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Excerpt

Excerpt

Teach Me

The Physics of Falling

Welcome to my head.

Let's hit the ground running. I will get you up to speed. We need a short learning curve here. Those are things my Dad likes to say. He works for NASA. He spends his days figuring out problems like this: If an object weighing 8.75 ounces traveling 10,000 miles per hour strikes the earth, how big a hole does it create?

Answer: One exactly the size of my heart.

Call me Nine.

Everybody does. When I was three I couldn't pronounce Carolina; it came out Caronina. My math-crazy father thought that was cute and shortened it to Nine.

Right now I'm sitting with my parents in Mom's Victorian Room surrounded by drapes with tassels, photographs of long-decomposed relatives. And on today's menu:

I've broken my mother's heart. All because at this penultimate moment in my 18-year-old life, two weeks before Senior Prom, I'm just not interested.

"But you're so smart, Nine," Mom sputters.

Exactement, I want to say. Don't you know that boys don't like smart girls? But men ---

I look out the window so they can't see my eyes.

My teacher, Mr. Mann, said the same thing the day the craziness started that knocked my heart out of its orbit.

Two hours later, behind the Wal-Mart Rule the World Super Center, he kissed me.

Excerpted from TEACH ME © Copyright 2005 by R. A. Nelson. Reprinted with permission by Razorbill/Penguin Young Readers Group, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA). All rights reserved.

Teach Me
by by R. A. Nelson

  • Genres: Fiction
  • paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Razorbill
  • ISBN-10: 1595140859
  • ISBN-13: 9781595140852