The Candy Smash

by Jacqueline Davies

  "Come on," said Adam, pulling open the pizza shop door. "You're acting like a bunch of idiots."

  "What's with him?" Paul muttered to Ryan as they followed Adam inside. Evan brought up the rear, the basketball pressed against his hip, wishing he'd never suggested going uptown that afternoon.

  After they'd finished their pizza slices and decided it was too cold to play basketball, they all went home. Evan climbed the stairs to his bedroom, hung the Locked sign on his door, then closed it firmly and pushed the edge of his desk in front of it so there was no way anyone could "accidentally" come in. He sat down and pulled out the stack of Post-it notes from his top drawer. It was easy to come up with the first six words. He'd been thinking about them on the walk home.

  But after that, he couldn't think of what to do.

  He heard Jessie's door open, and then came the sound he dreaded: her impatient knocking at his door. Sometimes he wondered whether there was some kind of magnetic force field around the Locked sign. Every time he hung it up, Jessie appeared immediately.

  "Busy. Can't talk right now," Evan called through the door.

  "I need you to look at something." Jessie's voice was matter-of-fact. Evan couldn't tell if she had even heard him.

  "I said I'm busy. Come back later."

  "But later is too late. I need you to look at something now."

  "Not now. And not later, if you keep bugging me!"

  "But what are you doing?" Evan could hear her knocking her shoe against the jamb of the door.

  Evan buried his head in his hands. "I'm thinking."

  "Thinking about what?"

  Evan slammed a book down over the Post-it notes, pushed the desk roughly away from the door, and flung the door open. "Why are you always such a pest?" he shouted.

  "I'm not always a pest," she said. "Just when I really need something." She held up a single piece of paper in her hand. "Can you look at this and tell me if it's good?"

  "No! I really can't. That's why I said later. Because later means later, Jess. You've gotta learn that!" Evan retreated back into his room and slammed the door shut. He heard Jessie's voice from the other side.

  "Your sign flipped around. Do you want me to fix it for you?"

  "Yes!" said Evan.

  There was a slight scraping noise, and then Jessie said quietly, "Okay, I did it."

  "Thanks," said Evan tightly, sitting back down at his desk.

  And it was funny, because something about the interruption or yelling or maybe just getting up from his desk and moving around suddenly made it easy for Evan to fill his entire desk with Post-it note words.

  He started moving the words around. He tore one word in half.

  He lumped together all the words that started with f

  He gathered up the short u sounds.

  Then he grouped the long i sounds.

  He added more words and tossed out others. Half an hour later, he leaned back in his chair and looked at the poem on his desk.

  He liked it. He felt proud of the words on the page.

  From his top desk drawer, he pulled out a piece of paper and quickly copied the poem over. He was worried Jessie would come knocking again before he finished. But when he was done, he noticed that in his haste he'd misspelled three words. When he tried to fix them, his poem looked like a mess.

  He took another piece of paper from his desk drawer and copied the whole poem over again, slowly and neatly, in his best handwriting. Then he put the good copy in his desk drawer, buried under several notebooks and old copies of Mad magazine, and crumpled up the messy draft and threw it in his trash can.

  Chapter 8

  Survey

  survey (n) a series of questions that investigates the opinions or experiences of a group of people

  Jessie was irritated. The color photocopier in her mom's office wasn't working. At least, it wasn't printing color copies. A yellow light blinked, telling her that one of the color ink tanks was empty.

  To Jessie, this was a tragedy. The wings of the butterflies were supposed to be bright blue. The hearts were meant to be red. The delicate centers of the daisies were colored a buttery yellow.

  In disgust, she punched the "copy" button and printed out twenty-seven copies of her survey in boring black and white.

  Then she packed the special survey box she'd made into her backpack and walked out the door.

  On the playground, she stayed apart from the others, waiting for the bell that would signal it was time to line up. Megan, of course, was late as usual, and Jessie didn't know if the other girls were mad at her, too. She decided not to ask them. Evan had explained this to her: asking people if they were mad at you sometimes made them even madder.

  Jessie wasn't the only one keeping to herself that morning. David Kirkorian was also on his own, wandering along the edge of the playground, picking up rocks, and talking to himself. Eventually, he worked his way around to where Jessie was standing, waiting for the bell.

  "What's that?" he asked, pointing at the stack of papers that Jessie held to her chest.

  "Nothing," said Jessie.

  "It can't be nothing," said David. "Just say 'None ya' if you don't want to talk about it."

  "Okay, none ya."

  "Why?" asked David. "Is it a secret?"

  Jessie thought about that. It wasn't a secret. But it was about a secret, or really a whole lot of secrets. Jessie had that uncomfortable feeling that she was about to mess around in something she didn't really understand. Maybe David could help her figure it out.

  "Well, it's a survey. A bunch of questions. Everyone in the class fills one out—anonymously—and then I add everything up and hand out the results. In my newspaper. It's going to be the front-page story."

  "A survey about what?" He seemed really interested, and Jessie felt encouraged. Maybe this was a good idea.

  "Love," she said. "The survey asks if the person likes anyone, you know, like-likes. Anonymously. Obviously, no one's going to say out loud if they like someone else." She looked at David closely to see if he agreed with this statement.

  "Obviously," he said, looking up at the sky.

  "And then there are some other questions, too. You want to see?"

  "Sure," said David, but he shrugged one shoulder casually as if to say that he didn't think the topic was really worth talking about.

  Still, when she handed him the top sheet from her stack, he readjusted his glasses and started to read with lightning speed. When he got to the bottom of the page, his eyes went right back to the top and started reading again.

  "Mrs. Overton is never going to let you pass this out," said David, giving the sheet back to Jessie as if it were a losing hand in gin rummy.

  "I'm going to convince her," said Jessie. "It's my extra credit project for math: finding practical ways to use decimals. She can't argue with that."

  "Yes, she can," said David, his lip curling just a little at one end. "She's the teacher. She can do whatever she wants."

  This was so true! Teachers did get to do whatever they wanted. Still, Mrs. Overton was pretty fair. Fairer than most. She couldn't say no to a project that involved the whole class and decimals. Could she? Jessie was even planning to make a pie chart once she had collected the data. A pie chart! Mrs. Overton loved pie charts almost as much as she loved poems.

  But when they trooped into the classroom to begin the day, Mrs. Overton wasn't there. Instead, Mrs. Feeney was sitting behind Mrs. Overton's desk, and the hearts of all the kids sank. Mrs. Feeney was, by far, the worst substitute teacher. She was old and sour and hardly paid any attention to what was going on in the classroom. She also sent more kids to Mrs. Fletcher's office than all the other substitute teachers combined. Jessie couldn't figure out why the school kept hiring her. It must be because she was available at a moment's notice.

  "Settle down," bellowed Mrs. Feeney as the students walked into the classroom. We're not even making any noise! thought Jessie. She took her chair down from her desk, then walked up to Mrs. Fee
ney with her survey held tightly to her chest. For some strange reason, David walked up right behind her.

  "Mrs. Feeney, I have something I need to pass out to all the kids." She held up the stack of papers, but didn't turn them around.

  "What is it?" Just then the ding-a-ling of a cell phone was heard coming from behind Mrs. Overton's desk. Mrs. Feeney immediately moved to retrieve her phone from her enormous handbag.

  "An extra credit project," said David. "For math."

  "How long will it take?" Mrs. Feeney's eyes were on her phone, reading the screen. "Oh, for Pete's sake!" She poked at the phone a few times, but this didn't seem to improve her mood.

  "Less than five minutes. And I guarantee everyone will be quiet and stay in their seats the whole time!"

  "All right. Be quick. I need to take this call. But I am right outside in the hallway, so no monkey business. And don't think I don't mean it." She sailed out into the hallway, with the phone already at her ear, and closed the door behind her.

  Jessie looked at David, who looked right back at her. Their eyes seemed to say, That was just too easy.

  "Okay, everybody listen up," said Jessie in her best in-charge voice. "I'm doing an extra credit project—"

  "Dweeb!" shouted Paul, but he said it jokingly. During the course of the year, the kids in 4-O had gotten used to Jessie. Sometimes she was a bossy pain in the neck, but at other times she had good ideas. Different ideas. Like the time she got the whole class to create a courtroom on the playground, complete with a judge and jury and verdict. Jessie was almost never boring.

  "It's a survey," she said, ignoring Paul. "And everyone has to fill one out. But don't write your name, and when you're done, fold your paper up a bunch of times and put it in this special box." Jessie showed them a shoebox with the lid taped on and a thin slot cut into the top. Once a paper went through the slot, there would be no way to get it out without cutting through the cardboard.

  While she was talking, Jessie was handing out the papers, one on each desk, face-down. Tessa was the first to talk.

  "I'm not answering this!"

  "Me, neither," said Paul.

  Megan raised her hand. "This is kind of private stuff."

  Jessie stared at her and tried to figure out whether Megan was still mad. Then she looked around the room. A lot of kids were shifting uncomfortably in their seats. No one had written a single thing on the survey. Why were they against this? It was just a survey, and it was anonymous. Jessie couldn't see what the big deal was.

  She looked at Evan. He was leaning over the top of his desk, his head resting in his hand, staring at her. He gave just a little shake of his head, as if to say, What are you doing now, Jess?

  Then David said, "Don't you want to know?"

  "Know what?" asked Ryan.

  "Know what everyone else is thinking? About boys and girls and love?"

  That got most of the class laughing and calling out.

  "Love!" hooted Scott Spencer, slapping his desk. "Oooh, lo-o-o-o-ve!"

  "What's so funny about love?" asked Megan. "Love is a good thing."

  "Yeah," said Salley. "Everybody should love everybody."

  "I don't love anyone," said Christopher, "and no one can make me."

  "So, what's the big deal?" asked Jessie. "Just write that down in the survey and hand it in."

  "No way. What if I'm like ... you know ... the only one?" He looked around the classroom, and his eyes got big and he wasn't laughing anymore.

  The class grew quiet when he said that. It was as if each kid was thinking the same thing: Am I the only one?

  David broke the silence. "So—don't you want to know?"

  "It'll only take a couple of seconds," said Jessie. "But we've got to be quick because Mrs. Feeney is going to come back any minute, and I guarantee you she won't let us do this survey."

  If there was one thing that united the kids in 4-O at that moment, it was their dislike of Mrs. Feeney.

  "Just do it," said Megan, and she began to fill in her survey.

  "Yeah," said Evan. "Do it."

  Everyone started writing, and then a competition broke out over who could fold the paper the most number of times. (Six was the best anyone could manage.) Jessie quickly filled out a survey herself. Her answers were easy: "no," "no," "no idea." She stuffed hers in the box along with everyone else's.

  "Hurry up!" said several of the kids as Maddy Garber, the last one, slid her paper into the sealed-up shoebox.

  Jessie pressed the shoebox to her chest. "I solemnly promise that I will guard this box with my life for the rest of the day. I will keep it with me at all times, and I will report the results to you on Monday, Valentine's Day."

  "She's coming!" shouted Jack, who had peeked through the glass of the door after sharpening his pencil.

  Mrs. Feeney walked in and found the entire class of 4-O seated silently at their desks, all eyes staring at her expectantly.

  "Well, I guess we can get started now," she said, as if she'd been waiting for them instead of the other way around. "Hopefully Mrs. Overton will be back after lunch. She had to take her cat to the vet."

  "Langston?" asked Megan, looking around at the other kids in her desk group. Several kids started to talk, and Jessie's eyes couldn't help jumping to the laminated photo of Langston over the door with a speech bubble coming out of his mouth that read BE KIND AND DO YOUR WORK!

  "Quiet!" barked Mrs. Feeney. "Some kind of an emergency, I guess. There's no lesson plan, I know that." She stared glumly at Mrs. Overton's neat desk.

  Oh, brother, thought Jessie. Mrs. Feeney practically needed to be dragged through the day. "We start with Morning Meeting," she said.

  "And then the Poem of the Day," added Evan. Jessie frowned. She'd been hoping they could just skip that and get right to math.

  "Poetry?" said Mrs. Feeney, raising her eyebrows. "Well, I don't know anything about poetry."

  "It's okay," said Megan. "We'll teach you."

  The class moved, fairly quietly, to the rug area and sat on the floor.

  After Morning Meeting, Salley turned the page on the easel to reveal the Poem of the Day. Mrs. Feeney called on Ray to read the poem out loud.

  TOAD

  by Valerie Worth

  When the flowers

  Turned clever, and

  Earned wide

  Tender red petals

  For themselves,

  When the birds

  Learned about feathers,

  Spread green tails,

  Grew cockades

  On their heads,

  The toad said:

  Someone has got

  To remember

  The mud, and

  I'm not proud.

  There was silence. Mrs. Overton had taught them to let a poem sink in before talking about it. But Mrs. Feeney didn't know about that, so she was the first to comment. "You see. That's what I mean. It doesn't make any sense to me. I'm just not a poetry person."

  Well, Jessie wasn't a poetry person, either, but she thought it was pretty weak of Mrs. Feeney to just give up without even trying. She looked at Evan. He was reading the poem again to himself, his lips moving silently, shaping the strange words.

  Megan raised her hand. "The flowers are kind of selfish," she said. "They're just thinking about themselves."

  "What's a cockade?" asked Christopher.

  "I have no idea," said Mrs. Feeney. She didn't move from her seat.

  "We have a dictionary, you know," said Jessie.

  "Well, feel free to look it up, if you want," said Mrs. Feeney.

  Jessie stood up, exasperated, as Evan raised his hand and asked, "Why does someone have to remember the mud?" Jessie noticed he wasn't directing his question at Mrs. Feeney. He was looking at the other kids in 4-O.

  Salley answered. "Because mud is one of the things you take for granted. No one bothers to remember it. But it's important. At least to a toad."

  "Toads love mud!" said Malik.

  "Hey, it's a love poem
!" said Tessa. "A love poem for mud." And instead of laughing, the kids in 4-O nodded their heads and agreed. It turns out you could even write a love poem about mud.

  "A cockade is a fancy thing you wear on your hat to show that you're better than everyone else," said Jessie, her finger still marking the spot in the dictionary—the grown-up dictionary—that Mrs. Overton kept on the shelf beside her desk. "It's a sign of rank." She looked particularly at Mrs. Feeney, but Mrs. Feeney didn't seem to be listening. She had her eye on the clock.

  At recess, Jessie carried the box of surveys with her to the playground and guarded it safely. Three more days until Valentine's Day. Tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday. Only three days to calculate the results of the survey and write her article. Kids kept wandering over to her on the playground. It was as if they were ants drawn to a big sticky spot of spilled lemonade on the sidewalk. They couldn't keep away.

  But as soon as the class went back inside, they forgot all about the surveys. There was something much more interesting on their desks: more candy hearts! And the messages on these were just as personal as the other ones.

  "Mine says SMART GUY," said David, waving his box in the air.

  "Hey, look!" said Taffy Morgan. "Mine says TWINKLE TOES," and she held up one foot to show the glittery shoes she was wearing that day.

  Jessie's hearts said GO-GETTER on them. It was as if the hearts were telling her to spring into action now that there was something to investigate!

  Obviously, Mrs. Overton hadn't put these candy hearts on their desks. So who had? Jessie whipped out her reporter's notebook and began to write down the names of everyone in the classroom and the messages on their hearts. As she made her list, she wondered: Will there be more hearts tomorrow?

  Mrs. Feeney didn't know the new rule about no candy in the classroom, but she did know her old rule about no noise in the classroom, and she promptly threatened to send all of them to the principal's office if they didn't "pipe down and put a cork in it." She handed out math worksheets and said the first person to make a sound would miss lunch recess. Jessie thought that sounded pretty good. She'd rather stay inside where it was warm and work on her newspaper than go out on the playground and guard the survey box. So as soon as she finished the problems on the page, she got up to sharpen her pencil, but wandered over to Evan's desk. He was hunched over his math paper with a scowl on his face.