by Jack Gantos
“Even when you were a baby you had a hard time getting a square peg into a square hole,” she called out from behind me. “Remember rule number one: Slow down and think about what you’re doing.”
Mom is big on rules for me.
3
HANDFUL
Over the summer, there was a big meeting about me at school. Mom came home very serious and sent me to my room while she read my file. After she read it she opened my door and sat down on the edge of my bed. She said I should have been kept behind and given extra help, but no teacher wanted to risk getting me two years in a row.
“I guess I can’t blame them.” She sighed. “You are a handful at times.”
“I don’t get how they think I’m such a pain,” I said to her. And I didn’t, because most of the time I wasn’t even in the classroom. I was in the principal’s office, or with the nurse, or I was helping out in the library or cafeteria, or running laps out on the playground. It wasn’t like I was a pain all day long. Like when it rained the teachers all asked me to run out to the parking lot and roll up their windows. I didn’t hear them complain when I came back dripping wet. Or if a stack of new supplies was dropped off and I was in the office then I always helped move them into the storeroom and received an “awesome kid” stamp on my hand, not a “pain-in-the-neck kid” stamp. Plus I was famous for snatching flies right out of the air, killing all the classroom spiders, and making sure the white mice were always in their cage. I’ll bet helpful things like that were not written down in my file. I know I’m not perfect, but I didn’t think it was fair that they told me one thing and wrote down another.
“Hearing stuff like that about me makes me sad,” I said to Mom.
“Well, it should,” she replied. “But this year we can start over. The school wants me to take you down to the doctor and get you fixed up.” Then she reached out and grabbed me and kissed me all over my face and I had to close my eyelids otherwise she would kiss me right on the eyeballs.
Mrs. Maxy had also read my file. When I arrived in her class she assigned me my seat and said that she was going to give me a fair chance to show just how good I could be. And all that first day she kept glancing at me with the “I got my eye on you” look. I was used to people keeping an eye on me, especially after last year, when a special counselor was called in to follow me everywhere. He gave me tests and kept sending reports home to Grandma, which she called junk mail and threw in the trash.
I had taken my special meds at breakfast and they were working good so I was mostly sitting still, looking right back into Mrs. Maxy’s eyes and shouting out the answers when we did our math drills.
Before lunch my seat felt like any old hard seat, and I felt like any old kid. But after lunch I felt as if I was sitting on a giant spring and it was all I could do to keep it from launching me head first up into the ceiling. My morning pill was supposed to last all day but it gave out on me. I gripped the bottom of my chair and held tight and watched the second hand on the clock sweep around and around. And it wasn’t that the important stuff Mrs. Maxy had to say went in one ear and out the other. It was that it didn’t go in at all but just bounced off. And when the bell rang I loosened my grip and blasted off for the door.
But Mrs. Maxy was waiting for me.
“Not so fast, Joey,” she said, and snagged the back of my shirt collar as I ran by. “We need to talk.”
That’s when she sat me back down and told me about her rules. I had to stay in my seat, she said. No running, jumping, or kicking. Keep my hands on top of my desk. I wasn’t allowed to look over my shoulder. No touching the person in front of me. No fidgeting and no drawing on myself. And I absolutely wasn’t allowed to say anything until I raised my hand and was called on.
She had all the rules printed out on a little white note card. “Now these are my basic rules,” she said to me, and taped them firmly to the upper corner of my desktop. “They apply to everyone in the class. I make no exceptions. So if you work by these rules and keep your mind on your studies, then you and I will not have any problems.”
Problem was, I wasn’t listening. She had on bright red nail polish and I couldn’t get my eyes off the way her fingers tapped on my desktop and were leaving tiny half-moon dents in the wood. And the next day I sure didn’t remember a thing she said, and by lunchtime my meds had worn off again and I was spinning around in my chair like it was the Mad Hatter’s Teacup ride at the church carnival.
“Joey,” Mrs. Maxy said, “will you come up to my desk please?”
I did. I stood before her and hopped from foot to foot as if I had to pee.
“You’re losing it, Joey,” she whispered, and set one hand on my shoulder to settle me down. “Remember the rules?”
“Rules?” I asked, kind of lost.
“Didn’t we have a talk yesterday?” she asked.
“I’m a little antsy,” I said. “I get this way and I need to do stuff. My grandma used to give me a broom and make me sweep the sidewalk all the way around our block.”
Mrs. Maxy shook her head back and forth. “Well, we already have a janitor,” she said. “But I’ve got something you can help me with.”
She gave me a box of used pencils to sharpen. Everyone else was doing some old social-studies handout about presidents. When I got to skip it and just sharpen pencils our class president, Maria Dombrowski, gave me a look. I figured she was jealous because in less than a week I was already the teacher’s pet and got to do all the fun stuff. I just crossed my eyes and kept going.
I stuck the first pencil in the sharpener and began to turn the crank. I loved the sound of the wood and lead being ground down. I lowered my nose to just over the sharpener and sniffed the clean smell of wood shavings, which smelled like the inside of my mom’s blanket chest where I used to hide from Grandma then pop up and scare her bloodless. I just kept turning the crank and pushing in the pencil and finally I had it ground down to an inch above the eraser. I pulled it out and checked the tip. Sharp as a needle. I put it in the box and got another and began to grind it down. When I finished that I found a couple pieces of chalk and sharpened those down so that when I stuck the flat end up between my upper lip and gum they hung down like fangs. Then I saw some Popsicle sticks on the art cart that were used to make paper puppets. I made sure Mrs. Maxy wasn’t looking, then grabbed one and stuck it in the sharpener. I began to turn the crank, but it didn’t turn so well and finally it jammed up and I couldn’t get the stick out. I nervously glanced at Mrs. Maxy and luckily she was busy stapling all the presidents’ heads on a bulletin board. I yanked at the stick again but it was stuck real good and I only ended up with splinters in my hand.
I wrapped the bottom of my Pittsburgh Penguins hockey jersey around it and tugged with one hand and turned the crank with the other. The stick came loose and I stumbled back against an empty desk and my fangs fell out and rolled across the floor in pieces.
Mrs. Maxy looked over at me and so did everyone else. “Joey,” she asked, “is there a problem?”
The question made me feel jittery. I picked up my fangs and stood real still.
“No, Mrs. Maxy. No problem,” I said in a small mouse voice.
She nodded, then turned her back on me. But Maria kept frowning at me and then she pulled out a little pad from her desk and wrote down four letters I couldn’t see but figured spelled J-O-E-Y. As class president, it was Maria’s job to make sure everyone had good behavior or Mrs. Maxy would take minutes off our recess time.
Brownnoser, I thought, then forgot all about her.
The sharpener had a bunch of holes for different-sized pencils, like a regular hole for No. 2 pencils, then when you turned the dial there was a bigger hole for thicker pencils, and even a hole big enough for one of those giant clown pencils that are about as thick as my finger.
Mom had said I needed to cut my long fingernails back because I was scratching myself all up in my sleep. Plus, I thought it would be cool to grind my nails down to sharp points and look li
ke a vampire. So I stuck my little finger in and gave it a good turn but in an instant I jerked it out and started shrieking.
Mrs. Maxy spun around and ran toward me.
“I slipped. I slipped,” I hollered. “It was an accident.”
“Let me see that,” she said, and grabbed my hand.
I held my finger up in the air and it was only a little scratched up and bloody on the tip. But the nail had been yanked over to one side and was just hanging there like when you peel the shell off a shrimp.
“It doesn’t hurt,” I said, trying to get my hand away from her and shove it down into my pocket where no one could see it. “It’s okay.”
The next thing I knew Mrs. Maxy had a wad of tissues around my finger and she held it tightly with one hand and told me that it was going to be all right, and she held my elbow with her other hand to settle me down because by then I was swinging around and slapping at my leg with my free hand as if red ants were biting me all over.
“It’s not good to hurt yourself,” she said calmly.
“I was just playing vampire,” I explained.
She took me directly to Nurse Holyfield, who said she’d seen worse and not to worry, other kids had done the same. She fixed me up with a big white bandage around my finger so that it looked like a stick with a huge wad of cotton candy on the end.
“The nail will fall off,” she said. “But don’t worry You’ll grow another.”
“Is there a fingernail fairy?” I asked her. “‘Cause if there is I’ll put it under my pillow and get a dollar.”
She smiled at me, glanced up at Mrs. Maxy, and nodded like they both knew something about me I didn’t know. People were always giving each other secret looks around me. But I didn’t care. I had private thoughts of my own that I didn’t share with them, so it made us even.
After class that day Mrs. Maxy was waiting for me at the door. “We have to have another talk,” she said. “Let’s sit down.”
I stared at her because I wasn’t sure what to talk about and if I started talking first it could be about anything. So I waited, and she went first.
“Joey, you have to listen to me carefully,” she said in a calm radio voice. “I want to help you, but you have to help yourself too. Today, you hurt yourself…”
“It was an accident,” I shouted, and jumped to my feet. But she just put her hands on my shoulders and slowly pressed me back into the chair.
“But you did it,” she said. “Other kids would not have and this is my concern. That you don’t know what will hurt you or not. And no one at the school wants to see you hurt. And …” She stopped for a moment to be real careful. “And no one at the school wants to be hurt by you.”
“I wouldn’t hurt anyone,” I said.
“Not intentionally,” she replied. “Not on purpose. But we have to make sure you don’t.”
I don’t know why I couldn’t listen to her. She talked some more about the dangers of hurting people, but it was as if all her words were crowded up together in a long line of letters and sounds that just didn’t make sense. It was more like listening to circus music than to talk.
“Joey,” she said, “you need to know that there are limits in the classroom. And if you can’t live by the class rules then we’ll have to send you down to the special-ed class for extra help. We’ve talked to your mom about this.”
“Okay,” I said, only saying the word because agreeing to stuff was the best way to make it stop. “Okay. Okay,” I repeated. “I get it.” But I didn’t get it because the special-ed room was new and I didn’t even know what it was yet.
“Please do get it,” she said. “We all want to keep you going in the right direction.”
When Mom returned home from work I told her about my day and showed her my finger. She sighed, pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and snapped a rubber band around it. “Let me see,” she said, and unwrapped my bandage. While she looked at my finger I looked at her face, which turned sad. “It’s gonna be okay,” she whispered, as if loud talk would wake up the hurt.
“I think so too,” I whispered back. Then very carefully she rewrapped the bandage.
“Did you get in trouble?” she asked.
“Not really,” I replied. “The nurse said it was no big deal.”
“Good boy,” she said, and gave me an air kiss. “Now, mix me my medicine. The beauty parlor was a zoo today.”
I ran over to the kitchen cabinet and got the jug bottle of Amaretto with the red $23.99 price sticker right on the paper label. Mom had been calling it her medicine ever since I got my medicine. I think in the beginning she called it that so I would not feel bad about having to take something to make me feel better.
Like we had something in common, because, as she said, her medicine makes her feel better too.
I first got my meds after Mom had her school meeting and took me to the clinic. I spoke with a doc who had a lot of forms and asked me questions like “Can you do homework while watching TV?” and “During dinner can you keep your napkin on your lap?” Then he gave me a Rubik’s Cube and timed how long I played with it until I gave up. He wanted to know how I felt when other kids called me names, and I asked him how he knew kids called me names. And he said he was just guessing. And I told him some kids on my street called me “Zippy” because I was skinny and hyper, and other names too, and I didn’t like it. Then he spoke with my mom for a long time and made her fill out a lot of forms.
But we must have passed the test because afterward we went directly to the pharmacy. And while I waited for the prescription to be filled I picked the cotton stuffing out of an old padded chair. By the time Mom gathered her things up and paid for the big bottle of pills, I had hidden all the cotton in my pants, which made me bunchy around the middle, like a lumpy scarecrow. All the way home in the car Mom had borrowed I kept picking it out of the tiny hole I had worked in my pocket and slowly tossed it out the window. By the time I got home I was so scared, because I thought the pharmacist would discover his skinny chair and follow the little wads of cotton to my house, like when Hansel and Gretel first made a trail home with bread crumbs. I was so afraid I told Mom what I was thinking, and she held my cheeks in both her hands and kissed my face and said, “Don’t worry so much. Now let’s get you some medicine.” She put a pill in my one hand and a glass of water in the other, but before I could take the pill she said, “Just hold on a minute more.” She got the bottle of Amaretto and mixed it with some Mountain Dew and then said, “See, Mommy has her own meds. It comes in a bottle.” Then we clinked glasses and I took my pill. I was so happy to take it. I could feel it going down my throat like a little white round superhero pill on its way to beat up all the bad stuff in me. Everyone said it would help.
And it did. That first day I felt quiet as a lamb and went to bed early and didn’t wake up until the next morning at ten. By then Mom had already gone to the beauty parlor and left me a pill to take and a note telling me to just stay indoors all day. So I stayed home and felt like a normal kid for a while. But then my old self started to sneak up over me. After watching Wheel of Fortune and a Simpsons rerun on TV, I got up and made a huge peanut-butter mess in the kitchen, and when Mom came home she freaked and gave me another pill, but already it didn’t work as good and I could hardly sleep that night. In fact, after that first day the pills only worked on and off. I never knew which it was going to be. “Peace or consequences,” Mom called it. She phoned the clinic and a doctor said it was because I was going through extra-early puberty, so my blood was half boy and half man and the medicine worked good on the boy and not good on the man. I told that to Nurse Holyfield today when she was fixing my finger, and she said it was pure nonsense and that the problem was we were given the cheap medication and some worked and some were duds.
When I finished mixing Mom’s drink I put the Amaretto away and carefully carried the drink to her. She tasted it, then said, “Joey, if you slip anymore, school just might let you slip away like water down a drain and the c
lass will continue on as if you never existed.”
“Is that what happened to Grandma?” I asked.
“Not quite,” she said. “As it turns out, your dad was in town and Grandma decided it was easier to live where she could do whatever she wanted and nobody would care. So she’s back in Pittsburgh with him”
“I hope she’s okay,” I said.
“Don’t worry about your grandma,” she said. “She’s as tough as old whip leather and might just crack some sense into your dad.” She smiled after she said that.
4
GO FISH
I was sitting at my desk after lunch and Mrs. Maxy had her back to us and was writing a long list of spelling words she had taken out of The Great Gilly Hopkins, which was so good I actually could listen to it for more than a minute at a time. But now that I had heard it all I was playing with the house key that was on a long string around my neck. I loved touching that old brass key with the smooth round top that looked like a tiny face. It was like touching something magic. I didn’t know how it locked and unlocked doors, it just did. Mom had given me the key since my grandma wasn’t around and I got home from school two hours before she got home from work. She trusted me with the key, and we had a rule that I went directly home and once inside I could do anything I wanted except light the gas stove, take a bath, make joke phone calls to strangers, or throw the baseball at the walls, because it dented them. And once I was in the house I was forbidden to step outside or open the door for strangers. This was okay with me because like I’d told the doctor the kids in my neighborhood were pretty mean. Once a few of them caught me on the way home from school. A kid named Ford held me down and tied a leash around my neck. “Roll over,” he hollered, and I did. “Play dead,” he ordered. That scared me and I jerked my head out of the leash, which ripped one of my nose holes so that it bled. But I got away. Now I don’t open the door for no one.