a million times before, only this time the tiles were popping right up into it. Pop! Pop! Pop-op-op!
I knew right away what it was.
"Earthquake!" I yelled, running to her locker. Her hair was moving in a wave as she turned herself to the light then back to me. Ignoring the danger to myself, I pulled Courtney by the waist down the hallway toward the light. But as far as it actually was from our lockers to that doorway, it now seemed totally endless.
Pop! Pop!
We ran faster. Now the fluorescent ceiling lights began exploding one by one above us, the floor opened, and huge cracks appeared. A cloud of steam and flames burst up out of the ground under the school.
"I knew it - the center of the earth!" I said angrily. "It was just a matter of time!"
She looked at me, her eyes so wild. "But, Tom -" I shook my head. "Just come with me!"
Dancing over the widening cracks, holding her closely, I drew her toward the doors to safety. We plunged
through a small gap of daylight just as the walls thundered down behind us.
Standing next to her, breathing hard, as the police and fire engines and ambulances roared up around us, my arm still around her waist, I turned and smiled. "First period tomorrow's going to be a little tough."
She fainted then, but I caught her, moving my other arm swiftly up under her knees.
Chapter 4
But that wasn't all. I had lots of rescues.
Masked marauders - I always liked the word marauders, which I got from one of Jeff's comics, and of course they had to have masks on, really creepy masks with horns - would try to steal Courtney for some reason involving lots of money.
But there I was, battling my way past them, breaking the chains on her wrists, and carrying her up through some kind of tunnel of falling blades, which turned out to be not far from school when we surfaced. We dived right into my fat red Cobra and out of the parking lot, our pockets dripping with gold and jewels - enough for us to live on for the rest of our lives.
Or I would be at recess, flapping cool air into my blazer and talking with the guys about the science quiz, when I'd suddenly look up - I was the only one who knew to do this at just that moment - to see Courtney
plummeting through the air. The jet her uncle was piloting was on fire and crashing.
"She bailed out!" I would say. "Stupid chute didn't open!"
Tossing my blazer aside, I would somehow leap up from the roof of the gym (I was on top of the gym now) and jump sort of sideways across the school yard and catch her just as she fell. We would tumble slowly and softly to the ground together, on the bright green grass of a golf course that was across the street, and her hair would fly across our faces as we rolled and rolled down a little green hill. Then it would get a little hazy, but suddenly everyone was crowding around us - Joey and Rich and Darlene and Mrs. Tracy and Samantha Embriano.
And there would come the moment in front of everyone when Courtney would thank me.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
And she would always be with me after that. It could happen.
A short snapping sound of loose papers being stacked on a desk made me lift my head. Mrs. Tracy called on Joey Sisman to hand back some graded papers. He started in the back corner, putting a couple on Courtney's desk. She nodded and then leaned forward, moving her right hand between her skirt and the desk seat.
She looked up, maybe at the clock, and I turned away.
Of course, Courtney Zisky never actually noticed me. She was popular and had her own big bunch of friends that had never included me. Why would it include me? I was just a sweaty, fat kid with baggy pants, and she was Courtney Zisky.
But being unknown was actually good. Here's where not "getting out there" was a good thing. Not being noticed was perfect for a superhero. And I sort of was a superhero in all the adventures I thought of with her in them. I was pretty fearless. I had powers.
I had powers, even though I have to say that there was a pretty strange thing about every rescue story I thought of. The powers I had were not the usual superhero ones. They were small. Little powers. Not very remarkable. You could say they were even dumb.
In my battle against the marauders, for instance, I didn't have amazing strength or superspeed. When it came to the big moment to rescue Courtney, I found that what I could do was spin really fast - so fast I was like a blur! - on one foot.
If spinning fast was almost worthless in most situations, it happened to be the perfect thing against the marauders. They could do nothing against my spinning around. They fell away from me, dropping their weapons, which clanked to the floor. Their mouths (I could see their mouths behind the masks) were open wide and yelling. Their eyes were full of fear. Finally, I stopped
spinning long enough to pull Courtney away to freedom. We lived a happy life after that.
One-foot spinning was not all I could do, though. Sometimes a hand made of glue was the one thing I needed to stop the bad men. Once I used a detachable ear to trick them. A very loud finger snap, invisible elbows, an earthshaking hum, legs of snow, and the ability to roll uphill were just some of the many powers that helped me in my Courtney stories.
Each time, before I hopped into my famous roaring red Cobra and tore off into the night with her, I would use one of these abilities and leave all the powerful evil doers falling down in defeat.
Not that these rescues were ever easy.
Some of them were very tough. A lot of the time there would be a point when I'd have to choose between two really horrible things to save Courtney.
It was either the pit of hissing snakes or the rushing bunch of sweaty men with big iron clubs. The stairway of flashing sabres or the man-eating-snake-infested pool that stank like garbage.
Faced with these kinds of dangers, there came a moment when everything stopped and an instant of complete stillness fell over me and over everything around me.
I stood there, sizing up my choices.
It was like I was standing in the middle of a flimsy, little rope bridge. On one side the ropes were on fire,

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: No support

Vocabulary: Some difficult words

Language: Many descriptive words

Sentences: Multiple phrases

Text structure: Blend of written/oral

Inferences: Some implications

Concepts: Abstract/Complex Social

Mature concepts: With common experiences or clear fantasy

Features

Character development

Complex character relationships

Complex Problem/Solution

First Person

Present Tense

Topic

Bullies

Fears

Kindness

*Community

Courage

Fire

Friendship

Youth

Classrooms

*Family & Friends

*Feelings, Behaviors

Burns/Burning

Low Frequency Words

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angrily	announcing	avengers	babbling	bailed
bemioli	blazer	blotches	blur	breathed
catherine's	catholic	chute	classic	cranberry
curve	curved	dangled	detachable	doers
downing	earthshaking	embriano	emergency	engines
flimsy	flung	fluorescent	freckled	freckles
freedom	gross	guy's	headlights	ignoring
infested	instance	instant	invisible	involving
jewels	kayla	lavatory	level	lifesaving
liquid	lobianco	magazines	marauders	mayer
melissa	models	nastiest	navy	ninth
ordinary	original	pastor	pavement	piloting
pimples	plummeting	plunged	pockets	posing
prayers	private	public	radiator	reel
refrigerator	remarkable	rescues	restaurant	restored
roberts	sabres	scent	science	seventh
shared	shelves	sideways	silhouetted	sisman
situations	sloshed	slouching	snickered	spawn
spine	stairway	stank	stillness	superspeed
sweat	swiftly	taylor	thundered	tracy
transferred	tumbler	unbelievable	unclouded	uniforms
unknown	uphill	weapons	wrists	yanked