The Best School Year Ever
Page 8
There had been a lot of everything else because Labor Day was late, so school started late. Parents had an extra week to buy their kids school shoes and get their hair cut; kids had an extra week to finish the fort or tree house or bike trail or whatever else they’d been building since June; and teachers had an extra week to pray they wouldn’t have any Herdmans, I guess. . . . And of course the Herdmans had an extra week, too, to tear up whatever they’d missed during the summer.
That turned out to be a lot and, as usual with the Herdmans, it wasn’t always things you would expect them to do.
The police guard at the bank said that he had seen them come in. “Can’t miss them!” he said. “So I went right over and stood by the big fish tank. I figure, if I see a bank robber coming I’ll defend the money, but if I see those kids coming I’ll defend the fish.” He shook his head and sighed. “Didn’t occur to me to hang around the revolving door.”
Nobody got hurt and everybody got out all right, but they had to call the fire department to take the door apart, and they had to close the bank till they got the door back up.
The fire chief said he never saw anything like it. “Two kids,” he said, “maybe even three kids might go in that door at the same time to see what would happen, but this was eight kids! What you had was one section of a revolving door full of kids. Couldn’t move the door forward, couldn’t move it back, had to take it down . . . unless, well, you couldn’t just leave them in there.”
This was supposed to be a joke, but most people thought it would have been a great opportunity to shut the Herdmans up somewhere, even in a revolving door.
It would have been a great opportunity, except that by then it wasn’t Herdmans in the door. It was eight different kids, including Charlie.
“Why?” my father asked him. “Why would you follow the Herdmans anywhere, let alone into a revolving door?”
Charlie shrugged and looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor and finally said he didn’t know. “It was just that they were all around,” he went on. “There were Herdmans in front of us and Herdmans in back of us, and then Ralph said, ‘Let’s see how many kids will fit in the door,’ and so . . . ” He shrugged again.
The bank manager was mad because of his door, and the bank guard was mad because he picked the wrong thing to guard, but nobody blamed him. How could he know what the Herdmans were going to do? Most of the time, I don’t think even the Herdmans knew what they were going to do.
I don’t think they planned to mix up the mice and the guinea pigs until they happened to see some guinea pigs, and I don’t think they decided to find some kids and shove them into a revolving door until they happened to see the door and a bunch of kids all at the same place at the same time.
There probably wouldn’t have been any trouble at the pizza parlor either if Mr. Santoro hadn’t introduced a new variety— sardine pizza—and that wouldn’t have caused any trouble if Boomer Malone didn’t have to get rid of his guppies.
Boomer started out with two guppies in a fishbowl, and by the next week he had about a hundred guppies in jars and bottles and bowls. Mrs. Malone told my mother that she even found guppies in ice cube trays.
Boomer’s original idea had been to sell the guppies, but he finally had to pay Leroy Herdman fifty cents to take them away. According to Gladys, they were going to dump all the guppies into their bathtub and then charge kids a quarter to come and see the guppies go down the drain, all at once.
“It won’t hurt them,” Gladys said. “They’ll just go wherever the water goes and swim around. They’ll like it.”
Maybe so, but it never happened. Before they got the guppies home to the bathtub, Leroy and Claude and Gladys stopped in the pizza parlor, saw six sardine pizzas on the counter, and immediately swapped guppies for the sardines.
Nobody ever did think that sardine pizza would be a success but, as Mr. Santoro said, “After that, sardine pizza didn’t have a chance.”
Other Books by Barbara Robinson
THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER
THE BEST HALLOWEEN EVER
MY BROTHER LOUIS MEASURES WORMS
And Other Louis Stories
Copyright
The Best School Year Ever
Copyright © 1994 by Barbara Robinson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robinson, Barbara.
The best school year ever / Barbara Robinson.
p. cm.
Sequel to: The best Christmas pageant ever.
Summary: The six horrible Herdmans, the worst kids in the history of the world, cause mayhem throughout the school year.
ISBN 0-06-023039-8 — ISBN 0-06-023043-6 (lib. bdg.)
ISBN 0-06-440492-7 (pbk.)
[1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Humorous stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.R5628Bg 1994
[Fic]—dc20
93-50891
CIP
AC
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EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062089953
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