by Jamie Gilson
4B Goes Wild
Jamie Gilson
Dedication
FOR MATTHEW,
WHO KNOWS HOW TO CALL OWLS,
PUSH COWS,
AND SANITIZE THE TELEPHONE
FOR YOUR PROTECTION
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
1 DINOSAUR DELIGHT
2 ON TRIAL
3 IF ONE OF THOSE BOTTLES SHOULD HAPPEN TO FALL
4 RIP
5 ZAP
6 HONK
7 CROCS IN THE GRASS, ALAS
8 DOWN ON THE FARM
9 HERE, KITTY, KITTY
10 SQUIRT
11 THE ANNOUNCEMENT
AFTERWORD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER BOOKS BY JAMIE GILSON
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
1
DINOSAUR DELIGHT
“You know what Dinosaur Delight sounds like? It sounds like ice cream with salted fossils,” I told Nick. “Just the sound hurts my teeth. I’d rather spend my Saturday cleaning the cat’s box than going to a Dinosaur Delight.”
Nick Rossi was walking his front porch rail, tilting like a stunt airplane. He tipped, flapping his arms, and almost crashed into the juniper bushes. I was next door in my yard filling my bike tires with fresh air after their long, flat winter. It had rained the night before, and worms lay on the sidewalk gagging for air.
“It was my mother who thought up that name!” Nick yelled. He jumped to the porch and whipped a fat green rubber frog at me. It sailed way over my head. I couldn’t have reached it with accordion arms. Toby, Nick’s little brother, ran after it into my yard.
“Frogger!” he shrieked. “Mine!” Toby is four, and the frog was his.
“It’s because my mom knew the fourth grades would be doing dinosaurs now,” Nick went on. “She said we’d go bananas over a fair called Dinosaur Delight. So that just shows how much you know, Hobie Hanson.”
“I know we studied almost an hour for the dumb test yesterday, and I know that’s enough dinosaurs for me.” I lifted the frog from Toby’s clutch. “Besides, I’m going to ride my bike today all the way down the Green Bay trail.”
Toby stomped on my foot. I dropped the frog on his head. Nick and Toby’s mother is big in the Central School PTA. She’s head of something called Ways and Means. That’s a bunch of people, Nick says, who figure out ways to make money. The Dinosaur Delight was one of those ways.
Actually, every spring the PTA throws a fair in the gym. Last year it was the Jungle Jamboree. My dad took me and wanted to leave after five minutes. The place was decorated with tons of crepe paper and pink-and-yellow snakes that curled down through the basketball nets. My dad couldn’t believe it. Pink-and-yellow snakes! People sold cookies and other stuff they’d made. But the worst part was a bunch of third and fourth grade girls dressed up like leopards who hopped around selling alligator whistles and chocolate-covered animal crackers. They made jungle-type noises, held their hands up like paws, and thought they were incredibly cute. My dad said we should leave before he stepped on one.
“I won’t go,” I said, pumping away on my back tire. One more squirt of air, I thought, the tire will be full and I’ll be free. “Dinosaurs are extinct and I’m glad.”
Toby sat on the grass at my feet and ground dandelion heads on his knees, covering them with bright yellow dots. Then he reached over and twisted a splotch on the toe of my grungy gym shoe. “Hey, Hobie, you know what?” he called up to me. “You like butter, too!”
“Hobie Hanson!” Mom called out the living room window. “Are you and your father going to that Dinosaur Delight thing with Nick or not?”
“Come on,” Nick grumbled. “I’m not going to that thing by myself.”
“Not!” My dad called from the garden out back. “I’ve got a glitch in my side from too much digging.”
“Not!” I told her, and Nick spun around and banged toward his front door.
“Great,” she said. “Then you can help me take down the storm windows. I’ll just send the money to school with Nick.”
“Do I have to?” I groaned.
Nick grinned and jumped down the steps. “You can’t win, Hanson. When do we leave?”
“Oh, Hobie, you know what else?” Mom said, sticking her head out again.
“Yeah, I know. I haven’t changed Fido’s litter.”
“Right.”
The early April sun was warm, but the air still smelled like it had just rained. Even on a good day, Fido’s litter box does not smell like fresh rain. I had been pumping my back tire for about five minutes, and it was still your basic flat back tire. Something was wrong. If I’d pumped that much air into a kickball, it would have exploded.
“And your father needs some help in …” Mom started.
“I know. I know.” Dinosaurs were beginning to sound like prime-time TV. Maybe the fair would be fabulous and not cutesie. Maybe none of the fourth grade girls would be wearing weird costumes and selling things.
“I’ve changed my mind,” I told her, and she smiled. “I’ll do all that stuff when I get back. Nick would probably lose the money anyway.”
Nick flicked a black spider at me by the long rubber band in its back. Toby yanked out a handful of grass and started to sweep the sidewalk clear of beached worms.
Handing me a ten-dollar bill, Mom said that if they weren’t gone I was to buy a dozen of Mrs. Bosco’s famous chewy walnut brownies that she made for every bake sale and to spend the rest the way I wanted to because it was for such a good cause. Then she went back to exchanging storm windows for screens.
After I’d stashed my sick bike in the garage, Nick and I started out for school. It seemed weird on a Saturday morning. Especially at nine-thirty. We knew there wasn’t going to be a bell at the other end. Or a kickball game before the bell. Or Mr. Star with a spelling test.
“Hold up,” Toby yelled. We turned and watched him scramble to his feet.
“You’re not going with us,” I called to him. “This is for the big kids.” He stuck out his bottom lip and sucked in enough breath for a major shriek.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Nick said, inspecting his gym shoes. “We’re taking Toby.” He went on fast. “Mom had to be there at seven-thirty this morning to set up.”
Toby can be a pain. He’s got a whine like fingernails scraping a chalkboard. But there didn’t seem to be any way out. The cat’s box in the basement was still full, my father still needed help planting asparagus, and the winter windows were still up. Toby’s not that much of a pain. So we started off, Nick and I walking, Toby riding his Kermit the Frog Big Wheel with Kermit peering over his shoulder from the backrest.
“What’s this ‘good cause,’” I asked Nick, “that my mom gave me ten dollars to spend on? She has never given me ten dollars, not even to buy my grandmother a birthday present.”
“School stuff,” Nick said, shrugging. “You know, like last year when the fifth graders got on buses and went to hear the symphony—the PTA paid.”
“Very educational.” I yawned. “That sounds like something my mother would think was worth ten dollars.”
“You know what we get this year?”
“We learn how to rotate crops.”
“Close.”
“Oral hygiene lessons?”
“Right!”
“You’re kidding.”
“Right.” He grinned at me. “This year we go on an overnight.”
“Come on.”
“And put a whole school of fish between Miss Hutter’s sheets.”
“Outdoor Ed!” I yelled. “They’re letting us go? I thought after last year they were never going to have Outdoor Ed again. Hiding a catfish in the
principal’s bed was too much. That’s what they said.”
Nick started walking backward in front of me. “They lied.”
“The whole fourth grade? Our class and Ms. O’Malley’s?” I asked him. “All night long?”
“Two nights,” he said, “at this camp almost ninety miles away in Wisconsin. Mom says we’ll be in a big lodge place—the boys and the girls. And the teachers, too, I guess. Mom says they’ve decided we’re more mature than last year’s fourth graders.”
I rolled my eyes at him. I’d been mad when I thought we weren’t going, but now I wasn’t so sure. I’d never been away from home in another state—not without my folks. A couple of sleepovers, sure, but …
“Besides,” he went on, “they’re sending in more chaperones. There’ll be Miss Hutter and Mr. Star and Ms. O’Malley, and anybody else they can con into it, I guess.”
“Hold up!” Toby called from half a block back. We held up.
He was frowning as he pedaled toward us. “My pants are wet,” he said.
“That’s because you’ve been sitting in the grass and it rained last night,” I told him.
“Really?” he asked. He frowned again and turned his Big Wheel around. “I want to go home.”
“You’ll dry,” I told him.
“You can’t be homesick,” Nick explained, “we’re not that far from home. Besides, Mom is at school and she needs you there holding onto her leg while she walks around the gym.” We kept going.
Toby sat still for a minute, deciding. Then he honked the frog-croaking horn, leaned back, and cranked like crazy to catch up with us. “Zoom,” he zoomed, and sped between us to wait at the corner.
When we finally got to school, Nick opened the front door and let Toby steam down the hall like it was the Indy 500. If they caught him inside on his Big Wheel, he’d wail and they’d let him off just for the quiet. If they caught me inside on my bike, I’d get life for sure with no time off for good behavior. Toby left his wheels at the gym door like a big deal who doesn’t care beans if he gets a ticket.
But when we stepped inside, he turned into little kid again. He didn’t bound off and grab his mother’s leg like Nick said he would. He picked mine instead and hugged it like he was trying to squeeze toothpaste out the top. It’s true that the sweaty old gym looked wild. From the ceiling hung the huge white silk parachute we sometimes use in gym class. It was strung from all four basketball hoops and it sagged low, like a cloud about to pour. Each of the hoops was covered by a nest of fuzzy brown-paper strips with a pterodactyl plopped on top. While marching from class to gym the week before we’d peered through the art room door to see the sixth graders make those pterodactyls out of papier maché. The bodies were purple, the batlike wings drooped, and the orange beaks opened wide, like they were ready to snap up a bellyful of little kid. Toby peeked at them from behind my knee.
“Hey, Tobe, we’ll see you later,” Nick yelled over his shoulder, charging through clumps of parents and kids. When I tried to follow him, I had to walk like Frankenstein, dragging my Toby leg as I went.
And just as I was about to give him a fast shake, I went blind. Zap, just like that. These hands gripped my eyes from behind and a girl’s voice said, very high, “I am a dinosaur. If you guess who I am you get a free gift.”
“I don’t want a free gift.” I tried to pull loose, but my anchor held fast. Toby was sitting on my foot, his legs wrapped around my leg. And his pants were wet. I hoped it really was because he’d been sitting in the damp grass.
“Clue number one,” the voice said. “I have jaws like a crocodile and teeth like daggers.”
“You’re Molly Bosco,” I answered, because that’s who was holding my eyes.
“Dwerp,” she said, and squeezed tighter. I saw flashy yellow stars like Fourth of July sparklers. “You’ve got to try or it isn’t any fun.”
Toby grabbed my hand.
“Clue number two,” the high voice charged on. “I have fierce claws and I am the Brontosaurus’s biggest enemy. I hold down my prey and tear the flesh off his bones.”
“Sounds more like a Mollybosco all the time.”
“She’s an Allosaurus,” Toby said from the floor. He’d learned that when Nick and I studied for the test. It was his favorite dinosaur by far. “Al-lo-saur-us,” he said like he was licking a lollipop. He unwrapped himself from my foot. My sock was damp.
“Double dwerp,” Molly muttered, and let go of my eyes. Toby wandered off toward a game called Tar Pits where his mother was selling tickets. I turned to see Molly’s cute little Allosaurus costume, but she wasn’t wearing one. She had on jeans and a sweater dotted with red hearts. Her dark brown hair bounced as she and Lisa Soloman flapped their arms, waving the helium balloons tied to their wrists.
“Great costume,” I told her. “Especially the jaws, claws, and teeth like daggers.” Molly did not smile.
Lisa laughed until she saw Molly looking grim. “Nobody wanted to make costumes this year,” she told me.
Molly shrugged. “My grandmother says dinosaurs are extinct because their shapes don’t make sense. She sewed a whole batch of Stegosaurus capes, though, for the Tar Pits game.”
“You want a balloon?” Lisa asked, holding her wrist out to me.
“I didn’t win it.”
“You knew, though. We just had a test.”
“No answer, no prize,” Molly said, pushing Lisa aside. “Hobie, you better go buy your door-prize tickets. They’re going to draw the winners at—” Suddenly she stopped talking, put her finger to her lips, and pointed to the gym door. Her balloons flipped through the air.
Lisa turned and tiptoed around behind Marshall Ezry, who stood facing the other end of the gym. She snuck up on him, flung her hands over his eyes, and began her memorized speech. “I am a dinosaur. If you guess who I am you get a free gift. Clue number one: I-am-the-biggest-and-heaviest-of-the-dinosaurs.”
“If-you-do-not-let-my-eyes-go-I-will-flip-you-and-you-will-be-the-flattest-of-dinosaurs,” Marshall said, very calm. “You will be a dinosaur rug.”
I decided Marshall could take care of himself, so I wandered around to see what I could spend Mom’s ten dollars on. At the first long table somebody was painting names on barrettes. The next one had kids’ high school brothers and sisters drawing hearts and flowers and skulls on people’s cheeks and foreheads. Then there was a booth with silver star wands and little tinsel crowns, not high on the list of stuff I wanted.
Mrs. Bosco, Molly’s huge, half-deaf grandmother, was in charge of the bake sale table. And across the gym I could see Nick with R.X. Shea and Rolf Pfutzenreuter. They were trying to win goldfish in little plastic Baggies. It didn’t seem very dinosaur to me, but I was about to go win one myself as a pet for Fido when this hand with about four rings on it grabbed my shoulder. Mrs. Bosco had escaped from her booth.
“I have a batch of brownies for you, sonny,” she boomed, guiding me over to the long table covered with plates of gingerbread men and chocolate chip cookies and carrot cake with white icing an inch thick. “My brownies always, always go first. And if your mother hadn’t warned my daughter you were coming, I wouldn’t have saved any. I’ve been telling people they’re all sold.”
I have to admit, her brownies are always fantastic. They are thick and rich and gooey like fudge, with chunks of walnuts in all the right places. Even piled on a paper plate covered with plastic wrap, their dark-chocolatey smell leaked out and curled into my mouth.
“I thought your father was coming. Where is he?” she shouted, snapping the ten-dollar bill from my hand.
“Home, I guess,” I told her. She gave me eight dollars and a broken oatmeal-raisin cookie in change.
“Well, sonny, have your mother and father finally stopped fighting?” she yelled. People for yards around turned slightly to listen. I wondered how she got that. Then I remembered when my mom called Molly’s about the brownies. She’d said how my dad is stubborn as a mule about going to the doctor for gas pains. And how whe
n she wanted him to go he said he didn’t need to pay forty dollars to find out he eats too many cucumbers. Molly’s mom must have spread the word. Mrs. Bosco, though, made it sound like they were going at each other with bows and arrows.
“Pretty much,” I said loud, so she could hear, but that didn’t sound quite right. “It’s no big deal,” I went on, but people had turned away. “I’ve gotta go,” I mumbled through a mouthful of cookie and fled to the other side of the gym. Next she’d be asking if I didn’t think Molly was the cutest girl in fourth grade.
Halfway across, Toby ran up and spun around to show me the cape he was wearing. “I won this in the Tar Pits,” he said. “I got out. That’s how you win.” The cape was brown cloth with a hood that reached to his eyelashes. All the way from his forehead down his back was a mountain range of scales shaped like triangles.
“What do dinosaurs say?” he asked, scraping at my jeans with his claws and aiming for my wrist with his teeth.
“Roogie-roogie,” I told him, holding my arms over my head.
“Roogie-roogie,” he answered. “Can I have one of your brownies? They smell good.”
“No, you can’t. They’re poison,” I said, and kept walking.
“Last call for door-prize tickets,” a crackly voice announced on the loudspeaker. “Fifty cents a ticket, two for a dollar. Eight big prizes: a luxury weekend for two at the Marriott, a weekday lunch at the Chuckwagon, Stockton’s finest food, with Mr. Star, Mr. Vaccarella, or our very own principal, Miss Hutter, and more, much more. Get your razzle-dazzle, high-class prize tickets here.”
Nick, R.X., and Rolf were still at the goldfish booth, each of them clutching a fat Baggie of goldfish and water.
“My dad did it when he was in college,” Rolf was saying.
“You lie.”
“I don’t either. I think there’s something about it in the Guinness Book of World Records.”
“About your dad?”
“About people swallowing goldfish.” He held up his bag, and the fish fluttered in its tight, shiny pond. “My dad swallowed three of them live,” he said, slowly opening the bag.