Thirteen Ways to Sink a Sub

by Jamie Gilson

  Mrs. Bosco swung open the door again and addressed us. “I don’t see what’s funny. I don’t see what’s funny at all. This looks like a disaster to me, a disaster pure and simple. I can’t imagine what’s happening in this room. Yesterday was so beautiful. Yesterday,” she told Miss Ivanovitch sternly, “was an educational experience. I heard a beautiful, well-ordered report on China in this classroom. It was absolutely comprehensive, with excellent visual aids. The children told about Confucius’s beautiful, beautiful philosophy, ‘Do Not Do To Others What You Would Not Have Them Do To You.’”

  Miss Ivanovitch blinked at us in wonder. “ ‘Do not do to others’?” she asked, shaking her head and starting to laugh. “These children?”

  “They are marvelous boys and girls,” Molly’s grandmother went on, shocked again about the sub. “I don’t know what they have done to deserve such a…curious…substitute teacher.” She looked around the room. “Molly, don’t let them open the cookies.” She harumphed and left. When she slammed the door, the room shook.

  Miss Ivanovitch couldn’t keep it in any longer. She grinned around at us standing there, our jaws hanging open. Shaking her head, she started to smile even wider, and finally she just threw back her head and began to laugh. But her huge, hiccupy giggle was stopped halfway out. From the ceiling there came a fat, slogging splatch!

  Knocked free by the slamming door, the soggy wad of paper towels that Nick had flung up when he was mad came splashing down on Miss Ivanovitch’s head. It sat there wetly, half on her black hair and half on her forehead, like a wrinkled trick hat leaking streams of water down her face and neck.

  And that was more than she could take. She lifted off the hat, tipped it to us with a bow, and then lobbed it, swish into the water-filled wastebasket. She laughed and laughed, and we laughed with her. She laughed so hard that tears came to her eyes.

  “Anybody got a Kleenex?” she asked between laughs.

  There was a gasp or two and then suddenly a strange silence.

  “Kleenex?” Molly yelped, like Miss Ivanovitch had asked us for a fistful of lighted firecrackers. “A Kleenex? I don’t believe it,” she whispered. “The sub is crying.”

  “A paper towel will do,” Miss Ivanovitch said, grabbing one from a free pile and wiping her eyes and her runny nose.

  “No fair!” Molly yelled. “She’s laughing, that’s why she’s crying. That’s no fair.”

  Giggling, Miss Ivanovitch asked her, “Am I not allowed to laugh, Lisa?”

  “My name is Molly.”

  “Oh?” Miss Ivanovitch smiled. “Then I must have been mistaken after all. That was your grandmother?”

  “You know perfectly well that was my grandmother. You’re just out to get me.” She stuck out her bottom lip and looked around the room. “All of you.”

  “Confucius says,” Miss Ivanovitch said lightly, turning away, “that each person should grab a desk and put it back in its place. It’s ten minutes to three. The place is still like a marsh, but I think it will probably dry out overnight.” Spotting Nick and me, she said, “Do the crossing guards have to go now?”

  “Oh, we’re not really crossing guards,” Nick told her. “You have to be in fifth grade to be a crossing guard. We’re still too little.”

  “Too little? I’d long since stopped considering you little.” She looked us over. “Good grief, I’ve learned a lot today. But I’m afraid I haven’t taught you anything at all.” She sighed. “Oh, Marshall, could you do me a favor?”

  Marshall, who was helping scoot the desks back in place, answered her in a strange language that wasn’t English and sure wasn’t Japanese. “Herro may watchie san chop suey oosick,” he said with a straight face.

  “Glad to hear it, because what I want to do now is see if those airplanes you have been slaving away on fly as good as they look. Do you have enough for everybody to have one?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Girls, too?”

  “Girls are usually included in the pronoun ‘everybody.’ As am I.”

  “Then there’s enough for everybody to have at least three,” he said, and started passing them out.

  I leaned over to Nick. “Well, did we sink her or not?”

  “Sure,” he whispered. “Fair’s fair.”

  “They won’t say it’s fair.”

  “Maybe.” He shrugged. “But we got real tears. You can still see the rivers on her face. The spit pit belongs to the girls for the rest of the year. We won fair and square.”

  We all gathered at the far end of the room near the chalkboard and Mr. Star’s desk so we could make our planes fly the longest distance. Marshall threw the first one, and it whipped up to the ceiling and then took a dive, cracking up at once. He started explaining to us what had been the matter, something technical about balance, but nobody was listening. We were filling the air with paper, zooming planes up to the lights, skimming them just over desk level, looping them in tailspinning stunts. It was beautiful, as Mrs. Bosco would have said, beautiful.

  But it was Miss Hutter who opened the door. She opened it so quietly that nobody even noticed. And when she and Mrs. Bosco breezed in, two planes flew out, still rising high down the hall. Aretha, who was taking such care in aiming that she didn’t see Miss Hutter come in, threw her last plane as the principal stood there, gaping, in the doorway. Aretha’s paper airplane sailed lightly, perfectly, gently down the length of the room. It was one of Marshall’s best. Mrs. Bosco stepped briskly forward and caught it, like a large grandmother raccoon snapping a fish out of its stream.

  They both stared at Miss Ivanovitch and her tear-streaked face.

  The planes had all stopped, but one of the mops dropped out of its bucket with a crash.

  Miss Ivanovitch cleared her throat. “It’s…science,” she explained in a slightly shaky voice. “We’re having Science last period today. Our lesson is…aerodynamics. Earlier, for Social Studies, we found out rather a lot about the philosophy of Confucius, a beautiful philosophy the class had started to consider yesterday.”

  We did not move, but just stood there quietly waiting for the explosion that was bound to come.

  “Miss Ivanovitch, I think we should speak for a moment alone in the hall,” Miss Hutter said, her face grim. We were going to lose our sub, our sub who threw snowballs and paper planes, knew how to folk dance, and didn’t rat on us when she should have. We were going to lose her for sure.

  “The fourth grade has changed a great deal since I was in school,” Miss Ivanovitch went on, not moving an inch toward the hall. She threw her head back and her earrings jingled merrily, but she looked nervous.

  “Yes,” Miss Hutter said, adjusting her glasses, “I suppose it has.” Mrs. Bosco poked her with her elbow. “Oh, yes,” she went on, “Mrs. Bosco has asked me to question you because she felt there was some mix-up about her granddaughter.”

  “That was all my fault,” Miss Ivanovitch said, nodding seriously to Molly. “A simple case of mistaken identity. Right, Molly?”

  Molly narrowed her eyes and looked as though she’d like to stick her tongue out as an answer. “Right,” she said, sharply.

  Lisa covered her mouth and giggled.

  “Oh, by the way,” Miss Ivanovitch asked, “how is Mr. Star? We’ve all been wondering.”

  “Yes, yes,” we all said, eager to change the subject. “Yes, how?” we wondered loudly. “Has he stopped vomiting?” Nick asked, louder than he meant to.

  “I earnestly, earnestly hope he will be back by tomorrow,” Mrs. Bosco said, pushing the grocery bag into the corner away from our strange paper-plane-covered classroom.

  Miss Hutter opened her mouth to answer, but her eyes had wandered back to the chalkboard and focused on the big smiley face there that still beamed its fanged grin.

  “Tell me, Miss Ivanovitch…” she started, and then paused, looking the rest of the question over her glasses.

  “It’s art!” Aretha called, the first to find her voice. “Miss Ivanovitch was just showing us how many,
many ways you can change a smiley face into something else. It’s amazing!” She dashed to the board and drew another circle next to the lady vampire. In it she put two dots for eyes, two eyebrows that slanted in, a grin, a little pointed beard, and half a curvy moustache.

  It was me as half a Confucius.

  This time Mrs. Bosco started to chuckle. She must have recognized the makeup from yesterday. “I meant to tell you,” she said, thunking me on the back, “I meant to tell you yesterday that I have a Confucius-says joke from the time when I was a child. We told a lot of those in my day. Those were my favorite jokes.” The raccoons of her coat shook like they meant to leap off and run away. “It’s because of Confucius that I brought the treat today,” she said, lifting fortune cookies and cans of punch out of the bag.

  “I suppose I really shouldn’t tell this.” She giggled. “It’s a trifle unseemly. But then I don’t see why one shouldn’t laugh in school, do you?”

  Miss Hutter nodded politely and glanced at the clock.

  “Do you know what Confucius says he-who-stick-face-in-punch-bowl gets?”

  Nobody answered. We all laughed a little nervously, kind of embarrassed for her. “Oh, Grandmother,” Molly groaned.

  “Confucius says,” she barreled on, anyway, “he-who-stick-face-in-punch-bowl…gets punch in nose.” And she laughed until the tears rolled. “I learned that when I was in fourth grade.”

  “That’s charming,” Miss Hutter said as the bell rang. It was time to go home.

  “Really, how is Mr. Star?” Miss Ivanovitch asked quickly. None of us moved to leave.

  “Oh, oh, yes, I meant to say,” Miss Hutter explained, “he’s feeling much, much better. No temperature, calm stomach. Much better. He called earlier to say he expects to be back in school tomorrow.”

  Miss Ivanovitch’s face fell. She looked disappointed. I couldn’t believe it. She actually looked sorry not to be coming back for another day of us.

  “But,” Miss Hutter went on, “I told Mr. Star I wouldn’t hear of it. You simply can’t get rid of stomach flu that quickly. Tomorrow is, after all, Friday, and if he rests tomorrow and through the weekend, too, he should be in tip-top shape by Monday. So, I told him to stay home. And I planned to ask you, Miss Ivanovitch, whether…” She looked around the room. The windows were covered with steam from all the dampness, paper littered the floor. “…Under the circumstances, do you think you…” She wondered, I could tell, if she should go on, even if the sub pool was almost empty.

  It was getting late. As kids rushed out to catch their buses, Mrs. Bosco handed each one a fortune cookie.

  “Very funny,” R.X. said, reading the little white strip of paper that had been inside his. “This cookie tells me that through storm and strife, good sense rules my life.”

  “Before I came this morning, a friend gave me a big bag of caramels to bring to school,” Miss Ivanovitch told Miss Hutter. “She said if I kept handing them out all day, the boys and girls wouldn’t talk so much because their little jaws would be endlessly stuck together.” She cradled her skinned elbow in her hand. “I laughed at that.” She smiled at the kids who were leaving, and waved at Marshall with both hands. “All day, I thought about caramels, huge sticky taffy ones that might even glue children to their chairs. But tomorrow,” she grinned at Miss Hutter, “I think I will do much better, even without candy.”

  Miss Hutter smiled back, took a deep breath, and hurried off to the office. “We’ll see you tomorrow then,” she called over her shoulder.

  Molly raised her right eyebrow.

  “I’ve decided to leave the Hawaiian Punch for tomorrow,” her grandmother told Miss Ivanovitch.

  “Will it go with tacos?” Nick asked. He folded a piece of paper and bit the crease to make it tight.

  “By my count, the total number of really good ways to sink a sub,” Molly said low to Nick, “was thirteen, and the girls had seven of them. How many more do you suppose there are?”

  A filled blue water balloon quivered on the sink. In my pocket from early in the day there was a note to myself that said “Bring rubber bands!”

  Molly took a fortune cookie from the bag and turned it over in her hand. “I don’t feel like eating this,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you,” Nick told her. “I already got the good one. It was, ‘Your pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.’ Besides, yours probably says ‘I see a spit pit in your future.’”

  Molly’s face turned green, like Mr. Star’s had the day before. “Grandmother,” she said, tugging at her arm, “we had better go home. I feel awful.” And they rushed out the door, Molly’s hair swishing.

  “Well, she’s sure not going to be here tomorrow,” Nick said. “I would say she is definitely oosick.”

  “Yeah, and with her gone, I don’t know,” Jenny told Michelle on their way out. “She’s the one with all the good ideas.”

  Miss Ivanovitch smiled.

  Nick tucked the taco into his desk and winked at me.

  Miss Ivanovitch’s earrings jingled as she picked up a soggy airplane from the floor. She looked pleased. “So, Molly won’t be here.” She sighed in relief. Then her eyes lifted once more to the brown spot on the ceiling and she turned to us, her eyes open wide.

  “You don’t suppose, do you,” she asked, “that they send in substitute kids?”