The Boy Who Failed Show and Tell

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  To top it all off, after my mom’s last phone call, she tells me I am going to be in B.J.’s class, and that my new teacher is named Miss Tough. I am thinking, Are you kidding me? My last teacher hit me, and my new teacher is named Miss Tough? It sounds like a joke, but I don’t find it funny due to the fact that it is actually my life.

  That night I can’t sleep. It is Wednesday, which means my mother is at Rutgers. I start to panic about what is going to happen in the morning, and my chest feels so tight that I have to get up and do two puffs of my inhaler. Then I lie in bed, shaking and pulling hairs out of my head, until I hear my mom’s car pull into our driveway.

  Great! The only thing worse than being a bald, bad new kid is being a balder, bad new kid who has barely slept.

  The drive to P.S. 54 takes forever. It’s so strange—the route takes us right past P.S. 35. My heart starts to beat really hard when I look at the top right corner of the building at Mrs. Fisher’s window. I have to tell myself over and over, She can’t hit you now, she can’t hit you now, until we are on the highway and Mrs. Fisher is just a fading spot in the rearview mirror.

  Ten minutes later, my mom parks her Chevy Nova in front of my new school. The place is huge! There are three stories instead of two, plus there’s even a basement! There’s a fancy front porch with an overhang like movie theaters have, with a marble entrance arch around the entryway. When we get inside and meet with the assistant principal, Mr. Levy, he tells us there are five classes in each grade. P.S. 35 only had two classes per grade, so coming here feels like moving to a bigger, busier city. I don’t know what he has heard about me, but he must have heard something, because as he is walking me upstairs to class, he says, “This is your chance to make a fresh, clean start, Jordan. Make it count, all right?”

  A fresh, clean start sounds good. On the other hand, I am pretty sure my new assistant principal thinks I am going to be trouble.

  When Mr. Levy stops at room 303, I have just enough time to read the nameplate on the door before he knocks. It says, MISS TUFF.

  Maybe if it isn’t spelled Tough, she isn’t mean. But what do I know? I have literally been wrong about every teacher I’ve ever met.

  Miss Tuff answers the door and smiles warmly at me.

  It’s a trick! a little voice says in the corner of my mind.

  “Oh, you must be Jordan,” she says. “Benjamin has told me all about you!”

  Ooh, she’s good, says the little voice.

  “Class, this is our new friend Jordan,” Miss Tuff says, leading me into the room and stopping in front of the chalkboard. “Jordan, why don’t you introduce yourself?”

  I look at her. I am confused. She just told everybody my name. What else does she expect me to say?

  “You don’t have to tell us a whole lot. Just things like your name and where you are joining us from.”

  I’m thinking, My name is Jordan Sonnenblick, and I am fleeing the violence of P.S. 35.

  But I just say, “Hi, I’m Jordan. Uh, P.S. 35.” Then I shuffle my feet and blush, because I sound like a moron.

  Miss Tuff says, “We are so glad to have you, Jordan!” She puts her arm around me, and her hand brushes against the left side of my head, where the bald spot is.

  I can’t help it—I flinch. Miss Tuff feels me pull away from her, and as the class gets back to whatever work I have interrupted, she says softly in my ear, “Oh, you don’t like being touched? I promise I will remember that.”

  Tears spring up in my eyes. I love being touched. My mom has always referred to me as her “affectionate child.” But I am afraid of being touched by a teacher, because The Slap happened two days ago. And I am even more afraid my bald spot will be discovered. I look up and sideways at Miss Tuff. She must see that I am nearly crying, because she says, “Don’t worry. You are going to be happy here!”

  That’s when I start to feel just the tiniest bit of hope in my heart. Miss Tuff is not tough.

  The other kids in my class are wildly different from the kids at P.S. 35. There are five other Jewish students! And the other kids aren’t all Catholic, like nearly everybody at my old school. There are kids whose families come from all over Asia, with amazing names that feel like tongue twisters in my mouth: Chandra Mahapaurya, Ramesh Ganeshram, Mondhipa Ratnarathorn. Also, the boys aren’t only interested in sports. During recess, B.J. introduces Jonathan Marks by saying he is a “chess genius.” Jonathan’s opponent, a tall, thin, serious-looking kid with a deep voice, introduces himself as “Walter P. Kelly.” That sounds very sophisticated. I mean, my middle name is Ted, but I have never called myself “Jordan T. Sonnenblick.” “Walter P. Kelly” is a grown-up name, like he should already be a doctor. Or a tough, no-nonsense detective: “Walter P. Kelly, Private Eye.” B.J. sits down to play against a small, frizzy-haired boy named Stuart Heffer, who tells me he is in the middle of a massive project. Stuart wants to be the first kid ever to read the entire World Book Encyclopedia by his eleventh birthday. Last summer, he read the entire B volume!

  I’m like, Well, I read several extremely informative comic books last summer. But somehow, I get the feeling Stuart is way ahead of me in the information department.

  The girls are all really serious about school. Stephanie Casella and Laura LoBianco both want to be lawyers when they grow up, and there are tons of others who say they are going to be doctors someday. At P.S. 35, I never heard anybody talk about what they were going to be when they grew up.

  I am impressed, but also a bit scared. I had thought it would be exciting to be in a class with a lot of intelligent kids, but it never occurred to me that if everybody else was smarter, it might make me look dumber in comparison. In my other school, I was “that smart kid who gets in trouble all the time.” What if in my new school, I am just “that kid who gets in trouble all the time”?

  By the end of the day, I am sure I like Miss Tuff. I also feel like I have a lot of new friends, even though the experience of being the new kid is overwhelming.

  * * *

  It isn’t until the second day that my problems start. While I am laughing at lunch with B.J., Jonathan, and two really funny boys named Joey Chablis and Chuck Dai, I notice that a kid named Albert is glaring at me from my class’s other table. When we go outside to play kickball, I am playing second base and he purposely steps on my foot as he is running from first to second. This hurts because he is nearly as big as Walter P. Kelly. I say, “What’s your problem?”

  “You think you’re so hot, don’t you?” Albert says. He looks really mad, and I have no idea what I have done.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Stupid new kid! You took my seat at lunch.”

  I don’t get it. All I did was take the last empty place at B.J.’s table. But I do not like getting accused. Or stepped on.

  “Oh, yeah?” I spit. “I must have missed the big sign that said, ‘For Buttheads Only.’ ”

  “You’re a butthead.”

  “Great comeback,” I say. “Have you tried out for Saturday Night Live yet?”

  Albert snarls, “That’s it! You’re dead!” Then a girl named Samantha kicks the ball into the outfield, so Albert runs from second to third, and that ends our lively chat. But Albert stares at me the whole rest of the game.

  I can’t believe this! I haven’t gotten in anything remotely resembling a fight at school since a bloody incident in second grade, when some new kid who had just moved to Staten Island from Vermont stabbed me in the hand with his scissors during art. And I hadn’t actually done any fighting that time.

  I mostly did the bleeding part.

  And my two fights at camp were with other tiny guys like me. Fighting Albert is going to be like fighting a tree. I’m not even sure my fists will be able to reach all the way up to his face. But I know one thing for sure: I can’t back down. If I do, Albert will just pick on me all year.

  Fortunately, my father has given me some boxing lessons in our basement. He watches boxing matches on TV all the time
. Plus, when he was a kid, he used to box with his older cousins in their basement. He calls boxing “the sweet science” and has taught me a lot about how it works. I know how to jab and uppercut. I know I have to keep moving my feet, but keep my body angled slightly sideways so I “present a smaller target.” I know I have to keep my elbows in to protect my ribs, and my hands up so the other guy doesn’t have a clear shot at my face.

  And I am getting better and better. Just the other day, I hit my dad so hard he had to call time out and stop to rub his forearm. Then afterward, he even put ice on it.

  The only thing I don’t know about boxing is whether this stuff works in real life, when the enemy isn’t (a) wearing padded gloves and (b) my dad.

  The whole afternoon, I try to concentrate on Miss Tuff and our lessons so I won’t get in trouble, but I am so nervous that she asks me twice to stop tapping my pencil against my desk. Actually, it’s worse than that. She only asks me twice, but Stephanie Casella, who sits next to me, asks me at least ten times. Stephanie even catches me whistling “Drive My Car” when we are supposed to be reading silently.

  This is perfect. Even if I survive the fight, now my teacher has noticed my problem with sitting still, and Stephanie probably thinks I am the most annoying kid in America.

  When we are dismissed, I try to walk fast enough so I can get out to the area where my mom will pull up before Albert can get to me. Unfortunately, when I am halfway there I find the entire sidewalk blocked by Albert, who has two other boys with him—one on each side.

  This is ridiculous! It’s just my luck that in my second day at a new school, I run into the only fourth grader in the world who has his own henchmen. I start to say, “I’m sorry I took your seat. I really didn’t know it was yours.” But all I get to say is “I’m—” before Albert steps toward me, puts both his hands on my chest, and shoves. I go flying backward, and the only thing that stops me from falling on my butt is that I reach back to catch myself, which makes me land on my metal lunch box instead.

  Sadly, metal is harder than my butt. The edge of the lunch box smashes into my spine and I can’t stop myself from letting out a weak little “Ow!”

  All right, then. Now there’s no way I can stop a fight from happening. (Or really, continuing.) But Albert is twice my size, and it’s three against one. Thinking fast, I show him my lunch box. “Okay,” I say. “Here’s how this is gonna go. Either you let me pass, or I am going to hit you in the face with this lunch box.”

  He sneers. “You’re not serious.”

  “Try me.”

  “Fine, I will,” he says, but this time his voice doesn’t sound so brave.

  “Excellent!” I say as cheerfully as I can. I look down at the lunch box and pretend to study all the slightly raised NFL team helmet emblems on it. Then I add, “You’re going to look great with a Pittsburgh Steelers flag–shaped dent in your forehead. Or you can step aside.”

  Albert’s two sidekicks look at the lunch box, then at their leader. For a second, I think there is a chance of him backing down, but I realize he isn’t going to let himself look bad in front of these guys.

  Well, if I wait any longer for the action to start, either we are going to get in trouble with a teacher or—even worse—my mom is going to pull up beside us and see me misbehaving at my brand-new school. And Dad always says you should never let your opponent take the first shot. I cock my right fist down low around the handle of the lunch box and step forward. Albert raises his fists and starts to swing at me.

  I swing as hard as I can. BONG! goes the lunch box. BONG! goes Albert’s face. He stumbles backward, holding his nose.

  “You hid me wig a lutch box!” he says, looking at me with hurt in his eyes. Like this had been some kind of surprise move on my part.

  “Yup,” I say, trying to sound like my heart isn’t going a million miles an hour. “And tomorrow, I’m bringing my big lunch box!” I step around Albert, wondering whether his sidekicks are going to step in and block my path.

  They move aside, and I don’t blame them. They’re probably concerned I might also be packing a thermos.

  A couple of weeks later, I am sitting on my butt in the hallway, with all my classmates around me. Miss Tuff is telling us to “skootch your tushies into the wall.” I have been through a lot of these atomic-bomb drills at P.S. 35, and I have always thought they were the dumbest thing ever. I live in New York City, okay? If atomic bombs start falling, I know we are going to get blown up before almost anywhere else. Plus, I have never understood how hiding in the hallway with my butt crunched into the crack between the wall and the floor is supposed to protect me from explosions or radiation. If a bomb did hit, the wall would just fall over right on top of me. And if that didn’t get me, the wave of radiation would probably make me glow in the dark.

  Briefly. Until it killed me.

  So usually, I giggle my way through the drill. And that is how the kids around me have always behaved, too. Today, though, we are all very serious. I think of the question my family will ask next month at our Passover seder, if we are all still alive by then: Why is this night different from all other nights? And I ask myself, Why is this drill different from all other drills? The answer is simple:

  Because today may or may not be the end of the world.

  My parents were talking about it at breakfast. Somewhere in Pennsylvania, there has been an accident at a nuclear power plant called Three Mile Island. One of the reactors is melting down. I don’t understand exactly what that means, but according to my dad, if the reaction isn’t stopped, there is going to be a huge radioactive explosion. I guess Three Mile Island is a couple hours south and west of our house, but nobody knows whether we are far enough away to be safe. Besides, my parents say the wind blows from the south and west to the north and east.

  That means if the explosion doesn’t get us, the huge cloud of radiation will probably blow straight over here. “Nuclear fallout” is what they call it, and apparently, it is a very, very bad thing.

  All of a sudden, the drill seems like a really big deal. For once in my life, I do exactly as the teacher says. I skootch my tushy into the wall. I think about my parents. I think about Lissa. I think about Hecky. Does nuclear fallout kill snakes? Or will she mutate into a super snake? Because that would be kind of awesome.

  Though I guess I wouldn’t be around to check it out.

  I think about my Aunt Sylvia and my Great-Grandma Rose in Brooklyn. My Aunt Ida in Queens. My Cousin Shira in Manhattan. For the first time in my life, I am happy all my grandparents moved away to Florida when I was little. At least they should be safe if that whole Three Mile Island place goes BOOM!

  After the drill ends, Miss Tuff reads to us from a science fiction book by an author with a funny name: Andrew J. Offutt. The story is great, and every day when she gets to the end of the chapter, we have all been begging her to read more. But I can’t concentrate today. I look around the room. I look at all my new friends and feel sad. I even feel sad when I look at Albert’s face, which is still slightly bruised. Sure, he was going to beat me up, and I only saved myself by whacking him in the face with my lunch box. And it’s not like he and I have become pals, although I have high hopes that we might be done fighting. Maybe he will speak to me now that the swelling around his nose has mostly gone down.

  And anyway, even he doesn’t deserve to get blown up at age nine.

  Nothing that used to bother me seems important anymore. It all seems so small when there is a nuclear accident hanging over everything. This goes on for days and days, until the guy on my mom’s Eleven O’Clock News show announces that the crisis is over. But I don’t get a break, because right after that, my father goes to see Dr. Suarez about a bump on his forearm. The same forearm he was rubbing after we rode Space Mountain. The same forearm he had to put ice on after the last time we boxed. This must be the appointment my mom was talking about when I was eavesdropping on their big argument!

  Dr. Suarez sends him to another doctor, and tha
t doctor sends him to another nother doctor. Finally, I am up in my closet eavesdropping when my dad says the C word to my mother. The last doctor has stuck a long needle into my dad’s arm to take a sample and send it away to a lab. But the doctor has already told my father he is pretty sure what the test will say.

  Apparently, my dad has cancer.

  I sit there on my shelf in the dark, crying. I know all about cancer. My dad’s mom, my Nana Adele, died of it when I was in second grade. First, she started coughing a lot. Then she had a fever all the time. Then she started shrinking and shrinking until she didn’t even really look much like the grandmother who had always taken Lissa and me out for ice cream when we used to visit her apartment in New Jersey. The one who always had room for me on her lap. The one who had bought me my favorite Tonka fire truck. The one who had always taken care of me when I was sick.

  When I was little, I always thought Nana Adele was a nurse, because she worked in the gigantic Johnson & Johnson factory in New Jersey, and always smelled like Band-Aids. Plus, my very first memory is of a time when I got a high fever, and she stayed up with me all night, wiping my face with a cold washcloth and rubbing my body down with alcohol to lower my temperature. I begged her to just let me sleep, but she never left my side.

  Grandmothers who take care of sick people aren’t supposed to become sick people.

  And I remember when the phone call came to say she had died. My father was supposed to fly to Florida to see her the next morning, and while he was down there, he was going to go to my cousin Michael’s bar mitzvah. He was all packed up and ready. My parents were standing in the kitchen arguing, because my mother wanted to go with him so she could say goodbye to Nana Adele. My father was saying she could say goodbye on the phone, because we didn’t have the money for another ticket, “and besides, the kids are in school. You have to be here to take care of them.”

  “But, Harv,” my mom said, and it was like she was begging. “I love your mother.”