The Secret Sheriff of Sixth Grade

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  He sat there for a while, silently staring down at his quote in its damaged frame. Then he said, “I’ll take care of everything. But if anybody asks, you tell them I yelled at you. Because that’s what will happen if you ever barge in here again.”

  I got up to leave. The back of my skull throbbed when I stood.

  “Oh, wait. There is one more thing. I’m going to email Mr. Cavallero right now to explain what happened. But please take great care to be kind to him. AND I am sure I don’t need to remind you that everything we’ve said today is confidential, right?”

  “Right!”

  I forced myself not to rub my head until I was out of the office. The last thing I needed was another visit to The Bird.

  * * *

  When I opened my locker the next morning, I found a Nike box crammed in there. I stood around trying to look casual until everyone around me had gone back into Mrs. Sakofsky’s room, and then took the box out. Inside I found a beautiful new pair of sneakers.

  I literally couldn’t remember the last time I had owned a new pair of sneakers.

  I sat down right there in the hallway, whipped off my taped-together footwear, and slipped my feet into the Nikes. They fit perfectly, and were so cushiony I couldn’t believe it. It was like wrapping my feet in clouds or something.

  The bell rang, and I scrambled to shove my old sneakers into the Nike box. Then I pushed the box down deep into the hall trash can before anyone could come out of class.

  I felt like I was gliding through clouds all day, until I got to gym class. When I got to my spot, Mr. Cavallero was staring at me. He gestured for me to come over, so I did. Then he put one hand on my shoulder and shouted, “I GOT MR. OVERBYE’S EMAIL ABOUT YOUR FAMILY’S MONEY PROBLEMS. DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE UNIFORM FEE! WE HAVE A SPECIAL FUND FOR CASES LIKE YOURS! YOU SHOULD HAVE JUST COME AND TALKED TO ME ABOUT IT!”

  I gritted my teeth and told myself, Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

  “AND HEY! I LIKE YOUR NEW SNEAKERS! IT WAS REALLY NICE OF MR. OVERBYE TO BUY THOSE FOR YOU!”

  Wow, this guy had a special talent. He didn’t even have to be mean to be mean.

  Getting new sneakers made me decide to jump-start my campaign of good deeds around the school. Mom was always bringing home random boxes of stuff from her new job, and I dug through to see whether anything might be useful for the cause. All I found was one of those tree-shaped air fresheners that people hang from their car mirrors. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me. The next morning, I ran from the bus into school so I would get to homeroom before everyone else, climbed up on a chair, and hung the air freshener from a little pushpin over the dry-erase board.

  Unfortunately, it turned out that Mrs. Sakofsky was severely allergic to the scent of tree-shaped air fresheners. Her neck broke out in hideous hives, and she had to run out of the room to see The Bird.

  I sank lower and lower in my seat, praying that Lysol wouldn’t cause too much agony when sprayed onto hives.

  I wasn’t going to give up, though. Later that afternoon, I noticed some older girls putting up birthday decorations on a friend’s locker, so I thought it might be kind of cheerful and festive to start that tradition in our class. I happened to know that Jamie’s birthday was the next day, and I figured anything that made her more cheerful would be good for everybody, so the next morning I snuck into homeroom early again. My plan was to borrow one of the dry-erase markers from their ledge under Mrs. Sakofsky’s board, go out into the hall, and write a joyous message on the front of Jamie’s locker while everyone was saying the Pledge of Allegiance and listening to announcements. When homeroom ended, Jamie would see the decoration, and be amazed and overjoyed.

  Easy, right?

  Wrong.

  When I got to school, the markers weren’t on the ledge. So I grabbed the first marker I saw from Mrs. Sakofsky’s desk, shoved it way down in my pocket—jabbing my pinkie painfully on the pin in the back of my sheriff’s star in the process, by the way—and sat down at my desk to wait for my moment.

  When the pledge started, I ducked out and quickly scribbled HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JAMIE! on Jamie’s locker. Then, when the bell rang, I sort of eased my way through the back door of the room to grab my stuff without anyone noticing I had been gone.

  Jamie came to the next class period a few seconds late, and I noticed she was smiling . . . and kind of blushing, too. Yes! I thought. I had finally done something right! I had secretly made somebody happy. Jamie kept on smiling most of the day, and I kept basking in the warm glow of my quiet hero status.

  I daydreamed my way through the beginning of Mr. Kurt’s class. Who knows what I can accomplish next? I thought. First, the pencil sharpeners and the litter! Now the birthdays! Tomorrow, I conquer the—

  That was when Mr. Overbye barged into the room.

  “All right, sixth graders!” he bellowed. “I need you to listen up. I suppose some of you have probably noticed that it is Jamie Thompson’s birthday today.” His voice softened and he smiled as he turned to Jamie and said, “Happy birthday, Miss Thompson.”

  Jamie said, “Umm . . . thank you?”

  Mr. Overbye’s voice boomed again: “And apparently, one of you has noticed that students in this school traditionally decorate their classmates’ lockers with birthday greetings, which is a very nice thing to do. However, there is something else that this person has failed to notice. Observe!”

  The Bee held up a fat marker in one huge hand. “This,” he said, “is an erasable marker.”

  He raised his other hand, which held a very similar-looking writing tool. “This,” he said, “is a permanent marker!” He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a near whisper. “Now, sixth graders, which of these do you think is the appropriate tool to use for writing on a fellow student’s locker?”

  I slumped down in my seat, thinking, Well, sure, when you say it like that, it all sounds obvious.

  “Now,” Mr. Overbye continued, “our school’s custodians are tremendously overworked and underpaid as it is, so I promised them I would find the student who unintentionally added a graffiti masterwork to the face of Miss Thompson’s locker. Furthermore, I promised them that the student would put on a pair of rubber gloves, grab a sponge and some industrial-strength cleaning fluid, and restore the surface of that locker to its original, gleaming appearance. So: I will be waiting at the end of the school day. I sincerely hope that the young artist will present herself or himself to me at that time for work duty—because if I have to clean that locker myself, I will not be happy with this class. Understood?”

  I was extremely busy staring at a stain on my desk, but I assumed there must have been a bunch of nodding, because The Bee left after that, and class went on. For the last two periods of the day, all anyone seemed to be thinking about was the identity of the person Nate referred to as The Mad Marker.

  Which didn’t totally make sense to me. I sort of thought it should be The Mad Markerer. No matter what they called this person, though, all I could think about was the awful, inescapable fact that The Mad Marker (Markerer, whatever) was me. And if I didn’t want my whole class to suffer, I was going to have to step up and admit it.

  What was Jamie going to say?

  What was The Bee going to say?

  What was everyone else going to say?

  I realized another thing, too: I was going to miss my school bus. There’s nothing like trudging several miles with a heavy backpack to cap off a pathetic, embarrassing, and generally disastrous day.

  When the last bell rang, practically my whole class showed up outside of Mrs. Sakofsky’s room to see The Mad Marker unmasked. The Bee was there with his sponge, gloves, and a bucket of something that was making the entire hall smell like ammonia. People were whispering and sneaking sideways peeks at one another. I heard one of the girls say, “Obviously it’s not a girl, or she would have just said something already. It’s got to be a boy! How embarrassing!”

  I thought, You have no idea. />
  Jamie stood there, at the edge of the group, blushing again. By this point, she wasn’t smiling at all.

  After three or four of the most awkward minutes of my life, The Bee said, “If you have a bus to catch, you’d better run. The Montvale Bus Company waits for no man!”

  Nobody budged until Mr. Overbye growled, “Go! NOW!” Then most of the group backed away slowly, until it was just Jamie, a couple of her friends, The Bee . . . and me. I took a deep, shaky breath and stepped forward.

  “Mr. Overbye,” I said, “I did it.”

  “You?” Jamie asked. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I looked around. Jamie’s friends were sort of half puzzled and half laughing at me. The Bee looked rather amused. But Jamie looked almost . . . hurt.

  I didn’t know what else to do or say. I reached for the gloves. By the time Jamie and her friends were out of sight, I had completely erased the word HAPPY.

  The whole grade whispered about the “Marker Incident” for weeks, and of course Bowen had a field day. He kept humming the happy birthday song whenever I walked by, and hiding uncapped Sharpies in my bag whenever I wasn’t looking, until I couldn’t stand the smell of marker ink.

  And, of course, Jamie didn’t talk to me again for weeks. Every once in a while, I caught her glaring at me, though. It was kind of weird.

  Sometimes, a good deed feels worse than a bad one.

  The night before school started in fourth grade, my mom told me, “I know you haven’t always gotten the best grades in the past, but this year you’re going to show them just how smart you really are!”

  I was like, Mom, that’s what I’ve done every year. The school knows exactly how smart I really am. I get decent grades, but I never get a chance to shine. That is how smart I really am.

  I remember the first morning of that year like it just happened ten minutes ago. The teacher, Mrs. Foster, jumped right into action with a lesson about similes and metaphors. Then she told us to write an essay called “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.” But there was a twist: We had to use similes and metaphors in the essay.

  She stood there at the front of the room, smirking like this was the most brilliant thing ever. I sank low in my seat, because writing anything about my life outside of school was dangerous. What was I supposed to put down? At the end of June, we got kicked out of our apartment because Mom lost her ten millionth job, so we had to pack our meager belongings in garbage bags and move across town by bus? Or maybe The best part of my summer was the middle of July, when my mother worked at a diner for nine days. One of the cooks thought she was pretty, so he made me hot breakfast nine days in a row! Then he got caught stealing eggs and lost his job, so that was the end of the best part of my summer.

  Come on. I knew this thing was going straight onto a bulletin board. There was no way I could be honest about my summer.

  Mrs. Foster came over to my desk and asked, “What’s wrong, Maverick? By the way, what an . . . interesting . . . name you have!”

  I couldn’t tell her the real problem, so I pretended I didn’t understand the difference between a simile and a metaphor. So she said, “A simile is when you compare things using like or as. So if you said, ‘The water in my hotel swimming pool was as blue as the sky,’ that would be a simile. A metaphor is when you say one thing is something else. So if you said, ‘The beach towels in the Bahamas were fluffy white clouds on my skin,’ you would be using a metaphor. Get it?”

  I nodded, but when she walked away, I still couldn’t think of a single acceptable thing to share with the class. Because as bad as the end of June and most of July had been, August had been a nonstop nightmare. When the cook at the diner got fired, Mom cursed at the manager about it, which led to her getting the boot, too. So she went home and started drinking. And drinking. And drinking. It had never been so bad before. First, I used up all the money in her purse to walk down to the corner market and buy peanut butter and bread. When that ran out after a few days, I scrounged up all the change around our new apartment and got a bunch of nearly expired snack puddings that were ten for a dollar. I ate those until one of them made me throw up.

  Nothing got my mother up off the couch until the eighth day, when she ran out of alcohol. I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth, when I heard her shuffling around. At first, I got excited, because I thought this meant the binge was over, and she was ready to start getting dressed, looking for work, finding food, and taking care of me again. But when I came out of the bathroom, she was shoving stuff into a canvas shopping bag.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Going out. Back soon.”

  My heart sank. I had seen this before. Mom was going to sell off some of our stuff so she could buy more booze. I tried to move between her and the door, but she just stepped around me.

  After she left, I frantically rushed from room to room, trying to figure out what was missing. In a tiny apartment, that didn’t take very long. Soon, I was shaking all over. There was only one thing missing that I really cared about. It wasn’t just any old thing: It was the most important possession we had.

  That was what made me call Aunt Cat, and what caused the huge, ugly battle between my mom and my aunt.

  If I wanted a great metaphor to use in Mrs. Foster’s assignment, I could have written, This summer, my mother drank up my dead father’s army medal.

  Instead, I just sat there and took my first zero of the year.

  That gave Bowen Strack about a month’s worth of material for making fun of me. He ran around school saying things like, “I’m Maverick Falconer. My summer vacation was like sitting in an apartment all day with no friends and nothing to do. Oops, sorry, I messed that up. I mean, my summer vacation was sitting in an apartment all day with no friends and nothing to do.”

  So you see, schools are really good at sorting us out. By the time you get to sixth grade, everybody knows who’s smart, who’s athletic, who’s good at music, who’s good at art, who’s rich, who’s poor . . . and on and on. There’s no hiding anything for long. If the teachers don’t expose you, the kids will.

  I made the big mistake of thinking Nate would be different.

  After we presented our poster projects in English class, Mr. Kurt gave us our first writing assignment of the year: Each of us would write a biography of somebody at our table. He got pretty excited about this. He practically jumped on top of his desk as he told us to “Dig deep, dudes!” and “Explore the person inside the person!”

  At first I thought, This shouldn’t be too bad. All I have to do is talk Nate through my poster again, and he can write about that.

  But then Mr. Kurt said, “We need to see what’s not on the poster, maaannn! If you really want to get a decent grade on this, you’ll probably have to meet outside of school. The best thing would be if you could visit each other at home. You get a different sense of your interview subjects in their natural environments.”

  That was easy for him to say. He probably wasn’t deathly ashamed to be seen in his natural environment.

  Before I could come up with an excuse, I had a date to get off the school bus at Nate’s house that Friday, and stay for dinner. If I hadn’t been aware yet of how different rich-kid life was, that evening clinched it. When we walked up to Nate’s house, which had its own little half-circle driveway like the mansions in movies do, his mom answered the door. She wasn’t wearing sweatpants or anything. She looked like she was ready to go to work in an office, or maybe go out to lunch at a fancy restaurant. She knew who I was, and invited me to come to the dining room for a snack. The Fergusons had two completely different tables for eating—one in the kitchen, and one that was ten feet away in this separate room. Plus, there were four high stools and a counter in between the two. You could basically stop and eat every few steps in their house.

  It was crazy.

  Then she offered me choices. She made a whole speech, while Nate rolled his eyes:

  “Maverick, are you a
healthy snacker or a junk food snacker? Nathan here is a junk food guy. He’ll sit and eat an entire tube of potato chips single-handed if you let him—isn’t that right, Nate? Anyway, if you want healthy, I stopped by the whole-foods store today and got an organic-vegetable platter, with whole-grain pita crisps. Or, if you want junk, there’s ice cream, tofu ice cream, frozen yogurt, potato chips, sweet potato chips, spicy yucca spears with picante dip . . . ”

  It was pretty overwhelming. First of all, she had already listed more food than we had in my whole apartment. Second of all, I didn’t know what half of it was.

  Luckily, Nate interrupted. “We have to work. Can’t you just leave us potato chips and ice cream?” I was kind of surprised, because he said it in a pretty snotty way. If my mom had gone out of her way to buy me all that food, I would have been kissing the ground.

  Nate’s mother didn’t even finish her sentence. She just put the ice cream, the chips, and some bowls and spoons on the table, and then walked out of the room.

  Nate had drawn up a series of questions for us to ask each other, so getting all of his information took almost no time at all. Nate was an only child, like me. But his family of three lived in a house with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a really fancy SUV parked outside. His favorite movie was anything with Harry Potter in it. And he could watch whatever movie he wanted on one of the family’s big-screen TVs. Or his own, personal laptop. Or his brand-new Apple phone. I didn’t have a phone. Who was I kidding? I had no technology at all. I didn’t even have two cups tied together with string. If I wanted to communicate long-distance with a friend, I would basically have to light a fire and send smoke signals.

  His favorite food was French. I didn’t even know what French food was, so I asked him for some examples. When he told me, it was all stuff I hadn’t even heard of.

  His biggest annoyance was when his mom didn’t do the laundry on time, so his favorite clothes were dirty. Mine was when scary teen gangsters were smoking and drinking in front of the laundry room of our apartment complex, so I was afraid to do my laundry and had to wear dirty stuff to school.