Free A Girl from Yamhill by Beverly Cleary

lunch, I must have looked peaked. Convinced that something must be wrong, Mother visited our class at school.
    That day Miss Falb told Mother what a nice little girl I was and went out of her way to be kind. This confused me. When some of us were sent to the blackboard, I accidentally erased part of Miss Falb’s example of writing that the boy next to me was supposed to copy. Fearing punishment in front of Mother, I began to cry.
    â€œWhy, Beverly, there’s nothing to cry about,”said Miss Falb, so gently I felt even more confused. This was not the Miss Falb I knew.
    â€œOf course you didn’t mean to erase the writing,” she said, and rewrote the erased example while Mother, smiling, sat on a straight chair at the back of the room.
    After Mother’s school visit, life was worse than ever. “Please, Mamma, don’t make me go to school,” I begged. “Please, please!”
    â€œOf course you have to go to school,” she said. “Miss Falb is a very nice teacher. It’s all in your imagination.”
    â€œIt is not!” I screamed. “She’s mean, and I hate her!”
    â€œNow, show your gumption and remember your pioneer ancestors,” ordered Mother as she shoved me out the door. I was fed up with all those pioneer ancestors, who only faced danger and starvation and did not have Miss Falb for a teacher.
    Somehow the first grade came to an end. Free at last, I raced home with my report card.
    Mother examined it and pointed out something I had overlooked in my escape, three words written in perfect script so pale it was almost invisible: “Passed on trial.”
    Mother looked sad. “Beverly,” she said, “you must never, never tell anyone.”
    â€œWhy?” I asked, unprepared for shame. The Bluebird who lived across the street had demanded to see my report card. She knew. I was filled with guilt.
    â€œBecause we don’t want anyone to know,” Mother told me; “and you must work harder in the second grade. If you don’t, you might have to go back to Miss Falb.”
    I need not have worried about facing Miss Falb again. When school started in September, she no longer taught at Fernwood. She had been transferred to the open-air school for tubercular children.

Miss Marius
    That summer, the children of the neighborhood skated once more. We skinned our knees tumbling off tin can stilts and played Lotto and Old Maid. Bobby’s mother reclaimed her sad little boy, and Mother was mine again. Father began to work days instead of nights at the Federal Reserve Bank. I was now confident that I would live through the night, that no earthquake would turn our house into rubble, and no Thing lurked under my bed, ready to pounce if I moved. I forgot the ominous words “on trial,” and entered the second grade refreshed.
    Miss Tessie Marius, our second-grade teacher, was plump and blond, with a pink and white complexion. She was pretty, calm, gentle, kind and, in my memory, never wore navy blue. MissMarius, aware of my shameful record, asked me to come to her desk with my book, The Beacon Second Reader . She had me stand beside her, and there she quickly taught me to read—or perhaps I had already learned but had been frozen by fear.
    The second reader was an improvement over my primer. There were no silly accounts of Ruth and John, Rover and Kitty, or stories of Tom and May going to the seashore. Seashore! No one in Oregon went to the “seashore.” Oregonians went to the beach or “over to the coast.” Everything in that primer had been pretty—brooks, books, dolls, doves, robins, ponies—and everyone happy—kissing papa, spinning tops, swinging high, and riding their stupid pretty ponies. The Beacon Second Reader had stories already familiar from Mother’s library in Yamhill: “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” “The Wolf and the Seven kids,”