Free You Can Call Me Al by Crimson Cloak Publishing

Chapter 1

    Johnny Meyers was hurrying home from school,
and he was going to be in trouble. He had to stay in detention
after his last 8 th grade class because he had made a
‘not so smart’ remark to one of his teachers. He was only trying to
be funny, but it had backfired; now he wasn’t going to be able to
finish his chores before dinner. He also had a note that his Mom
would have to sign, from the teacher who had detained him. It
described his lack of proper behavior. It had been raining all day
and Johnny had lost his new umbrella that his Mom had given him
this morning. Well he didn’t really lose it, when he went to the
cloak room it had been gone. Some other kid must have picked it up
while he was being detained.
    Johnny lost his footing on the wet pavement,
tumbled over and fell flat on his face into a small puddle. His
math homework, that he had been doing while in detention, fell out
of one of his books, and was now lying face down on the wet
sidewalk. He got to his knees and slowly picked it up; it was
soaked, and his numeration was now illegible.
    “Oh, no! 1 1/2 hours of work ruined, what
else could go wrong today?”
    “Here, let me help you up.” Johnny’s eyes
darted up to a tall, sandy-haired man with blue eyes.
    “Thank you, but I can manage,” Johnny said
as he struggled to his feet.
    “What is that?” the sandy-haired man said,
pointing to the wet document in Johnny’s hand.
    “It was my math homework: now it is
ruined.”
    “May I see it?” Without waiting for a
response, the sandy haired man took the piece of paper and gently
held it up to his face.
    Seconds later he handed it back to Johnny.
“Looks okay to me, but you made an error in one of your steps in
your third calculation. You subtracted instead of adding.”
    Johnny looked at his homework in disbelief.
It was now perfectly dry and once again legible, and this man was
correct: he had made an error in the third problem.
    “Here,” the man said. “Looks like you are in
need of one of these.”
    He seemed to have produced a small umbrella
out of thin air.
    “Sorry sir, but my Mom doesn’t want me to
accept gifts from strangers.”
    “Someone is only a stranger for a second,
until you meet them; my name is Al, by the way. You are getting
soaked; here take this before you catch a cold.” Al shoved the
umbrella onto Johnny’s chest.
    Johnny grasped hold of the small umbrella,
it looked a lot like the one he had lost, not exactly, but
similar.
    “Well, thank you …”
    Al had disappeared.
    “ Well, maybe Mom won’t notice the
difference,” Johnny thought as he set down his books for a
moment and opened the umbrella.
    “ Who am I kidding, Mom always notices
stuff.”

    Johnny was fortunate; his Mom only gave him
a 5 minute lecture about his detention after she signed the note
from his teacher. She did inquire why he had left with one umbrella
and came back with another. Johnny explained to her that while he
was staying after school some nasty kid had stolen the umbrella she
had given to him, then on his way home, some stranger had given him
an umbrella and before he could refuse the offer the man had
disappeared.
    His Mom didn’t quite believe this story
because she frowned at him and gave him a cold stare: luckily the
phone rang, and his Mom got into a long conversation with a friend.
They had just finished dinner, so Johnny took up the dinner plates,
silverware and glasses and rinsed them off in the sink. His mom
would then load them in the dishwasher later. He then raced into
his room to finish his homework; he was off the hook for a while
anyway.
    Johnny lived alone with his mother, Melody.
He had never really known his dad; he had left after Johnny was
born. His Mom wouldn’t talk about him very much, she just told
Johnny that his father had to “go away”.
    The next day Johnny had softball practice
after school, it was cloudy and overcast but no showers had moved
back into the area. They were going to play another