The Best School Year Ever

by Barbara Robinson

  “It even has his initial on it,” I said. “H, for Howard.”

  “Huh-uh,” Louella said. “There’s no initial on Howard’s blanket.”

  I started to show her the H, and then I saw the other initial. It was an I.

  I.H. There was only one I.H. in the whole Woodrow Wilson School—Imogene Herd-man. “Louella,” I said, “Imogene didn’t find this blanket underneath a bush or anywhere else. This was her own blanket.”

  Louella refused to believe this and you couldn’t blame her. It was hard enough just to imagine that Imogene ever was a baby, let alone a baby with her own blanket to drag around and hang on to.

  “Besides,” Louella said, “if it was hers, she wouldn’t give it away. The Herdmans never gave anything away in their whole life.”

  “But what about the initials?” I said.

  “They aren’t really initials,” Louella said. “I think they’re just what’s left of the bunny pattern.”

  I guess Louella believed this, but I knew better. They were Imogene’s initials, all right, and this was Imogene’s blanket. Maybe somebody took it away from her when she was a baby, and maybe she yelled and held her breath and turned purple, so she would know exactly how Howard felt. She would be sympathetic.

  I could hardly wait to write this down on the Compliments for Classmates page in my notebook, but it looked too weird: “Imogene Herdman—sympathetic.”

  Nobody would believe this and I would have to explain it and Imogene would probably wrap my head in chewing gum if I told everyone that she once had a blanket with a favorite chewed corner and everything.

  Chapter 8

  Two or three times a year all the Herdmans would be absent at the same time and it was like a vacation. You knew you wouldn’t get killed at recess, you wouldn’t have to hand over your lunch, and you wouldn’t have to hide your money if you had any.

  We even had easy lessons when they were absent. Boomer Malone said the teachers did that on purpose to give us all time to heal and get our strength back, but my mother said it was probably the teachers who had to get their strength back.

  Nobody knew why they were absent. Nobody cared. They didn’t have to bring a note from home either like everyone else, to say what was the matter.

  “Why bother?” the school nurse told my mother. “They would write it themselves, no one could read it, and it would be a lie. Besides, if they ever did have something contagious, they wouldn’t stay home. They’d come here and breathe on everybody.”

  You never knew when they would be absent either, but nobody thought this made any difference till they were all absent on a fire-drill day and our school won the Fire Department Speed and Safety Award.

  “I can’t believe this improvement,” the fire chief said. “Last time it took you thirty-four minutes to vacate the building. What happened?”

  “You know what happened,” Mr. Crabtree said. “We lost half the kindergarten. Ollie Herdman led them out a basement door and took them all downtown.”

  “I mean, what happened this time?”

  “Nothing happened this time,” Mr. Crabtree said, “because Ollie isn’t here. Neither is Ralph or Imogene or Leroy or Claude or Gladys.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They’re absent,” Mr. Crabtree said.

  The chief sighed. “I thought maybe they moved away. Oh, well . . .” He sighed again and said in that case he’d better get back to the firehouse and be ready for anything.

  Everyone was pretty excited about the Speed and Safety Award, because we had never won anything before and probably never would again till the last Herdman was gone from Woodrow Wilson School.

  So far, though, we could only be excited about the honor of it because we wouldn’t get the actual award till Fire Prevention Day. There was a Fire Prevention Day every year, but all we ever got were Smokey the Bear stickers, so this was a big step up. There would be a special assembly with the fire chief and the mayor there, and the newspaper would send someone to take pictures and interview kids about fire prevention.

  Of course fire prevention was the last thing the Herdmans knew anything about— except to be against it, I guess—so you had to hope the reporter wouldn’t pick one of them to interview. You had to hope they wouldn’t show up for this big event wearing beer advertisement T-shirts. You had to hope they wouldn’t show up.

  “Maybe they won’t,” Charlie said. “Maybe they don’t even know we won the award.”

  It’s true that the Herdmans didn’t know much if you count things like who invented the telephone, but they always knew what was going on around them, which in this case was plenty. There were signs and posters about fires and firemen everywhere; all the blackboards said “Woodrow Wilson Elementary School, Speed and Safety Winner!” Kids were making bookmarks and placemats, and writing poems and stories about our big accomplishment. We didn’t even have hot dogs and hamburgers at lunch—we had Fire Dogs and Smokey Burgers.

  How could the Herdmans miss all this? They didn’t.

  Somebody in the second grade brought in this great big stuffed bear and they stood it up in the hall with a sign around its neck— “Smokey says Congratulations to the Woodrow Wilson School!”—and the very next day there was the bear with its paws full of matches and cigarette lighters, firecrackers in its lap, and a half-smoked cigar sticking out of its mouth . . . Smokey, the Fire-Bug Bear.

  “Oh, that is so disgusting!” Alice said. “What if someone reports it to the fire department? We might not even get the award. As usual, they’re going to mess everything up and ruin the whole assembly, hitting people and tripping people and folding little kids up in the seats!”

  I guess Mr. Crabtree came in the back door that day and didn’t know what had happened to the bear, because the first announcement was all about the outstanding fire-prevention display by the second grade. “I want every student to stop by the second-grade room and see our very own Smokey the Bear,” he said, “and let’s be sure to thank those second graders for this . . .” Then there were some whispers and a thwip sound as somebody put a hand over the microphone, but you could still hear voices and a few words: “. . . matches . . . horrible wet cigar . . . get rid of that bear . . .”

  Then the secretary, Mrs. Parker, got on and shuffled some papers and cleared her throat and said that Mr. Crabtree had been called away suddenly and she would finish the announcements: Picture money was due by Friday; a Fred Flintstone lunch box had been left on Bus 4; there would be a meeting of the Fire Safety Team in the lunchroom after school.

  Right away Alice wrote this down on a piece of paper, as if she had so many important engagements that she had to write them all down.

  Imogene poked me. “What’s the Fire Safety Team?”

  “It’s for the assembly,” I said. “It’s some kids who are going to demonstrate what to do in case of fire.”

  Imogene shrugged. “Throw water on it and get out of the way.” Then she squinched up her eyes. “What kids? Who’s on this team?”

  I was going to say “I don’t know” or “Who cares”—something so loose that Imogene wouldn’t want to waste her time— but as usual Alice had to blow her own horn.

  “I am,” she said. “There’s ten of us plus two alternates in case somebody gets sick at the last minute.”

  It’s not unusual for people to get sick at the last minute if they’re mixed up with Herdmans, so that got Imogene’s attention, but it wasn’t enough to hold her attention till Alice said, “We’re going to have T-shirts that say ‘Fire Safety Team, Woodrow Wilson School,’ so we’ll all look alike in the picture.”

  I didn’t even bother to say “Shut up, Alice”—it was too late. You could tell that Imogene was already seeing herself in the Fire Safety T-shirt and in the picture, and there was only one thing that you didn’t know for sure—who, besides the two alternates, was going to get sick at the last minute.

  Naturally Imogene wasn’t the only Herdman who showed up in the lunchroom after school. The
y were all there, slouching around ready for action, draped over the tables, scraping gum from underneath the benches, chewing it—and this was old gum, shiny with germs and hard enough to tear your teeth out.

  There was at least one kid from every grade on the Fire Safety Team and they all had one eye on the Herdmans, so Mr. Crabtree couldn’t just ignore them, which is probably what he wanted to do.

  “School’s over, Ralph,” Mr. Crabtree said, “Imogene, Ollie. Unless you people have some reason to be here, it’s time to go home. We’re just having a meeting.”

  “We came to sign up,” Ralph said.

  “Sign up for what? This is the Fire Safety Team.”

  “Right,” Leroy said. “That. We want to sign up for that.”

  “It was on the announcements,” Gladys put in, “about the meeting after school.”

  Mr. Crabtree opened his mouth and then he shut it again because there wasn’t anything he could do about this. He had made it a major rule that anybody at the Woodrow Wilson School could sign up for anything they wanted to, no exceptions, and he had made another rule that everybody had to sign up for something whether they wanted to or not. So you had kids who signed up for two or three things, and you had kids who signed up for everything, and you had kids who wouldn’t sign up at all till their teacher or their mother or Mr. Crabtree made them be something. What you didn’t have was Herdmans signing up for anything.

  Till now.

  My mother said it was a good idea for the Herdmans to be on a Fire Safety Team. “Who needs to know more about fire safety than those kids?” she said. Some people said at least this way you could keep an eye on them during the assembly. My father said it was like inviting a lot of bank robbers to demonstrate how to rob the bank.

  Three kids quit the Fire Safety Team right away before anything could happen to them, but their mothers said they ought to get the T-shirts anyway in view of the circumstances.

  Mr. Crabtree knew what circumstances they were talking about—Herdmans—so he didn’t even mention that. He just said he didn’t have anything to do with the T-shirts. “That’s up to the PTA,” he said. “The PTA is providing T-shirts for the Fire Safety Team in honor of this special occasion.”

  The president of the PTA said they weren’t providing T-shirts for kids who quit the Fire Safety Team. Mrs. Wendleken said they better not be providing T-shirts for the Herdmans, who had muscled their way onto the Fire Safety Team.

  All anybody could talk about was T-shirts, but I agreed with Charlie, who said he wouldn’t be on the Fire Safety Team if you paid him, not even for fifty T-shirts. “I watched them practice,” he said, “and when Mr. Crabtree yells ‘Drop and roll!’ all the Herdmans drop on somebody, like in football.”

  They dropped on Albert Pelfrey and nearly squashed him flat, which wasn’t all bad because as I said Albert is this really fat kid, but Albert quit the Fire Safety Team anyway. “I’ve got enough trouble just being fat,” he said. “I don’t want to be fat and dead both.”

  At the last minute two kids got sick (or said they did) and right away both the alternates quit, which didn’t surprise anybody.

  “You don’t want to quit,” Mr. Crabtree told them. “This is a big opportunity.” He meant it was a big opportunity to take part in Fire Prevention Day and get a T-shirt and have their picture taken. But it was also a big opportunity to get pounded two feet into the ground by the Herdmans.

  “I can only be an alternate,” Roberta Scott said. “I can’t actually be in it or anything.”

  “Roberta, that’s what an alternate is,” Mr. Crabtree said. “It’s your responsibility to be in it and everything. You too, Lonnie.”

  Lonnie Hutchison was the other alternate, and he said he had to quit because of his asthma.

  “Nice try, Lonnie,” Mr. Crabtree said, “but you don’t have asthma. I know who all has asthma. I know who has pinkeye and poison ivy and athlete’s foot, also coughs and colds and nervous stomachs.”

  Mr. Crabtree didn’t mention any other diseases, and when Lonnie’s mother called the school to say that Lonnie was sick with a rash, Mr. Crabtree didn’t believe it.

  “Too convenient,” he said. “It’s probably finger paint or Magic Marker, something like that. Two or three weeks ago I saw Leroy Herdman walking around with red spots all over his face, looking for trouble. I just told him, ‘Leroy, go wash your face,’ and the next time I saw him all the spots were gone.”

  But it wasn’t finger paint on Lonnie.

  It was chicken pox, and before you could say “Speed and Safety Award assembly” there wasn’t anybody left to go to it.

  Mr. Crabtree wanted to postpone Fire Prevention Day but the fire chief said he couldn’t do that. “It’s Fire Prevention Day all over town,” he said, “all over the state. You can’t just have your own Fire Prevention Day whenever you want to. Tell you what, though. If you’ll get together a small group of whatever kids you’ve got left—your Fire Safety Team would be good—and bring them down to the firehouse, we’ll have the award presentation right here. We’ll make it a big event.”

  It turned out to be a bigger event than anybody expected because the pizza-parlor ovens caught fire half an hour before the presentation. They put the fire out right away but Mr. Santoro made all his customers leave because of the smoke, and most of them just followed the fire engine back to the firehouse and stayed for the presentation. Some people thought the fire was part of the presentation, especially when Mr. Santoro showed up with all his leftover pizza and handed it out free.

  Everybody said this was a great way to advertise fire prevention, and they congratulated the mayor and the fire chief for thinking it up, and the fire chief congratulated Mr. Santoro for donating the pizza.

  The newspaper reporter got it all wrong too. “MOCK FIRE STAGED TO HIGHLIGHT FIRE PREVENTION DAY,” he wrote. “RESTAURANT OWNER CONTRIBUTES PIZZA FOR LARGE CROWD ATTENDING AWARD CEREMONY. SCHOOL STUDENTS HONORED FOR SAFETY TECHNIQUES.”

  The “honored students” were what was left of the Fire Safety Team—Ralph, Imogene, Leroy, Claude, Ollie, and Gladys—and there was a picture of them standing in front of the fire truck, looking like a police lineup. You could imagine an officer saying, “Now, which one did it?” and the victim saying, “I can’t be sure. They all look alike.”

  They did look alike, except for being different sizes . . . plus, of course, they had on the famous matching T-shirts.

  “If I didn’t know better,” Mother said, “I would think this was the Herdmans being honored instead of the school.”

  This turned out to be the general opinion, and so many people called the newspaper to complain that they printed another story— “WOODROW WILSON SCHOOL, DESPITE CHICKEN POX EPIDEMIC, WINS SPEED AND SAFETY AWARD,” which my father said was better than nothing, but not much. “What does chicken pox have to do with it?” he wanted to know, but my mother said he was just tired of watching Charlie and me scratch.

  Mrs. Wendleken made Alice sit in a bathtub full of baking-soda water so she wouldn’t scratch, and made her wear these white cotton gloves so she wouldn’t scratch, and when Alice came back to school, besides having puckery seersucker skin, she was still wearing the gloves.

  “I don’t think that’s necessary, Alice,” Miss Kemp said.

  “I have to wear them while I’m thinking,” Alice told her, “so I won’t forget and scratch. If you scratch chicken pox, they get infected and leave scars.”

  “Not on Leroy,” Imogene said. “Not on Ollie. Not on . . .”

  “Wait a minute,” Miss Kemp said. “Leroy? Ollie? I wasn’t aware that any of your family was absent during our epidemic.”

  “Oh, we weren’t absent,” Imogene said.

  Miss Kemp frowned. “But you had chicken pox?” she asked.

  “You mean, did I have chicken pox?” Imogene said.

  This was like talking long distance to my grandmother without her hearing aid, and— just like my grandmother—Miss Kemp didn’t try to pin it down.
>
  “If you have chicken pox, you can’t come back without a note from the doctor,” she said, and Imogene said, “Oh. Okay,” and got up and left.

  So no one ever knew for sure whether they did actually have chicken pox, or how many of them had chicken pox, or exactly when they had chicken pox, and no one ever knew for sure whether they came to school and breathed on everybody and ruined our big award assembly, or whether they were all sick and stayed home on the fire-drill day so we won the award in the first place.

  Chapter 9

  The last day of school is pretty loose and they probably wouldn’t even bother to have one except that that’s when you clean out your desk. If you didn’t have to clean out your desk, Mr. Crabtree could just get on the PA system any old day in June and say, “All right, this is it, last day of school. Go on home. Have a great summer. See you in September.”

  But then everyone would go off and leave their smelly old socks and moldy mittens and melted Halloween candy and leftover sandwiches. Once a kindergarten gerbil got loose and climbed in Boomer Malone’s desk and died there.

  Nobody knew what to do with the gerbil because, like all the kindergarten animals, it had a name and a personality and we knew all about it from the notice on the bulletin board—“Our friendly gerbil is missing. His name is Bob. If you see Bob, please return him to the kindergarten room.”

  So this wasn’t just any old dead gerbil— this was friendly Bob. It didn’t seem right to drop him in the trash, so Boomer took him back to the kindergarten room. We all thought the kindergarten would stop whatever it was doing, hunt up a cigar box, write a poem for Bob, and have a funeral, but according to Boomer they couldn’t care less.

  “Not even the teacher,” he reported. “She took one look and said, ‘Oh, that’s not Bob,’ and dropped him in her trash basket.”

  If there was a moral to this, I guess it was: Don’t show up with dead animals on the last day of school.

  You couldn’t show up with live ones either anymore. We used to have a pet parade every year on the last day of school, till the year Claude Herdman entered their cat.