She didn’t feel brave enough, or tricky enough, to say something completely false about the book, the way she had planned before. She was going to try a more direct, but still tricky, approach.
“You read The Secret Garden, didn’t you?” she blurted out.
She was afraid he’d snap his book shut and stomp away, like the famous fifth-grade reader, but he didn’t. He closed his book, keeping his finger in his place.
“Have you read it?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.” Kelsey tried to think of what to say next.
“What was your favorite part?” Simon asked.
Was he trying to trick her? “What was your favorite part?” she shot back.
“I liked when Mary heard someone crying in the night,” Simon said. “And then it turned out to be Colin.”
“I liked when Colin was having one of his tantrums, and Mary had a tantrum, too, and told him that there was nothing wrong with him but temper and hysterics,” Kelsey said.
“But the best part,” Simon said, “was just—”
“The garden.” Kelsey finished his sentence.
“The garden,” Simon repeated. “How it came to life. With all the flowers that were growing in it. And how it sort of brought Mary and Colin back to life, too.” He hesitated. “Do you think that’s dumb?”
“What’s dumb?”
“Liking the garden?”
“No!” Kelsey said. “Nobody could really read the book and not love the garden.”
Simon glanced down at his book, where his finger still marked his page.
“You can go back to reading,” Kelsey said. “I need to read, too.”
Kelsey found Annika waiting for her by the edge of the playground. Izzy had joined a pickup softball game.
“So?” Annika asked. “Is Simon cheating?”
“No,” Kelsey said. “He isn’t.”
11
Kelsey read through dinner. Nobody tried to stop her. She read past her bedtime.
“The contest does end tomorrow,” she heard her mother say to her father. Her mother! Taking her side!
Kelsey couldn’t hear what her father said next, but she thought it might have been “About time.”
When Kelsey arrived at school on Friday morning to present her final worm total for the contest deadline, she had read a total of thirty-seven books in the month of April.
“How many do you have?” she asked Simon, who was pulling completed bookworms out of his backpack in the coat cubby.
“How many do you have?” he asked.
“I asked first.”
Simon still paused. Then he said, “Thirty-seven.”
“Me, too!”
Kelsey hadn’t beaten Simon, but at least they had tied. She felt better about not beating him now that she knew that he had loved The Secret Garden the same way she did. It seemed right that two people who loved the same book in the same way should have the same worm total.
“They can put both of our names on the plaque,” she said, beaming.
Simon returned her grin.
“Where’s Mr. Piggins?” Kelsey turned to ask Cody, who had come into the cubby right behind her, pigless, not that Kelsey had expected that Mr. Piggins would spend the day in their class, math time and all.
“My dad is bringing him in his pickup this afternoon, right before the assembly.”
“Do you think Mr. Boone is going to try to back out of kissing Mr. Piggins the way he backed out of shaving his beard?” Kelsey asked.
“I think Mr. Piggins is going to try to back out of kissing him,” Cody said.
Annika and Izzy had come into the coat cubby, too.
“Do you think it’s fair that Mr. Boone backed out of shaving off his beard?” Izzy asked. “Changing the rules in the middle of the contest?”
“No,” Annika said. “I mean, what if he said that instead of a pizza party there was going to be a … a spinach-eating party?”
“But…” Kelsey wasn’t sure how she was going to finish her sentence. “Mr. Boone loves his beard so much.”
“I still think he should shave it,” Izzy said. “He said he would.”
“I think so, too,” Annika said.
Then Simon chimed in. “Me, too.”
“Me, too,” Cody said, “except that I’m glad that he’s going to kiss Mr. Piggins.”
Kelsey didn’t know what to think.
During morning announcements, Mr. Boone didn’t reveal which class had read the most. He said the final scores were still being tallied, and the winning class would be announced at the assembly.
“But it’s looking as if I may have to kiss that pig, after all!” Mr. Boone finished.
Kelsey could picture him as he said it, happily stroking the beard that wasn’t going to have to be shaved off.
Then and there Kelsey decided that the others were right. Mr. Boone should have to kiss a pig and shave his beard.
He really should.
* * *
The whole school crowded into the gym for the assembly, four hundred students sitting crisscross applesauce on the scuffed wooden floor. Kelsey could see Mr. Piggins waiting outside the gym door in the school parking lot with Cody’s father, who also had a cowlick.
Mr. Boone bounced over to the microphone, beaming with delight.
He announced the grand total for Franklin School: 2,147 books!
He announced the winning class: Mrs. Molina’s third grade!
Then he began to read the names of the top readers in each room. The winners from each class in the lower grades filed up to get their certificates. Then came the winners from the other third-grade classes.
Then: “Simon Ellis and Kelsey Green!”
Kelsey heard Annika and Izzy’s cheers as she came up on the stage in the front of the gym, clutching a plastic bag behind her back.
As Mr. Boone handed Simon and Kelsey their certificates, Kelsey stood on tiptoe to reach the microphone.
“Mr. Boone?” She made herself go on. “Our class is the winning class, and a bunch of us think you should still have to shave your beard. Because you said you would.”
Simon helped her. “And kiss Mr. Piggins, too. But you can’t change your mind about shaving your beard.”
Kelsey handed him the cordless electric razor that her mother had brought in to give her right before the assembly. Kelsey had called her from the school phone at lunchtime, whispering into the receiver so that the school secretary wouldn’t hear.
Mr. Boone glowered down at them. For the first time ever in Kelsey’s years at Franklin School, the principal actually looked angry.
The whole school was chanting now, “Beard! Beard! Beard!”
Then Mr. Boone started to laugh. He laughed until tears ran down his face and trickled into his beard. Relieved, Kelsey laughed with him.
“All right, Miss Kelsey and Mr. Simon.” Mr. Boone gave one last gasping chuckle. “It was wrong of me to break our agreement, I admit it. I just—well, I’m so used to my beard. I hadn’t quite realized how extraordinarily fond I am of it. But because of Franklin School’s astonishing accomplishments this month, I will kiss your pig. And then I’ll keep my promise and—goodbye, beard!”
The gymnasium roared.
The fourth- and fifth-grade winners hurried up to get their certificates.
Cody’s father led Mr. Piggins onto the stage, to thunderous applause. The pig balked a bit as they approached the center of the stage, but Cody’s father leaned down and said something soothing into his ear, and Mr. Piggins continued over to where Mr. Boone was standing.
Mr. Boone stooped down and planted an awkward kiss on the top of Mr. Piggins’s head, sort of a practice kiss. Then he gave a very quick, darting peck on the pig’s hairy snout. It definitely wasn’t a long, romantic kiss, like in the movies, but it did count as a kiss. Mr. Piggins didn’t seem to mind. He just stood there, probably puzzled as to why an entire gymnasium full of kids was cheering.
And then the music teacher led the students i
n singing patriotic songs, while Mr. Boone disappeared from the stage for a few minutes.
They sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”
They sang “America the Beautiful.”
They sang “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”
When the song came to an end, the music teacher played a few fanfare chords on the upright piano by the stage.
Mr. Boone reappeared through the side door of the gymnasium: their new beardless principal.
His beard was gone, every single whisker. He could have been an ordinary principal at somebody else’s school, not the pirate principal of the best reading school in the world.
But then he laughed. Nobody else laughed like that man. When he laughed, he was still Mr. Boone.
* * *
Before dinner that night, Kelsey showed her family her certificate; her mother had been at the assembly to see her get it, but her father had been at work, and Sarah and Dylan had been at school.
“They’re going to put our names on the plaque, Simon’s and mine and all the other winners’, this weekend. And the plaque is going to be hanging up in the library on Monday, Mr. Boone said. And he said that by Monday he’s going to start growing back his beard.”
“So what do you want to do tonight to celebrate?” her father asked. “It’s your night, Kelsey. The sky’s the limit! Do you want to go out for dinner? Go to a movie? Or I think there’s a concert in the park.”
Kelsey shook her head. She knew exactly what she wanted to do to celebrate.
She had A Little Princess already checked out from the school library.
“What do I want to do?”
She smiled at all of them.
“Read!”
Also by
Claudia Mills
Dinah Forever
Losers, Inc.
Standing Up to Mr. O.
You’re a Brave Man, Julius Zimmerman
Lizzie at Last
7 × 9 = Trouble!
Alex Ryan, Stop That!
Perfectly Chelsea
Makeovers by Marcia
Trading Places
Being Teddy Roosevelt
The Totally Made-up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish
How Oliver Olson Changed the World
One Square Inch
Fractions = Trouble!
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
175 Fifth Avenue, New York 10010
Text copyright © 2013 by Claudia Mills
Pictures copyright © 2013 by Rob Shepperson
All rights reserved
First hardcover edition, 2013
eBook edition, October 2013
mackids.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Mills, Claudia.
Kelsey Green, reading queen / Claudia Mills; pictures by Rob Shepperson. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
“Margaret Ferguson Books.”
Summary: Kelsey is the best reader in her third grade class, and she is determined to lead her class to victory in the all-school reading contest.
ISBN 978-0-374-37485-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-374-37488-4 (e-book)
[1. Books and reading—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Contests—Fiction.] I. Shepperson, Rob, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.M63963Ke 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2011027870
eISBN 9780374374884
Kelsey Green, Reading Queen Page 5