Gooney Bird and All Her Charms

by Lois Lowry

  Tricia said, after she sniffed, “Yikes! I might need my inhaler!”

  “Are we all in agreement about who stole Napoleon?” Gooney Bird asked.

  Everyone nodded.

  Mrs. Pidgeon frowned. “It certainly smells like Mrs. Gooch’s perfume, that’s true. Over-the-top gardenia.”

  “And she’s the one who hates Napoleon,” Beanie pointed out.

  “But we don’t really, truly have proof,” Barry said, with a worried look. He stared down at the numbers written on the back of his hand. 7508J.

  “I have an idea,” Gooney Bird said. “Veronica Gooch is in third grade, right?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Well,” Gooney Bird said, “we could try this. She described her plan.

  “I think perhaps we should talk to Mr. Leroy,” Mrs. Pidgeon said, after a moment.

  “I’ll put on my formal meeting hat,” Gooney Bird said. Carefully she arranged her flowered hat over her red hair. Then she put on her white gloves and set out, with Mrs. Pidgeon’s permission, for the principal’s office. She was carrying the clues.

  Seated behind his big desk, Mr. Leroy listened carefully to Gooney Bird’s description of the kidnapping of Napoleon. He looked very concerned.

  Carefully he sniffed the hat, gloves, and balloons.

  “I agree,” he said. “That’s Mrs. Gooch’s perfume. She’s been in this office several times in the past few weeks, complaining about the skeleton. Her scent is very distinctive. I’ve had to spray air freshener in here again and again. My secretary always says, ‘We’ve been Gooched.’”

  “And we think it was Mrs. Gooch driving past in a blue car, watching us, when we discovered Napoleon was missing. We got the license number. Barry has it written on his hand. 7508J. She kept going around the block really slowly,” Gooney Bird explained. “She was probably even laughing,” she added angrily.

  Mr. Leroy stroked his necktie while he thought about the situation. Today he was wearing a tie with Jack-in-the-boxes on it. Jack had a silly smile on his face. But Mr. Leroy didn’t. He looked very serious.

  “And you said you have a suggestion?” he asked.

  “Well, I’m the head detective. And we need proof that she is the thief. We have her perfume, of course.” Gooney Bird wrinkled her nose and gestured to the little pile of objects on Mr. Leroy’s desk. “But now we need to find out if that was her car driving sneakily past, watching us.

  “So here is my idea. You get on the intercom and announce that you are holding a contest.”

  “A contest?” Mr. Leroy said.

  “Yes. You tell everybody you’re wondering how many children in the school know their parents’ car license plate numbers. You can say it’s a test of observation and memory. Tell all the children to write down the numbers. With their names, of course.

  “Then you collect all of those from all the classes and we look through the third grade ones to see if Veronica Gooch wrote down 7508J. And if she did? Ta da! We know it was her mom driving past.”

  Mr. Leroy was silent for a moment. Then he opened a drawer of his desk and removed a folder with a blue cover.

  “You know what, Gooney Bird?” he said. “You are a wonderful detective. And I always enjoy your hats.”

  “Thank you,” Gooney Bird said, arranging her flowered hat more tidily on her head. “I should be wearing my Sherlock Holmes hat. But I didn’t know we’d have a mystery to solve today. So I am wearing my important meeting hat.”

  “Well, this is certainly an important meeting,” the principal told her. “And you came up with quite a complex and effective way of identifying our suspect.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But the contest you describe would be quite time-consuming. And I think I can accomplish the same thing in about two minutes.”

  “You can?” Gooney Bird looked very interested. “How?”

  Mr. Leroy opened his folder, turned a couple of pages, and ran his finger down a list until he found what he was looking for. Then he reached for his telephone and dialed the number he had located.

  “Hello?” he said pleasantly, after a moment. “Mrs. Gooch? This is John Leroy.”

  Back in the second grade classroom, Gooney Bird removed her hat and gloves and returned them to her cubby. She smoothed her hair. Mrs. Pidgeon and the students were waiting.

  “She has confessed,” Gooney Bird announced.

  The children clapped their hands.

  “Mr. Leroy told her that if she didn’t return Napoleon immediately, he would have to notify the authorities.”

  “But is he okay?” asked Barry in a worried voice.

  Gooney Bird nodded. “He’s in her car trunk. The blue car. 7508J. Mr. Leroy told her that if he was broken, she might have to pay for him. So she got all flustered and said that she had bent his legs and arms pretty carefully. So he’s not damaged.”

  “Thank goodness,” said Mrs. Pidgeon.

  “She also said,” Gooney Bird told the class, “that he is disgusting, and after she returns him this afternoon, she hopes never to see him again in this school. And she would like all books about the human body removed from the school library.”

  The children gasped. They began to mutter. “That’s not fair!” “He’s not disgusting!” “She can’t take books out of our library!” “What did Mr. Leroy say?”

  “Mr. Leroy said we shouldn’t worry. He said first of all, let’s make sure we get Napoleon back and that he isn’t damaged. Then he and Mrs. Clancy will talk to Mrs. Gooch and explain about how a library works and how important it is to have books about everything, and how it isn’t her job to decide what other people can read.”

  Mrs. Pidgeon, who had been sitting at her desk, stood up and turned to the chalkboard. “Thank you, Gooney Bird,” she said. “And now we have to get busy on our spelling. Our detective work took a lot of time, and we don’t want to fall behind.” She wrote the letter H on the board.

  “But, Mrs. Pidgeon!” Chelsea called out. “We hadn’t finished with all the lessons we were teaching the other kids about the human body! We still have more to do, when we get Napoleon back!”

  Mrs. Pidgeon nodded. She wrote the letter E beside the H.

  “We haven’t done the liver, or the pancreas, or the spleen—” Ben said. He pointed to the poster with the outlined body and all its organs.

  Gooney Bird interrupted him. “And I have bad news,” she said. “Look at the calendar. Uncle Walter needs Napoleon back on Monday. We’re not going to have time to do every single organ.”

  Mrs. Pidgeon wrote the letter A. She turned to the class. “You’re right,” she said. “We only have a limited time left with Napoleon. We’ll do just one more very important exhibition with him for the school.”

  “Liver?” asked Ben. “Spleen?”

  “Pancreas?” asked Beanie. “Or kidneys?”

  “Skin!” Tricia called out. “My mom said our skin is our biggest organ. And she should know because she’s a dermatologist! That’s a skin doctor.”

  “How about appendix?” Malcolm asked. “When I had a stomachache last summer, my dad thought it might be my appendix. But it wasn’t. It was just that I sneaked a whole entire bag of cheese puffs at a picnic and ate every single one, and then had ice cream. After I threw up, my stomachache disappeared.”

  Mrs. Pidgeon chuckled. “Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm,” she said.

  “Appendix isn’t an organ,” muttered Berry.

  Gooney Bird raised her hand politely. “If we’re only doing one more part of Napoleon, it should be a really important part.”

  “I agree,” said Mrs. Pidgeon. “Of course all the parts of the body are important. They all do their work together. And while you children have been thinking about which part of Napoleon we’ll use for our final exhibition, none of you noticed that I was about to use the most important part for one of our spelling words.” She reached for the chalk. The children looked carefully at what she had written on the board.

  H E A
r />   “Head!” Barry called.

  “Head?” said Tricia. “But we already did the brain!”

  “We could put a big hat on him, though, or maybe a wig,” Chelsea suggested, “and then we could maybe talk about his hair, and—and—?”

  Felicia Ann said, in her small voice, “I don’t think head will be very interesting.”

  Mrs. Pidgeon smiled and added another letter to the board. Now it said H E A R

  “Hearing?” asked Keiko. “But we already talked about how we hear when we did the brain.”

  Gooney Bird was grinning. “Everybody!” she called. “Close your eyes and listen to this!”

  All of the children closed their eyes and sat quietly.

  In a soft, mysterious voice, Gooney Bird said, “Thu-dump, thu-dump, thu-dump. Put your hands on your chests.”

  The second-graders, with their eyes tightly closed, put their hands on their chests as if they were saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

  “Thu-dump, thu-dump.”

  The children, with their hands still on their chests, all opened their eyes. They were smiling.

  “Heart!” they said, and Mrs. Pidgeon added the final letter to the word.

  11

  “March is finally like a lamb, not a lion!” Mrs. Pidgeon pointed out as the children streamed onto the playground wearing only sweaters: no hats, mittens, earmuffs, or parkas. Spring was here at last. The sun was shining and the willow tree at the corner of the playground had turned pale green.

  Napoleon had been returned to them safely, and now they edged the skeleton, dangling from his stand, down the front steps. It was his final day at Watertower Elementary School.

  “We didn’t even need to dress Napoleon,” Malcolm pointed out. “Napoleon is naked!”

  Keiko squealed and put her hands over her ears. “Don’t say ‘naked,’” she said.

  “He’s not wearing clothes, but he’s wearing gardenia perfume,” Chelsea pointed out, wrinkling her nose.

  “I’ll have to explain to Uncle Walter that Napoleon got Gooched,” Gooney Bird said. “It will wear off.”

  “Is Dr. O. here yet?” Barry asked, looking around.

  “No. But he will be,” Gooney Bird told him. “No one in my family is ever, ever late.

  “Look! There are my parents, over there.” She waved. Her mom, who had long pigtails and was wearing army boots, waved back.

  “Mine too!” said Chelsea.

  “And my mom,” sighed Malcolm, “with the babies.” He waved to a woman standing beside a huge stroller.

  “And mine!” Tyrone said, grinning at his mom and dad. “There they be, standing by the fence,” he chanted. “The brothers and the sisters and the triplets and the ’rents!”

  The second grade parents, who had been invited to Napoleon’s final lesson and farewell, were all standing together at the edge of the playground, smiling.

  Mr. Leroy, the principal, came down the front steps of the school. He greeted the parents.

  “Ready, Gooney Bird?” he asked.

  Today Gooney Bird was wearing a men’s felt hat, the kind of hat that she said was called a fedora. “When I have a daughter someday,” she had once said, “I am thinking of naming her Fedora. It has a nice sound to it.”

  Now she nodded. “Ready. I’ll just pass these out to the parents.” She was holding a stack of papers that she had prepared that morning, in Mr. Leroy’s office. Carefully she distributed them to the audience. Then she gave one to Mr. Furillo, who was standing with Bruno near the door.

  “Where’s Uncle Walter?” she asked her parents. “No one in our family is ever, ever late!”

  “He’s on his way,” Gooney Bird’s father explained. “He called a few minutes ago. He had car trouble. He said to start without him.”

  Mrs. Pidgeon began the ceremony. “This is Napoleon,” she said to the gathering of parents. “He has been visiting our school since the beginning of March, but today is his last day with us. Gooney Bird has given each of you a picture. Now she’s going to explain what you are looking at.”

  Gooney Bird went to the top of the steps and adjusted her hat. Her wrist jingled. “I am wearing my charm bracelet,” she told everyone. “I wear it on special occasions, like today. And this morning I used the copying machine in Mr. Leroy’s office, and I copied my charm bracelet so that you could each see it up close. Take a look.”

  The parents and Mr. Furillo all looked carefully at the papers they were holding. There was a picture of Gooney Bird’s bracelet with all its small silver charms.

  “We’re going to use the charms to tell you about what we’ve been learning about the human body. Napoleon has been helping us. Chelsea is going first. Chelsea?”

  Gooney Bird took off her fedora and placed it on Chelsea’s head as she stepped forward.

  “First charm is a skull,” Chelsea said in a loud voice. They had all practiced using outdoor voices. “Sometimes skulls look scary. But they shouldn’t. This is Napoleon’s head. And he is smiling. And also he took very good care of his teeth. Everybody? Smile like Napoleon!”

  All of the children, and the parents, and Mr. Leroy, and Mr. Furillo, gave big smiles that showed their teeth. The only ones not smiling were Bruno, who was chewing on a stick, and the triplets, who were asleep in their stroller.

  Chelsea removed the fedora and gave it to Ben, who came forward and put it on.

  “Napoleon’s skull is protecting his brain,” Ben explained. “If you look at the charm bracelet, you can see how when we took him to the library and learned about his brain, Napoleon sat in a rocking chair, wearing glasses and reading a book.”

  All of the parents, looking at the pictures they were holding, smiled as they identified the chair, the spectacles, and the book.

  “He was using his brain for all of that,” Ben pointed out. Then he bowed, and removed the fedora. “Malcolm? You’re next,” he said.

  Malcolm put on the fedora. “Next,” he announced, “find the lobster and the wineglass and the pizza slice.”

  The parents all nodded, after they had located those charms on their pictures.

  “We learned about digestion from Napoleon,” Malcolm continued. “We had to take away his wineglass because someone named Mrs. Gooch got all upset and—”

  Mrs. Pidgeon put her hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. “I don’t think we need to talk about Mrs. Gooch,” she murmured.

  “Well, anyway, when Napoleon was drinking and eating the lobster and the pizza, everything got mixed with saliva and went down his esophagus, and then it churned around and turned into moosh in his stomach, and after that the moosh went into his intestines, and . . .”

  “I think you can stop there, Malcolm,” Mrs. Pidgeon whispered.

  “Can I say about the toilet?” Malcolm asked.

  “No,” Mrs. Pidgeon said firmly. “Who’s next?”

  “Me!” Barry came forward and put the fedora on. “Next, after he ate, Napoleon went to the gym.”

  “First he went to the bathroom,” Malcolm muttered.

  Barry ignored Malcolm. He continued. “Look at the sneaker and the basketball. When he was in the gym, we all learned about Napoleon’s muscles. His muscles make his bones move. Without muscles, we would just be like statues.”

  Tricia put up her hand, suddenly. “Excuse me for interrupting,” she said. “But without skin, we would be a blob. Our skin holds all of our insides together. Isn’t that right, Mom?”

  She looked over at the parents. Tricia’s mom waved and smiled. “That’s right,” she said.

  “My mom is a dermatologist,” Tricia explained.

  “May I continue?” Barry asked in an irritated voice.

  “Sorry,” Tricia said.

  “Back to muscles,” Barry continued. “Muscles work in pairs.” He held up his arm.

  “One muscles stretches it out, the other muscle pulls it back.” He demonstrated.

  “Good job, Barry,” Mrs. Pidgeon said. “Who’s next?”

  “Wait,” B
arry said, “I just want to say one more thing! It is okay to eat the other kind of mussels, because they are not spelled the same.”

  “Me! I’m next!” Felicia Ann stepped forward and reached for the fedora. She put it on her own head. It was too big and slipped over her eyes, but Felicia Ann didn’t mind.

  “Big voice, Felicia Ann,” Mrs. Pidgeon reminded her.

  Felicia Ann nodded, and the fedora slipped down farther over her face. She shouted, “The reason I’m able to shout is because of the air in my lungs! Napoleon’s ribs protect his lungs because they are very important! All of his cells need oxygen, and they get it from his lungs!

  “If you look at the charm bracelet, you’ll see a pipe. If Napoleon smoked a pipe, it would damage his lungs! So don’t do that! Or cigarettes, either!”

  “That means you, Dad!” Nicholas said loudly.

  His father, standing in the audience, looked guilty. “Got it, son,” he said. “I’m trying to quit.”

  Felicia Ann lifted the fedora off. “You know what?” she said to the other second-graders. “When I can’t see anything, I’m not so shy!” She grinned.

  Gooney Bird replaced the fedora on her own head. “There are two more charms on the bracelet,” she announced. “The first one is a little heart. Nicholas and Beanie are going to pass around some hearts for you.”

  Nicholas and Beanie, each carrying a small bag, distributed red cinnamon hearts to everyone. Mr. Furillo nodded okay when they got to Bruno, so Bruno got a cinnamon heart as well, but it made him sneeze.

  “Napoleon’s heart is there behind his ribs, between his lungs, and without it, Napoleon would be dead.

  “Well, he is dead, actually. He’s a skeleton. But you know what I mean. Our hearts are very, very important because they pump our blood around, and our blood carries oxygen to all our cells, and that’s what keeps our organs working.

  “And we make valentines shaped like hearts, and we say I HEART New York and other stuff, because some people think we feel love inside our hearts.