Free I'm Still Scared by Tomie dePaola Page A

because, except for the white stuff around their faces, the Sisters were always dressed in long black dresses and black veils.

    Mom, Dad, and Buddy went up to the altar for Holy Communion. I sat quietly in the pew. I hadn’t made my First Communion yet.
    They came back and knelt down for a little while. Then Mom whispered, “Okay, boys, we have to go now or you’ll be late for school.”
    Because no one had had breakfast, we went into the drugstore across from the church. They had a soda fountain. “We don’t have time to go all the way home,” Mom said. “So we’ll have a quick breakfast here. It will be a treat.”

    I had a glass of chocolate milk and a doughnut. “From the Vienna Bakery downtown,” the lady told me. I had never had a chocolate milk and a doughnut from the Vienna Bakery for breakfast before!
    â€œI need the car, boys, so your mother is going to walk you to school,” Dad told us. We said good-bye to Dad and started down Linsley Avenue toward Hanover Street with Mom.
    â€œWe’ll take the walkway through the cemetery,” Mom said. “It comes out on Orange Street, right before King Street.”
    While we were walking, I saw people standing around, talking quietly.
    â€œWhat are all those people doing?” I asked.
    â€œOh, just going to work,” Mom said.
    It didn’t look that way to me.
    Mom left Buddy and me at the corner of Orange and King Streets. That’s where the school was.
    â€œI’m going to take the bus home. Be good, boys,” Mom said, kissing us.

    When Buddy and I got to school, I saw the two teachers who were on duty in the upper school yard with the two teachers from the lower school yard. They were talking in low voices. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
    The older kids were talking in groups, too. Buddy went over to his sixth-grade friends. I looked around. There was my best friend, Jeannie.

    â€œWhat’s everyone talking about?” I asked her.
    â€œI guess it’s all about the attack on Pearl Harbor yesterday,” Jeannie said.
    â€œMy mom said that things will never be the same,” I told Jeannie.
    â€œMy father and Mr. Conroy were talking this morning about how there will probably be a war,” Jeannie said. “They didn’t know I heard them.”
    â€œMy uncle Charles said the same thing yesterday,” I said. “He and his girlfriend, Viva, his best friend, Mickey Lynch, and my grandparents, Tom and Nana, came up to our house. I heard Mom on the phone saying that we need to be together.”
    â€œI don’t know why nobody will tell us anything,” Jeannie said.
    â€œBuddy said that we’re just kids,” I said. “He may be older, but he’s just a kid, too,” I added.
    Then the school bell rang.

Chapter Two
    It was time to go inside. All the kids lined up by class. One by one, we filed into the school and down the hall or up the stairs to our rooms.
    Miss Burke, the principal, was usually standing in front of her office, watching us come into the school. Today she wasn’t there. We could hear her in her office, talking on the telephone.
    We had to take our coats and stuff off before going into the classroom. In first grade we had a coatroom in the back of our classroom But in second grade we had to use a small space next to the stairway leading down to the auditorium.
    It was always a pain in the winter. We had so many coats to hang up and galoshes (or Arctics, as we called the rubber boots we wore to keep our shoes dry) to take off and put away.
    School was always smelly in the winter, especially if it was snowing.

    â€œWet wool,” Jack Rule told us. “My grandma says winter clothes are made from wool and when they get wet, they smell.” Well, Jack’s grandma was right. On a snowy day, the whole school had a “wet wool” smell.
    Then there was the “mittens drying on the radiators”