Thirteen Ways to Sink a Sub

by Jamie Gilson

  Out in the hall, Miss Ivanovitch heard Molly and flinched. I was standing next to her. “You don’t have to go in with us,” I told her. “Mr. Star never does. But you are supposed to come for us at noon.”

  She didn’t believe me. And she walked right in behind the class like a Russian princess just back from a windy sleigh ride. She was still wearing her fuzzy black outside boots.

  “You don’t have to stay,” Mrs. Franchini said kindly, “just come back in half an hour.” She took Miss Ivanovitch’s arm and leaned toward her. “Stop in at the teachers’ lounge, room 115, and get a cup of coffee. You look as though you might need a rest.”

  Miss Ivanovitch smiled first at her and then at me. Right then I think she decided I was a truth teller and a friend. “Thank you, Hobie, my dear,” she said.

  As Miss Ivanovitch turned away, I heard Mrs. Franchini say, “Nicholas Rossi, it’s time to start singing and stop talking. Or I’ll make mostaccioli out of you, head to toes.”

  Nick grinned. Both of them have Italian names, and she’s always teasing him like that.

  “With Parmesan cheese,” he told her, as if what he meant was, “Certainly, Mrs. Franchini.”

  “All right, then,” she said, sitting down at the piano, and we started right off with two songs we were going to do for the Fourth Grade Sing in March. First, “I can Sing a Rainbow” and then one that is funnier than its name, “Be Kind to Your Parents.” I knew my mom and dad would, for sure, like the part where it goes:

  Remember they’re grown-ups, a difficult stage of life.

  They’re apt to be nervous and over excited,

  Confused from the daily storm and strife.

  Just keep in mind, tho’ it sounds odd, I know—

  Most parents once were children long ago.

  Incredible!

  My mouth was wide open shouting “Incredible!” when I glanced out the door and saw Miss Ivanovitch standing there, not as hidden as she thought. She was listening. Maybe to the singing. Probably not, though, because we weren’t all that good yet. I think she was listening to see how it was done. In Mrs. Franchini’s class nobody was scraping chairs or crawling on the floor or scribbling on the chalkboard. I believe she wanted to learn how to make us into good little children.

  Just as I was looking, she peeked around the corner, laughed when she saw me, and waved with both hands like she did when we left with the cafeteria count. I had the sinking feeling that I was fast on my way to being Hobie, my dear, the substitute-teacher’s pet.

  When the time came to leave she was still around the corner, waiting, and she led us, the short way, back up the fourth grade steps. Molly joined Nick and me, a smirk on her face. “She may talk big and know how to throw a handful of snow, but I think she’s scared,” she said, walking backward down the hall in front of us. “I hope you guys were over there spitting into the pit at recess to make it more gross because it’s going to be all yours from now on. We’ve scored a whole lot more points than you have.”

  “Ha!” I answered. “Ha! Ha! That’s what you think.”

  “Points don’t even matter. It’s the final flood that counts,” Nick told her.

  “You know,” Molly said, “my grandmother told my mother about Mr. Star practically barfing in class, and my grandmother said she anticipates that we will all be sick by tomorrow. She said Mr. Star was all germy and that he had no business, no business at all, being in school yesterday.”

  “I’ve heard,” I told her, “it’s the Shanghai flu that’s going around. I think your grandmother brought it back with her in that box of stuff. I think there are Shanghai flu germs all over her Chinese cricket cage. I think it’s not empty at all. I think it’s filled with billions of million-legged, bug-eyed germs. If you want to know what I think, I think that because you brought your grandmother’s germy stuff to school, the flu is your fault.”

  Molly tossed her hair and raced up the stairs ahead of us. At the top she turned around and said, “I am rubber and you are glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you,” stuck out her tongue, and disappeared into the room.

  “She is definitely not cueshee. She is oosick, a dwerp, and a squird. And we can’t let her win,” Nick said. He was right.

  7

  THE FANGED FACE

  The sign on the principal’s office read “IN.” That didn’t mean Miss Hutter was in. That meant we were. The sign had a picture on it of a fat gray cloud with a mean eye and O-shaped lips blowing out a mouthful of stormy weather. We were staying in because by lunchtime the snow had gotten so deep or the temperature so low or the wind so wild that she was afraid she’d lose a kid or two if she let us out. We were sorry. Out days are better. After we ate our hot dogs and Jell-O in the cafeteria we had to go into the auditorium to watch movies. Nick and Rolf and I sat together, but we didn’t watch too close. One movie was on the life cycle of the monarch butterfly. The other one was about sharks. Nothing but leaves and little fishes got eaten up in either movie. I’d have given each one about half a star.

  The auditorium was hot and most kids were dressed for cold, so the whole place smelled like wet boots and damp hair. By the time the first bell rang, we were pretty much zonked out by the dark and the steam heat, but we slogged back upstairs anyway, ready to give sub sinking another try.

  People had been talking about it all through lunch, thinking of things they wanted to do, remembering stuff their brothers and sisters and even parents had told them they’d done. So when we got to the room, everybody’s plans started rolling right away. The line at the pencil sharpener had at least five girls in it. At one-eighteen all the boys dropped their math books flat on the floor. They made a giant smack and a few people jumped. Unfortunately, though, Miss Ivanovitch was in the hall at the time, trying to reel in the kids who were out there talking. The girls started raising their hands to go to the washroom just as Rolf let a handful of paperclips slip through the slits in the radiator under the window. For a good twenty minutes those clips rattled and pinged like hail on a metal roof.

  The place was so up for grabs that Molly wasn’t even adding anything to what she’d decided the score was. But, somehow, on the way to the pencil sharpener, she did manage to detour past the chalkboard slow enough to grab a piece of red chalk and draw on the huge smiley face a pair of mountain-shaped eyebrows that met in the middle like Miss Ivanovitch’s. And on the way back from turning her pencil into shavings for the thirteenth time, she added two long red fangs to the smile.

  Marshall wasn’t making any noise. He sat at his work, happy as a pigeon on a ledge, stuffing his desk with new paper airplanes and making an occasional bird. When Miss Ivanovitch passed his chair, he gave her a crane folded out of blue paper, which she stuck in her thick hair. It perched there like it was sitting in a black nest.

  “Class,” she announced, “I have found Mr. Star’s lesson plans. They were right in the top drawer.” She shuffled through the pages. “It’s a little late to start the new unit in Social Studies, so we’ll begin Local Government tomorrow.” R.X., standing back by the sink, groaned. “Instead, we’ll forge right on to Math. The assignment sheet says that you are to do pages 89 and 90 in your math workbooks.” The girls at the pencil sharpener couldn’t hear her so she had to repeat it. “I want those pages on Mr. Star’s desk today so I can correct them before he gets back. I suggest you take out your workbooks and start on them right now.” She waited, and when none of the talking stopped, added, “Or else.”

  “Or else what?” Rolf asked, and we all listened for the answer. My dad always says not to make threats you can’t deliver on. For a second Miss Ivanovitch’s face had the same panicked look our cat Fido gets when somebody turns on the vacuum cleaner. He doesn’t know whether to run or attack. Finally, she shrugged and said, “Or else Mr. Star won’t get them.”

  It wasn’t easy to argue with that. But then, I thought, after all, we’d got out of both Language Arts and Science in the morning by just fooling around. Might as wel
l go ahead and do the math. We’d have to sooner or later anyway.

  “But Mr. Star hasn’t taught us how to do any of this,” R.X. complained. “We don’t even know what these problems are all about. I think you must have got the page numbers wrong.”

  She looked over the assignment “You mean you’re in fourth grade and don’t know how to do simple multiplication? I don’t believe it.” She for sure had stopped thinking we didn’t know 2 plus 2. Now she had us ready for algebra.

  Staring over my shoulder, she saw that I’d already finished two problems. I should have covered them with my hand.

  “Hobie is doing the work,” she said in triumph, and R.X. looked daggers at me. “Perhaps when he’s finished he can help you.”

  Miss Ivanovitch gave me an encouraging smile. But as she checked over my math, I noticed that her eyes kept wandering to my T-shirt. Maybe, I thought, she feels sorry for me. Maybe I ought to explain about the melted crayons in the dryer so she won’t think my clothes are too weird.

  Nick, workbook in hand to ask a stupid question, was standing next to us. He had noticed her looking at my shirt, too. “I can see you like Hobie’s shirt, Miss Ivanovitch,” he said. “Did you know that Hobie’s mother is an artist?” I gagged a little because my mother is about as much an artist as Fido is. She’s a physical therapist and helps people who are just getting over strokes and car accidents and things. She can hardly even draw smiley faces.

  “Maybe you’ve heard of her,” he went on. “Mrs. Hanson is her name. She makes these fantastic designer T-shirts and jeans like you see on TV, and Hobie here wears them almost every day to school as advertisements. She uses mostly red colors, you’ll notice. That’s her trademark.”

  Miss Ivanovitch wasn’t going to let him put anything over on her. “Did your mother really do this?” she asked me, barely disguising the fact that she thought the shirt looked disgusting.

  “Yes,” I said, telling the truth, “she did it last October.”

  “It’s not signed, though, is it, Hobie?” Nick asked, pulling back my shirt and peering in at the neck label.

  “No,” I said, “this one’s not signed.”

  “He has some underwear in the same pattern.”

  “That’s not signed, either,” I told her.

  “I expect you’d like Hobie’s mother to make you one or two. They’re pretty expensive, though. Close to a hundred dollars. Maybe you could pay in installments.”

  “Miss I-van-o-vitch!” Lisa called.

  Rolf had moved over to the empty desk next to Lisa’s and was chewing on the tail of his pink plastic ball-point fish, swinging his untied gym shoes back and forth. He kicked the bottom of Lisa’s desk with each swing.

  “Miss Ivanovitch!” Lisa called again, waving her hand in the air urgently.

  “Yes, Molly.”

  Several girls giggled at how incredibly dumb you’d have to be still not to know that Lisa wasn’t Molly.

  “Pfutzenreuter is kicking my desk.”

  “I am not.” He banged her chair again for telling.

  “You are, too!”

  He stopped kicking. “I am not.”

  “You were!”

  “Who says?”

  “I say!”

  “Well, who do you think you are, the princess and the pea?”

  Using the soles of both her feet, she shoved his desk about a foot away.

  “Children, you mustn’t fight,” Miss Ivanovitch warned. But she didn’t say, “Or else.”

  Rolf started wiggling his fish pen toward Lisa like it might scribble zigzags on her neck.

  “Dwerp! Squird! Racket!” Lisa yelled, swatting her workbook at him.

  “Lisa!” Molly hissed. “Cut it out. It’s a trap. He started it. It’s his point.”

  I think he was just kicking, myself, but if she wanted to turn it into a point for us, that was all right with me.

  Lisa clenched her jaws, gave Rolf a double evil eye, and bashed him on the head with her workbook.

  “Lisa!” Molly warned.

  Miss Ivanovitch suddenly did not look upset by the fight at all. Instead she stared steadily at Molly with just a flicker of a smile.

  Molly glanced up at her and gulped, like she’d just swallowed a live fly.

  Miss Ivanovitch said nothing at all, but just moved to the other side of the room to try to coax Marshall, who didn’t speak English, into doing the part of the math that didn’t need any. I leaned over to Molly and said, “I’m pretty sure she heard you when you called Lisa ‘Lisa.’”

  “You think so?” she whispered back. Then she shrugged her shoulders and smiled. “If she heard me, why didn’t she say something about it? I would have.” She wrote a quick note, which she passed back to Michelle, who raised her hand and asked Miss Ivanovitch if she would please help her with a story problem.

  Miss Ivanovitch left wide-eyed Marshall and turned to her.

  “Let’s see now. This doesn’t look at all hard. ‘Four classes are going on a field trip to the Nature Center,’” Miss Ivanovitch read aloud. “‘If there are twenty-eight children in one class and twenty-nine in the other three, how—’”

  “Shhhhhh! Please! I’m trying to concentrate,” Jenny complained. What she was really trying to do, it seemed to me, was multiply using a pencil that by now was only about an inch long.

  While the sub had her back turned, explaining about the number of kids on the field trip, Molly was at the board again. “Girls I,” she wrote, “Boys IIII,” though I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out where she got those numbers. She was just trying to scare us, but it didn’t work on me. Confucius says, “Phony numbers don’t squeeze out real tears.”

  R.X. and Trevor got up, stretched, ambled over to the sink, and started to wash their hands. The math must have gotten them dirty.

  When Miss Ivanovitch announced finally that it was gym time, she looked to the front of the room and saw the new score, as well as the red fanged and eyebrowed face. She didn’t look anywhere close to tears about it, though. Instead, she walked straight up to the chalkboard, and, just when I guessed she was going to erase the whole thing, she picked up the yellow chalk and drew a pair of earrings with bells on the ends where the Face’s ears would be. Then, after smiling back at Molly, she added to the scoreboard, “Sub II.”

  Those numbers I could figure. Her first was the snowball. What the second one was, Molly and I both knew.

  8

  YOURS TILL

  NIAGARA FALLS

  Miss Ivanovitch didn’t get lost again. She herded us down the steps and through the hall the fastest way to the gym, plucking people out of doorways and scooting them away from the water fountains.

  “I stopped and looked in the gym on the way to Music this morning,” Nick told me, pushing his trot to a gallop. “The third graders were parachuting.”

  “I know,” I said, matching his steps, “I saw them, too.” That’s why we were both in a hurry. There was a chance that Ms. Lucid had kept the parachute out for us to use, too. The little kids mostly just lifted it and ran under, but we got to play ballgames with the parachute, puffing it up huge, trying to flip the ball on top, off to the other kids’ side. The parachute was the best, the very best gym thing.

  But even before we got to the gym, we stopped jogging, all of us. Our ears twitched. Today wasn’t going to be the best. It was going to be the worst.

  “This sub brought us rotten luck,” somebody behind us said.

  Worse luck than stepping on a stinkfish. From the gym we heard music. Not just any music, but “A Hunting We Will Go.” Folk dancing music. The pits. That meant we were going to have to skip across the gym and circle around this little square on the floor, “to catch a fox and put him in a box and then we’ll let him go.” Then, after that record, Ms. Lucid would put on another one that meant holding hands. Sooner or later you have to hold hands to folk dance. But then when you do, the girls always wrinkle up their noses and say your hands are too sweaty and wave their own A
rrid-dry hands in the air, refusing to hold yours again. After that, you look and feel even dumber skipping around the gym not holding hands. It’s a no win.

  Thinking about wet hands, we slogged toward the gym, practically in reverse, our lips curled. Miss Ivanovitch, though, just about flew. If Miss Hutter had been around she would have yelled, “No running in the halls,” and with our luck Miss Ivanovitch would have collapsed on the floor and cried. Then Miss Hutter would have been the winner and champion, which wouldn’t have done her a whole lot of good since she never goes down into the spit pit anyway. While most of the class was still down the hall making faces at the fifth graders in the Art Room, our sub was already leaping into the gym toward the music, the first one there.

  She was dressed for folk dancing, of course. I mean, she looked like she should sit right down on her heels and kick out her legs with her arms crossed.

  “Oh, my,” she announced, as soon as she managed to tug us all into the gym, “we’re an uneven number today—seventeen. I wonder,” she asked Ms. Lucid, “if I could join the children? I do love dancing.”

  “Take those boots off,” Ms. Lucid answered sharply. “No street shoes on the gym floor.”

  Taking that to mean, “You’re welcome to dance with your boots off,” Miss Ivanovitch sat down and tugged away. In her black-and-red-striped stocking feet she was just about our size.

  First off, Ms. Lucid lined us up. Then she put the needle at the beginning of the record again and turned up the volume on the old record player. Somebody stomped on the floor, and the needle skipped like a stone on water, shrieking at each bounce. Ms. Lucid frowned, dug in her pocket, and took out a quarter. She put it on the tone arm of the record player, to make it heavier, and tried again. This time the song blasted out, and she waved us forward.

  As we dragged our feet through catching the fox and putting him in a box, it made us mad to watch Sweat-lana I’ve Got An Itch skipping along. Even if you actually liked folk dancing, you weren’t supposed to show it. But raising her knees high and tilting her head like the people on the record jacket, she didn’t even notice our shuffling. Her eyes shone with happiness as she hummed along. Her bracelets clicked, and her earrings swung to the beat.