Thirteen Ways to Sink a Sub

by Jamie Gilson

  She looked like a little kid, a funny-looking kid dressed up for Halloween, asking for a triple-dip chocolate ribbon, peanut butter, and daiquiri ice cream cone. What was sad, she didn’t even know she wasn’t going to get it. Miss Ivanovitch wasn’t going to sink to the bottom of the sea, just get stuck at the foot of the pool. I wondered if Nick and Molly felt a little sorry for her, too.

  Nick was waving his hand at her like he was trying to shake his fingernails off.

  “First off, teacher,” he told her when she nodded to him, “you better take attendance and get the cafeteria and milk count going right away and send the flag people down to raise the flag. Hobie, R.X., Marshall, and me, we’re the ones who do all that today. It takes two to raise the flag so it doesn’t drag on the ground, one guy for the cafeteria count, and one for attendance. And they want that stuff down at the office five minutes ago.”

  Marshall and R.X. turned around and eyed Nick like he was bonkers, but when he grinned at them, they laughed back. They’re always game, Marshall and R.X. are.

  “Why, thank you very much…” She checked the seating chart to see who he was.

  “Nick,” he said, “Nick Rossi, at your service.”

  Molly looked over at Lisa and gagged like Nick made her sick, but she didn’t say anything. Actually, the same person takes the attendance and cafeteria count to the office, and it was the fifth graders’ month to put the flag up, not ours. But I guess Molly didn’t feel like getting the old silent treatment for the rest of the year, so she didn’t tell. Aretha, who sits next to Molly, raised her hand to say Nick was lying, but Molly shook her head and Aretha shrugged and gave it up.

  Nobody lied about the cafeteria count because we knew they’d discover that one back in the office. If the cooks boiled twenty-five hot dogs for our class, somebody was sure to notice if only eight of them got paid for.

  Roll call, though, was a riot.

  Maybe Molly hadn’t passed the word yet about not telling, but she had changed names, and when the sub called the roll, all the girls giggled when Molly answered to Lisa’s name and Lisa to Molly’s. Jenny didn’t get to change names with Molly after all, and she didn’t look too pleased about that.

  “Now, my dears, that isn’t the way you’re down on the seating chart,” Miss Ivanovitch said to them. “Mr. Star’s chart says Molly Bosco is supposed to be sitting in the second seat next to the windows and Lisa is in the first row away from the windows.”

  “Oh, Miss Ivan-slow-vitch,” Lisa rolled her eyes over the sub’s ignorance, “that’s an ancient seating chart. Mr. Star hasn’t used that seating chart since, like the first week of school.”

  “Well, thank you, Molly,” Miss Ivanovitch said, and everybody laughed. “I’ll just write your name on the chart in pencil so I can remember.” And she did. If Mr. Star saw that, they’d really catch it.

  Miss Ivanovitch got lots of names messed up, but we were all waiting for her to get to Rudolph Pfutzenreuter, who sat next to me, right in front of the teacher’s desk.

  “Is it Rudy?” she asked, not even trying his last name. We knew how to say it easy because we’d known him all our lives. And nobody ever calls him Rudolph, or Rudy either. He’s Rolf.

  But Nick had sent him up another note while the sub stumbled through Trevor Teneick and Michelle Duguid in the second row.

  “I’m called by my last name, Miss Ivanovitch,” Rolf said, proving he could handle hers.

  “Everybody calls you…Pfutzenreuter?” she asked.

  When we poked each other and laughed, she laughed, too, like a real person, and said, “Then I just won’t call on you very much. You’ve even topped Svetlana Ivanovitch.”

  After Aretha Eliott, she said, “Raymond Xavier Shea.” That really broke everybody up. We haven’t called him anything but R.X. since second grade when he moved to Stockton. As she finished roll call we began to realize how many people were absent, a lot more boys than girls. “My,” the sub cooed, going back to baby talk, “that old flu bug is really nibbling away at my poor dears. Why, eight children are sick,” she moaned, like it pained her so. As she wrote out the absence slip she told us, “There are ten girls here and only seven boys.” She shook her head sadly, and her ears chimed.

  Molly smirked at me.

  “It’s not fair, you know,” I told her. “You’ve got three more than we do.”

  She was folding a note she’d been writing to Lisa. “Your subtraction skills are truly amazing,” she said lightly, handing me the note, which I almost put in my pocket. Instead, I read it. It told Lisa to start a note going about the bet to the girls in the two rows on her side of the room. Molly, it said, would pass one back down the two on our side. Big deal, I thought. We’ve already done that. I gave the note to Rolf, and he reached over an empty desk and handed it to Lisa right under Miss Ivanovitch’s nose. Lisa didn’t even bother to hide it as she read.

  It was nine-twenty-five by the time Nick and I, R.X., and Marshall stood up to go. Miss Ivanovitch waved both hands at us as we left. “Hurry, now, like good boys,” she said. She didn’t want us to stop and nibble the cabbages in Mr. MacGregor’s garden. But we didn’t hurry. There was time, plenty of time.

  5

  I’VE GOT AN ITCH

  We slammed the door behind us. Nick jumped up and clicked his heels together. “Wahoo!” he shouted. “How’s that for escape?”

  “Clever,’’ Marshall told him, “very clever, but what do we do now? Hide in the lockers until lunchtime?”

  “We can’t all go down to the office,” R.X. said. “That would look very suspicious.”

  “Of course not,” Nick said, rolling his eyes. He strolled over, opened the door of the empty fourth grade room just down the hall, and bowed us in. Last year they’d used it as a teachers’ lounge, so a red-and-blue-striped curtain still hung over the window in the door. The teachers had put the curtain there so kids walking by couldn’t see them eating mounds of double-chocolate brownies while they graded those math tests that made us gag.

  At least, that’s what Nick said the reason was, and I believed him. But that curtain made the room a perfect place for us to hide. Most real teachers were busy getting their classes going first thing in the morning. But Miss Hutter could be anywhere, anytime—and usually was.

  R.X. took the lunch count and attendance downstairs while Marshall, Nick, and I stayed behind to plan. We closed the door quietly behind us.

  “You got any rubber bands?” Nick asked, clutching my sleeve. I shook my head, but started digging around in my pockets to be sure. Marshall shrugged. I knew why Nick needed rubber bands. He was the best shot in our class, and his whole supply had been lifted when Mr. Star had caught him making Aretha’s braids bounce from across the room. He’d been zapping her hair with little yellow rubber bands that sometimes missed and stung Aretha’s neck, making her yelp. So those were gone and Nick didn’t have any in reserve.

  There weren’t any rubber bands in my pockets. Mom turns the pockets of my jeans inside out before she washes them, and the ones I was wearing were hot out of the dryer when I put them on that morning. Mom has been hysterical about pockets ever since a few months ago when I left one bright red and one red-violet crayon in my pants and they fell out in the dryer. The two crayons tumbled around for the whole hot cycle and melted all over my jeans and shirts and underwear and everything. They were new clothes, too, because fourth grade had just started, and I’d grown a lot since third. Those yucky crayons left big blotches of reddish gunk on half my clothes, just about. So a lot of the time it looked like I’d been in a fight and lost. The color had faded some, but if I was at camp, I sure wouldn’t need name tags sewn on my clothes. Anyway, that’s how I knew my clean pants didn’t have rubber bands or anything else in the pockets.

  We all agreed to bring some the next day. That way we could shoot tacos. Not the mushy kind with hamburger and lettuce and cheese and hot sauce that drips all over you when you eat it. Those wouldn’t work. This taco is a piece of pap
er you keep folding over and over until it’s shaped like a V. You bite the crease to make sure it stays and fasten the ends with tape. It ends up pretty small, about a half inch wide, and looks a little bit like a real taco. It shoots much better, as anyone can tell you who’s ever tried to shoot a real one.

  Marshall said he’d help by folding a hundred or so airplanes, the kind that soar up high before they dive, long flyers. He was doing it not so much for the bet against the girls, though, as just because he likes to make planes. He’d rather do that than eat. For sure he’d rather do it than work long division problems or give his report on Australia.

  “My brother told me,” Marshall said, tearing a sheet of paper off the square pad he kept with him, “that he was in a class once where this kid said he didn’t speak English so all the time the sub was there she left him alone. I like that.”

  “It’s pretty good,” I told him, “but what if she speaks that language? I mean, she’s got on this foreign costume. Maybe she speaks lots of languages. You’d get caught right away if you chose the wrong one.”

  As we were talking, Marshall was folding. What he was folding was not an airplane, but a gorilla. He also makes spacemen, lobsters, kangaroos, and like that, just by folding paper. It’s this thing he learned to do from reading a book about origami, which, he says, is the Japanese art of paper folding. He tried, in a demonstration speech for Language Arts once, to show us how to make a crane, but it didn’t take.

  “You tell the sub that I can’t speak any English,” Marshall said. “Then she’ll leave me alone and won’t suspect when I spend all my time folding. Tell her I can’t speak anything but…” First he grinned, and then he laughed out loud. “…Japanese.”

  “Japanese!” I groaned. “Listen, Marshall, I don’t know, but I think there are very few black Japanese, no kidding. Very, very few. And even fewer black Japanese who go around Stockton, Illinois, wearing orange shirts that say ‘My Mom and Dad Went to San Francisco and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.’ We have here a substitute teacher who doesn’t know very much and thinks we are mere babies, but about this I think she just might suspect something.”

  Marshall looked down at his orange shirt. “So?” he shrugged. He made a sharp crease in the paper, folded the gorilla’s hand over, and hung it on the edge of an empty shelf. It swung back and forth, but didn’t fall. “Tell her you don’t know anything about me,” he went on, “except that I grew up in Tokyo and just moved last month to the suburbs of Chicago so different from my native land. Tell her I’m lonely for Japan so I sit around folding origami to make me think of home. Tell her teachers make me nervous. Then she’ll forget I’m there, and I can produce whole convoys of planes. When she drops by to tell me what a good little foreign boy I am, I’ll be working on a crane or something else Oriental and she won’t even guess. I promise not to crack.”

  “Listen, if we were going to have anybody speak only a foreign language, it should be Eugene Kim. He used to live in Korea,” I told him.

  “Wouldn’t work,” Marshall said. “One, he can’t make airplanes that fly worth anything, so what good would it do? Two, he’s home sick today.”

  Nick grabbed his shoulder. “Listen, Ezry, if you mess up after we tell her all you say is ‘here,’ since that’s what you said when she was taking attendance, you’ve had it, and I mean that!” Marshall just looked blank and blinked his eyes like he didn’t understand a word Nick had said.

  I turned to Nick. “OK, so Marshall here folds a hundred Japanese jets. Then what do we do with them? I mean, exactly what?”

  Nick bit his lip and thought about it a while. Marshall sat cross-legged on the floor and folded another sheet of paper into a plane. When it was finished, Nick picked it up and skimmed it toward the windows. It glided and dipped like a dream. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s hard to decide whether to shoot them all off at once so the whole room is crammed with flying paper, or just to go at it slow and easy over maybe an hour. I think,” he went on as he scooped up the landed plane, “maybe we should throw slow at first so she can’t tell where they’re coming from and then bombard the air so fast she won’t know what to do. That should drive her batty.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “and batty is close to sunk. It sure is better than the girls’ dumb plan. I mean, what’s so sub-sinking about changing names? That’s nothing. I bet they won’t have any good ideas at all. They’re practically crawling into the spit pit already.”

  Bap-bap-bap! There was a loud knock at the door. Bap-bap-bap, the sharp knock of somebody who means business. We looked around the almost empty room and saw at once the only place to hide. Skidding across the waxed floor, we opened the closet next to the sink, packed ourselves in, and closed the door behind as fast and quiet as we could.

  But the knock came again. Bap-bap-bap! We heard the door of the classroom fly open and feet hurry in, sounding like they knew where they were going and why. It almost had to be Miss Hutter. She would open the closet door and see us huddled there and then—I couldn’t even imagine what would happen next. She was headed straight toward us. We pressed ourselves against the walls of the closet. Closing my eyes, I tried not to breathe. Next to my ear there came a rap on the closet door.

  “Hobart Hanson!” a strange voice boomed. And then nothing. “Nicholas Rossi!” the voice said next. We couldn’t tell who it was, but it didn’t sound like Miss Hutter. Maybe Miss Ivanovitch. “Marshall Ezry!” it said at last, as the handle turned and the door flew open.

  “Gotcha, dipsticks,” R.X. cackled, sounding like himself this time. He shot his arms out straight at us as if he was starring in Frankenstein Meets the Closetmen.

  We felt more like The Three Stooges, scrunched up in the corners of that musty old closet that used to hold teachers’ coats and wet boots and drippy umbrellas. R.X. didn’t need to make us feel dumb like that.

  We chased him around the room, getting closer to the windows than hide-outs should. We could have gotten him down on the floor and tickled the sweatsocks off him, too, if we’d had the time.

  “Listen, you guys, I heard about something 4A did to their sub yesterday,” R.X. said, waving us away so we wouldn’t tackle him. And he whispered it to us as we opened the door and looked both ways to see if anyone was coming.

  “No kidding, though, you think we’re gonna pull this off?” I asked Nick as we reached the room. “Only seven boys and one of them doesn’t even speak the language.”

  Opening the door to our room, we saw right away that something was wrong. For a long second it looked like nobody was there at all. Geez, maybe they’re out looking for us, I thought. But first we heard their voices and then we discovered them—all of them. They were on their knees. The whole class was crawling around on the floor except for Molly, who was scrunched in front of the chalkboard. She ducked behind the teacher’s desk when she saw us.

  “Careful!” Miss Ivanovitch called out in a high, shaky voice. She was kneeling with a couple of kids over by the pencil sharpener. She rose and tiptoed toward us, searching the floor at each step. “Oh, do be careful where you walk.”

  I looked at the floor, too, expecting to see a shattered jar of yellow paint, a smear of white paste, or maybe even a tile missing with a vast hole opened up to the cafeteria below us. But nothing seemed to be strange about the floor at all.

  “Jenny has lost a contact lens,” Miss Ivanovitch explained. “It’s one of the new kind that’s made of something practically invisible like gelatin, and the poor dear is so upset.”

  Jenny did look upset. Arms folded on her desk, she was resting her head on them, and her shoulders were shaking. I never even knew she wore contact lenses.

  “We’re helping her search,” Miss Ivanovitch went on, scanning the floor. “Unfortunately, she doesn’t know where she was when it dropped out. It could be anywhere underfoot.” She fingered the flowers on her blouse nervously, dropped to her knees again, and craned her neck under a desk, jangling her jewelry.

  Jenny lifted her
head and I could see by her grin that her shoulders had been shaking with laughs, not tears. At the chalkboard Molly picked up a piece of yellow chalk and wrote, “Boys I, Girls II.”

  Nick looked at Molly’s scoreboard, lifted his eyebrows, and poked Marshall, who started planting his feet firmly as he marched back to his seat.

  “Watch out, young man!” Miss Ivanovitch called, and everyone snaking around on the floor stopped to see what was happening. “Young man, that contact lens is very fragile. I said very clearly it was fragile.” Marshall didn’t pay any attention. “‘Fragile’ means if you step on it you’ll break it!” she yelled, not very patiently.

  Marshall turned around and looked sadly at her, but kept blasting up the aisle to his desk next to the bulletin board. He scraped the chair loudly as he sat.

  Miss Ivanovitch blinked. She couldn’t believe that dear boy was doing what she’d asked him not to, especially when she’d been careful to explain the hard word.

  “Oh,’’ Nick said, snapping his fingers like he’d just remembered something, “I bet you don’t know about Marshall.”

  The kids on the floor quieted down and stared at Marshall, trying to figure what there was special to know about him. He bent toward his desk, tore a piece of square paper from his pad, and started folding.

  “Marshall is Japanese,” R.X. blurted out. Marshall turned his head away from Miss Ivanovitch and winked at Trevor on the floor next to him. Trevor collapsed on his back and started kicking his feet, he was laughing so hard. Miss Ivanovitch glanced quickly around at the rest of the class. Most of them were laughing, too. Then she stared at Marshall again. His face was turned away so all she could see was his San Francisco T-shirt and springy black hair. It was true that even from the back Marshall didn’t look Japanese. Miss Ivanovitch smiled slightly as though she might laugh, too.