LI: To synthesise your understanding of a text by using varied sentence structures to communicate character, mood, and abstract ideas.
Several weeks after. One afternoon I saw Shmuel with a black eye. I asked him what happened, but he refused to talk about it. Although I was surprised, I realized that bullies were not just at my school in Berlin, but all around the world and one of them did this to him. I talked about how small a three-story house was, not remembering how he had lived with eleven people in one room before coming to Out-With, including a boy named Luka who kept hitting Shmuel for no reason. Sadness washed over. The next day it was raining non-stop; I thought about Shmuel, felt guilty, and spoke softly, “I need to apologize to him.” How could I have been so blind to his pain? I dropped my book, stared at the door, and gasped as Gretel walked in unexpectedly. I had to lie to protect my secret friend.