by John J. Bonk
“Oh, yeah? Well, your mother just called - she wants her lipstick back,” he said. (See, I told you about the “mother” thing.)
“Oh, stick a sock in it, Buttrick,” Pepper said.
“What’s the matter, Dust Bin?” Travis said. “You make your girlfriend do all your fighting for you?”
“Just ignore him, Pepper,” I said, yanking her away.
The fire drill was taking a lot longer than usual. Teachers were trying to round up their classes, but some kids escaped to the swings and monkey bars. Others were picking on innocent costumed bystanders.
Derek, one of Travis’s boneheaded friends, started sniffing the air around Pepper.
“Oh, no, I’m gonna sneeze!” he said. “Ah… aaah… ah-chooo!”
“How original,” Pepper said. “Can’t you Neanderthals come up with a new one?”
“Now, Pepper,” I said, “you mustn’t speak ill of the brain-dead.”
“Pepper sounds like a dog’s name,” Travis said. “Sit, Pepper! Stay, Pepper! How did your parents know you’d turn out to be such a dog?”
“Okay, knock it off!” I said, stepping forward.
Travis’s arm sprang out at me with his fingers in flicking position, like a bee ready to sting. I tried dodging, and he knocked off my jester’s hat.
“Hey!”
“You said ‘knock it off,’” he said, laughing.
Miss Honeywell had made me that hat with her own two hands. It was constructed out of multicolored felt and had five floppy points with pom-poms on the tips. When I bent over to pick up the hat, Travis kicked it out from under me. Then he grabbed it and threw it to Derek. The next thing I knew, they were playing keep-away.
“Give it back!” I shouted.
“Look at me, I’m king of the dweebs!” Travis had my hat on and was dancing around like a drunken marionette.
Why is there never a teacher around when you need one?
People other than Travis Buttrick suck-ups were starting to watch. We had to get even. Pepper came up with a plan and whispered it into my ear. I gave her a “let’s go for it” nod, and we assumed our positions.
“Okay,” Pepper said, “on the count of three…”
“One.” We turned our backs to the enemy.
“Two.” We yelled, “Hey, Buttrick! Wanna see a butt trick?”
“Three.” We bent over, lifted our costumes, and shook our rear ends.
It was excellent. Even Travis’s friends were howling. It wasn’t exactly the performance I thought I’d be giving that day, but as my aunt Olive says, “If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”
Pepper and I were shaking our bottoms and stirring our lemonade when I saw a pair of deformed high heels stomping toward us. A whiff of stale perfume slapped me in the face. I was getting to be an expert at recognizing teachers by their smells. While Miss Honeywell’s was a perfect combination of peach pie and vanilla, this stink bomb was a way-too-flowery blast from the past.
“Mr. Grubbs! Miss Pew!”
It was Mrs. Eugenia Sternhagen, my old second-grade teacher. Ah, yes, I remember it well: an overpowering blend of Country Garden toilet bowl cleaner and Dr. Desmond’s wart remover.
“Save your shenanigans for the stage!” she shrieked.
Pepper and I shot upright. Birds stopped chirping. The American flag stopped rustling.
“Sorry, Mrs. Sternhagen.” Those words seemed so familiar to my lips.
“This is a serious situation we have here,” she said.
Is she talking about the fire drill or the butt trick?
Mrs. Sternhagen was lugging around one of her trademark shopping bags. You never knew what she was going to pull out of those things - a stapler? comfortable shoes? her pet tarantula? Sometimes she’d recruit a few of her second-graders to carry the bags for her. I remember - I used to be one of them. Slave labor.
“This isn’t just a drill,” she said, digging around in her bag. She pulled out a tissue and handed it to me; I guess I must’ve been leaking. I blew my nose and handed it back. “Principal Futterman informed me that there was a small grease fire in the cafeteria. So, best behavior!”
Her favorite saying. It made me want to shove pencils in my ears. Or hers.
“Did they put the fire out?” Pepper asked. “Is everyone all right?”
“Everything is under control,” Mrs. Sternhagen said. “It’s a shame about your play, children. I understand you worked very hard.”
Wow, kind words. That was unusual from someone with a personality you could store meat in.
“The whole thing was this guy’s idea,” Pepper said, punching me on the shoulder.
“Mine and Miss Honeywell’s,” I said. “We’re still doing the play today, right?”
“It’s doubtful,” Mrs. Sternhagen said. “Perhaps Principal Futterman will reschedule it.”
“Perhaps”? What does she mean “perhaps”?
“I seem to recall you had the acting bug back when you were in my class,” she said to me. “You were so enthusiastic about our little Christmas pageant.”
“Uh-huh.”
She’d given me one measly line. Still, it was my first taste of applause. I was hooked.
“Mr. Donovan! Miss Oliver! Best behavior!” Mrs. Sternhagen barked, snapping her fingers at her second-graders. One of them had probably scratched an itch or adjusted a bow or something. “There’s always a mischief maker in the bunch.”
“This drill is taking forever,” Pepper mumbled.
“Patience is a virtue,” Mrs. Sternhagen said. “So, Mr. Grubbs, speaking of mischief makers, how is your big brother? Gordon, was it?”
“Fine, I guess. He’s at Fenton High.”
“Hmm, I’m pleasantly surprised to hear that. I’ll never forget what a handful that boy was.”
My sixteen-year-old brother, Gordy, had a nickname when he was at Buttermilk Falls Elementary: Trouble. And I had to prove to every new teacher from day one that I wasn’t going to be a carbon copy. “Grubbs?” they’d say, tensing up. “Are you Gordon Grubbs’s brother?” Lying wasn’t really an option, so I’d answer, “Yeah, but only by birth.”
Mrs. Sternhagen fished out a small tube of hand cream from her shopping bag. “Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t follow in his footsteps,” she said. “But when I catch you pulling stunts like this on the playground, it makes me wonder.”
Okay, you made your point, lady. Let’s drop it.
“It all comes down to the family unit.” She squeezed a blob of lotion onto her palms and rubbed them together furiously. “And it can’t be easy in your circumstances. Am I right, Mr. Grubbs?”
I had an overwhelming urge to kick Eugenia’s chubby ankles. Slamming Gordy was one thing, but leave the rest of my family out of it. I had to say something. The words were already forming in my mouth.
“Am I right, Mr. Grubbs?” she repeated, rubbing her hands together like a mad scientist coming up with an evil scheme.
I glanced at Pepper, then locked eyes with Mrs. Sternhagen. My face felt like a red-hot briquette. I got my nerve up, took a deep breath of wart remover, and said, “Yes, ma’am.”
The green metal doors sprang open, and Pepper and I got swept away by the mob spilling back into the school. Something rammed me from behind.
“Yeoww!”
I collided with Pepper and we both hit the ground.
“Enjoy your trip?” Travis said, laughing the devil’s laugh. “See ya next fall!”
He crumpled my jester’s hat and lined it at me, then melted into the crowd. I must’ve banged my head, ‘cause there was definite pain on the left side. No blood, but things were getting whirly.
“You’re roadkill, Buttrick!” Pepper shouted. Her sheet-turned-costume was ripped all the way up one side.
The stampede just kept coming. I guess when you’re rolling around on the ground in a crazy costume, people think you must be doing it on purpose.
“Hello!” I yelled. “The King’s Jester and the beautifu
l Princess are being trampled to death!”
“Omigod, are you guys all right? What happened?”
I squinted up at two droopy socks. I think they were attached to the little knock-kneed girl who lived next door to me.
“Here!” she said, balling up her sweater and shoving it under my head like a pillow. “Don’t move, Dustin Grubbs. I’m going for help!”
The next thing I remember was having a sneezing fit -probably ‘cause the sweater was covered in orange cat hair. I scrunched my eyes closed to wait for the pain in my head to pass. But when I opened them again I was lying on a cot, with the nurse’s office spinning around me.
Chapter 3
Famous
“What’s your name? What’s your teacher’s name? What grade are you in? What school do you go to?”
Nurse Opal was hovering over me, firing off questions like a criminal investigator.
“Huh? Can you repeat that?”
She went through the same list again, but this time I paid closer attention.
“Dustin Grubbs, Miss Honeywell, sixth, Buttermilk Falls Elementary.”
“Excellent,” the nurse said, adjusting the ice pack on my forehead. “Now just lie still. You whacked your head but good. How did that happen?”
“I guess I must’ve tripped.”
Ratting on someone was like extra-credit homework - it just wasn’t done.
“Well, you’re going to be fine, thanks to that little girl Ella something-or-other. You can thank your lucky stars she ran to get me,”
“Who?”
“Skinny little thing covered in freckles. Braces make her talk funny.”
“Oh. LMNOP.”
“What’s that now?”
“Ellen Mennopi. Everybody calls her LMNOP. She’s this weird little girl who lives next door to me. I rescued her cat from the roof of her garage a few years ago, and she hasn’t stopped bugging me since.”
“Sounds like someone has a little crush.”
“Yeah, my whole body just had a little crush!”
Nurse Opal sprayed something that stung like acid on my scraped elbow, but I didn’t scream - too loudly.
“So what’s the deal with Pepper?” I asked. “Is she all right?”
“She’s back in class. Strong as an ox, that one.”
“My head is frostbitten,” I said, removing the bag of ice.
“Leave it. It’ll help with the swelling.”
“I think the swelling’s doing just fine on its own.”
I put the ice pack back on my lump, which was the size of Pittsburgh, and took a deep breath. The tiny room we were in smelled like the inside of a vitamin bottle.
“Nurse Opal, could you please hurry?” I said. “We still might be doing The Castle of the Crooked Crowns.”
“Oh, you’re not going to be doing any play today, young man,” she said, sticking a Band-Aid on my elbow. “You’ve got yourself quite a nasty bump on your noggin.”
“So? Whatever happened to ‘The show must go on’? Whatever happened to ‘in sickness and in health’? ‘Neither snow nor rain, nor gloom of night…’”
“I think that’s the motto of the U.S. Postal Service - with wedding vows mixed in.”
“No play? Great,” I said, feeling even more white-hot hatred for Travis Buttrick. “Just great.”
Nurse Opal started shining a little flashlight in my eyes. Her face got real close to mine, and all I could see were her wiry, gray nose hairs. She had mega coffee breath.
“Firemen running through the halls,” she mumbled. “Mrs. Klumpsky, that nice cafeteria lady, with a second-degree burn. We can go for weeks at a time without so much as a stubbed toe, and then - lordy, when it rains it pours.”
She was staring into my eyeballs as if she were trying to see clear through to my brain. Then she switched off the flashlight and sighed.
“Well, you don’t seem to have a concussion, thank goodness,” she said. “Now just lie back and rest for a while. Your mom’ll be here to pick you up soon.”
“My mom?” I tried to get up, but she pushed me back down. She was unusually strong for such a doughy lady. “You didn’t tell her I was in a play, did you?”
“No. I just said that you had a little accident. Nothing serious.”
“Good. I should get dressed. Where’re my real clothes?”
“Your little friend went to fetch them,” Nurse Opal said. “I won’t ask - but it seems to me any mother would be proud as Punch to have their kid starring in the school play.”
Yeah, right. It’s not easy keeping secrets in a small town, but somehow I managed to hide the whole play thing from Mom. She wasn’t a mean mom or anything, just still a little fragile from the divorce. Okay, a lot fragile. Once I heard her tell Gordy, “The day your father stepped onto a stage was the day this family started falling apart.” I didn’t want to risk her knowing that her only decent son was about to step onto a stage too.
“So, your mom works at Jack Sprat Donuts?” Nurse Opal said, tidying up. “On Clearwater Road?”
“Mm-hm. Just got promoted to assistant manager.”’
“How wonderful. That place has been around for years. We used to have a nickname for it - now, what did we used to call it?”
“The Donut Hole,” I said.
“Bingo!”
“Everyone still calls it that.”
Okay, no more small talk. I stared at the door, hoping my clothes would make an appearance before Mom did. Finally LMNOP burst into the room, all hyper and winded.
“Nurse Opal! Here’s his stuff!” she lisped. She practically tripped over herself coming toward me. “Omigod, Dustin Grubbs, how’re you feeling?”
“Just peachy.” I grabbed my street clothes and sneakers from her and dashed behind the changing screen.
“Oh, crud,” I said. “My socks aren’t here.”
“Oops, sorry,” I heard LMNOP say.
“That girl is running herself ragged for you,” Nurse Opal said. “Not even a thank-you?”
“Thanks.”
“Too late. She’s gone.”
“What rotten luck,” I said, fighting into my stiff jeans. “I can’t believe this is happening to me.”
“Oh, you’re going to be just fine,” Nurse Opal said. “That lump’ll go down in no time.”
“Not that, the play. We came so close to doing it, and now -”
“Cheer up, hon. I’m sure it’s just being postponed. In the meantime, you must be excited about that famous kid transferring into your class, huh?”
“What? Who?”
Did she really just say that, or were my ears hallucinating?
“Didn’t Miss Honeywell tell you?”
“No!” I said, shooting around the changing screen. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, Jiminy Cricket, maybe I wasn’t supposed to let the cat out of the bag.”
“Too late. Bag open, cat meowing. What famous kid?”
“Forget I said anything.”
“Please! You don’t have to actually say the name. I’ll ask twenty questions and you can nod yes or no.”
“Just keep icing your head off and on,” Nurse Opal said, ducking into the outer office. “Your mom’ll be here any minute.”
I chased after her and saw a white blur disappear into the faculty restroom across the hall.
“Is it a boy or girl?” I called. “Movie-star famous or National Spelling Bee-champion famous?”
I went back into her office and stretched out on the cot. Still a little woozy. No wonder Miss Honeywell was so wigged out before. Someone famous was coming! I closed my eyes and saw the word FAMOUS spelled out in flashing light-bulbs. Then I shook my head like an Etch A Sketch to erase it. I didn’t have enough info, and I thought my head might explode from the countless possibilities. I forced my mind to wander.
I thought about how “Jack Sprat” was a strange name for a doughnut shop since, according to the poem, “Jack Sprat could eat no fat” and doughnuts are deep fried in oil
. I wondered why someone with as bad a lisp as LMNOP’s would name her cat Cinnamon. I thought about the look on Travis’s face when we mooned him, and about how Mom was right - you have to wear clean underwear every day because you just never know.
I was about to drift off when I heard Nurse Opal from the other side of the door.
“Oh, hi. Nice to see you again. Dustin is doing just fine -and he’s good to go.”
Maybe Mom had brought me a dozen chocolate-covered cream-filleds to ease my suffering.
“I would ask that Dustin be examined by your family physician, though,” Nurse Opal said. “Simply as a precautionary measure.”
Oh, man!
“He’s right in there.”
Mom was going to be in one of her moods - not only for missing half a day’s work, but for having to dish out money to see a doctor too. I should sue Travis Buttrick.
“Come on, Freakshow. Move it!”
It wasn’t my mother standing in the doorway. It was my juvenile-delinquent brother, Gordy.
I should sue Mom.
Chapter 4
Double Take
Barf Breath got out of school an hour early on Fridays, making him the logical choice for chauffeur. The radio was busted, so the ride home in Gordy’s rusty old make-out mobile was quiet - except that every time he hit a pothole, the tools in the trunk clattered and I moaned in pain. I think he did it on purpose, to torture me.
“Nice dice,” I said, swatting the fuzzy pink blocks hanging off the rearview mirror.
“Keep your paws off’em!” he snarled. “Those are antiques.”
“Whatever you say, Elvis.”
That crack got me a knuckle punch on the leg. I figured we were even.
Gordy had met his latest girlfriend, Sheila, at the new diner in town, the Jukebox Café. I guess she was heavy into the 50s, ‘cause Big Brother had transformed himself into a full-fledged greaser: slicked-back hair, a tight white T-shirt. There was even a pack of cigarettes rolled up in one of his sleeves. Gordy went through more girlfriends than Wally did cheeseburgers, and his “look” changed with every single girl. His annoying personality, however, was a permanent feature.