CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
1. KYLE
2. SAMANTHA
3. ADAM
4. KYLE
5. ERIC
6. KYLE
7. MAGGIE
8. ERIC
9. KYLE
10. MAGGIE
11. SAMANTHA
12. MAGGIE
13. ERIC
14. KYLE
15. SAMANTHA
16. MAGGIE
17. ADAM
18. ERIC
19. SAMANTHA
20. KYLE
21. MAGGIE
22. ERIC
23. SAMANTHA
24. ERIC
25. KYLE
26. SAMANTHA
27. KYLE
28. SAMANTHA
29. MAGGIE
30. ADAM
31. ERIC
32. SAMANTHA
33. MAGGIE
34. KYLE
35. MAGGIE
36. ADAM
37. ERIC
38. MAGGIE
39. ERIC
40. SAMANTHA
41. MAGGIE
42. KYLE
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY ALLAN WOODROW
COPYRIGHT
I look up at the clock. There’s still an hour left until the school bell rings and class is dismissed.
Actually, there are sixty-four minutes and eleven seconds left.
Now, sixty-three minutes and forty-four seconds.
It’s only Monday and I’m already looking forward to the weekend.
I want to raise my voice and yell, “Let me go home! Yow! Yow! Yow!”
Yow. Yow. Yow. That’s what my favorite cartoon character, Squiggle Cat, always says when he’s annoyed or angry or just wants to shout something.
Now there are sixty-three minutes and twenty-one seconds remaining in class.
Yow. Yow. Yow.
Don’t get me wrong. School isn’t totally awful. But learning is hard, and Ms. Bryce doesn’t make it any easier.
Just this morning I walked up to her desk with my math sheet and said, “Ms. Bryce, I don’t understand why—”
She didn’t even let me finish, she just barked, “Before you add fractions, you need a common denominator.” She jabbed her finger on my paper.
“What’s a denominator again?”
“Look it up!” she said with a nasty frown. And that was that. I felt stupid.
Who cares what a denominator is, anyway? Fractions are stupid, not me.
I stab my notebook with my pencil, and the tip breaks. So I lean over and grab Seth’s pencil from his hand. Seth frowns at me and fishes another pencil from his desk.
The class pencil sharpener broke last week so we’re supposed to bring backups, but I forgot.
I can picture my extra pencil on the kitchen counter of our apartment, right where I left it, next to the carrots Mom cut up for my lunch. I forgot those, too.
I bet if Mom put the pencil next to some cookies, I wouldn’t have left it behind.
But Mom never gives me lunch dessert. That’s why I always swipe one from somebody else during lunch. Usually I grab a cookie, but sometimes it’s a brownie or cupcake. I’m not picky. But a lunch without dessert is like a classroom without a pencil.
Meanwhile, Ms. Bryce drones on about something. I’m not really paying attention.
My pencil tip breaks. Again. I reach over to grab Seth’s pencil, again, but he turns his body to block me.
“C’mon. Give me your pencil,” I whisper to Seth, holding out my palm.
“Then what am I supposed to use?” Seth asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Steal Cooper’s.”
“What’s going on back there?” Ms. Bryce hollers way too loudly. When I look up, she’s frowning and staring at me. I think screaming is Ms. Bryce’s second favorite thing to do in the whole world, right after sending kids to the principal’s office. “Is there a problem?”
There is a problem, but it’s our teacher. She has way too many rules. Except I can’t say that. So I just shrug and say, “No problem. Sorry.”
I look up at the clock. There are now fifty-nine minutes, thirty-six seconds.
Yow. Yow. Yow.
I loved fourth grade last year. My best friend, Bridget, was in my class, but she moved away last summer. She loved makeup and clothes as much as I do. I really miss her. We had the best teacher last year, too. Mrs. Middleton smelled like strawberries, her blond hair was almost as pretty as mine, and she had excellent fashion sense.
Mrs. Middleton and I even owned a pair of the same shoes! I have thirty-six pairs of shoes, so we only wore the same pair on the same day once.
But Ms. Bryce, my fifth-grade teacher, doesn’t wear the same shoes as me. She’s a fashion nightmare. Really. I had a nightmare just last week where I was forced to wear the same shapeless mustard-yellow polyester-twill secretary jacket and skirt that she’s wearing right now.
I still break out in a sweat thinking about it.
Ms. Bryce paces in front of the room while I try not to stare at her clothes. I mean, that style might have worked fifty years ago, although I doubt it. Maybe when you’re ninety-six years old, your eyesight gets so bad you can’t see how terrible your clothes look.
Jasmine claims that Ms. Bryce is ninety-six, but I doubt it. She’s probably way older. It’s not like Jasmine has seen Ms. Bryce’s birth certificate or anything. I don’t even know if they had birth certificates that long ago.
I should have Daddy check. Daddy can do anything.
At least, Daddy’s money can do anything.
“Stand up and find your vinegar!” our teacher yells. Her voice pierces through the room like static electricity. Mrs. Middleton’s voice sounded like cooing doves, but Ms. Bryce’s voice resembles a screeching crow. “I said to stand up!” she hollers at Kyle, who is talking to Seth and not paying attention, like usual.
Kyle has bright red hair. If you’re going to horse around, you shouldn’t have bright red hair that stands out like a newly painted fire engine.
Our teacher stares at him, her eyes radiating darts of grouchiness. “Or do you want detention?” she barks, spit flying from her mouth.
Ms. Bryce always spits when she talks. Not that she ever talks. She screams. You practically need an umbrella if you stand too close to her, which is why I sit in the back.
“Sorry,” mumbles Kyle. He looks sincere enough, but then he turns and smirks to his friends. Ms. Bryce can’t see it, but I can.
“Humph!” Ms. Bryce shouts back.
But I can’t blame Kyle for smirking. I mean, Ms. Bryce is more than just a fashion disaster. She’s a teaching disaster, too. I wonder if I can do anything about it.
I can try, anyway.
I think about my fashion magazines. They usually have quizzes in them, and last month one of those quizzes asked, “Do you have telepathy?” Telepathy is the power to make things happen with your mind. The quiz included questions like Do you know if it’s going to rain before it does? and Do your dreams come true? I only got four points out of twenty (my score was A rock is more telepathic than you) but maybe I just had an off day. Maybe, if I think really hard, as hard as I can, I can get rid of Ms. Bryce. I close my eyes and concentrate:
Retire, retire, retire, retire, retire, retire, retire, retire, retire, retire, retire!
I open my eyes. Nope. She’s still here. I guess the magazine was right about me.
I should ask Daddy to buy our school, Liberty Falls Elementary, and then he could force Ms. Bryce to retire. Daddy will buy me anything. Anything except a pony, that is. He says there’s no room in our penthouse apartment.
I say we should just buy a bigger apartment.
“Now pour in the vinegar,” Ms. Bryce barks. “And pay attention! I’m tired of this class always messing up.”
We’ve built little volcanoes that will ooze lava when you add vinegar. Ms. Bryce makes her students do this every year. She’s so old that her classes have probably been building volcanoes since before volcanoes existed.
You’d think building volcanoes would be sort of fun. It might be, if we had a different teacher.
“Samantha, are you going to help?” asks Giovanna, reaching over for the jar of vinegar.
“I am helping,” I answer. I’m holding a notebook to take notes. You never know when things might happen that are noteworthy.
Besides, I don’t want to get too close to the volcano. That lava gook could get on me. What if it splashes on my new cashmere sweater?
Giovanna probably wouldn’t mind if the lava got on her clothes. She is my best friend now that Bridget is gone, but that sweater is so last year. And her hair is curly when everyone knows straight hair is in. I should loan her my flat iron.
Her brown hair is the wrong shade of brown, too. It would look nicer if she added highlights. I’m always giving her fashion tips, but they never seem to sink in.
“How much vinegar should I add?” Giovanna asks me. She’s holding a spoon and a jar of vinegar that’s been dyed with red food coloring.
I shrug.
We turn to Ms. Bryce, but she isn’t paying attention to us. She’s screaming at someone else now. The spit flies.
She’s yelling at Adam Lee. It looks like he took apart the broken pencil sharpener. That is so Adam. He practically lives in the principal’s office. He could walk there blindfolded.
Adam looks at his sneakers, wringing his hands as he tries to explain himself. His face turns from olive to white and his spiky black hair sort of droops. But Ms. Bryce won’t let him say a word. She turns her back to him, scribbles a note on her detention pad, and then thrusts the paper at Adam. Now she’s marching him to the door, right past me. “You can explain to Principal Klein why you enjoy destroying school property!” she barks.
Poor Adam walks out, his head low.
“I’ll just dump in the whole jar,” Giovanna says brightly.
“Um,” I say, looking at my notebook for volcano notes. I’ve written none. “I think you should wait until Ms. Bryce tells us exactly how much vinegar to add.”
Giovanna doesn’t listen. She pours the entire jar of vinegar inside the volcano top.
It immediately gurgles, and then—
Uh-oh.
The red ooze gurgles from the top of the volcano. The blobby bubbling is pretty interesting, at first. But then it keeps coming. And coming. The red-colored liquid spurts out of the volcano, followed by a large burping river of never-ending fizz. It happens so fast. One moment everything is dry, and the next moment, fake lava washes over the aluminum tray, across the desk, and spills onto the floor in large puddles.
The vinegar stink rises from the floor and I gag.
Ms. Bryce is so busy watching Adam march out of the room and toward the principal’s office that she doesn’t notice what has happened. She steps backward, into the red muck.
She notices it now.
She looks down. Her shoes are half buried in red glop. I think those shoes are new since I haven’t seen them before, although they are so not in style. Ms. Bryce opens her mouth, and a scream like a siren screeches out, so loud and shrill that I think it might shatter the windows. I have to cover my ears. I wouldn’t be surprised if people could hear her from across the school.
I wouldn’t be surprised if people could hear her from across the state.
“What did you girls do?” she cries. She raises her eyebrows, and the deep wrinkles in her forehead crease even deeper.
“I just poured in the vinegar,” replies Giovanna in an almost-whisper.
Ms. Bryce jabs her finger at the empty jar. “I said to put in a quarter of a cup!”
I’m about to point out that no, she didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything about vinegar measurement. But I keep quiet because I don’t want to get in any more trouble than I might be getting into already. Ms. Bryce’s face is tomato red, or rather, fake-lava red. If this were a cartoon, she’d have little clouds of smoke puffing from her ears.
“That’s it!” our teacher yells. She marches to the front of the class, red glop dripping from her sensible but fashion-poor footwear. “This is the third pair of shoes you’ve all ruined this month!” she shouts. But I don’t think you can blame us for the other two pairs. It wasn’t entirely Ryan’s fault that she kicked over a bucket of mop water that shouldn’t have been in the middle of the room, and it’s not Cooper’s fault that he dropped an egg salad sandwich on Ms. Bryce’s foot.
If you yell at people, they might get nervous and drop their sandwiches. So really, ruining that pair of shoes was entirely Ms. Bryce’s fault.
Besides, her shoes are simply awful. Our destroying them is actually doing her a favor.
Ms. Bryce doesn’t think that. She picks up the phone. For a moment, I worry that she’s calling the police to arrest us for ruining her shoes, and I wonder how I can explain to my parents that I need them to bail me out of prison. But she presses the button for the school office instead, which makes no sense. After a few seconds of waiting, she hollers, “This is Ms. Bryce. Tell Principal Klein that I am resigning. Effective immediately!” She hangs up.
Then she grabs her coat from behind her chair, marches across the room, and leaves, slamming the door behind her.
Maybe I have magic powers. Maybe my telepathy earlier did work. Maybe I’m the reason she resigned!
But I doubt it.
I guess I won’t have to ask Daddy to buy the school. Not anymore. Because we just lost our teacher.
I look at Giovanna, and she looks at me. Everyone in class looks at one another, this way and that way. No one knows what to do.
The room is disturbingly quiet until my volcano gives one final, loud burp and a big nugget of red froth shoots up and lands on the sleeve of my cashmere sweater.
Detention? Again? This is so, so unfair. I just have rotten luck, that’s all. My ma and pop say that some people are born under a lucky star. But some evenings you can’t see any stars, and I bet I was born on one of those nights.
In Korea, the number four is unlucky, and my birthday is April fourth. That’s 4/4.
I wish I had been born in March.
But I don’t deserve detention. I was doing a good deed! I was fixing something! Trying to fix something, anyway. Lizzie’s pencil got stuck in the pencil sharpener. Everyone knows the sharpener has been broken for a week. I guess Lizzie forgot. She said that was her favorite pencil, too. It looked like any regular old pencil to me, but if it was special to Lizzie, then it must be special.
Everything about Lizzie is special, like the freckles around her nose and her light brown hair and her perfect teeth and how she was the best singer in the fourth-grade talent show last year.
Seriously, she sings like a star.
Once I took the pencil sharpener apart, I wasn’t quite sure how to put it together again. I thought it would be easy. It should have been easy. But the pieces didn’t quite fit back the way they were supposed to. That’s hardly my fault.
And for that, for trying to do a good deed, I get sent to the principal’s office? Every day it seems like it’s not if I’ll go to his office, but when.
They have lollipops outside his office, in a small green metal bucket next to the sheet where parents sign in to pick up their kids. I usually grab a sucker. Maybe today I’ll grab two, one for me and one for Lizzie. A lollipop is better than a pencil. You can’t lick a pencil. Well, I suppose you can lick anything, but a pencil wouldn’t taste very good.
I wonder what flavor Lizzie likes. Raspberry. I bet she likes raspberry.
Or grape. I’ll grab one of each.
My sneakers squeak with every step dow
n the hallway. Everything sounds louder when you walk in the hall by yourself.
Going to the principal’s office is the loneliest feeling in the world.
My sneakers go SQUEAK, SQUEAK, SQUEAK. But I pass no one.
I walk slowly. There’s no sense in rushing. The longer it takes to walk to the office, the longer I won’t be in trouble.
So, my sneakers sort of go:
SQUEAK.
Pause.
SQUEAK.
Pause.
SQUEAK.
When I get to the office, all the grown-ups are hurrying away, even Mrs. Frank, the school secretary. Her tall, tight, gray-hair bun doesn’t sway an inch even as she dashes off.
I wonder why everyone is rushing, and if I missed a fire drill. But I would have heard that. Those alarms are loud. They’re even louder than Ms. Bryce. And she’s as thundering as a foghorn.
No one in the office sees me as they dart from their desks and across the room and into the teachers’ lounge in back. The teachers’ lounge door is propped open, and all of the office workers crowd inside with the art teacher, Mrs. Wilson, in the middle.
I hear Principal Klein. I couldn’t miss his deep, loud voice anywhere. I hear it almost every day, although usually he starts with the words, “What did you do this time, Adam?”
Curious, I stand on my tiptoes to get a better look at what’s happening back there.
“We’ll get your necklace out, Mrs. Wilson,” Principal Klein says. “It’s just caught in the disposal.” He rolls up his sleeve and sticks his hand in the sink.
“Maybe we should wait for the janitor … ,” Mrs. Wilson says.
“Nonsense,” Principal Klein replies, and it looks like he’s pulling on the caught necklace.
His hand jerks backward, he slips, and suddenly a spout of water erupts from the sink. The wave soaks Mrs. Wilson’s and Principal Klein’s faces.
Principal Klein is holding the faucet in his hands. “Whoops.”
While the school administration fights with the teachers’ lounge sink, I wonder what I should do. Should I stay here and wait? Should I help? I could fix the sink.
I bet I’m better at fixing sinks than I am at fixing pencil sharpeners.
Then the office phone rings. Once. Twice. It’s right next to me, a button flashing, demanding to be answered. “The phone is ringing!” I call out, but there’s no one in the office to hear me.
Class Dismissed Page 1