by Jamie Gilson
“What R.X. means,” Nick explained with a very straight face, trying to save us, “is that Marshall just moved to Stockton from Japan last month. He’d lived over there all his life and he doesn’t speak any English yet. Only a word or two—maybe three. Before too long he’ll start English lessons, but he likes it better now if you don’t fuss. I tell you what, I’ll look on the bottoms of his shoes to see if Jenny’s lens stuck to either of them.” He tiptoed toward Marshall’s feet.
“What Marshall does,” I went on with the story, “is he sits at his desk all day and folds origami because that reminds him of home. Or-i-ga-mi!” I called. Marshall nodded his understanding, smiled a small, sad smile, and held up this fancy purple kangaroo. A few of us clapped. Since there were also a few giggles, I went on, “We try to laugh a lot with him to cheer him up.”
Miss Ivanovitch, trapped, clapped and laughed with us. It was actually a very impressive kangaroo. Marshall raised his eyes toward the ceiling and looked glum, like he was dying for Tokyo and some good old-fashioned raw squid.
“I’ve got it,” Nick yelled, falling to his knees next to Marshall’s desk. “I’ve found Jenny’s lens.”
Jenny, who had been peeking over her arms, raised her head. “You’re kidding,” she said. She picked her way slowly around the kids on the floor to the place where Nick was kneeling and narrowed her eyes at the piece of cracked plastic Nick held on the tip of his finger. Miss Ivanovitch peered, too.
While their heads were together, Molly was busy again at the chalkboard. The rest of the class kept fooling around on the floor, talking, taking books out of other kids’ desks, and stacking them up in a row like standing dominoes.
When Nick, Jenny, and Miss Ivanovitch came out of their huddle, Jenny moaned, “That’s nothing like my very fragile contact lens. I kn-kn-know I’ll never find it. Ever. Ohhhhh,” she blubbered, putting the back of her hand on her forehead.
I watched Molly drop low and crawl away from the chalkboard, inching down the middle aisle. In five minutes more it would be recess. So far we’d done no school work at all.
“Perhaps we should call your mommy,” Miss Ivanovitch said, resting her arm on the sobbing shoulder. Jenny stopped moaning at once. “My mommy,” she said flatly, “lives in Kankakee,” which was true, even though it didn’t sound like it. “My daddy is a psychiatrist in Chicago, and he’d put me on stale bread and water if I bothered him at the office.”
Trevor and David, sitting on the floor near the windows, were lobbing wads of paper into the wastebasket and mostly missing. The fat paper balls kept colliding in midair, so the floor was littered with them. When David made two baskets in a row, he got up and bonged the Chinese gong still there from the Ting Tang Show.
Molly, meanwhile, had gotten all the way back to her desk. She and Marshall were the only ones sitting down. “Jenny might just have forgotten to put her contact lens in this morning,” she called over the din.
Jenny smiled at Molly. “I might,” she said, “at that. When I get home from school, I’ll be sure to check.”
Miss Ivanovitch looked from one girl to the other. Her shoulders drooped.
The gong sounded again. Rolf was taking his turn.
“Pfutzenreuter,” she said, raising her voice, “you put that hammer down this instant! Everyone return to his or her own seat.” Rolf rang the gong again, but gently. “The lens has been found. Or rather, it—”
Somebody tapped the first of the dominoed books and they slapped sharply to the floor. The racket of talking and laughing got louder and louder as kids headed more or less back to their places.
But Miss Ivanovitch stood completely still in the middle of the room, her hands clutching her skirt. She was looking, bewildered, at the chalkboard. Her eyes were wide with astonishment, but they weren’t quite crying.
We stared, too. One by one, the kids stopped talking as they saw what she saw. It wasn’t the scoreboard that got her, though now it said, “Girls III, Boys II.” She couldn’t know what that meant. It was her name. While everybody else was searching the floor for The Emperor’s New Contact Lens, Molly was working on Miss Ivanovitch’s name. She had added a couple of marks to SVETLANA, erased ANOV from the last name, and made a few other fast changes.
The announcement now read in big red block letters:
MY NAME IS SWEAT-LANA
I’VE GOT AN ITCH
I’M YOUR NURD
From the room next door we could hear a high, thin voice rise over the low mutter of the class. It was their sub shouting, “I was not, my friends, born yesterday.” And then they, too, were quiet.
The bell rang. “Recess!” Marshall called into the silence. We grabbed kickballs from the bashed-up Styrofoam box where the school ones were kept and ran to our lockers.
“That’s one of the three words he knows,” Nick called back, loud enough for Miss Ivanovitch to hear. “Geez,” he said to me, “can’t he keep his mouth shut?”
I closed my eyes. This is too awful, I thought. Now she’ll tell Miss Hutter and Miss Hutter will make us write our parents letters about it and then she’ll tell Mr. Star and he’ll start being grim instead of fun and then we’ll be the ones to sink to the bottom of the deep blue sea.
6
HAVE A NICE DAY!!!
The snow was falling so fast we were afraid Miss Hutter might be there barring the outside door. If she was, we were going to argue. There was a lot to talk about and inside recess meant staying in the room. Staying in the room meant being overheard. Lockers slammed all around and kids were covering their mouths as they laughed, like they were telling dirty jokes. I could hear them saying “Sweat-land” and “Stink-llama” and then laughing some more.
Nick and I zipped our coats as we ran, but even then we just tied with Molly and Lisa getting to the door. Miss Hutter was there, all right, but all she said as she watched the four of us forge out into the blizzard was, “Remember, boys, no snowballs,” as though no girl ever threw a snowball in her whole life.
Outside, the wind was whirling so hard that in some places you could see the blacktop and in others the drifts were way up over the tops of our hiking boots, almost to our knees.
“What I want to know is, how are you keeping score?” Nick asked Molly. “Not that it matters, since points don’t count, but I’d say we’re way ahead of you.”
Molly started drawing lines in the snow with the toe of her boot. “I’m only counting important things like our switching names and the contact lens caper and my changing Sweat-lana’s message on the board.” She chewed on her mitten a minute. “I gave you one for leaving the room and one for Marshall’s Japanese, even though they barely counted.”
“What about the crossing-guard story?” I asked.
“Excuse us,” Lisa said, “but we’ve got, like, a lot to talk about,” and she and Molly headed toward the jet slide. It’s this big swept-wing slide that on warm days lots of kids can go down at once. In winter it makes a perfect shelter from the wind. Every single girl was huddled under it to talk about the sub.
The dry snow was not good for packing, but it would have been great to scoop it up by the armful and heave a batch under the jet slide. You couldn’t miss, the girls were so neatly packaged in one space. But even things like snowballs were strictly forbidden. For throwing snow Miss Hutter sent you home. And if your mom worked, like mine does, she called her at work, and then your mom really let you have it when she got home. Then, even if it was sloppy joes for supper, they didn’t taste good because your mom was mad. Miss Hutter stood there at a big cafeteria window spying on us, so we decided not to bother snowing the girls, but just to make plans of our own.
Nick herded the boys over to a corner near the spit pit. As we passed, I glanced over the rail and noticed that it didn’t look half bad all piled up with clean snow. But everybody knew what was underneath, so the white icing didn’t fool us for a minute. It was like a coat of paint over a bicycle held together by rust.
I looked over to see
how Miss Ivanovitch was surviving. She’d put on a purple down coat and fuzzy black boots, but she had nothing over her ears to keep her from hearing us talk if the wind was right. Her back was tight against the brick wall, and her arms were crossed to keep in the warmth. While she didn’t look ready to kick up her heels with happiness, there weren’t any big, fat tears freezing on her cheeks, either. I wondered if she still loved little children.
“How do we know,” Rolf asked, as we got into a football huddle, “how do we know who sinks her? I mean, what if it was right now that she started bawling?”
“I think,” Nick said, thinking, “that it goes to the ones who did the last thing before she gives up. Right now,” he sighed, “the girls would probably win.”
“Yeah,” I said, staring down into the pit, imagining things under the snow, things like frozen wads of Hubba Bubba, scrunched up test papers with C– written on them, and hibernating fungus. Then we all stared at Sweat-lana to see if she could take fourteen eyes looking at once. When she felt our whammy, she moved around the corner, closer to the jet slide. Maybe she thought she was safer near the girls. Maybe she’d decided it was us who’d changed her name to Sweat-lana I’ve Got An Itch.
No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t think of anything that good ourselves. Marshall still needed to finish our fleet of planes, and Nick and I would buy a bag of rubber bands after school. But that was for tomorrow, and tomorrow might be too late. For a while we tried just kicking the ball, but, like our ideas, it kept sinking into the snow. Marshall and R.X. raced around making fresh tracks and tackling each other in the drifts. Still, nobody came up with anything else spectacular to do to the sub and it was only eleven o’clock, with almost the whole day left.
“Hey, how about watches?” Trevor asked suddenly. He was lying flat on the ground, flapping his arms and legs, making a snow angel. “Everybody wearing one?” Everybody wasn’t. “Look, wear them tomorrow,” he said, as we gathered over him and watched him finish his wide-winged angel.
We all had watches that were alike because of a sale at Dominick’s, the big supermarket on Green Bay Road. Actually, it wasn’t as much a sale as a special deal. Your family was supposed to save $300 worth of the pink cash register slips they gave out from October through December. The whole thing was to make you shop there, but if you did and saved the pink receipts, you could buy a digital watch with an alarm for just $8.99. It was such a great deal that almost every boy in fourth grade got one for Christmas or Hanukkah. When you’re in fourth grade you start feeling a little weird wearing the Star Wars watch your grandmother gave you when you were just learning to tell time, so you hide it in the junk under the bed or in the back of the drawer with the sea shells. Then you tell your folks you lost it at the swimming pool or something, but you don’t throw it away because it will be good to take apart on a dull day. Anyway, most guys came back after winter vacation wearing a new Dominick’s special with an extra hole poked in its black plastic band to make it small enough.
“If you don’t have one, borrow one from somebody,” Trevor said. “Then we all set them to go off at—I don’t know—ten-thirteen tomorrow morning.” He got up and shook himself clean. “What do you think? By then she ought to be pretty much worn down. Maybe that’ll be the end of it.”
Marshall, who was being very, very careful not to say a word, patted Trevor on the head like he thought old Trev was a terrific sub sinker. Actually, though, nobody expected a chorus of seven alarm beepers to make anyone get hysterical, but it did sound like fun. We could synchronize them like spies do on television.
That’s all the plans we had.
“Time to go in,” Miss Ivanovitch called, and we dashed to the door. I had the feeling if we didn’t go in soon, the storm would bury us like old bubble gum. The girls came running from their shelter, hopping through drifts, scraping at snow with their mittens. Miss Ivanovitch stood at the door, waiting.
“Now I want you to tiptoe quietly up the stairs, children,” she said. “Miss Hutter mentioned to me that you were a little bit too rowdy on the way out. I know you don’t want to disturb the other boys and girls who are working. So let’s all keep our lips locked.” She turned an imaginary key in her mouth, took it out, and flung it toward the playground. Once her hand was free of the let’s-pretend key, she reached to open the door. But before she’d budged it an inch, the girls let her have it. Zap, paw, slam, socko, five, six, seven, eight, nine snowballs smacked her from behind or got the door she was pulling at. Only nine. Some girl hadn’t thrown one. Unfortunately, Miss Hutter was not at any window. If all the girls got sent home, they would have had to forfeit. But nobody was there to send them home. Nobody stood there but Miss I’ve Got An Itch.
Her lips still locked tight and the only key lying in a drift, she leaned over, scooped up a huge wad of snow, and, letting the ball warm in her bare hands, packed it tight. When it was just the way she wanted it, she tossed it straight up about a foot, caught it, and eyed us to make sure we were watching close. Then, without a word, she wound up and smashed that snowball flat on the nose of the jet slide. Giving us a little half smile, she turned around, opened the door, and went inside.
The kids in 4A, who’d been with their sub building a snowman on the far side of the playground, were on their way in, too. They saw the shot and whistled. We didn’t whistle because our jaws were hanging open.
Inside, we slowly hung our coats up in our lockers and stamped up the stairs to our room, our fingers and noses and toes still red and cold. As we thawed, we settled in for the next round. It began to occur to me that it wasn’t just boys against girls anymore. The sub was in it, too.
The writing on the board was gone, both her name and our score. Even Mr. Star’s math assignments left over from the day before had been erased. She must have decided to start out with a clean slate before she came down to recess. After she’d cleaned it, though, she’d drawn a picture with bright yellow chalk, a three-foot smiley face that had a grin from one circle eye to the other. Below the face, down near the chalk tray, she’d written, “Have A Nice Day!!!” Nobody smiled back at the face but her. We were not having a nice day and didn’t want her telling us to.
Marching up to the front of the room, she sat on Mr. Star’s desk again to start over, full of confidence, fresh from her bull’s-eye. Her grin, though, like the one on the smiley face, was too wide, and she started off with a laugh that was too loud.
“Well,” she said, chuckling, “I guess you’ve really put one or two over on me this morning.” She swung her feet from side to side, and chewed on her bottom lip a minute before finally explaining, “I guess you got away with what you did because I did my student teaching with kindergartners and their regular teacher was there with me all the time, so I just didn’t know about fourth graders. I mean, those five-year-olds were just so cute and cuddly. Oh, you’re cute, too, of course, but you are also very, very funny. I guess,” and the strange chuckle came again, “what I didn’t realize is that fourth graders have such a terrific sense of humor.” She beamed her appreciation of our humor.
It must have been hard smiling that wide at seventeen straight faces. Molly’s was totally sour. She, for sure, didn’t like Miss Ivanovitch fake laughing at things she thought were surefire sub sinkers. I noticed that Miss Ivanovitch wasn’t going goochie-goo any longer. She was trying to talk to us now like we were buddies who had managed to pull a good practical joke on her. She smiled warmly.
Aretha smiled back. I wondered if she was the one who hadn’t thrown a snowball.
“Well,” Miss Ivanovitch said finally, “now that you know that I know, maybe we can just be friends. What do you say?”
There was a long silence and then Nick spoke up. “I say that we’re five minutes late for music class and Mrs. Franchini won’t like it one bit.”
Miss Ivanovitch was getting smarter. Before believing him, she checked the schedule on Mr. Star’s desk. It did say “Music” at 11:15 on Thursday, but that’s all it s
aid.
“Where do you go for Music?” she asked.
The girls already had a plan. Molly and Lisa stood up, linked arms, and led the whole class the longest way possible to the Music Room. Aretha walked with Miss Ivanovitch, but I could see from the way the girls looked at her that she’d be afraid to tell. First, we tromped all the way to the other end of the school on the second floor, past the Resource Center and the third grades, stopping off at fountains on the way to get drinks, and then down the stairs by the sixth grade rooms, and all the way back the whole length of the school again.
R.X. and I stopped at the gym to watch the little kids play. They were using the parachute. The whole class was gathered around the edge of this humungous, real parachute. The gym teacher, Ms. Lucid, was calling out, “Lift!” The little kids raised it up, flapping their arms. The air gathered underneath so the parachute puffed out like a huge dome, then practically picked them up off their feet. When it had mushroomed out at its biggest, every second kid around the edge let go and ran like mad underneath, looking for a new place to hold on before the parachute collapsed on the floor. They were having a great time.
Then we strolled past the Art Room and the second grades before we got to the Music Room, which was just next to the cafeteria on the first floor. When we finally made it, our music teacher, Mrs. Franchini, said, “I’d about given up on you,” and Molly told her with a sigh, “We got started late. We’ve got a substitute teacher today who’s never even been in this school before.” Heading back to her seat, she said, “She doesn’t know much.” Mrs. Franchini gave her a warning frown.