Happy Kid!

by Gail Gauthier

  “Kyle, wow, you’re just like one of Master Lee’s warriors,” Luke said.

  “One of the zombies?”

  “Well, yeah, they were dead,” Luke admitted, “but they were still cool.”

  “Tell Melissa that if ol’ Gus gives her any trouble when you guys are visiting him, she can just mention my name,” Jake told me.

  “Thanks, Jake. I think she’ll be really pleased to hear that.”

  She wasn’t.

  “How can you be friends with him?” she demanded on our way to social studies.

  “I’m not. He just always seems to be where I am. By the way, you probably should know that a little over a week ago, Jake and I were in the same movie theater with Mr. Alldredge. Jake farted and blamed it on him.”

  “Why are you telling me that disgusting story?”

  “Because I was sitting next to Jake when it happened, and Mr. Alldredge turned around and saw me there. I don’t know that it will matter today, but—”

  Melissa stopped dead in the hall. “So Mr. Alldredge really does think you’re part of Jake’s posse?”

  “I told you so.”

  Melissa looked as if someone had punched her in the stomach. “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no,” she kept saying while her eyes kind of bulged out of her head.

  “You still want me to go with you?” I asked.

  “I’ll let you know,” she gasped, and she hurried off.

  When I walked into social studies, Brad asked, “What’s up?”

  That could have meant anything. I decided it meant, “Are you going to the principal’s office with Melissa this afternoon?” because that was all I could think about. So I just said, “Yes.”

  “Yes?” Brad repeated.

  “I’m going to the principal’s office with Melissa this afternoon.”

  I had been sure he would be shocked or mad or disappointed. But he just nodded and said, “I know how it is. Once or twice last week I almost broke and told her I’d go.”

  “You still can,” I offered eagerly. “Melissa’s not that happy with me right now.”

  “That’s okay.” Brad grinned. “I’ve been to the principal’s office before.”

  “Me, too. You may have heard about it? A cop was there?”

  “Oh, yeah. That sounds familiar,” he admitted.

  “And why did you have to go?” I asked.

  “I was one of the Citizens of the Month in February, and we all went to Mr. Alldredge’s office to have lunch with him,” Brad said, sounding just a little bit embarrassed.

  I thought it would be something like that.

  “We’re still on for this afternoon,” Melissa told me after English. “I’ll meet you at your locker right after school.”

  She looked a little jumpy and pale. The sight of her just filled me with confidence.

  It’s funny the way time both drags and goes by too fast when you’re waiting to do something you really don’t want to do. It seemed to take forever for the school day to end, but then, way too soon, there I was standing next to my locker with Melissa.

  “Remember, I’m going to do all the talking,” she said as we started to walk toward the office.

  “That’s always been the plan,” I reminded her.

  “I’m going to do all the talking.”

  “Yes, Melissa.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this for days. I’ve planned what I’m going to say, so I’ll do all the talking.”

  “Okay,” I said, noticing that we seemed to have slowed down.

  “Teachers always like me. Don’t teachers always like me?” Melissa asked me.

  “I guess. I’ve only known you a year and a half,” I told her.

  “Teachers always like me, so I should do all the talking.”

  “Melissa, you’re freaking out,” I said.

  “I am not. Why should I freak out?”

  “Your voice is shaking, Mel. Why are you putting yourself through this? Mr. Borden is the one who should be telling Mr. Alldredge about what happened. It hardly has anything to do with us.”

  “What if everybody said that?” Melissa asked me. “What if everybody said, ‘I’m not going to do this thing that somebody needs to do because it’s too difficult, or I’m scared, or it hardly has anything to do with me’?”

  “According to those articles you keep bringing to current events, that’s pretty much what everyone does say.”

  “Should we be that way just because everyone else is?” Melissa asked.

  I could have said, “That would be fine with me,” but I didn’t want to sound as if I wasn’t as good a person as Melissa was. So instead I said, “Let’s get this over with. Someone is coming to get me in fifteen or twenty minutes, and she doesn’t like to wait.”

  We had to sit out with the secretaries for a couple of minutes because Mr. Alldredge was on the phone. When he was done he came to the door and said, “Come in, Melissa! Glad to see you! Oh. Kyle. Did one of your teachers send you down here? The detention room is right down the hall—”

  “He’s with me, Mr. Alldredge,” Melissa said.

  I had never had detention. Not once. But just as soon as Mr. Alldredge saw me, that’s what he thought I was there for.

  Talk about thinking negatively.

  “Hello, Mr. Alldredge,” I said. “Nice tie.”

  “Well, come on in. Take a seat. How can I help . . . the two of you?” Mr. Alldredge asked as he slipped behind his desk.

  Melissa looked a lot perkier than she had when we were out in the hall. “We want to talk to you about something that happened when we were taking the State Student Assessment Surveys.”

  Mr. Alldredge stopped smiling just like that and leaned forward in his chair. “What is it? What happened?”

  The way the expression on his face changed so rapidly would have been neat if it hadn’t been so scary.

  Melissa’s right knee started leaping up and down under her blue jeans. She leaned her hand against it and said, “Well, you see, during the English Survey we were given two essay questions to choose from. One of them we had seen before. Mr. Borden had given it to us as an assignment. He was told he could use some old SSASies that were stored in the English Department so we could prepare for the test.”

  “You practiced the essay?” Mr. Alldredge broke in. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  His voice was tense, bordering on upset, and once you get to upset, the next stop is angry. I’d heard that tone of voice coming from a teacher a few times over the years, but Melissa hadn’t. She began to sink down in her chair.

  But she said yes without hesitating.

  “Mr. Borden, you said? Excuse me for just a moment.”

  Melissa relaxed a little when Mr. Alldredge left the room, but I didn’t because I guessed what was coming. A minute or two later we heard Mr. Alldredge’s voice on the intercom.

  “Mr. Borden, would you report to my office, please. Mr. Borden, report to my office.”

  Melissa gave this little shriek and kind of hopped once or twice on her chair. “Now what do we do?” she asked me.

  “You said you had a plan,” I reminded her.

  “I never planned on Mr. Borden being here. I don’t want to have to talk to him. What if he thinks I’m accusing him of cheating? You saw how he was when I asked him about the essay question in class.”

  “He did get kind of touchy,” I recalled. “People get that way when they think they’re being blamed for things. I can tell you that from personal experience.”

  “I’m not blaming him for anything!” Melissa insisted. “All I want is for someone to fix this test problem and make everything all right.”

  All I wanted was to get out of there.

  “I don’t know what to say now,” she said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”

  Something like this had happened to me, though. In fact, I was beginning to feel as if the old time and space continuum was totally twisted and I was being spun back to June. Mr. Alldredge’s v
oice drifting out over the intercom, one of my teachers being called to the office, my backpack on the floor by my feet . . . all I needed was my father and a guy in a uniform to complete the scene.

  As Melissa got more and more upset, I got calmer and calmer. Because, I realized, my life stunk so bad that this wasn’t the worst mess I’d been in. The act of doing something different—getting hauled into the principal’s office last year for carrying a concealed screwdriver—had made me a different person. I was used to things not going the way I expected them to now. All my plans had flaws. There was no point in going nuts and getting down on the whole world whenever things didn’t go the way I wanted them to. I’d be nuts all the time. And then how could I keep my mind open for those surprising new opportunities to make the best of the many, many bad situations I was always in?

  We could hear Mr. Alldredge speaking in the reception area. From the sound of his voice, he was walking back toward his office, and he wasn’t alone. Melissa was teetering on the edge of her seat, as if at any second she would jump up and run for the window.

  “You’ve got to control yourself,” I whispered to her. “Don’t—”

  “Of course I’ll control myself,” she snapped at me, her voice shaking.

  When Mr. Alldredge arrived, he had Mr. Borden with him. Mr. Borden sighed when he saw Melissa and shut the door behind him. He looked at me and his head drew back as if he’d had a little electric shock. I’m sure I was the last person he expected to see sitting in Mr. Alldredge’s office next to Melissa Esposito.

  Yeah, well, me too.

  Mr. Alldredge sat down behind his desk, gave a big sigh that made the bottom of his mustache flutter a little bit, and said, “I know this is going to be awkward for all of us, but Melissa has told me some disturbing news. The charge she is making is so serious that I felt it was only fair to bring you in, Mr. Borden, so that you could hear and respond to it yourself.”

  Melissa had slid back in her seat and folded her hands in her lap. She was sitting up nice and straight. She looked pretty good. But when she opened her mouth to speak, the word “Charge?” came out with a squeak.

  “You’re accusing Mr. Borden of cheating,” Mr. Alldredge explained.

  Well, that was pretty much what Happy Kid! had predicted. For what good that was going to do me.

  “Cheating?” Melissa croaked.

  “If he helped you with the test, then he was cheating. Did he help you with the test?”

  “No! Yes . . . ch-cheating?” Melissa said.

  “I discussed this with Melissa in class,” Mr. Borden said. “I thought I had reassured her about this issue. As far as cheating is concerned, how could I have done something like that? She took the test in her advisory with her advisory teacher. I wasn’t even there.”

  “Not cheating. No, not cheating,” was all Melissa managed to say.

  “Assigning an essay question that later appeared on the SSASie?” Mr. Alldredge asked Mr. Borden. “It sounds a lot like cheating.”

  “I gave them the assignment weeks before this year’s tests even arrived here at the school,” Mr. Borden insisted. “It was one of many essays they wrote in September. I took all the topic questions from old SSASies.”

  Melissa couldn’t say anything more than “ch—ch—ch.”

  I guessed she had pretty much finished saying whatever it was she had planned to say.

  “The superintendent of schools is going to want to investigate this,” Mr. Alldredge muttered. “And the school board. The PTO will have something to say about it, I’m sure. And then the newspapers.” He looked over at me. “Accusations like this never go away, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. It would have been nice if he’d thought of that back in June when he was waving the student-parent handbook at my father and me.

  Mr. Alldredge turned to Melissa then. “I want you to think very carefully about whether or not you want to do this. Mr. Borden might be removed from his classroom for at least a little while. You and your classmates may be questioned. I’m just telling you these things so you can make an informed decision. Whatever you decide to do, you will have my total support.”

  Sure she would.

  Melissa turned toward me. Her eyes were filled with tears. She opened her mouth once as if she were going to say something, but didn’t.

  Hard as it was to believe, Melissa Esposito was speechless. If anyone was going to say anything now, it was going to have to be me.

  “Melissa never accused Mr. Borden of cheating, Mr. Alldredge.” I looked at Mr. Borden. “She didn’t accuse you of cheating when she talked to you in class, either. You were the one who used that word. Melissa never blamed anybody for anything. She just wanted someone to fix this, to make it fair again for everybody. We’re not talking about cheating at all. We’re talking about an ‘irregularity.’ ”

  Both men looked at me as if I’d just said “constipated.” Then Mr. Alldredge looked at Mr. Borden and said, “That’s right.”

  “Melissa thinks it’s wrong that our class had an advantage over the other kids. Mr. Borden didn’t cheat, because he didn’t know what questions would be on the test. What happened with the test was an accident, but if Melissa and I didn’t do something to try to correct it, that wouldn’t be an accident. That would be intentional. We’d be cheating now if we didn’t try to fix this.”

  I got that part from Luke. He was going to be really excited when I told him I used his argument with the principal.

  Then, just to wrap things up, I very carefully added, “No one is really to blame for any of this.”

  Mr. Borden looked over at Mr. Alldredge, who was gazing into space. Then Mr. Alldredge looked over at Mr. Borden and started to nod.

  “That’s right,” he said. “There was no intent to do anything wrong so—no one’s to blame!”

  He looked at us and stood up, which, when a principal does it, is always a sign that a meeting is over. “Thank you both so much. You did the absolutely right thing by coming to tell me about this.”

  Mr. Borden patted Melissa on the back. “I don’t want you to worry about class. I really respect what you did. I know it must have been hard.”

  I guess he didn’t notice I was there.

  Melissa sniffed and smiled and almost wiggled like a puppy she was so happy to have a teacher pleased with her.

  “And you, Kyle, am I ever pleased to see you here backing up Melissa. Good work.” Mr. Alldredge shook my hand.

  He was about to open the door when he paused and said, “By the way, how many people know about the essay?”

  I shot a quick look at Melissa out of the corner of my eye. She was biting her lip. Don’t say anything, Melissa! I wanted to shout. He’ll send his secret police out to collect them. They’ll never be seen again.

  “All the kids in our English class know. And some of them knew we were coming here today, too. Maybe four or five other kids know, and so do both my parents,” Melissa told him.

  She didn’t give any names, and she made it seem as if a lot of people knew. Okay. I could see where she was going with that. There’s safety in numbers. I wished I’d told more people.

  “Let’s try not to let it get all over the school until after we’ve decided what we should do about it,” Mr. Alldredge suggested. “That way Mr. Borden can have some privacy while we’re sorting things out.”

  Mr. Borden was going to get privacy. I got my picture in the paper.

  “I really appreciate that, guys,” Mr. Borden said, as if that would force us to agree to keep our mouths shut.

  I could tell Mr. Alldredge didn’t plan to do anything about that essay because he had that same look on his face that politicians and police officers get in Sci Fi Channel Original Movies when they’re part of an alien plot to take over the world and are only pretending to help the main character stop it. It didn’t matter to me. I said I would help Melissa, and I did. What happened afterward was none of my business.

  But Melissa must watch the Sci
Fi Channel, too (who knew?), because she had also figured out what was going on. She was twitching and squirming and clearing her throat as if she had something to say.

  “I have another question,” she finally said just as Mr. Alldredge was saying good-bye to us. “How long will it take to sort this out?”

  I couldn’t believe she’d found the guts to start the discussion all over again, especially given how badly she’d done during the first round. Brad was right. She just didn’t give up.

  “It’s hard to say,” Mr. Alldredge said, just as my grandmother and Mr. Kowsz came walking into the office.

  “You get everything worked out?” Mr. Kowsz asked us.

  I took one look at Mr. Kowsz, the guy who made trouble for Mr. Alldredge over a gym teacher swearing at a seventh-grader, and saw one of those “surprising new opportunities” to make the best of a bad situation I found myself in.

  “Oh, Mr. Alldredge,” I said, turning back to him. “By the way? Mr. Kowsz knows about the essay, too.”

  The smiles left both Mr. Alldredge’s and Mr. Borden’s faces.

  “I’m going to get right on it,” Mr. Alldredge told Melissa. Then he tapped Mr. Borden’s arm and said, “Come on back inside. I’d better call the school superintendent and tell him what happened.”

  “Does this mean you’re done? What perfect timing,” Nana said. Then she leaned toward me and whispered, “Tim and I are going to the home show at the civic center this weekend. We’re going to look at tile for him to use on his lamp bases.”

  I heard way more about Mr. Kowsz than I wanted to on the ride home. He’s fine in the dojang, but I don’t know how I’d feel about him showing up with Nana for dinner on Sundays.

  Nana left me off at home and went back to her office. I ran upstairs and picked up Happy Kid! I thought I deserved a new message. Maybe one that praised me instead of telling me what to do.

  Share Your Cookies

  Generous people form satisfying relationships. Give others your time and your attention and your knowledge. Pass this book on to someone who can use it.

  I was going to have to give away my book?

  CHAPTER 18