Xander and the Lost Island of Monsters Read Free

that’s just how I am, a freaking creative genius (well, he doesn’t actually use the word
freaking
, which he would call “a non-academic term”), and they all can just deal with it. “I know medication benefits many children,” Dad always tells them, “but Xander doesn’t need it. It is not medically necessary. He behaves appropriately at home. The difficulties arise only in certain classes, and so he does not meet the criteria for diagnosis.”
    Earlier this year, when Mr. Stedman pressed the issue, sending home note after note and making Dad come in multiple times, my father finally got angry during a conference. He stood up to his full height, and his eyes turned into polar ice caps. “You want these kids to grow up into unthinking cubicle monkeys. But that’s not going to happen to Xander, I can tell you that much,” Dad had said. “You bring this up one more time, and you’ll be very sorry.”
    I was sort of impressed. I’d never seen Dad threaten anyone. The worst thing he ever did was write a slightly annoyed letter to the newspaper for misspelling something.
You folks really need to invest in a copy editor
, he wrote. I wondered how Dad would make Mr. Stedman sorry. Probably sit him down and lecture him
so hard
. Maybe even wag his finger at him.
    For a second I wondered what my mother would have done about Mr. Stedman, if she were here. She had a real temper—Dad said it came with the red hair and the Irishness. I remember her curls flying all around her head, like a flaming halo of doom, when she got mad. Mom got angry about a lot of stuff—one of my last memories of her is Mom yelling at Dad about how he made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “You put the peanut butter on
after
the jelly, not before! Otherwise, the peanut butter sticks on the knife and gets in the jelly jar!”
    It seemed like a really funny thing to get so worked up about. I asked Dad about it once, and he said she wasn’t mad, just passionate. “Passionate about peanut butter and jelly?” I asked. “It’s only a sandwich!”
    â€œPassionate about everything.” Dad got a big smile on his face. “Besides, it wasn’t the sandwich she was angry about.” He shook his head and looked gloomy. I changed the subject.
    That makes me think that my mother would have given Mr. Stedman more than a lecture. She probably would have given him a solid right hook to the jaw.
    Anyway, the threat worked. Mr. Stedman’s nostrils flared as he sputtered and combed his fingers through his balding hair. Dad’s glare bored holes into my teacher until Mr. Stedman finally looked away.
    This whole school pretty much hates my family now. Especially Mr. Stedman.
    I strategically place my thick textbook in front of my notebook and start drawing while I stare at Mr. Stedman like he’s the most fascinating thing I’ve ever seen. If I don’t draw, I will literally fall asleep, because Mr. Stedman’s voice is like Ambien. And if that happened, he would truly go nuts.
    I consider what to draw. Self-portrait? Too boring. Just straight black hair in a style that’s almost a bowl cut, because Grandma, Obāchan, cuts it for me. (Dad keeps promising to take me to a real barber, but I’m not holding my breath.) Gray-blue eyes. Skin I can never find the right crayon color for anyway, even in Crayola’s “Multicultural” collection. It’s a shade with too many pink undertones to be yellow and too much yellow to be pink.
    A mix. A blend. A mutt. That’s me.
    â€œYesterday, a volcano in Hawaii froze,” Mr. Stedman says.
    I pause. Huh. Now
that’s
interesting. Idly, I draw sharks ice-skating on frozen lava covering the ocean. Weird climate things have been happening for the past two years. Pretty much every day, some news anchor interrupts my grandma’s
Wheel of Fortune
show to tell us about snakes fleeing a