Clementine and the Spring Trip

by Sara Pennypacker

  When I was finished, my dad looked up from stirring yogurt into my brother’s cereal. “Who made this rule?” he asked.

  “Dad. I already said. The fourth graders. First the mean ones, and now all of them.”

  “Yes, but who are these people? The sound police?”

  “Dad, they’re the fourth graders! They’re the bosses of the whole school, because they’re the oldest. Except for the fifth and sixth graders, but they don’t count because they’re locked up on the second floor.”

  “But who are they, Clementine?” my dad asked again. My brother stared at him as if even he knew that was a dumb question.

  My father has trouble paying attention. I used to have trouble paying attention too. Okay, fine—I still have trouble paying attention.

  I went over to my dad, looked right into his eyes, and smiled. “Dad,” I said in a really kind voice—the voice I wish people would use on me when I’m having trouble paying attention—“the fourth graders are Margaret and the other fourth graders.”

  “But aren’t they just kids? Kids who used to be third graders like you? I think that’s what your father’s asking,” my mother said. “And who will be the fourth graders next year?”

  “The third graders will be! We will! Me!” And then I stopped. “Oh,” I said.

  “Exactly,” my mom said. “And would you make a rule like that?”

  “Of course not!” I said. “We’ll probably make a new rule. One that says you have to be as loud as you can when you’re eating.”

  My dad put my brother’s cereal down in front of him. “Food is a big deal, Clementine,” he said. “Most people would be happy just to have enough of it. So maybe you won’t make any rules about eating. In fact, maybe you won’t make any rules at all.”

  Sometimes he has trouble staying serious. “Dad,” I reminded him, “making rules is the whole point of being a fourth grader.”

  My dad went off to work, my mom left to get Kohlrabi dressed, and I repacked my lunch.

  I saw my dad again in the lobby as I was leaving. “Got your homework, Sport?” he asked.

  “No homework,” I said. “Field trip.”

  “Oh, right.” He patted my backpack. “Well, then, you’ve got plenty of room in here.” He unzipped it and tossed in a package of pecans. “Courtesy of the Condo Association. Your mom went a little overboard, a little extra-crunchy. Share them, and have fun today.”

  I didn’t point out to him how dangerously loud nuts were, because just then, the elevator doors opened. Margaret stepped out. She pointed at me. “You’ll make him an ashtray,” she said. “I’ll give it to him and say, ‘Alan, your pipe lives here.’”

  “That’s a really good solution, Margaret!” I said. And it was, because we’d all get to do what we loved most: I’d get to do an art project, Margaret would get to make a rule, and Alan would get to smoke his pipe.

  Then I pointed at the drawing I’d done of her with the shiny duck statues.

  Margaret looked. “Oh!” she said. “Oh, oh, oh!” With each “Oh!” she seemed to sprout her own sparkle rays. She stood there “Oh!”-ing and sprouting sparkle rays so long I worried we were going to miss the bus.

  “Remember, you said I could clean the lobby this weekend,” she called out to my dad as I pulled her past him. “The steps, too, okay?”

  My dad said okay, and then I dragged Margaret out the door. On the bus I showed her my lunch. “There’s no mayonnaise on this chicken sandwich, is there?” she asked me.

  “Of course not,” I said. “Snicking.”

  She nodded at the string cheese and the raisins, threw in a bunch of her hand wipes, then finally she said, “Okay. But remember: keep your mouth closed.”

  I shut my lunch box. “Margaret, what are you going to do next year, when you’re in fifth grade?”

  Margaret slumped over, as though her head was suddenly too heavy for her neck. “I wish I could stay in fourth grade forever,” she admitted. “You wouldn’t believe the stories Mitchell tells me about that second floor. He says it’s a miracle any of the fifth graders survive.”

  “Well, what I meant was, what are you going to do about not making the rules anymore?”

  Margaret’s head fell down even farther. “I don’t know,” she mumbled into her lap. “My life will be over.”

  When we got to school, we went inside to our classrooms as usual. But all we did was take attendance and listen for the three hundredth time about how to behave on a field trip so we wouldn’t make our school embarrassed. I asked my teacher “Yet?” and he answered “Not yet,” and then we lined up to go right back outside.

  Pretty soon the whole school was there. Our teachers read off partners and assigned us to groups for the buses.

  Kyla elbowed me. She pointed to one of the buses waiting in the line.

  “What?” I asked. “Those are the buses. What?” And then I understood. “Oh, no. Oh, no,” I said. “Kyla, is it…?”

  Kyla nodded. The word passed around until everyone was staring at Bus Seven. You could practically see the smell-rays pulsing out of it.

  “Cheer up,” I told our group. “Maybe it’s here for the big kids.”

  The fifth and sixth graders climbed onto Bus Five and Bus One and took off for the Museum of Science.

  Bus Seven sat lurking at the back of the parking lot like a stink bomb waiting to explode.

  “Cheer up,” I said. “Maybe it’s here for the little kids.”

  A few minutes later the first and second graders got shoveled onto Bus Eleven and Bus Four and left for the Aquarium.

  “Cheer up,” I said to my group. “It’s probably here for our other group.”

  Except by now even I knew what was going to happen. And sure enough, the other group of third and fourth graders practically danced onto Bus Three, they were so happy to be avoiding The Cloud.

  And Bus Seven pulled up in front of us. If you have ever watched prisoners walking the plank on a pirate show, you will know how we climbed onto that bus.

  The strongest kids wrestled their way into the front seats, farthest away from The Cloud. Olive and I got stuck with the second-to-last row, where The Cloud was really bad. Willy and Lilly were in front of us, Maria and Rasheed were across the aisle, and Margaret and Amanda Lee took the back row.

  Right away, everyone started gagging and groaning. I didn’t know which was worse—the smell, or the noise of the kids complaining about the smell. I pressed my nose against the glass and clapped my hands over my ears.

  The door cranked open, and Mrs. Rice climbed onto the bus. She began making her way down the aisle, staring each kid in the eyes until he or she went silent. Even though I am not going to be a principal when I grow up, I’m going to go to principal school so I can learn some of the great tricks they teach there.

  When Principal Rice came to our row, I zipped my lips and plugged my fingers into my ears to show her we were on the same team about the noise. Then I pinched my nose and pretended to faint, to let her know it still smelled gross, though. Mrs. Rice nodded at Olive and me for being quiet, and then turned her stare onto Maria and Rasheed.

  And that is when I saw something I had never seen in my entire life: Mrs. Rice was not wearing her principal shoes! Instead, her feet were strapped into some navy blue puffy things. I climbed over the back of Olive’s seat and hung down to get a better look. I think the things on her feet were supposed to be sandals, but what they looked like was…car seats!

  I wanted to ask her if they made her feet feel like they wanted to go for a ride, or if they just felt trapped. Sometimes my own feet felt like squirrels—that’s how much they wanted to skitter along sidewalks or up trees. But just in time I remembered I had zipped my lips to promise her quiet. This is called being rememberful.

  I slid back down into my seat. The Cloud settled around me and crept into my nostrils.

  Mrs. Rice made her way back up the aisle and called for our attention. “The bus company assures me the bus has just been c
leaned, so no more complaining. You may talk, but use your inside voices,” she announced. Then she sat down behind the driver with Margaret’s teacher, and the bus started up. The kids around me went back to talking again, except quietly now.

  And in a different language. Olive-language.

  Willy and Lilly told Olive stories about being twins, in Olive-language. Maria and Rasheed invited Olive to their wedding in it. Some of the other kids from our class actually passed notes back from the front of the bus, written in it.

  Right in front of me, everyone was making friends with Olive. By next week she’d be best friends with everyone in the entire third grade. Except me, because why would she want to be friends with someone who couldn’t even talk her language?

  Olive must have hypnotized everyone, because nobody paid any attention to me when I growled, “Stop. Talking. Olive!”

  Okay, fine—maybe nobody paid any attention to me because I only growled it to myself. Still, they looked hypnotized, all right. Lilly was practically melted over the back of her seat, smiling as if just being near Olive was a magic dream come true. “Tholivis olivis solivo folivun!” she sighed.

  I slumped down. It wasn’t fun—it was the opposite of fun, which is boring. Luckily, I had invented a game for extra-boring times. How you play Dead-Arm is this: Pretend one of your arms is dead. You can only move it by using your other, still-alive arm, or your teeth. If you use your teeth, put your lips over them and be very gentle, like a mother cat when she lifts her kitten, because your arm is not really dead, and teeth can hurt.

  Anyway, Dead-Arm makes everything you do more interesting. I lifted my right arm with my left and dropped it onto Willy’s head.

  “Quit it,” Willy said without even turning around. “I’m trying to draw a zombie shark, and you’re messing it up.”

  Then he turned around and gave Olive a big, bloopy smile. “I mean, I’m trying to draw a zolivombolivie sholivark,” he corrected himself.

  I closed my eyes and stuffed secret fistballs into my jacket pockets. And guess what I found in there? Pine needles! This is the good news about forgetting to clean out your pockets.

  I pulled them out, buried my nose in them, and kept it there for mile after mile. But after a while, I smelled all the pine-scent out of them. I leaned my head way back so I could at least smell some good bus exhaust, but it wasn’t much help. By the time the doors finally opened, I was practically dead from The Cloud, like the rest of the kids. We staggered out to see the first attraction.

  All I am going to say about Plymouth Rock is that they should rename it Plymouth Pebble.

  Next we got to the actual Plimoth Plantation. We started with the Native American site. They were planting their garden, so it smelled really good there—like dirt that was just waking up, and things that wanted to grow. “Corn and beans and squash,” our guide told us. “Five seeds of each in every mound. Five is a lucky number for Wampanoags.”

  For my family, too, I thought to myself, remembering the Pentagon.

  Next we lined up with our partners at the gates of the Seventeenth-Century English Village. The guide reminded us that everyone inside was an actor, pretending to be a real person who was at the Plimoth Colony in 1627. “They’ll be going about their everyday routines. Feel free to ask them any questions, or help with their chores.”

  Even though Margaret was ahead of me in line, I saw her face when the guide said that. It looked as if what Margaret had heard was, “Feel free to roll around in some garbage.” She was still shuddering as we filed inside.

  The first thing we passed was a pen full of pigs. Margaret had thrown her arms over her head and run down the road, but Olive and I stopped. The pigs didn’t look like actors to me—they looked like real, live pigs. There were big ones, little ones, and even some baby piglets, crawling over their mother.

  A Pilgrim man in red balloony pants came over and tossed a pail of scraps into the pen. The pigs got pretty excited about that, and a group of chickens came skidding over too. The way those chickens ruffled and clucked and bobbed their heads over the scraps reminded me of my grandmother and her friends gathered around the refreshment table at bingo.

  I laughed about that, and one of the chickens raised its head to look. It left the flock and came over to investigate Olive and me. I had never seen a real, live chicken before, so I bent down for a good look. It was so pretty that it could have been a chicken-shaped sugar cookie—one that was all speckled with butterscotch sprinkles and had a red-frosting Mohawk on top of its head.

  “Hi, chicken,” I said. “Nice hat.”

  “That’s its comb,” Olive said. “Colivomb.”

  The chicken twirled around and pretended to be extremely busy studying some dirt. “Look, it’s playing I Am NOT Interested in You!” I explained to Olive.

  I walked over to the fence and began to admire the garden beyond it. “Pay no attention to it, and it will follow us. She will follow us, I mean,” I corrected myself, remembering about chickens and roosters.

  And sure enough, the chicken did. She walked right over my foot, as if my sneaker was just another piece of the road to her. I bent down again, and the chicken darted off, as if she had suddenly realized she was late for a really important chicken meeting.

  Before I could follow, Olive took my hand and pulled me down the village road behind our chaperone. The chaperones had all stopped in front of the little Colony houses and were motioning for their groups to go inside. I looked up and down the road to wave good-bye to my chicken. I didn’t see her, but halfway down, I noticed Margaret. She was standing all alone, with her head drooping and her hands in her pockets.

  When Olive and I went inside, I understood: Margaret was right. “Your floor is dirt,” I told the Pilgrim lady inside. Which she already knew, because she was sweeping it. “You’re sweeping the dirt off dirt!”

  The Pilgrim lady stopped sweeping and stared at her floor for a minute. She looked really disappointed at what she saw. “My husband promised me a wooden floor like we had in England,” she said with a sigh. “That was seven years ago.”

  “Do you miss your home?” I asked, looking around the dark, smoky house. I sure would miss my home if I had to move here.

  “Oh, no,” the Pilgrim lady said. “The New World is the place for us.” Then she leaned on her broom to think about it a little more. “Well, I miss apples,” she said at last. “We had all different kinds in England. Oh, I’d love to bite into a pippin right now! And how I would fancy a splash of cider with my stew…or beer,” she said, leaning over to eye Olive and me more closely. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any beer with you, travelers? We’ve run low.”

  I laughed at her joke. “Our parents wouldn’t give us beer!”

  But then I found out she wasn’t joking! “What’s the matter with them?” she asked. “Don’t they love you? All our children drink beer.”

  “For real?” Olive asked.

  “Of course!” the woman said. “You don’t think we’d let them drink the water, do you? Look at this.” She pointed to a bucket of water beside her table. “It’s clear! There’s nothing in it! That can’t be good for a person.”

  “Then what’s it for?” Olive asked.

  The Pilgrim lady pointed to a bowl of dried peas. “Soup. They need to be washed first.”

  Which gave me a great idea. “Do you need any help?” I asked.

  “Around here, always!” The Pilgrim lady wiped her hands on her apron and held the bowl out to me.

  I took it, and picked up the bucket of water, too. Then I stuck my head out the door. “Margaret,” I called down the road. “Come over here!”

  Margaret walked over with her arms folded across her chest. She squint-eyed me.

  “Here’s a doing thing for you,” I said. When I explained, Margaret brightened up. She sat down on a bench beside the house and began washing the peas, one by one, until they gleamed.

  Olive and I sat down beside her, and the Pilgrim lady came out with some se
wing and joined us. I asked the Pilgrim lady if she had any tattoos, which I ask every grown-up I meet because you never can tell who’s got one under their clothes. The Pilgrim lady answered no—but she’d seen a few on some sailors on the Mayflower.

  “Why did you leave, anyway?” Margaret asked.

  The Pilgrim lady told us about how it had been in England. It was the story we had learned in school—about how the king of England was bossing his people with some new church rules that they didn’t like—but it sounded sadder the way she said it. “Burdensome rules,” she called them. “They did not suit us. So we left.”

  Margaret’s face sagged at that answer. I knew what it had reminded her of: the sixth graders, bossing her around with their new rules next year. I bet Margaret was thinking, Great, so I should just find a New World to colonize.

  Luckily, the butterscotch-speckled chicken came over then and pecked at my sneaker laces, so I could change the subject.

  “What’s her name?” I asked the Pilgrim lady.

  Secretly, I was hoping the Pilgrim lady would say she hadn’t thought of a good name yet, did I have any suggestions? Then I would get to tell her a great name that I saw in the bathroom yesterday, which is where I get all my pet names. It was written on a tube of cream my mother rubbed into her belly each night so it wouldn’t explode. That Pilgrim lady and her chicken would be so happy with a beautiful name like PreNata-Stretch! And okay, fine—Olive would know that I was very talented at something, even if I couldn’t do Olive-talk. So I asked again, “Does she have a name?”

  The Pilgrim lady looked at me as if I’d just asked her if her chicken had a pair of ice skates.

  “Isn’t she your pet?” I asked.

  “Pet?” she asked back. “Oh, we don’t have the luxury of keeping pets here.”

  “Oh. So you just have her for giving eggs,” I said. Which I thought was a little selfish. I didn’t tell the Pilgrim lady that, though.

  “Eggs, yes,” the Pilgrim lady said. “And after that”—she pointed over her shoulder at her house—“into the stew pot.”