by Jamie Gilson
“And I’ve kept my lip buttoned about Miss Ivanovitch,” she told Miss Hutter even louder. “Even when Molly asked specially. Miss Ivanovitch was so gracious to her during that darling skit, didn’t you think?”
“Um,” Miss Hutter said again. I got the feeling she wasn’t crazy about Mrs. Bosco, but was too polite to let her know.
“And when will the announcement be?” Mrs. Bosco asked.
“I expect she’ll decide that,” Miss Hutter answered as R.X., Rolf, and Marshall ran up to join us. Eugene had gone down early to be a hopper. We told them about the announcement.
“I guess the girls are right about their getting married,” R.X. said, shaking his head. “But that sure was quick. Miss Ivanovitch only substituted three or four times around school after she subbed for us.”
“Once you meet her you don’t forget her, though,” Marshall said.
Halfway down the hill, Miss Ivanovitch was walking alone. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said to the guys. “There’s something I want to find out.”
“Find out if we’ll be invited. I want to throw rice,” Rolf called after me.
“The sheet of instructions said to bring two pairs of shoes,” I told her as I ran up. She had only one boot on. The shirt under her painters’ overalls was blue with big white dots. Today’s socks were yellow-and-white.
“The sheet of instructions was for the kids.” She shrugged. “Grown-ups don’t need two pairs of hiking boots.”
“What did you want to tell me last night?” I asked her.
“Let’s talk about it later,” she said, looking down and walking faster.
“Now, please,” I begged. My knees turned to Silly Putty, because I could tell she had something to hide, something she didn’t want to say.
“After breakfast?” she asked.
“Now!”
Instead of walking into the mess hall, we turned down the road toward the lake.
“Well,” she began, glancing back to see if anybody was following us, “last night when everybody seemed settled, around ten o’clock if you can believe that, I went down and made a telephone call to … to a friend. When nobody answered, I got to thinking about meeting you at the phone the night before and how homesick you seemed, and I thought maybe it would help …” She took a deep breath before going on. “… maybe it might help if I brought you a big hello from your folks and good news from home, since you couldn’t call yourself, and—”
“You’re kidding. So you called them?”
She put her finger to her mouth to quiet me. There were only a dozen or so kids left to go in to breakfast, so she started talking fast.
“I wanted to help.” She wiped her palms on her painters’ pants and went on. “I’ve taken lots of psychology courses in school. I don’t know why I thought a marshmallow could be the answer.”
“What did they say? Were they home?” I didn’t see how marshmallows had anything to do with it.
“I spoke to your mother.”
“What did she say?”
“Well, everything is all right,” she began, putting her hand on my arm, “but it isn’t. I just don’t want you to worry. Your mother doesn’t want you to worry. It’s not what you think.”
“It’s not what I think. It’s what everybody says.”
“Whatever. Your mother was right by the phone when I called. She said she was thinking about calling you, but was afraid it was too late.”
“Too late?”
“At night.”
I sank down on the cold concrete bench overlooking the lake. The skunk smell was almost gone.
“She was going to tell you,” Miss Ivanovitch said, sitting beside me, “that your father is in the hospital. He had gallstones.”
“Hospital? Gallstones? I never heard of gallstones.”
“It’s, well, the gallbladder is a little sack that holds fluid from your liver and sometimes—mostly in very heavy people—it gets stones in it and sometimes the stones cause it to hurt.”
“My dad is pretty fat, but where would he get a bag of stones?” I asked her. This is a phony story, I thought. I never heard such a phony story. “My dad has gas a lot,” I said.
I guess she could tell I didn’t believe her. “The stones form in the bag,” she went on, leaning forward, serious, like I had to believe her. “It hurt so much, Hobie, they took his gallbladder out.”
“Took it out?”
“Operated. They were at the hospital night before last when you called. She was even going to drive up for you, but she didn’t want to leave him, and besides, the hospital doesn’t allow ten-year-olds to visit.” She sighed. “I stopped by last night to talk to you about it and kind of prepare you for today like your mom asked me to. But I thought, later, that the skunk attack was enough excitement for one night.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, “what does all this have to do with a divorce?”
She looked up, startled. Mr. Star was heading down the path toward us. “Nobody knows I called,” she said. “Listen, it was probably the wrong thing for me to do. Certainly it was against the rules.”
“Divorce?” I asked again.
She shook her head. “Your mother thought that was a crazy idea. She said she guessed you really were homesick.”
“But it wasn’t crazy. Everybody …” I could feel my face turn red as I realized what it was. It was Telephone. It was Camp Trotter-Damp Daughter. It was Mrs. Bosco’s voice shouting across the gym and the ladies at the booth where I bought chances. Lisa hadn’t known anything after all.
“… a lot of pain,” she was saying, “but your mom said he’s smiling again. It’ll be OK. She said to tell you.”
Mr. Star reached us, his whole face a question. “Can I help?” he asked.
My stomach was churning. Miss Ivanovitch looked at me and I shook my head at her.
“No, it was just …” she said.
“I had a …” we both started talking at once. Mr. Star waited, but neither of us went on.
“There might not be any scrambled eggs left if we stay out here much longer,” he said.
I ran ahead, wondering how much she’d tell him. For two nights and almost three days I’d worried about phony things. And now I was so glad my parents weren’t divorced I wasn’t even scared about real stones in a sack. The woollyworms were gone.
After cold scrambled eggs, we packed our bags and stripped our beds. Miss Ivanovitch gathered us around for our last Outdoor Education project. The Scotch Tape was scheduled for orienteering. That meant we were supposed to find our way with compasses. Only we didn’t stick together. After Miss Ivanovitch talked about poles and paces for a while, she split us up into twos. Marshall and I were a team. She gave us paper with stuff written on it like “Go NNE 5 paces. Go S 9 paces,” so that at the end you’d expect to dig for Bluebeard’s treasure chest and giants’ bones. My pace wasn’t the same as Marshall’s, but at last we found our gold treasure anyway, hanging from a tree branch—two bananas in a brown bag.
Wolfing them down, we made our way back to the clearing that was the meeting place for our group. Molly and Lisa were there playing catch with Miss Ivanovitch’s hiking boot. They hadn’t gotten a list of SSW and NE 13 paces stuff like we had. Instead, their paper had told them to find the boot, and fast.
And they had. But they were tossing it so high, it was going to end up as a bird nest if they weren’t careful.
Miss Ivanovitch was off orienteering with Vince because there were an uneven number of kids in my group. I hoped their path wasn’t covered with thorns or broken beer bottles, because those yellow-and-white stripes weren’t going to keep out much.
“Look what I found,” Molly called, tossing the shoe at Lisa with one hand and holding up a piece of paper with the other.
“It’s a rubbing. We found it in a bush, like it was growing there,” Lisa said, grabbing the pitch. “There must have been a cyclone last night to drag it so far from the graveyard.”
“I didn’t hear a wi
nd,” Molly said.
“There was a lot of action,” I told them, “after midnight.”
“And I suppose you were out after midnight?” Molly laughed.
“Can I see the paper?” I asked her, knowing what it was.
“I found it,” Molly said, holding it behind her. “But it’s mine,” I told her. “Prove it.”
“It’s a purple cupid with a moustache.” She turned around, peeked inside the rolled-up paper, and then looked back at me, very suspicious. “How did you know?”
I shrugged. “I know because it’s mine.”
“But it rained the night we were at the graveyard, and this rubbing hasn’t been rained on. A car’s run over it, though.” She flipped it past me so I could see the tracks on one corner.
“If you’d asked me about the tracks, I could have told you about them, too,” I lied. I almost snatched it, but Nick would have killed me if I’d torn that one too.
Lisa leaned over and fingered the tire tracks on the paper. “You sure don’t take good care of your stuff to have it, like, floating around under cars.”
“OK,” Molly demanded, “explain about why it didn’t get wet.”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“You’re right.”
Miss Ivanovitch came jogging up with Vince, a bag of banana peels in her hand. “… climbed sheer cliffs when I was on Outward Bound,” she was telling him. And then she saw the rubbing of the angel.
“Oh, Molly, you have my picture! Wherever did you find it?” She held out her hand.
Molly put the rubbing behind her back again and stepped away. “Hobie said it was his. He described it. Can you?”
Miss Ivanovitch looked flustered. “But it’s …”
Nick and Aretha ran up behind Molly and Lisa, the fourth pair back.
“Molly,” Nick yelled, spotting the angel. “I take back everything gross I ever said about you. You’ve found my rubbing. I thought it was gone for good.”
“Your rubbing?” She held it out at arm’s length and stared. “What’s so incredibly cueshee about this, anyway? Mine was much better. This angel has a moustache.”
“Oh, does it?” Miss Ivanovitch cried. “That’s fantastic.” Suddenly, she raised her chin up high, held out both hands, and said, “Molly Bosco, I’d like two things, and I’d like them promptly. First, I’ll take my shoe, and,” she smiled at Nick and me, “and then I’ll have my rubbing.”
Molly blinked, looked at us to see if we’d complain and, when we didn’t, handed them over. Then she turned away and, shrugging like she couldn’t care less, pulled Lisa down on the ground with her. They started balancing acorn caps on twigs.
Miss Ivanovitch handed us the rubbing. “Sign it in small letters—both of you—down by the tire track,” she said, taking a red pen from her big bag and handing it over. “Not that I’m likely to forget. It’s just that I’m framing it to hang in a special place, so it ought to be signed.”
I could imagine our rubbing right over a fireplace with candles burning on each side. And I could see her and Mr. Star standing in front, smiling up at it.
“You gonna put your boot on now?” Nick asked her.
“Maybe not,” she told him, tilting her head. “I’m just getting used to walking askew.”
“What I want to know,” Molly said, “is when you guys did that rubbing, whichever of you did do it.” She flung an acorn top, like a frog’s Frisbee. “I’ve been thinking, and I don’t know when it could have been. There just wasn’t any time.”
“Some things are mysteries that will never be solved, Molly,” Miss Ivanovitch told her, and she hurried off to greet two more banana eaters.
For lunch I was hopper again for hot dogs and potato chips. Then we played one last kickball game up on the high field, the smell of skunk still faint in the air. The story was, Mr. Star told us, that a farmer’s dog had tangled with a skunk and lost. I was glad we hadn’t barked at Kitty-Kitty.
The score was four-all when Eugene shouted, “The buses, they’re here!” He hadn’t had his eyes off the road for the whole game. The buses were pure sunshine. I had never noticed before that they smile. These were grinning from fender to fender.
After I tossed my little red suitcase up to the driver, who was packing them in the bus, I looked back one last time at Camp Damp Daughter lodge. Somebody had hung his underwear on the sign.
I settled down in a window seat. The heater was on, so it felt steamy, like August.
“Whad’s dad smell?” Nick asked, holding his nose and looking at me. I smelled it, too. It was near. People were staring. The heat made it stronger. Nick broke up and dug a rose-perfume-drenched Kleenex from my pocket and tossed it toward the back of the bus. It smelled like predator-prey. And it smelled like Mrs. Bosco, too.
“Better than skunk,” he said, laughing. I poked him in the ribs, but it isn’t at all bad, the smell of roses. As the bus moved, my head felt heavy and my eyes kept flapping shut. Whenever I thought of the gallstones I remembered Miss Ivanovitch saying, “It’ll be OK,” and the gallstones would disappear and turn to granite or marble or skipping stones across the lake. I slept.
The bus was rumbling up Central Street toward school when I woke. Nick was shaking my shoulder.
“Except for the green slime mountain,” Nick said, “and the wrecked semi that spilled three hundred porcupines on the highway, and Eugene getting sick again in the back of the bus, you didn’t miss a thing.” I opened my eyes as wide as I could. He shook me again. “And if you don’t wake up they leave you on and you go back for three more days of peanut butter and jelly stew.”
“Three days!” I shook my head. It seemed a whole lot more like three weeks we’d been gone.
“We played Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral while you were zonked out,” Molly said, turning around in her seat.
“Yeah,” Nick moaned. “We played it a lot. One time you were the answer. You were vegetable.”
“Nick!” Lisa yelped. “That’s, like, not true, I never called Hobie a vegetable.”
“Maybe not,” Nick said, shrugging, “but you laughed when we said ‘animal.’”
I rubbed my eyes and focused on the group waiting on the sidewalk, peering at the buses. Mrs. Ezry was there, aiming her camera, waiting for the After shot. My mother was at work. Or at the hospital. Mrs. Rossi was going to pick Nick and me up, but she wasn’t around either.
Miss Hutter and Mrs. Bosco were already waiting on the steps of the school. Either our buses were slow or Mrs. Bosco had been hot-dogging it down the highway in her Honda trying to beat us back.
As we climbed off the bus, Mrs. Bosco stepped forward and boomed, “Welcome home. Welcome home after your wonderful adventure.” And when Miss Ivanovitch stepped off, she said, “Boys and girls, there’s going to be an announcement. I’m sure there is. Miss Ivanovitch has something to tell you all.” She beamed.
Miss Ivanovitch blushed. She stuck her hands in her pockets. “I’m not sure. What if something …” Mr. Star grinned at her.
“Go ahead, Svetlana. Tell them. They’ll be tickled,” he said.
Molly tightened her lips and crossed her arms to keep the news out.
Behind us two mountains of bags were rising on the sidewalk where the drivers were tossing them. Some kids were rushing off to get theirs, in a hurry to get home. Most of 4B stood, though, with our mouths open, waiting, when a green van tooled up in front of the buses and a red-haired man in a black-and-white check jacket bounded out. He hurried over to where we were standing like he was late, and I wondered whose father he was. I’d never seen him before. As he walked he smiled at the ground instead of us, but when he looked up, it was straight at Miss Ivanovitch.
She grabbed his hand and pulled him forward. “I’d like you to meet my friends,” she told him. He was only a couple of inches taller than she was, but big. He was big like he lifted weights, not like he ate too much chocolate chip cheesecake like my dad.
“This is Miss Hutter, the principa
l; Mrs. Bosco; Jack Star; and these,” she said, nodding at the group of us stacked up near the door of the bus, “these are a fraction of the 4B’s.” He shook hands with us all. “This is Edward Kinsella,” she told us, like that explained everything.
When Edward Kinsella finished shaking everybody’s hands, he took hers. And he held it. We stared, just as we had at her hand and Mr. Star’s in the campfire circle.
“Is he your brother?” Aretha asked. Mr. Kinsella grinned.
Miss Ivanovitch took her hand away and reached for her green duffle just tossed on the stack.
“Are you a teacher?” Michelle asked Edward Kinsella.
“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” I asked him.
He laughed. “I’m a telephone lineman. When the phones stop, I set them right.”
“I was looking for him to say goodbye to us when we left for camp,” Miss Ivanovitch told us, lugging the duffle back to the group.
“An emergency,” he apologized to her. “Some cable-TV guys sheared one of our lines. And a lot of wires were down night before last. Did it storm up by you?”
“Oh, yes,” we said.
“Oh, wow.”
“Lightning in the dark with sparks and ghosts.”
“And a tree down by the lake.”
“Oh, yes,” we said.
“Is that,” I asked her, “who you tried to call?”
“Right,” she laughed. “He wasn’t home either.”
We followed along as she tossed her duffle into the back of the van. I hoped the landing didn’t smash the angel.
Molly stepped forward and said, “What’s this big announcement about you and Mr. Star?”
Miss Ivanovitch threw back her head and laughed. “Molly, my dear, I think you were the only girl in 4B who wasn’t trying to play matchmaker with me and Mr. Star.”