Mrs. Schraalenburgh went on with her reading. Cricket sat back in her chair and concentrated hard on the story. “Hic!” Another hiccup popped out of her before she knew it.
A few kids began to giggle softly, but Mrs. Schraalenburgh acted as if she didn’t hear. Cricket took deep breaths with her mouth closed. “Hic!” Another hiccup escaped. It was awful.
Cricket looked over at Zoe Mitchell. She was sitting still and looking straight ahead at the teacher. Cricket was certain that she was having hiccups because of the piece of pickle that Zoe had given her at lunchtime. It had to be the reason for her hiccups because she had never had them this way before. But why didn’t Zoe have hiccups, too? And what about the other girls at the table who had taken bites out of the sour pickle?
“Hic!”
Cricket tried to hold her breath. She remembered having once heard that it was a way to stop hiccups. She looked at the clock above Mrs. Schraalenburgh’s desk. She watched the second hand moving slowly around. If she could hold her breath for thirty seconds, perhaps the hiccups would finally disappear. The hand on the clock moved more slowly than usual. “Hic!” The loudest hiccup of all escaped from Cricket.
Mrs. Schraalenburgh put the book down. “You had better go to the nurse,” she said to Cricket. “We can’t have this sort of disturbance going on during story time.”
Cricket got up from her desk again. This time she didn’t take care to be quiet and her chair scraped against the wooden floor and made a noise.
“I can’t help it,” said Cricket. “I don’t want to have hiccups. They just came.” As she said it, she remembered the times in the past when Lucas or Julio or one of the other boys had developed a case of hiccups. That was what they always said. “I can’t help it.” She had never believed them. Now she was sure that Mrs. Schraalenburgh didn’t believe her.
Cricket was afraid that she was going to start crying. That would be awful, hiccups and tears together. She rushed out of the room and heard the door bang behind her. Then she hurried down the hall to the nurse’s office.
Mrs. Phillips, the nurse, was all alone. She was sorting papers when Cricket entered. “How are you, Cricket?” she asked. “You can’t be sick. No one gets sick on the first day of school.”
“I’m not sick,” said Cricket as still another hiccup popped out. “But I’ve got hiccups and they won’t go away.”
“I once read about a man who had hiccups for two days,” said Mrs. Phillips.
“You mean, I might have them that long?” asked Cricket anxiously.
“No, I know a secret cure for hiccups. The poor man who had them so long obviously didn’t know it.”
“What is it?” asked Cricket. She knew that some people said the best way to cure hiccups was to scare you. But she hated being scared. She looked around the nurse’s office. Perhaps there was something that was going to jump out at her. Something that Mrs. Phillips had secretly rigged up to cure all the students in the school who ever came into her office with hiccups.
“Hic!” Another hiccup came from Cricket’s throat. It was beginning to hurt, having so many hiccups.
“My mother used to put a paper bag over my head,” said the nurse. She laughed.
Cricket wondered if that was what Mrs. Phillips was going to do to her. A paper bag wasn’t scary.
“But I’ve discovered a better cure than that,” continued the nurse. “You put a little sugar on your tongue and then you take a drink of water. It works like magic.” She rummaged through a drawer in her desk. “I always keep a few of these handy,” she said, taking out a little packet of sugar. It was the sort of packet that they have in restaurants for people who put sugar in their coffee.
“Stick out your tongue,” said Mrs. Phillips.
Cricket obeyed the nurse. She felt the grains of sugar landing on her tongue. Then the nurse handed her a Styrofoam cup filled with water. Cricket took a long drink. Then she waited. Nothing happened.
“I think you’re cured,” said the nurse.
Cricket waited another minute to be on the safe side. When nothing happened at all, she smiled.
“They really are gone,” she said.
“Just like magic,” said the nurse. “The funny thing is that I have no idea why that trick works.”
Cricket skipped down the hall to her classroom. When she got there, Mrs. Schraalenburgh was just putting the book away.
“My hiccups are all gone,” Cricket announced.
“Good,” said the teacher. “And I guess it’s a good thing that you have already read Mr. Popper’s Penguins because you missed so much of it.”
“I’ll hear the next part tomorrow,” said Cricket. She was already planning that from now on, she would carry a little sugar packet in her pencil case. If hiccups happened once, they might happen again. Next time she would be prepared.
“I can’t wait to get home and find out the name of the painter at my house,” said Lucas when the bell rang for dismissal. Everyone charged out the door. Cricket was glad to be going home. Tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow she would have to work harder to make Mrs. Schraalenburgh realize how lucky she was to have Cricket in her class. She knew that today Mrs. Schraalenburgh had no idea of her good fortune.
3
Another
Rotten
Afternoon
“How was your first day of fourth grade?” Cricket’s mother greeted her when she returned home after school. Usually, when she came in the house, Cricket bubbled over with stories about how many answers she knew and what good things the teacher had said about her. But today had been one big disappointment. So she just shrugged her shoulders.
“Do you have any homework?” asked Mrs. Kaufman.
“Not real homework,” said Cricket. “There’s nothing to write, but we’re supposed to bring an old shirt or something to use for a smock in art class. And everyone is going to bring soup-can labels to school. Could we have soup for supper tonight?”
“I wasn’t planning on soup for supper, but I have an idea,” said Mrs. Kaufman, smiling. “I was going to make rice to go with our meal. I’ll open a can of tomato soup and pour it on the rice and add some cheese. That way I won’t have to change the menu and you can have the tomato-soup label.”
Cricket beamed. She bet everyone else in her class forgot all about the labels. She would probably be the only one to bring one to school tomorrow. That would show Mrs. Schraalenburgh how attentive she was and how good she was at remembering things!
The next morning, as soon as she was in her seat, Cricket raised her hand.
“Yes, Cricket?” called the teacher.
Cricket opened her notebook, which had a pocket made out of heavy paper inside the front cover. “I brought a soup label,” she said.
“How nice that you remembered,” said Mrs. Schraalenburgh. “Did anyone else bring a label?”
Sure enough, Cricket was the only one in the room who had a label. But as she sat glowing with pride at her accomplishment, Zoe Mitchell raised her hand.
“Yes, Zoe?” called Mrs. Schraalenburgh.
“I’ll probably have about a hundred labels by next week. Maybe more.”
Everyone in the class began laughing.
“That’s a lot of soup for you to eat,” said Mrs. Schraalenburgh, smiling with amusement.
Someone in the back of the room let out a loud belch at the thought of all that soup.
“I mean it,” said Zoe. “You’ll see.”
Cricket smiled to herself. Boy, that Zoe is really stupid. She couldn’t possibly get that many labels in a week. It would take a whole year to eat one hundred cans of soup. Cricket looked across at the new girl. She guessed Zoe wasn’t so smart after all. It made Cricket feel a lot better about being in the same class with her.
But during the morning, Zoe proved that she had learned her arithmetic well at her old school. And she was put in the top reading group with Cricket, too.
Cricket worried a bit about lunchtime. Would the girls all sta
rt bringing sour pickles in their lunch? She was quite relieved to discover that no one had a pickle today.
“My mother said if I ate a whole pickle I’d get too thirsty,” said Hope, explaining why she didn’t have one. Cricket was glad that Hope hadn’t thought of bringing just a piece of pickle. If all the girls were eating pickle slices, they could still have a pickle club and she would be excluded.
“What kind of sandwich are you eating?” she asked Zoe.
“Mayonnaise and strawberry jam.”
Cricket looked at the new girl incredulously. “You’re kidding,” she insisted. No one could eat a sandwich like that.
“No really,” said Zoe. “It’s delicious. Do you want a bite?”
Cricket shook her head as Zoe held out her sandwich. None of the other girls sitting around them wanted to try it either.
“I’ve got peanut butter and strawberry jam,” said Connie. “That’s good enough for me.”
“There’s mayonnnaise on my sandwich,” said Cricket. “But I think it goes better with tuna than with strawberry jam.” She giggled. Everyone else thought Zoe’s lunch was crazy, too. Today is turning out much better than yesterday, Cricket thought.
After lunch, the students had art class. They would have it every Tuesday afternoon. The boys and girls put on the old shirts that they had brought to school. Of course, Cricket noticed with superiority, only about half of the class remembered to bring shirts. She hoped they would get good and messy. It would serve them right.
Cricket looked down at the red corduroy jumper that she was wearing. She certainly didn’t want to spill anything on it. But even without an apron or a smock, she knew she was always neat and careful. She knew she wouldn’t spill anything.
The first art project, they were told, would be constructing masks out of papier-mâché. First the children were shown slides of masks that had been made by people in Africa and other faraway places. Then they were given newspaper to cut into strips. It was boring. But the next step was more fun. They made a paste of flour and water and pasted strip after strip of newspaper, one on top of the other.
“I’m going to make a Frankenstein mask,” said Lucas Cott.
“You already look like Frankenstein,” his friend Julio told him.
The girls talked among themselves, too. It was hard to decide what sort of mask to make. The art teacher looked at the clock. “It’s time to put your work away,” she said. “We will continue the next time you come to the art room.”
There was a sink in the art room and the children lined up to wash their hands. There was a roll of paper towels so that you could dry yourself. But most of the boys just wiped their hands on their pants or on their smocks.
When she was back at her desk, Cricket looked down at her hands. They still felt sticky from the art class. There was flour and water paste sticking to her ring, too.
She raised her hand and asked permission to go to the girls’ room. When Mrs. Schraalenburgh said that she could go, Cricket took the wooden pass and went down the hall. In the girls’ room, she put her hands under the faucet and rubbed them. Some of the paste was stuck under her ring. Carefully, Cricket removed her ring and washed it off. She remembered her mother’s warning about losing it, and so instead of resting the ring on the sink, she put it between her teeth. Now she didn’t have to worry about her ring getting lost and she could do a better job of washing her hands, too. She was pleased with herself for thinking of such a clever way to keep her ring from getting lost. She wondered why she had never thought of doing it before.
Just then, the door opened with a loud bang and closed with an even louder one. Someone had entered the girls’ room. The noise startled Cricket and something terrible happened: She swallowed her ring. For a moment, she stood in front of the sink helplessly. What could she do? She felt a funny pressure in her throat where the ring had rubbed as it went down.
She rushed out of the bathroom and back to her class.
“Cricket, what’s wrong?” asked Mrs. Schraalenburgh as she ran into the classroom and up to the teacher’s desk.
“I lost my ring,” Cricket gasped out. “I swallowed it.”
“You did what?” asked the teacher.
“I swallowed my ring.” Cricket started to cry.
“Swallowed your ring?”
Lucas Cott jumped out of his seat in the back row and came forward.
“I know what to do,” he said. Then, without waiting for anyone to tell him to do anything, he gave Cricket a hard thump on her back.
“Lucas!” Mrs. Schraalenburgh raised her voice. “What are you doing out of your seat?”
Lucas didn’t pay any attention to the teacher. Instead, he gave Cricket two more hard thumps. Cricket didn’t know what hurt worse: Lucas hitting her on the back or the funny feeling in her throat. Lucas pounded her back one more time. It was the hardest hit of all. And suddenly, the ring came flying out of Cricket’s mouth and landed on the floor.
“See!” Lucas shouted in triumph.
The other students in the class let out a cheer.
“I told you I knew what to do,” said Lucas proudly. “My little brother Marcus swallowed a nickel last week. So I’m an expert about things like that.”
Cricket picked up her ring and continued crying. She had never done anything so embarrassing before. She had taken off her ring, even though her mother had said to never take it off. And then she had swallowed it, just like a baby. And her throat still hurt, too.
“Zoe. Please take Cricket to get a drink of water at the fountain,” said Mrs. Schraalenburgh. “I think she will feel better. And please get the wooden pass from the bathroom where she left it.”
Cricket followed Zoe out of the classroom. “It must have been scary to swallow your ring,” said Zoe sympathetically. “I’m glad you were able to spit it up.”
Cricket bent down at the fountain and took a big gulp of water. Her throat felt scratchy and her face was burning hot from the embarrassment of what had happened. She wished Zoe weren’t standing right there watching her every second.
“Do you feel better now?” Zoe asked.
Cricket nodded her head. She did feel a little better, but it was no thanks to Zoe. She wondered what would have happened if Lucas Cott hadn’t given her that thump on the back.
The two girls walked down the hallway, and Zoe picked up the wooden pass that was still resting on the edge of the sink in the bathroom where Cricket had left it. Then Cricket followed Zoe back into the classroom. The first day of school had been bad, she thought. But the second day was much worse.
4
“Personality
of the
Day”
By the time Cricket got home from school, her ring was on her finger and her throat was no longer so scratchy. But still, Cricket felt bad. She didn’t know if she should tell her mother what she had done. She always told her mother everything. But she had never done anything like this before. Suppose her mother forbade her to wear her precious ring? Suppose her mother scolded her for almost losing it?
So, for the second day in a row, Cricket didn’t say anything about school. She played with her little sister Monica until it was time for her piano lesson.
Monica was almost a year old. She couldn’t walk yet, but she loved to crawl on the floor and play with her big sister. Cricket was fascinated by Monica. She wished she could remember how it had felt when she had been that age and size. She was planning to teach Monica everything she knew, so that when Monica went to school she would be the smartest in her class. Cricket had always been the teacher’s pet and that’s what Monica would be, too.
The only problem was that this year, in fourth grade, no matter how neatly Cricket did her work or how promptly she answered a question, Mrs. Schraalenburgh didn’t seem to single her out the way teachers had in the past. Cricket didn’t know why, but she had a feeling it was Zoe Mitchell’s fault.
At ten to four, Cricket left the house to walk to her piano lesson. She had been
taking lessons with Mrs. Aubrey for two years, and she loved playing the piano. But today, when she was playing “Für Elise,” she was still so busy thinking about Zoe and what had happened at school that she made several mistakes.
“You will have to practice harder,” scolded Mrs. Aubrey.
Cricket’s eyes filled with tears at this unexpected criticism from her piano teacher. She had practiced a lot, and when she had played the piece at home, she hadn’t made a single error. Everything seemed to be going wrong these days. And once again, Cricket wondered if it was because of Zoe Mitchell.
The following Monday, when Zoe came into class carrying a large box, Cricket was certain that something was about to happen to make her feel worse.
Zoe sat down in her seat and immediately raised her hand.
“Yes, Zoe?” called the teacher.
“I brought the soup-can labels that I promised,” said Zoe.
“That’s lovely,” said Mrs. Schraalenburgh.
Cricket pulled out the two labels that she had brought from home. She would have gotten more, but when she phoned her grandmother and asked her if she would save some labels for Cricket, too, her grandmother said she had just sent the labels from all the soup cans in her cupboard to the newspaper. Cricket didn’t know why she had to send them there.
“Did you get a hundred?” Lucas called out to Zoe.
“I don’t have a hundred labels,” said Zoe.
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