by Jamie Gilson
I got out the prizes. There were five Hot Wheels cars and some plastic models I had made of a Ferrari, an Edsel, and a Model T. Molly set up two life-size cardboard pictures of a washer and a dryer. She’d gotten them from the Maytag dealer in town. They were window displays of last year’s models, is how she got them.
“When we call your name, come on up,” Lisa said. “You can bring your notes. It’s not cheating to bring notes.”
Jenny Hanna couldn’t remember what Confucius said about not doing to others. R.X. had a hard time naming two major rivers. Aretha knew that rice was a major food, but Trevor guessed that there were 14 billion people in China. When Rolf finally named three Chinese cities, Lisa stepped forward to give him the last car, tripped on her untied laces, and went crashing into her empty desk in the front row. Everybody laughed.
Miss Hutter looked up, but she couldn’t tell what we were laughing at. Still, it was like she was typing our names on a computer program in her head called “Troublemakers,” so we got quiet quick.
“We’re finished,” Molly said very sweetly.
“Thaaaaaat’s all, folks,” Nick yelled, and we all started back to our seats.
“Very nice,” Miss Hutter said as she walked to the front of the room and stood behind Mr. Star’s desk. “I’ll stay with you people until the bell rings,” she went on. “You just sit quietly at your desks. I’m sure Mr. Star has given you ample work to do.” Nobody moved to get out workbooks or ditto sheets, so she went on. “Tomorrow, Mr. Star will most certainly not be here, so you will have a substitute teacher. I think I know just the young woman to call. She’ll be your first substitute of the year, I believe. Mr. Star has an excellent attendance record,” she said, looking back at Mrs. Bosco. “A fine teacher.”
Mrs. Bosco steadied herself with the bookcase next to her, rose from the little chair, and turned up the collar of her fur coat, ready to go out into the cold. “Today has been inspiring,” she told us all, “inspiring.”
“Well, class, may I count on you all to behave well with your substitute teacher?” Miss Hutter asked, her eyes wandering toward the room next door, where we could hear a rising hum.
Nobody answered.
“Class,” she said sharply, “I didn’t hear your reply. May I count on you to cooperate with her fully?”
“Yes, Miss Hutter,” we answered all together, like a song. Then we looked at each other and smiled. At last we were going to have a substitute teacher. She could count on us, all right.
4
SVETLANA IVANOVITCH
Burrrgggg! The first bell blared out as Nick and I crossed the street to the school yard. It had been icy cold sliding on the sidewalks, so our coats were hiked up almost high enough to meet our caps. When we swung in the front doors and turned the corner to our lockers, there were Molly, Lisa, and Jenny at theirs, kicking off snow-caked boots and putting on gym shoes.
“Well, if it isn’t the Ting Tang Show Peek-a-Boo Two,” Molly said when she saw us. Lisa and Jenny giggled.
“Did Mr. Star make it back today?” Nick asked Molly, unzipping his coat. We’d been talking about Mr. Star as we ran, and about what a blast it was going to be if we had a sub so we could fool around all day. Molly raised one eyebrow and smiled like she knew but just wasn’t telling.
“Come on,” I said to her, pounding my feet to knock the numbness out.
Molly looked away and shrugged as though she didn’t much care to talk to us, but, since we were being so pesty about it, she would. “Oh, Mr. Star is at home watching the soaps today. Miss Hutter just breezed by and told me what a lovely, sweet young woman we have instead of Mr. Star.”
“She said we should be especially nice to the lovely, sweet sub,” Lisa giggled, stuffing her boots and gloves into her already crammed locker.
“You know,” I said to them, “this may be our only sub of the year. Mr. Star is usually as healthy as a horse. Maybe we should do something special.”
“If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll sink her,” Nick said, lifting the knit cap off my head. We all looked at him and grinned. Even Molly. You sink a sub when you make her cry. Almost everybody’s been in a class where a sub has cried. You don’t start out to do it. It just happens when a sub finds out it’s the kids who are in control. Grown-ups sometimes can’t take that. When they can’t, usually they’re sunk. You know.
“I think we should sink her,” Lisa said. “Hobie’s right. It may be our only chance this year.”
“My brother,” Jenny said seriously, “had a sub once who only lasted half a day.”
“OK, we’ll go for it,” Nick agreed. “If she’s good, though, we won’t even get a sniffle.”
Molly placed her boots neatly on the green paper towels in the bottom of her locker. “I bet we can make her cry before you,” she announced.
“Who’s this we and who’s this you?” I asked.
“The girls,” Molly said slowly, like she was working it out as she talked, “the girls against the boys. See who can sink the sub first. Like a video game. What do you think?” She got a brush out of a little flowered box and started working at her hair, which is dark brown and hangs halfway down her back. It had lots of electricity and wouldn’t sit flat. Strands of if floated up like there was a magnet in the ceiling.
“What do you want to bet?” Nick asked her.
“I don’t know, what do you think?” she said, swishing her hair back and forth like a shampoo ad. “How about M & M’s?”
“Big deal,” I told her, because it wasn’t.
“Money?” Jenny suggested.
“How much?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Like a quarter a person?”
“Big deal,” I said again. When I was a little kid a quarter was a lot of money, but it didn’t seem like much anymore.
Nick, whose eyes had been looking fuzzy, like he was staring inside the closed lockers, said suddenly, “I’ve got it!” The girls gathered closer to listen. “This is absolutely it.” He banged his head with the palm of his hand. “I don’t know how I got to be so smart. Listen, we’ll bet you this. See what you think, Hobie.” Smiling with pure pleasure, he went on. “The losers, who don’t sink the sub, have to go down in the spit pit to get the pit balls for the rest of the year!” He stepped back and smiled like he thought his IQ must have just broken 200. “What do you think?”
Molly gulped.
“I won’t do it,” Jenny said.
“That’s, like, gross,” Lisa moaned.
“I don’t know,” Molly told him.
“Why not? Think you can’t win?” Nick asked her.
“Sure we can win,” Lisa said, but she didn’t sound all that sure.
“Look, if you want to back out of it…” I started, but Molly couldn’t take it.
“No fair dropping the ball down on purpose,” she said, and the girls looked at her like they thought she was bananas even thinking about a bet like that.
“Right,” I told her. “Only if it’s kicked there during a game.” I could just see the girls marching out every day and tossing the ball first thing into the spit pit and then leaning back and making the boys fetch it like Irish setters. “Right,” I said again. That’s what she was imagining, too, I guess, only the other way around.
The girls got in a huddle, whispering, but we could hear Molly tell them how much better they are than we are and like that, and pretty soon they all three turned to us with their heads cocked back, smirking.
“Okay,” Molly said. “We’ll do it. Too bad for you.”
Nick looked at me. “Well?” I could tell he really wanted to.
“Just for today?” I asked.
“For as long as she’s here,” Jenny said, looking over at Molly to see if that was right.
Molly nodded. “Right. If she’s here tomorrow and nobody’s won, the game’s still on.” She slammed her locker door and spun the combination lock.
“If we do this, we’ve gotta have some rules,’’ Nick told her. He opened up hi
s red notebook and got out a pencil. “One. No torture. You can’t bend her arm up behind her back or close the window on her fingers, things like that.”
Lisa rolled her eyes. “That’s not the way you’re supposed to make her cry anyway. That’s, like, too gross.”
“I think the only rule we need,” Molly said, “is that nobody can say anybody else is lying. I mean if I say I’m Jenny so everybody will laugh at the sub when she calls me Jenny and Jenny me, it’s not fair to say I’m not, if you know what I mean.”
Jenny smiled. She looked pleased that Molly wanted to be called her.
“Or,” Lisa said, “if Marshall happens to land a paper jet on the sub’s long, pointy nose, none of the girls will tell who shot it.”
It was almost time for the last bell and the girls were standing there ready to leave, shifting their feet, waiting for us to answer. Nick and I looked at each other. Then we looked outside. The snow that was falling as we walked to school was coming down faster now. It was a gray, boring Thursday. Why not?
“I guess,” I said.
“Sure,” Nick told Molly, “if you think you can make the rest of the girls do what they have to when they lose.”
“Ha!” Lisa said. “We won’t lose.”
Molly laughed. “They’ll do what I say. Don’t worry. And remember, telling isn’t fair, that’s the rule. Pass it on. Anybody who does tell gets the silent treatment for the rest of the year—until June. Nobody will say a word to them, not word one. Pass that on, too.”
Molly had organized a silent treatment last spring against this kid Marilyn, who Molly said was totally oosick, and Marilyn’s mother had gotten mad and called Miss Hutter, and Miss Hutter had had the guidance counselor come to our room. He had talked to the whole class about being nice. We’d had this big class discussion without anybody naming names. Anyway, this year Marilyn is in 4A, probably on purpose. Nobody wants Molly against them.
The three girls turned and rushed down the hall to spread the word.
The last bell rang as Nick and I were hanging our coats in our lockers. So we hurried toward the stairs to the fourth grade hall.
“I’ll write a note and pass it around so everybody will know what we’re going to do,” Nick said as we ran.
“Do you know what we’re going to do?” I asked him. “Do you think all the guys will do it with us?”
“I don’t know. It’ll be a blast, though,” he said, and I had to laugh because I knew it would.
There was noise coming out of both fourth grade rooms, which wasn’t surprising because now both classes had subs. From where we stood theirs sounded much louder than ours. We peeked in 4A to see why. Their sub was talking to this kid at the front of the class. The kid was waving his arms in the air, probably explaining how a panther had dropped on him from a tree on the way to school and he needed to go to the nurse or, if that wasn’t possible, the Resource Center. Everybody else was milling around. Their sub was nothing special—middle height, middle hair, middle age, gray dress—plain vanilla.
We looked in our room to size it up. A lot of seats were empty. I wondered if some kids were going to be late. Everybody in 4B was at least sitting down. Molly and Lisa must have been waiting for us. They probably wanted witnesses.
The sub was at the front of the room studying something on the desk. When we came in she looked up. “Hello, boys,” she said. “Aren’t you late?”
We stared at her from the back of the room. She was about five feet tall and she looked very young. Her hair was thick and black. So were her eyebrows, which practically met in the middle, meaning she was a werewolf. Everybody said that was the sign. She didn’t have a long, pointy nose like Lisa said she would. It was a very normal nose, but it was pretty nearly all about her that was normal. She wore a black skirt with colored flowers sewn all around the bottom and a white blouse with puffy sleeves that had the same flowers around the neck. She didn’t look like a substitute teacher. She looked different. She looked like we should have studied about her in Cultures of the World.
“You’re late, boys,’’ she said again. “Nobody else was.’’ She shook her finger at us as if to say, “Naughty, naughty, naughty,” and her long silvery earrings shivered.
I did not want to turn around and march back down to the office. I did not want to stand in front of Miss Hutter’s desk while she growled. How do I get myself into stuff like this? I thought. “It’s not late,” I said.
She got a funny look on her face.
“The bells are all messed up,” I said, closing the door behind me.
“Besides,” Nick told her, standing there looking her almost straight in the eye, “we’re crossing guards, and we’re always late. We protect kindergartners.” He waited a couple of seconds and then said, “We also leave early.”
You could hear the class suck in their breath. But we just wandered slowly to our seats, watching her as we walked. She looked at the floor. It had worked. We had gotten away with it. She had flinched. The kids who’d gasped before started to laugh now.
I smiled at Molly as I strolled along the windows and past her desk. “Give up?” I asked. She smiled back and stuck out her foot to trip me. I jumped over it easy, sank down in my chair right in front of her, and grinned. This was going to be fun.
The sub smiled, too. I guess she thought we were being friendly. Sitting on the edge of Mr. Star’s desk, she said carefully, “I want to tell you who I am. My name is Svetlana Ivanovitch. Now that is a very, very hard name to say, so I had better write it on the board. Then you can all see what it looks like.” She was talking slowly in that babytalk voice some grown-ups use with kids, puckering her mouth into a little O. Kitchie-kitchie-goo.
“I was born in Chicago, but my mother and father are from Russia, so they gave me a Russian name. That’s why my name sounds more…foreign than I really am. Do you know what the word ‘foreign’ means?”
She hopped off Mr. Star’s desk and twirled around, her hands on her hips, doing a funny little skip with her feet. The long earrings had silver bells on the ends that pinged as she turned. “What I am wearing is a costume from another land. That’s what ‘foreign’ means. From another land. It is a very, very old dress, and I thought you might like to see it.”
We were embarrassed to look at her so we looked at each other and shifted around in our seats. She really did think we were babies. She had another think coming. I turned around to look at Nick, three rows back. He was writing like mad. Folding the note carefully, he handed it to Marshall, who read it behind a dictionary he took out of his desk, grinned, and then palmed it to Trevor in the next row up.
The sub half skipped over to the chalkboard and, bracelets bobbing, carefully picked up a piece of the red chalk Mr. Star kept there for writing down names of people who talked too much or burped on purpose or forgot their math homework. For regular stuff he used yellow chalk. She wrote in the middle of the board in big red block letters:
MY NAME IS
SVETLANA
IVANOVITCH
I’M YOUR SUB
We all blinked. It was a hard name. You wouldn’t want to get it on a spelling test.
“Say it all together now,” she said slowly, pointing at each word and moving her mouth a lot like we were lip readers. “Svet-la-na I-van-o-vitch.” We mumbled along, barely opening our mouths, and then waited to hear her say, “Again, class. You can do better than that. I know you can.” But she didn’t. A real teacher would have.
“So what do we call you?” Molly asked, without raising her hand. “Svet-la-na?”
“Oh, my, no,” the sub said, shocked. “I don’t think that would be right. Surely that’s not done, is it?”
“Then it has to be either Miss, Mrs., or Ms.,” Lisa said, jumping right in there. “Are you married?”
“No, no, I…” She pulled at an earring like she wanted to have something to hold on to.
“Well, are you engaged?” Jenny asked, glancing over at Molly to be sure she’d asked the ri
ght question.
“No.” The sub smiled weakly like she knew this wasn’t the way classes were supposed to begin.
“Then I think you should be Miss Ivan-slow-vitch. That sounds best,” Molly declared.
“Ivan-o-vitch,” she said, “I’m Miss Ivan-o-vitch.”
We all waited. She ran her fingers through her hair nervously, then, smiling a brand-new smile, sat back up on the desk to start over. “How would you like to hear a secret?” she asked, smoothing out the wrinkles in her “foreign” skirt. We waited quietly, though we knew it couldn’t be much of a secret if she was telling it to all of us. “I expect you can’t tell,” she said, lowering her voice like she was reading us a bedtime story about Peter Rabbit, “but this is my very, very first time as a substitute teacher.” She beamed.
“You don’t mean it,” R.X. said, trying to be funny. A few people laughed.
“No, really, I do,” she went on. “I just got certified last month.” You could see in her eyes that she was worried about the babies here not understanding “certified.” “The state cer-ti-fies you to teach,” she said quickly to clear things up. “When you have all the college classes you need and they are certain you can do the job, you get a cer-ti-fi-cate that says you can be a sub-sti-tute teacher. I just got mine a month ago and you, my dears, are my very first class.” She threw her head back and held her arms out wide like she just wanted to hug us all.
We sat there and stared, thinking it over. Her dears, she’d said. I decided it would take us maybe half an hour at the outside and she’d be sunk to the bottom of the sea, right down there with the Titanic. She’d drift away and then they’d have to send in a substitute for the substitute. She didn’t know anything, or she’d never have told us we were her very, very first class.
“I love children,” she went on. “I love you because you are so sweet and good.” She leaned down like we were first-grade high and pointed at us when she said “you” and back to herself when she said “me,” as if that had to be explained, too. “That’s why I’ve told you the secret. So you will help me out and tell me, like the good little children you are, just what to do and when to do it. Then I will do well, and your principal will ask me to come back. You see, because I’m so new, I’m at the very, very bottom of the substitute teacher pool, but, what with all the flu going around, that’s who they’re calling now.” She paused just long enough to smile a tiny, begging smile. “Will you help me?”