by Jack Gantos
I was messing with my house key and before long I had it in my mouth and I was playing a game. I was trying to train myself to swallow the key so I could slowly pull it back up from inside my belly, up my throat and into my mouth, like I was fishing for bottom feeders. It hurt to do it because sometimes the key got caught sideways down my throat, but when it did that I just gave the string a tug and straightened it out. The only other problem was that every now and again it made me gag so hard I almost threw up.
Since I was doing it after lunch, I thought it would be especially colorful because bits and pieces of food would stick to the key and around the string and I’d suck them off and reswallow them.
Mrs. Maxy must have turned around but I never saw her. I was still fishing and wondering if I could pull my liver up, or my kidney, or some organ we had studied in science when suddenly Mrs. Maxy swooped down on me. With one hand she yanked the string out of my mouth, which really hurt because the key was about halfway down my throat. Then with her other hand she took her sharp “teacher only” pointy scissors and cut the string off the key and put the key in my T-shirt pocket.
“Keep your mind on your work,” she said, tapping the rules sheet on my desk. “Now sit up and listen.”
“Okay,” I said, and quickly sat on my hands. As soon as she left I pulled an old photograph of me out of my jeans and set it on my desk. It was a picture of me standing very still with my hands by my side and my eyes looking directly at the camera. I looked like a little statue. It’s a wonder a bird didn’t land on my head for a rest.
“See,” Mom said, when she gave the photograph to me. “This is proof that you can be still. So whenever you feel out of control, look at this picture and it will remind you to calm down.”
I looked at the picture and stared into the little eyes and tried to remember what I was thinking when I was so still, but I had no clue so my mind wandered and before long I didn’t remember about the string missing and I plucked the key out of my shirt pocket and popped it into my mouth. I stuck my tongue out so Seth Justman could see the key from his desk in the next row. “What’ll you give me if I swallow this?” I whispered.
“A buck,” he said. And he was good for it too because he wasn’t on free breakfast and free lunch, so I knew he had food money on him.
This will be a fast buck, I thought. So I worked up my mouth full of saliva and swallowed hard and the key scraped down my throat a little sideways. But I did it. All the way down! I opened my mouth to show Seth and he was pretty amazed and dug into his pocket and gave me a buck. Then I reached for my chin to pull the string but I only felt my lips, and suddenly I remembered there was no string and I hopped straight up onto my desk seat screaming, “Mrs. Maxy, I ate my key!”
Everyone spun around and stared at me, and Mrs. Maxy’s eyes bugged out because she knew she had cut the string.
“Oh my Lord,” she shouted. She grabbed me and ran to Mrs. Deebs’s room next door. “Watch my class,” she cried in a desperate voice, and then trotted me down to the nurse.
Nurse Holyfield listened calmly to Mrs. Maxy, who was anything but calm. Then she unlocked a white cabinet and removed a small brown bottle and plastic spoon. “Ipecac,” the nurse explained. “It’ll make you throw up like a champ. I promise.”
She gave me a green plastic dish to hold under my chin. It looked like a wading pool for Sea Monkeys. Then she gave me a spoonful of medicine that tasted so bad it made me vomit up everything I had eaten all last week. She stirred through the vomit with a plastic fork. But no key. She gave me a second spoonful and I gave her all of last year’s food. Still no key.
“Should we call the doctor?” asked Mrs. Maxy.
“Nay,” said the nurse. “At this point it’s either cut him open or let nature take its course.”
“I vote for nature,” I said.
“And I have a class to get back to,” Mrs. Maxy said. “I’ll tell Mrs. Jarzab he’s down here and she can take care of him.”
While we waited the nurse said she wanted to play a game with me.
“I’m good at card games,” I said. “Grandma taught me how to play poker.”
“No,” she said. “I want to ask you questions and I want you to answer them.”
“What?” I asked. I was still thinking about poker and how much I missed Grandma.
“Well, you just answered my first question,” she said. “Do you lose a lot of things?”
It wasn’t that I hated being asked a bunch of questions. I had nothing against questions. I just didn’t like listening to them, because some questions take forever to make sense. Sometimes waiting for a question to finish is like watching someone draw an elephant starting with the tail first. As soon as you see the tail your mind wanders all over the place and you think of a million other animals that also have tails until you don’t care about the elephant because it’s only one thing when you’ve been thinking about a million others.
“Do you lose a lot of things?” she asked.
“Keys,” I said, and gave her a big smile. “One day I lost my pants. I took them off in the bathroom and forgot where I left them.”
“Do you like animals?”
“I love animals,” I replied. “I want to get a dog.”
When Mrs. Jarzab, the principal, arrived, Nurse Holyfield talked with her out in the hall. When they were finished, Mrs. Jarzab told me to follow her.
“Joey, you need a little extra help,” she said as we walked down the main hallway. “Think of it this way. Students who have trouble with math get extra math help. Or if they have trouble reading we give them reading help.”
“I can read fine,” I said.
“That’s right,” she said, and patted my head. “But you can’t sit still very long and keep your mind on your work. So, we’re going to give you some sitting help.”
We went down a set of stairs to the basement. “Are we going to visit the janitor?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “This summer we put in a special-ed room to help out kids who need some extra help or attention.”
“I heard about it,” I said. “Mrs. Maxy said I was going to be sent there if I didn’t settle down.”
“She was right,” Mrs. Jarzab replied. Then she opened a door and we went into a big, bright yellow room that still smelled from fresh paint.
“Everyone is very friendly,” she said. “So don’t be afraid. You’ll probably know some of the children.”
But it was hard not to be scared. There were a few kids from upstairs, but the room was mostly filled with the hurt kids, the slow kids, the kids who steered their wheelchairs with their chins, the spastic kids who walked and talked funny and were brought to school in their own special bus or in special cars from home. I always wondered where they went once they arrived. Now I knew. Plus there were a lot of women hovering around who turned out to be moms, helping the teacher with their kids. It was pretty surprising to me that they weren’t at work because mine was always working. But I guess these moms had a whole job just taking care of their kids, which is why I didn’t belong there, otherwise my mom couldn’t work.
“Can I go back up to my class now?” I asked Mrs. Jarzab.
“After a while,” she replied. “First, I need to introduce you to Mrs. Howard.”
I looked away, far away to a shiny corner of the room because even my grandma taught me that it wasn’t polite to stare at crippled kids. Then I looked back and a few of them were looking at me, which was okay because I was normal. I waved to them and they waved in return, some better than others, and I felt a little more relaxed thinking they were nice.
“I only broke a few rules,” I said to the principal. “There’s nothing wrong with me but that.”
“I know,” she said. “But we’re going to help you learn not to break them.”
“I’ve already learned that,” I said. “I’ll never swallow another key again. I promise.”
“I’m sure you won’t,” she replied.
Just then Mrs. Howard walked ove
r and smiled at me.
“This is the student I spoke with you about,” Mrs. Jarzab said to her. Then she turned to me. “Joey,” she said, “I want you to listen to Mrs. Howard and do everything she tells you to do. We’re going to give you a little extra help with sitting still and staying on task.”
I felt like some kind of bad dog that had pooped all over the carpet, eaten the slippers, and attacked the mailman, and was now being sent to obedience school.
Mrs. Howard led me by my hand to the tall metal chair in the corner of the room. “This,” she said, “is the Big Quiet Chair. I call it step number one. The first thing I want to find out is how long you can sit still.”
I climbed up into the giant chair and sat back and just stared at her. I must have looked pretty calm on the outside, like I was really normal and that this was all a big mistake, because she smiled at me and gave me a dopey picture book to read. But inside my body I felt like a big bottle of warm Coke when you drop it in the grocery store and it begins to fizz out the top like a bomb about to blow. Then she went back to help some kid who still had his bicycle helmet on and had fallen over. I flipped through the book so fast I couldn’t tell you a thing about it except that it was made out of paper. Then I picked at my finger bandage until I had it unrolled. And then I started rocking back and forth, but the chair wouldn’t rock. So I heaved myself from side to side. It still didn’t move. I gripped the arms and jerked myself around and hung way out over the arms like some rodeo rider on a wild bull. But the chair didn’t budge an inch. When I looked down at the legs I saw it was bolted to the floor. Bolted, as if I was some kind of circus freak. So I rocked even harder, then took the heels of my shoes and kicked at the legs, and since it was metal it started clanging real loud like the heating pipes and that’s when Mrs. Howard came dashing back over. She put her hands on my knees and I slowed down for a moment, then she reached down and untied my laces.
She held my sneakers in her hand and said, “I’ll be right back.” She went into a closet and returned with a pair of those fuzzy bunny-rabbit slippers, the kind with the big buckteeth on the toes and long ears you can trip over. She put them on my feet and said, “Okay, you can kick the chair all you want. And every time you come here, until you sit still and stop kicking, you’ll have to wear these slippers.”
Over her shoulder some of the other moms were looking at me and they had tired faces. Not tired and mad like I had screwed up somehow and they were upset. It was different. They were tired from being so sad and now they were sad some more because I was screwed up too and they felt bad for me like they felt for their own kids because they figured I wasn’t ever going to get better. And it made me so mad to be stared at like some hopeless kid that I kicked away at the chair legs until my heels were so sore they were bruised and it hurt to kick. Then suddenly, it just seemed all the energy drained out of me and the yellow walls were so bright I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
Toward the end of the day Mrs. Howard woke me up and said it was time for me to go back up to Mrs. Maxy’s class so I could get my homework assignment. I did, only I was still wearing those bucktoothed rabbit slippers, and when I shuffled into class rubbing my eyes Seth Justman pointed at me and started to snicker and the whole class cracked up and Mrs. Maxy had to clap her hands to settle everyone down, then she led me to my seat. She gave me an “I mean business” look and tapped on my tasks list. “Remember, Joey,” she said right into my ear, “stick to the rules and you won’t get into trouble.”
Even though she was being nice I didn’t know what to say and I put my head down on my desk. It felt so cool against my cheek and I wanted to sleep some more.
“And I think you owe the class an apology for being disruptive earlier,” she said.
“I’m sorry I swallowed my key,” I said a little too loudly without raising my head. “Really. I’m sorry.” But I didn’t feel sorry and I could feel myself just wanting to jump up and run, so I hooked my slippers around the front legs of the desk and tried hard to look at one solid thing, like the big jack-o’-lantern on the window, and get a two-handed grip on my desktop, because if I slipped and lost concentration and didn’t pay attention to my highlighted tasks list Mrs. Maxy might have no other choice but to give up on me for good and send me full-time down to special ed. And there would be nothing I could do about it, or my mom, or anyone, because I’ve been warned so many times there is a file on my bad behavior as thick as the phone book. So I hung on to my desktop and with all my might I held myself in my seat as if some giant was holding me, and I don’t think I even breathed until the bell rang and I blasted out of my seat and headed for home still wearing those dumb slippers.
I was sitting on the porch when Mom returned from work and I just mixed her a drink and didn’t whisper a word about what happened today. But she found out anyway when Mrs. Jarzab called the house later that night.
5
MAKE A WISH
Before bed, Mom had given me a couple spoonfuls of mineral oil. The next morning nature took its course. I was sitting on the toilet with my new bedroom slippers on when I heard splash-clunk as the key fell out of my butt and hit the porcelain bowl. I put on my mom’s rubber cleaning gloves, crammed some toilet paper up my nose, took a swampy breath through my mouth, and fished it out. It was nasty, but the key looked the same after I washed it off.
At school, I walked into class with my hands clasped together up over my head like the World Wrestling Champion of the Universe. “I pooped it out!” I shouted. “I pooped it out in the toilet.”
Seth Justman cheered. “Did you save it?” he asked.
What did he think? That I’d throw it away? I pulled it up from the new string around my neck. “Same key,” I said. “Wanna sniff?”
“Do it, do it, do it,” Seth shouted, and instantly the class shouted along with him. Mrs. Maxy was busy down the hall with Mrs. Deebs organizing our field trip. I was so excited I forgot to ask for money and I put the key in my mouth and swallowed.
“Aggh,” everyone groaned, but they loved it.
“Gross,” Seth shouted. “You swallowed a turd-flavored key.”
Then I slowly pulled it up as if there was a drum roll in the air. It was kind of hard coming because my throat was scraped up and when I got it all the way out I saw why. I had eaten a bowl of cold spaghetti for breakfast and the strands were dangling off the head of the key like tiny octopus legs. I bounced it up and down for everyone to see and they squealed so loud Mrs. Maxy came flying in.
“I knew it would have to be you,” she said, wagging her finger at me as she turned the corner and saw my catch. “Now go down to the nurse and clean your face and mouth. And bring me back the key.”
Nurse Holyfield listened to what I had done and then gave me a little paper cup with some mouthwash that tasted like the stuff my mom drinks.
“I’d have made a million dollars,” she said, “if I could figure out a way to put an on-off switch on guys like you.”
“Want to touch my key?” I asked, and held it up.
“Did you take your meds today?” she asked in return.
“Can I get back to you on that?” I sang.
“I think I already know the answer,” she said, giving me a disapproving look. “You can’t take them only when you feel like it,” she continued as she sent me to the bathroom to wash up.
“I know that,” I sputtered. “But Mom forgot.”
“We can give them to you here,” the nurse said. “I have kids lining up every day for their meds.”
“No way,” I replied. “Mom said no one is ever to give me medicine but her.”
“Then make sure you take it,” she stressed. “Do the right things for yourself.”
“I am,” I said. “I’m washing my face.” When I looked up at her she was shaking her head.
“You better get back to class,” she said, and handed me a paper towel. “You’re a smart boy but you’ll fall behind if you don’t keep at your work.”
“How s
mart am I?” I asked.
“Smart enough to know how to press my buttons,” she said. “Now scoot.”
Mrs. Maxy had cleared a spot on her bulletin board and after I gave her the key she thumbtacked it to the cork. “Every morning your key goes up here,” she said. “And every afternoon, you can pick it up. Now, do you know why I’m doing this?” she asked.
“Can I get back to you on that?” I said.
“Okay, wise guy That’s enough smart talk for one day,” she said. “Now go downstairs and see Mrs. Howard for a focus session. If you calm down you can join your class after lunch for math drills.”
“See you later, alligators,” I said to the class. I grabbed my ruler and walked out of the room backward like I was sword fighting an entire army and I stayed walking backward, stabbing and slapping the lockers all the way down to Mrs. Howard’s dungeon.
“I’m back,” I said when I pushed open the door with my butt.
Mrs. Howard was setting frosted cupcakes on everyone’s desks. “Oh, how nice to see you, Joey,” she replied, and gave me a big smile. “You’re just in time for Harold’s birthday party.”
“I love parties,” I said right back and waved to all the moms. They smiled at me and waved. I knew they would like me once they got to know me. Everyone did.
“Can I help?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Howard. She pointed to a stack of rainbow party hats. “You can pass those out.”
The kids who could put on their own hats I left to themselves. But the ones who couldn’t move so well I helped, until we all, even the moms and Mrs. Howard and me, were wearing party hats, and we sang a very crazy “Happy Birthday” to Harold, who was in a neck brace and couldn’t blow out his own candle. Mrs. Howard held the candle an inch from his mouth and he just jerked his head back and forth and kept spitting little bubbles. But the flame hung in there. And we were gathered around him in a circle, and everyone was pulling for him like the candle was a fuse on a bomb and we were all going to be blown to shreds if he didn’t put it out. Harold kept trying, and still he had no wind in him, just those little bubbles. And the candle was getting shorter and shorter and whatever it was he wished for was not going to come true but just sputter out in the blue icing. I looked into his face as hard as I could and it was like I heard him screaming inside, “Come on! Don’t just stand there. Do something!” I looked around at the adults and they were all leaning forward, but were frozen as if they didn’t know what to do next. But I did, which meant it was up to me. Everyone wanted the candle blown out so I stepped forward, took a big breath, and when I let it out I made Harold’s wish come true and thought, Maybe now there is a pot of gold under that tilted rainbow hat.