Page 75 - SpringBoard_ELD_Grade6_Flipbook

Alpha and Omega: the beginning and the end
aCTIVITY 1.3
continued
My Notes
Interpret the Text Using Close reading
6 During that first week, when my father and I were at Margaret’s (we ate dinner there three times that week), I saw Phoebe’s face twice more at her window. Once I waved at her, but she didn’t seem to notice, and at school she never mentioned that she had seen me.
7 Then one day at lunch, she slid into the seat next to me and said, “Sal, you’re so courageous. You’re ever so brave.”
8 To tell you the truth, I was surprised. You could have knocked me over with a chicken feather. “Me? I’m not brave,” I said.
9 “You are. You are brave.”
10 I was not. I, Salamanca Tree Hiddle, was afraid of lots and lots of things. For
example, I was terrified of car accidents, death, cancer, brain rumors, nuclear war, pregnant women, loud noises, strict teachers, elevators, and scads of other things. But I was not afraid of spiders, snakes, and wasps. Phoebe, and nearly everyone else in my new class, did not have much fondness for these creatures.
11 But on that day, when a dignified black spider was investigating my desk, I cupped my hands around it, carried it to the open window, and set it outside on the ledge. Mary Lou Finney said, ‘’Alpha and Omega, will you look at that!” Beth Ann was as white as milk. All around the room, people were acting as if l had singlehandedly taken on a fire-breathing dragon.
12 What I have since realized is that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones. But this was later, during the whole thing with Phoebe’s lunatic, that I realized ‘this.
13 At this point in my story, Gram interrupted me to say, “Why, Salamanca, of course you’re brave. All the Hiddles are brave. It’s a family trait. Look at your daddy—your momma—”
52 SpringBoard® English Language Development grade 6
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