Clementine's Letter

by Sara Pennypacker

  But no! Instead, the substitute just smiled! “My new nephew,” I heard her sigh. “Isn’t he a cutie?”

  I took out a marker. NO BABIES FOR ME! I wrote on my arm.

  I like to write important reminders on my arm. That way, I don’t lose them—I always know where my arm is, which is not true about pieces of paper. Plus, they look like tattoos. On Sunday nights, my mother scrubs all the week’s notes off, and I start over. This was a good one to start with.

  Mrs. Rice picked up a stack of papers and came to the front of the room. She didn’t have to use any “Give me your attention” hand claps because all the kids’ eyes were pulled to her like magnets. I might go to principal school when I grow up so I can learn that trick.

  Mrs. Rice passed out the papers. My hand wanted to draw a picture on mine, but I told it to just wait.

  “You’re each going to write a letter to the Adventures for Teachers judges,” she said. “You’re going to tell them why your teacher should win the trip. Take it with you tonight for homework. I’ll come back tomorrow to collect them and send them in. Now, doesn’t that sound like a good idea?”

  All the kids pretended this sounded like a good idea. Except me, because it was not. A good idea is something like catching outlaws drinking beer in saloons. Or a teacher sticking around to be your teacher, if that’s what he promised.

  On the way home, Margaret sat beside me as usual. I kept my face turned to the window, but Margaret doesn’t like it when I don’t look at her. She pinched me until I turned around.

  “What’s the matter with your eyes?” she asked. “Have you been crying?”

  “No,” I said. Then I turned back to the window.

  Margaret pinched me back to her again.

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “Maybe I was. A little. In the girls’ room.”

  “How come?” she asked.

  So I told her about everything that had happened. “He promised he’d be our teacher and now he doesn’t care about that. If he wins, he’ll be gone for the rest of the year. I was just getting the hang of third grade and now I’ll have to start all over. And Mrs. Nagel’s really mean.”

  I felt a poke in my neck and turned around. “Mrs. Nagel isn’t mean,” Lilly said. “She’s nice.” Then she poked her brother and said, “Willy. Tell Clementine that Mrs. Nagel’s not mean.”

  Willy shrugged. “She’s not mean,” he said.

  Which didn’t count. Willy does everything Lilly tells him to.

  Sometimes I wish I had a twin brother whose name rhymed with mine and who did everything I told him to. Instead, I have a brother who is only three years old and who does everything I tell him not to do.

  Plus, his name doesn’t rhyme with mine and it’s not even a fruit name like I got stuck with. Which reminded me.

  I got out a marker and wrote COLLECT MORE VEGETABLE NAMES FOR TURNIP on my arm. Then I turned back to Willy and Lilly. “She’s mean to me. I was in trouble all day.”

  “That’s because you were doing things,” Lilly said. “I didn’t get into trouble today. I never get into any trouble.”

  “It was probably your own fault, Clementine,” Margaret interrupted, although I was N-O-T, not talking to her. “You were probably doing weird things. You’re always doing weird things. Why don’t you just watch Lilly and copy her this week?”

  “That sounds like a dumb idea,” I said.

  Willy poked my neck. “It’s what I do,” he told me. “And I never get into any trouble, either.”

  I slumped down into my seat. “Okay, fine,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  When I got home from school, I took out my homework assignment, put it on the kitchen table and stared at the blank sheet of paper.

  My mom came in and asked me if I wanted a snack.

  “No,” I said. I kept my teeth clenched together so it sounded like a growl. A fierce growl. “What I want is for my teacher not to leave.”

  My mom gave me some cheese and juice anyway. “Mr. D’Matz is leaving? Oh, that’s too bad. You like him a lot. Want to tell me about it?”

  Just then we heard a crash from the living room and my brother laughing. This meant he was in the art supply cupboard again.

  “Let’s hope he didn’t find those markers!” My mom ran out of the room.

  Then my dad walked in. He took one look at my face and unhooked the keys from his belt. “Do you want to take a ride?” he asked.

  When I’m angry, my dad lets me ride the service elevator until I calm down.

  “No,” I growled again. “What I want is to not have to do this homework.”

  My dad sat down beside me. “Tough assignment, huh? Want to tell me about it?” he asked. I really did. But just then his work phone rang. When he came back, he said, “Sorry, Sport, it’ll have to wait. The elevator’s broken again. We’ll talk about it later.”

  My dad is the manager of our apartment building. He says this means he’s in charge of all the problems. But he’s in charge of all the good parts, too.

  Like the roof. Sometimes, on summer nights, my family goes up to the rooftop, which is eight stories high. We can see all of Boston from there. We bring up a large extra-cheese pizza and a lamp with a really long extension cord, and we all play the board game Life up there on top of the city. Well, my parents and I play Life—Broccoli just jams the pegs into the little plastic cars and races them around the board. This makes my parents laugh—they say my brother is living Life in the fast lane.

  Just then my kitten walked into the kitchen and jumped onto my lap. I cuddled him and fed him pieces of my cheese. He started to purr.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to go off anywhere,” I told him. “Nope, you can count on me. If I say I’m going to be here, I’m going to be here, Moisturizer.”

  My brother came into the kitchen then. “Play with me!”

  I held up my paper. “I can’t, Lima Bean. I have to do my homework.” My brother laughed as if I’d told him a really good joke and climbed up onto my lap next to Moisturizer.

  “It’s not funny,” I told him. “You’ll see. In five years, you’ll be in third grade like I am, and then you might have to do a stupid assignment like this one.”

  I’m actually not so sure about this. When my brother wakes up, he sticks one foot up in the air and smiles really big when he sees it—as if it’s his best friend he’s been missing all night. He waggles it back and forth and thinks it’s waving to him. “Hi, foot!” he yells. Then he does the same thing with his other foot.

  I do not think anyone who says hello to his own feet is ever going to make it to third grade.

  I guess my brother didn’t think he was ever going to make it to third grade, either. He just meowed at me, and then he and Moisturizer took turns eating pieces of my cheese. When it was all gone, they jumped down and went off to play together.

  “Dear Adventures for Teachers judges,” I wrote. Then I stared at my paper and tried to think of something to say. I tried and tried until I started to smell brain smoke. Then I gave up and went to the freezer for a Popsicle to cool my head down.

  While I was eating it, my dad came back in to get a wrench. He walked past me, shaking his head. “I ought to write a book,” he muttered.

  My dad is always saying he ought to write a book. He says that as a building manager he sees a lot of strange things. Mostly, he says, they’re fascinating, wonderful things. But he also says there are a lot more nut-balls out there than anyone could imagine. And he could write a really good book if he ever sat down to try.

  Suddenly I had a wonderful idea.

  I went to my mom’s art supply cupboard and took out a fresh sketch pad. On the cover, in really important-looking letters, I wrote, THE BUILDING MANAGER—BY DAD. Underneath, I drew a picture of our apartment building. On the first page, I wrote the first sentence, to get him started.

  I went into my parents’ bedroom and put the pad on the table next to my dad’s side of the bed. Then I brought my homework up to the lobby to
see if he could help me while he was fixing the elevator.

  I didn’t find him. But I did find Margaret’s older brother, Mitchell. He was oiling his baseball glove, looking bored.

  “What are you doing down here?” I asked.

  Mitchell pointed up. “Margaret’s cleaning my room. I have to stay out.”

  My room is a little tiny bit messy. I wondered if I should have Margaret clean it so it looked like hers. “How much does it cost?” I asked.

  “Three dollars,” Mitchell answered.

  “Three dollars? Oh. I guess I wouldn’t pay that much just to get my room cleaned.”

  “Neither would I,” Mitchell agreed. “That’s how much Margaret pays me to let her do it. I’m saving up for a new bat. Otherwise I wouldn’t let her. When she’s done, I can’t find any of my stuff.”

  “She hides it?”

  “No, she just lines it all up in order. You know Margaret and her rules…short to tall, new to old, alphabetical order. It takes me hours to get it all back the way I like it again.”

  Mitchell slumped down and I slumped down the same way so he wouldn’t feel lonely. Then I told him all about my teacher trying to go to Egypt. “That’s what he thinks is more important than us! Digging around looking for old mummies and dumb hieroglyphics. And he doesn’t even want to go!”

  “So he’ll be camping,” Mitchell said.

  “I guess,” I said. “But he’ll be gone, Mitchell! After he promised us he’d be here all year!”

  But Mitchell was stuck on the camping thing. He whistled. “I sure hope he doesn’t get stuck in a tent with someone like Beans McCloud!”

  “You’re not listening to me!”

  Mitchell kept on not listening to me. “Dude!” he said, shaking his head as if he still couldn’t get over how bad things had been. “I had to live with him for two whole weeks at summer camp!”

  I gave up. “All right. What was so bad about Beans McCloud?”

  “What wasn’t so bad about him? Well, to start with…his socks! He never took them off, and I mean never. I think his mother put those socks on Beans in the cradle and he just got attached to them or something.” Mitchell pinched his nose and pretended to faint. “Those socks nearly peeled the canvas off our tent!”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “It couldn’t have been that bad.”

  Mitchell took off his Red Sox cap and held it over his heart, which means, I swear to the Red Sox. “Clementine,” he said, “when that kid went hiking, even the skunks keeled over.”

  I couldn’t help laughing at that. When I have a boyfriend, which will be never, I’m going to pick someone as funny as Mitchell. I did a drawing on the back of my homework paper so I wouldn’t forget what he said. Here it is:

  Mitchell was still muttering about Beans. “And that was just the first thing. That kid should have come with a warning label!”

  “How come?”

  “So somebody would have known not to let him in!”

  And suddenly I had a really good idea!

  I flipped my homework paper over to the “Dear Adventures for Teachers” side. “Okay, start at the beginning,” I said. “Tell me everything that should have been on Beans McCloud’s warning label. Don’t leave anything out.”

  At breakfast Tuesday morning, my mom asked about my teacher leaving.

  “Oh, it’s no big deal,” I told her. “He’ll be back on Monday.”

  Then my dad asked how I was coming with my homework assignment. I told him, Great. “I just need one more thing: how do you spell ‘Menace to Society’?” My dad spelled it, then asked if that was really all. “I thought it was giving you some trouble.”

  “Nope. Mitchell helped me, and it was easy.”

  “That was nice of him,” he said. “Do you want to show it to us?”

  “Oh…um…no. It’s sort of a surprise,” I said. Which was the truth, because my letter was going to be a pretty big surprise to those judges, all right!

  My dad left and I sneaked into his room to see if he had worked on the book I had started for him. He had. Just one sentence though. After

  he had written:

  Sometimes my dad needs help staying on track. So I pointed him in the right direction again.

  I wrote.

  On the bus ride to school, I told Margaret about helping him start a book.

  She just snorted. “Well, now you’ll have to do something nice for your mother. That’s the rule. It’s not fair if you don’t.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t like it when String Bean gets a present and I don’t. And my mom lives in that room, too, so she’s going to know about it.”

  Margaret looked like she was really mad at me then. “You’re so lucky,” she growled.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re always so lucky and you don’t even know it.”

  “How am I lucky, Margaret?” I was hoping she had found out I was getting a gorilla for Christmas. But it wasn’t that.

  “Well, for one thing, you don’t have Mitchell.”

  “I have Zucchini,” I said.

  “Your brother’s cute.” She made a face that said, You have no idea what I have to put up with! I didn’t make the face back because I happen to think Mitchell is not so bad at all. Which does N-O-T, not mean he is my boyfriend.

  “And for another thing, you don’t have Alan,” she added.

  Alan is Margaret’s mother’s boyfriend. When-ever Margaret says his name she makes a face like someone’s asking her to pat a slug. I made the face back, because she’s right about Alan.

  I figured it was really my dad who was lucky Mom didn’t have a boyfriend, but I didn’t tell Margaret. Instead I just asked her if there was anything else she thought I was lucky about.

  “If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you,” she said. Then she slammed her mouth into a ruler line. Except it didn’t work because her lips got stuck on her braces, which she calls teeth bracelets. I turned away so I wouldn’t laugh, because I know how bad it feels to be laughed at.

  Okay, fine. Also because she’s a little bit bigger than I am and her pocketbook has pointy edges.

  “Don’t forget,” Margaret said when we got off the bus. “Today, only do what Lilly does.”

  I tried.

  As soon as Lilly sat down, she opened up her backpack, took her homework paper out, and put it into her desk. I opened up my backpack, took my homework paper out, and put it into my desk.

  So far, so good.

  Then Lilly poked her brother in the back of his neck and hissed at him to put his homework paper away, too. I poked Willy’s neck—but not too hard, because he had a lot of poke marks there—and hissed at him, too.

  Then Mrs. Nagel clapped her hands for our attention.

  Lilly slapped her hands into a pile on her desk and straightened up. I stretched over to see better. She was staring at Mrs. Nagel as if she was hypnotized. I slapped my hands into a pile and made the hypnotized look. Then I slid down to the floor to get a better look at what Lilly was doing with the rest of her body.

  And you will not believe what I saw: every part of Lilly was completely frozen! Nothing was wiggling, not a single toe! Mrs. Nagel had hypnotized her into a statue! In front of her, Willy was frozen, too.

  “Clementine, what are you doing on the floor?” Mrs. Nagel shouted. Okay, fine, maybe she just said it, but from the floor it sounded like a shout. “Did you lose something?”

  “No, I was just trying to see what Lilly was doing so I could do it, too,” I explained.

  “Well, there’s an empty seat up in the front row,” she said. “Maybe it would be easier for you to concentrate if you moved up here.”

  So I had to move to the front of the room where I had to look at her desk with all her stuff on it where my real teacher’s stuff belonged.

  Then she collected our homework papers and put them into a big envelope. She placed the envelope on her desk. And that was good, because all day long that envelope reminde
d me that our teacher was N-O-T, not going to win that Egypt prize. Nope, once the judges read my letter they were going to send him right back to our class on Monday morning. He would be our teacher for the rest of the year. Just like he wanted to be. Just like he’d promised. It made me feel a lot better.

  Okay, fine, not a lot better. But a little.

  When I got home from school, my parents were sitting at the kitchen table. They were staring at a stack of mail exactly the way I had stared at my homework assignment the day before. As if they couldn’t believe what they had to do. This meant it was the first of the month, which is bill day in my family. I don’t like bill day, because on bill day my parents say No to whatever I ask. I tried anyway. “I need to collect some new names for Broccoli. Can one of you take me to the grocery store?”

  “First of all, your brother’s name isn’t Broccoli. And second of all, No,” they said at the same time. Then they both looked like they’d had a wonderful, sneaky idea. “Wait! Yes! I can!” they said at the same time, jumping up from the table. Then they looked at each other and all four of their shoulders sagged and they sank back down. “No, we can’t,” they both sighed at the same time. They went back to staring at the pile of bills.

  My mom looked up. “It’s Tuesday. Maybe Mitchell can take you.”

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Margaret’s mother works late at the bank. Sometimes she pays Mitchell two dollars to run her errands and bring Margaret along so he can watch her at the same time. “It’s not babysitting!” Margaret always yells at anyone they meet. “And I should be the one getting the two dollars to watch him!” Sometimes my parents pay Mitchell to run errands and not-babysit my brother and me, too.

  I called the number.

  “Red Sox training camp. Home of Mitchell the Mitt, future star player.”

  Mitchell is obsessed with the Boston Red Sox. He says they’re the greatest baseball team in the history of the world. He says the only way the Red Sox could possibly be any better would be if he were on the team. Which he will be soon.