4B Goes Wild

by Jamie Gilson

  “That must feel weird in your stomach,” R.X. said.

  “But why would anybody want to?” I asked him. Then it occurred to me that he wanted to. “I bet you won’t,” I told him. “I wouldn’t.”

  “I’m thinking about it,” Rolf said, and stuck two fingers in the bag.

  “Absolutely the last and final call for tickets,” the crackly voice announced again.

  “People eat sardines head and all,” Rolf said. “I think.”

  “They’re cooked first.”

  “In Japan they eat raw fish,” Nick said. “I don’t see why Rolf can’t if he wants to.”

  “Not live, they don’t,” I told him. By then Rolf had his whole hand in the bag. My stomach felt like the goldfish was in it chasing the cornflakes I’d had for breakfast. So I hurried over to the woman at the microphone and gave her my eight dollars.

  “All of it?” she asked.

  “It’s for the weekend at the Marriott,” I told her. “My folks really need it.” I thought about Dad planting the garden and Mom cleaning the house, getting everything ready for hot weather and stuff without me helping—they deserved a vacation.

  “Oh, really?” she said, raising her eyebrows. Then her voice turned all cotton candy sweet. “What was that I heard Mrs. Bosco say about their fighting?” She rested her hand on my shoulder. “Is it very serious?”

  “No!” I told her, shaking her hand off. She raised her eyebrows.

  While I signed my name on the stubs, she said to the woman next to her putting tickets into a big barrel, “That dear sweet Hanson child bought eight dollars’ worth of tickets just so his parents could have a weekend together. Had you heard they were separating?”

  “Wants to prevent the divorce,” the other woman whispered to her. “Thinks it’s all his fault. Sounds like a classic case of guilt to me.”

  I don’t know why some people talk about kids like they’re not there. “You’ve got it all wrong,” I explained to them and they looked serious at each other and then smiled at me sweet, like I was a cute pink bunny rabbit.

  “Oh, but don’t you think it’s a dear thing,” the first woman said, looking straight at me, “for him to think of his parents instead of playing all of the games and eating all the lovely treats?”

  “Geez, you did it,” I heard Nick gasp. “I never thought you’d really do it.”

  When I turned around, Rolf was standing with an empty bag of water in his hand, his face pale green and a funny smile twitching on his lips.

  “Can you feel its tail move?” R.X. asked in a quiet voice.

  “Yeah,” he said, his smile quivering. He started toward the gym door very slowly, then faster. Then he broke into a run and dropped the plastic bag plotch on the floor. Our gym teacher, Ms. Lucid, would banish him forever if she found out.

  “All gather round for door prizes,” the loudspeaker blared. Nick’s mom had taken over. Toby was standing next to her on a chair, the barrel of tickets in front of him.

  “I never win anything,” R.X. said.

  “You won the goldfish,” Nick told him.

  “Yeah, but that wasn’t luck. That was skill. I’m a world-class ring tosser.”

  “You suppose Rolf made it to the john?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You think he’ll tell his dad?”

  “And the big luxury weekend, including a champagne brunch, goes to …”

  Toby reached in, pulled out a ticket, and handed it to his mom. “Roogie-roogie,” he said into the mike.

  “… number four-five-one, that’s four-five-one,” Mrs. Rossi announced, breathless. “And the name on the back is … Ginny Massie. Oh, she’s not able to be here, but I know she and Mel will have a fabulous time.” People oh-ed and ah-ed.

  The women who had sold me the tickets tisk-tisked my way, and the one who’d said I was a dear sweet thing shrugged her shoulders like “That’s life, kid.”

  The next prizes a lot of kids wanted. A weekday lunch at the Chuckwagon three blocks away meant sitting on stools at the counter and ordering real hamburgers and fries while everybody at school was eating plastic lasagna. The first one was with Mr. Vaccarella, a really neat fifth grade teacher. Michelle Duguid in my class won that. I thought she was going to die giggling. Lunch with Mr. Star went to some kids’ mother. Her kids were in kindergarten and second grade, so Mr. Star said if she would rather have an evening’s free babysitting, he’d do that instead. The mother said, “Good grief, yes.”

  The other lunch taker was Miss Hutter. Miss Hutter doesn’t look like she ever ate a hamburger in her life. She wears dresses with bows at the neck and little half glasses, and her idea of a costume on Halloween is a white sunbonnet. My parents like her because they say she is “no nonsense.”

  “And the winner of the lunch with Miss Hutter is …”

  Toby drew out a long string of tickets that hadn’t been separated.

  “… somebody who bought a batch,” Mrs. Rossi announced over the speaker, “somebody who must want to have lunch with our principal pretty badly …” She took the wad of tickets from Toby, beamed out at us all, and announced, “It’s Hobie Hanson!”

  “Roogie-roogie,” Toby said.

  I should have stayed at home and cleaned the cat’s box.

  2

  ON TRIAL

  “Good morning, class,” Mr. Star said, like he does every morning after the last bell.

  “Good morning, Mr. Star,” we answered all together, like we’d done every day since school began.

  This time, after he’d checked the roll and cafeteria count and after we’d said the Pledge, Mr. Star leaned back against his desk and stared at us like he was trying to decide for sure if we were good apples or rotten.

  “Well, 4B,” he began, seriously, “it appears we’re going to do it.” It? We shot quick looks at each other and wondered. Run the mile? Skip recess forever? Teach old dogs new tricks?

  “If everything goes well,’’ he went on, “we are, contrary to an earlier decision, going on Outdoor Education this year.”

  It was for sure, then. My ears began to prickle, and woollyworms to crawl around in my stomach. There was a ripple of “Wow” in the class. Yelps of joy.

  “At a cost, I might add, of only eleven-fifty per person because of Saturday’s highly successful Dinosaur Delight. What do you think of that?” He smiled like he thought it was fantastic.

  “I’ll tell him,” I thought in a flash, “that I can’t afford it.”

  “Scholarships, of course, are available,” he went on, pacing up and down in front of the chalkboard. “Now, I expect you’ve all heard how a few of last year’s fourth graders spoiled the trip for everyone with their childish, immature pranks. So, when Miss Hutter asked me some weeks ago if I thought room 4B was ready for a nature study trip, I had to think long and hard.” He rubbed his head like all that thinking had pained him. “But I told her that 4B was ready. So, three weeks from today, if you’ve been perfect or near perfect in every way, we and room 4A—the whole fourth grade—will spend three days at Camp Trotter in Wisconsin.”

  Three days meant two nights. Two nights away from home. In another state. My heart was chuffing like I’d dashed down the hall to beat the bell, and my head swarmed with ways to be a whole lot less than perfect so they’d call the whole thing off. But I kept smiling like I thought it was great. Some flags you don’t wave.

  “Now, I have a packet of information for each of you to take home to your parents or guardians this afternoon explaining what we plan to do in Outdoor Education Studies and what you need to bring. I don’t want any of them stuck in your lockers and forgotten.”

  It wouldn’t do any good to leave the stuff in my locker. Parents have a way of hearing about things like that. But I could plan to have a stomachache.

  “My grandmother has volunteered to come as a chaperone, what with so many mothers working,” Molly chirped, like she not only knew already about the trip, but knew all about it.

  “T
he first thing we’re going to do in preparation,” Mr. Star said, as he erased Friday’s assignments from the board, “is to change gears in science. Now that we’ve finished the unit on dinosaurs, this afternoon we’ll be moving on to the live animals of our woods—including skunks.”

  Everybody laughed. Skunks sound funny.

  Nick raised his hand. “Hey, we’re going from ex-tinct to stinked,” he said, and everybody laughed.

  Mr. Star lowered his head and looked grim. “That, Nicholas, was uncalled for.” And then he smiled. “You stole my punch line. I should fine you a dollar for theft.” Nick groaned, reached in his desk, and pulled out a bill of Monopoly money, but Mr. Star waved it away, laughing.

  “In any case, it’s court time,” Mr. Star went on. For two whole months we’d been studying local government, and our room was set up like a town. We named it Stardom, short for Mr. Star’s kingdom, though, of course, it was supposed to be a democracy. Anyway, most of our desks were pushed back against the walls of the room, and each of us had masking-tape markers on the floor to show the land we owned around our desks. It was our private property. The places that weren’t marked off private were streets and parks, except for Mr. Star’s desk in the corner. That was City Hall, and he was the big shot.

  Molly’s desk was against the windows next to City Hall, then me, then Jenny Hanna and Tracey Hogrefe and Eugene Kim and Aretha Eliott. Mr. Star had tried to boy-girl-boy-girl us, but there were too many girls to make it come out right. Nick sat across the room next to Michelle and then Marshall. Rolf was one of the kids whose desks were clumped together as apartment buildings in the big middle space we called Central Park.

  Also in Central Park was the courthouse. It was a round yellow table, actually, and when we had court, we put a chair on the table for the person accused of the crime. We had city council meetings and park board meetings, and we set up businesses and stuff, but we all liked court best. Somebody was always suing somebody for something—five dollars and up for bugging, ten dollars for tripping. There was a whole list of possibilities.

  “Fifteen minutes for court today, no more. That’s all we can spare,” Mr. Star announced.

  “But we’ve got seventeen cases,” Molly said. “That’s no fair.”

  “Most courts have too many cases. Fifteen minutes.”

  “OK, court-is-in-session-order-in-the-court,” Lisa said, fast as firecrackers. She was bailiff. Molly, who was judge, sat down on the orange judge’s stool. “The first case is Michelle versus Hobie.” She banged the gavel on the edge of the table. “Hurry up, Hobie. We haven’t got forever.”

  I climbed onto the table and sat in the chair looking out over the class like I was king of the mountain.

  “Are you innocent or guilty?” Molly asked.

  “Innocent,” I told her. “I was framed.”

  “Guilty, guilty, guilty,” Michelle sighed, shaking her head like she was sorry for me that I had to lie.

  The rest of the class was listening only halfway. Most of them were whispering or passing notes about the sleepover camp. Mr. Star was working on some papers at his desk. Eugene had folded his arms on the back of his chair and was resting his head on them.

  Molly shifted on the judge’s stool. Around her waist she wore a belt that was printed MOLLYMOLLYMOLLY. She had two barrettes from the fair that said MOLLYMOLLYMOLLY on them, too. Not that anybody was going to forget. I had my baseball cap on, backward.

  “What are the charges?” she asked Michelle.

  “The charges are that Hobie pushed me, your honor,” Michelle said.

  “The charge sheet says it was nine fifty-two in the morning,” Lisa reported.

  It had happened at nine fifty-two two weeks ago, so it hardly seemed worth fighting about. But Molly had forgotten to make me promise to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so I lied.

  “Your honor, I didn’t do it,” I said.

  Michelle’s face turned red and she banged her fist on the table my chair sat on, and it shook. She loved going to court. She played it like a TV soap. “Your honor, he did so! You did so push me!” she yelled. “You pushed me on Marshall’s land and he’s suing me for trespassing.” Marshall grinned and tipped his baseball cap at us.

  “All I know is, I didn’t, or if I did, I didn’t mean it.”

  “You have any witnesses?” Molly asked her.

  She had four, all girls. And so I got fined two hundred dollars, the most you could be fined for pushing.

  “I thought you might try to get out of it by using your influence,” Rolf called as I handed over the money. “I mean, you’re going to have lunch with the prin-ci-pal, aren’t you? Wow-ee!” I could have poked him, but since I’d just gotten fined for pushing, it didn’t seem right. Besides, the possibility of witnesses was pretty good. Also, the fine doubled the second time around, and my money supply was getting low.

  Molly banged the gavel again. I stood up and stretched like I didn’t care beans for losing two hundred dollars to Michelle and climbed down from the defendant’s chair as slowly as possible.

  “Next case,” Molly declared and read off Jenny versus Aretha, who had other girls be lawyers for them.

  “What did those guys do last year on Outdoor Ed that was so bad?” Eugene asked me as soon as I got back to my seat. “It must have been awful.”

  “Just stuff,” I said. “Frogs in the girls’ shower stalls and like that.”

  He leaned over to my ear. “Have you ever been far away from home at night?” he whispered.

  “Lots of times,” I lied. “We slept in tents and thought we heard bears in the night, and bats.” I did do that once in Nick’s backyard, but it rained, so we went home to bed before midnight. “How about you?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, straightening up. “Sure. Lots of times. I’m not scared or anything. I was just wondering.” And he started to laugh.

  “Order in the court,” Lisa called. “Any more disturbances and I’ll clear the room.”

  After Aretha was found not guilty of stealing the top of Jenny’s blue pen because half the class has blue pens just like it and who’s to know whether the top on Aretha’s desk was Jenny’s or not, Mr. Star gave us a spelling test of local government words. I missed munisiple … munecipal … municipal.

  But I was great at recess. I shine at recess. It was an excellent warm kickball recess day. And when that ball came at me fast and smooth at the end of our inning, I made a crater a mile deep in it with my toe. We had two on base—R.X. and Aretha. My ball sailed up, hit a cloud or two, and angled down into the spit pit, and that meant we were all home free. It also meant I would get two points for kicking a pit ball. That made the score four to three. I strolled, very casual, toward first base, a hero.

  The spit pit is this disgusting staircase next to the playground that is filled with gross junk. Kids sometimes spit in it, and nobody likes to slip on all the mold getting kickballs out. So it was like somebody had waved a magic wand or something when, just as I was about to tap first base, the ball popped out of the pit. It sailed back up and onto the field like a movie playing in reverse.

  Geez, I thought, there’s a seal in there escaped from Lincoln Park Zoo. It’s sliding down the spit pit steps, flipping balls off its nose. I didn’t see how that ball could possibly have bounced out because the place is crammed with mud-crusted mittens and scarves, rotten bananas, and at least one three-page paper on the life and death of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Those things a ball would just sink its seams into.

  But there it was, my pit ball back in play. I ran like crazy toward second. But, wouldn’t you know, the ball was aimed straight at second. Michelle, who’d already won two hundred dollars from me in court, caught it and tagged me out. Just like that.

  My team all started screaming and demanding a replay and calling foul and cheat. There was a lot of pushing and shoving, too, until Mr. Star raised his voice. “OK, friends. What did I say about good behavior? You keep this up and 4B will definitely not be along
for Outdoor Ed. Think about it.”

  There was this silence while we all stared at the pebbly black asphalt and thought about it. If I tackled Michelle, would they keep us home? Probably not. Besides, somebody might figure out why I did it.

  “How’d I do?” a low, old voice called from somewhere under ground level. “Didn’t break anything, did I?”

  We all turned again to the spit pit, but it wasn’t the seal from Lincoln Park Zoo whose fringed bald head we saw. It was Mr. Gosnell, the custodian. He was chuckling. “Boy, that thing shot at me like Halley’s comet.” He had a black plastic sack slung over his shoulder and a shovel in his hand.

  We all stood staring. “Heading straight at my head, it was. So I stepped back, wound up, and …” He put the bag down, grabbed the shovel with two hands, and, using it like a bat, showed us how he’d slammed the ball out of the pit. He rolled his shoulders around like it had been some jolt, too. Then, picking the fat bag back up and heading toward the trashroom, he said, “I’m giving that stairwell a good spring cleaning. Lots of stuff blows down there during the wintertime, you know.”

  The bell rang. The game was over, and my team had lost. But nobody felt like arguing about points anymore.

  “That was wild,” Rolf said, grabbing the kickball to take it inside. “The Voice from the Spit Pit! Sounds like a ghost story.”

  “Yeah,” I told him, “and my best kick of the year shoots back to haunt me. There ought to be a rule.”

  “Right,” Rolf said. “Any pit ball returned by shovel counts triple.”

  “Hey, Rolf,” Nick called, catching up with us. “I looked it up last night.”

  We both stared at him.

  “The goldfish. I looked it up in the Guinness Book of World Records. And you were right. It was in there.” Rolf shrugged and started to hurry on ahead like he didn’t want to hear.

  “No kidding,” Nick went on, walking faster and catching Rolf by the elbow. “This is interesting. It says the book won’t list records for ‘potentially dangerous categories,’ and that those are swallowing chewing gum, live ants, raw eggs in the shell, marshmallows—and goldfish.”