Grape!

by Gabriel Arquilevich

  “And Dog is missing his left ear!”

  “Really?”

  “And the coolest part is she wants to be called Tammy. She won’t even let you call her Mrs. Sanders.”

  “No way!”

  “If you call her Mrs. Sanders, she calls you by your last name. You would be like, ‘Mrs. Sanders, do we have homework?’ and she would be like, ‘Why, yes, Mr. Borokovich, we do!’ Can you believe it?”

  “No!”

  “And after the Eskimo unit we get the whale watching trip!”

  “That’s cool!”

  “And we get Tammy!”

  But the first day of class, we didn’t get Tammy or a bulldog named Dog with a missing ear.

  We got Principal Kelly, and a super tall lady.

  “Go ahead and take a seat, everyone,” Principal Kelly said. “Anywhere is fine.”

  I looked at Lou. He was so pale I thought he was going to throw up.

  “You’re probably wondering why Mrs. Sanders isn’t here,” Principal Kelly said.

  I raised my hand. “You mean Tammy, right?”

  He glared at me.

  “Mrs. Sanders will be on maternity leave for six weeks.”

  I raised my hand.

  “Which means she’s going to have a baby. In the meantime, Miss Roof will be your teacher. I’m expecting you to treat her with respect.”

  Principal Kelly shook the tall lady’s hand and left.

  Mrs. C, she was like a Tammy opposite.

  She had a kind of suit on, like a man’s suit, and bright red lipstick, and red hair piled super high like she was a space alien, and even though she was already tall, she wore high heels and she had glasses hanging around her neck and her nails were super long and red, and the thing is, before she started talking she tapped her long red fingernails on the desk, then put her thin glasses on the tip of her nose and looked over her nose and down at the roll sheet.

  “Allen, James.”

  “It’s Jim,” Bully Jim said.

  Miss Roof peeked over her glasses.

  Jim stared back.

  “Ashton, William.”

  “Here.”

  “Borokovich, Gabriel.”

  “My name is Grape,” I said.

  She peeked over her glasses again.

  “So you’re Grape,” she said. “I was warned about you.”

  Some of the kids laughed.

  I felt kind of famous.

  Then she did something super weird, and all of a sudden I didn’t want to be famous. She tapped the attendance sheet with one of her long red fingernails. Tap-tap-tap. And as she tapped, she said, “I have—tap—been—tap-tap—warned—tap-tap-tap—about you,” again.

  I slumped in my chair.

  Miss Roof continued to take roll, and then, Mrs. C, something happened to me.

  “Donovan, Clair.”

  A girl in a pretty brown dress and pigtails stood up and said, “Here, ma’am.”

  And the thing is, Mrs. C, she had an accent!

  “And where are you from?” Miss Roof asked.

  “Texas, ma’am.”

  “And have you moved to California for good?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I believe so.”

  “Well, I can only hope our students have the manners that you do.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Miss Roof was not like any teacher I ever had.

  And Clair was not like any girl in the whole wide world.

  Even though Miss Roof was super boring and didn’t wear a Dodgers cap or bring her bulldog to school, and even though she tapped her long red fingernails every time she called my name, I didn’t care.

  And the thing is, the spiders didn’t care, either.

  We didn’t want to be sent outside to a yellow chair or to another school.

  We wanted to be near Clair.

  She sat two kids down in the row next to me, and she wore a different color dress every day, and on hot days she wore a sunhat, and her hair was always in pigtails, and she had freckles on her back, and her eyes were blue, and she was super smart.

  And then on the bus ride home something happened to me again.

  It was like a miracle.

  A new song came on the radio, and guess what it was called?

  “Clair”!

  Mrs. C, do you remember that song? The singer guy meets Clair, and the thing is, he keeps saying something happened to him.

  That’s how I felt!

  I felt like something had happened to me!

  So I bought the record and listened to it a million times.

  Lou could tell something had happened to me.

  One day we were playing Monopoly, and he just held the dice.

  “Grape,” he said, “that’s a lame song.”

  “Huh? What song?”

  “That Clair song you keep humming. My mom loves that song. It’s on the radio a thousand times a day. But it’s lame.”

  “I’m not humming any—”

  “Grape, you’re humming it all the time.”

  “Your turn,” I said.

  “No way KISS sings a song like that.”

  Lou rolled double-threes and landed on Marvin Gardens. “I’ll buy it,” he said.

  “That’s two hundred eighty dollars.”

  He handed me the money. “Hey, guess what?” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’re humming it again.”

  Mrs. C, Lou could have really made fun of me about Clair and the song, but Lou is my best friend.

  “You like that Clair girl, don’t you?” he said.

  “I guess.”

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “No.”

  “You have to talk to her.”

  “I can’t think of anything to say.”

  “That’s a miracle.”

  He rolled again and landed on Reading Railroad and paid me twenty-five dollars.

  “Hey, I got an idea,” he said. “Invite her to your birthday.”

  Lou was right! It was twelve days till my birthday!

  Lou was the best friend in the world!

  The next day I saw Clair at the drinking fountain and in the library, and the thing is, I tried to say something and give her the invitation, but whenever I got close my mouth froze.

  Then something happened to me again.

  During math Clair dropped her pencil and it rolled down the aisle and I jumped out of my chair and grabbed it, and sort of talked to her.

  I wanted to say, “Here, Clair, your pencil fell.”

  But I didn’t. I said, “Rolled away, pencil, here.”

  “Oh, thank you, Grape.”

  She knew my name!

  “You’re welcoming. And hey, so, yeah, well, I, um…birthday.”

  I pulled the invitation out of my pocket and set it on her desk.

  The next morning Clair walked right up to me.

  “I would love to go to your birthday party, Grape. Thank you for inviting me.”

  Mrs. C, things were going great! The Eskimo unit was starting, and after that the whale watching trip, and after that my birthday, and after that Tammy was coming back!

  Well, that’s when the trouble started.

  Miss Roof began class by taking roll and tapping her long red nails on the desk, then pacing like one of the lawyers in Movie of the Week, super slow and serious.

  “This afternoon,” she said, “we will begin our Eskimo unit by watching a documentary.”

  So far it didn’t seem so serious.

  “The documentary is true to life, so I’m expecting that we will be mature about it.”

  The spiders started spinning.

  She tilted her head and peeked over her glasses at me.
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br />   The bell rang.

  At lunch, Lou and I wondered what the big deal was.

  “I’ve seen National Geographic,” he said, “like lions ripping zebras apart and all sorts of stuff.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and I saw this show about UFOs, how they landed in Nevada and how sometimes they take over people’s bodies.”

  That’s when Sherman chimed in.

  “You guys,” he said, “she’s talking about an Eskimo mom breastfeeding. My friend Eric saw it last year. And from what Eric said, her whole boob comes out.”

  The projector was ready, and Miss Roof was doing her lawyer pacing.

  “This is the last time I will remind you. You will be mature about what you see.”

  She pulled the screen down and turned off the lights.

  Mrs. C, the thing is, the movie was super interesting. There was this narrator guy who described how a team of dogs pulls a super long sled, and there was a boy and a girl and the mom, and the dad whipped the dogs and they barked and pulled the sled across the ice, and then they stopped and the dad shot this seal, and I thought that was interesting because I didn’t know that Eskimos had guns, then they brought the dead seal over and the dad stabbed its belly and ripped it open and sliced off pieces and threw a few pieces to the dogs but then he handed pieces to the family, and they all ate it raw and a bunch of kids made ewww noises.

  And then the narrator guy said, “With the day’s travel over, let’s follow the family inside the igloo,” and the family crawled through the front little tunnel part and then they sat around and the dad cut more slices of raw meat all pink and blubbery and they all chewed on them, and a bunch of kids made ewww noises again, and then the dad lit a little stove.

  “The family jokes, making each other laugh,” the narrator guy said, “because there is little else to do.”

  Hey, I liked these guys!

  The dad made tea and the mom used it to wipe off a little boy’s face, and the boy cried, and the rest of the family laughed, and then they chewed more raw meat and it was all super interesting, and I started to wonder what the big deal was. I mean, I guess this was a different movie because there wasn’t any baby.

  But the thing is, there was a baby. It was tucked inside the Eskimo mom’s fur coat. The mom kind of leaned over and pulled the baby out.

  Well, I thought, that’s no big deal. The mom’s still got her big fur coat on.

  But she also had a trapdoor.

  A trapdoor for her boob.

  All of a sudden, her whole boob was out.

  The spiders went crazy.

  I bit my sweatshirt.

  The baby sucked on her mom’s boob.

  I bit harder.

  I looked over at Lou.

  His eyes were closed.

  I closed mine, too.

  But then Sherman ruined everything.

  “Well,” he said, “I see….”

  I bit down on my sweatshirt until my teeth hurt and I was sweating, and so what came out wasn’t really a laugh.

  “Ahha-aha-aha-boof!” I said.

  The lights went on and the movie stopped.

  Miss Roof already had the disobedience sheet written up.

  “I expected as much,” she said.

  She ripped the sheet out of the book, walked it over to my desk and slammed it down and told me to go to Principal Kelly’s office.

  Mrs. C, I was scared Principal Kelly would spit-yell at me.

  But I was surprised, because Principal Kelly was super nice about it.

  “Did the boob part get you?” he said.

  “Um…sort of. I mean….” I told him about Sherman.

  He laughed and then crumpled up the sheet and dropped it in a little trash can by his desk.

  “I should have known,” he said. “When Tammy got here, it was a breath of fresh air. Tammy lets her students laugh. Before her, every year I’d get a boob laugher in here.”

  I wanted to tell him how awful Miss Roof was, but I think he knew.

  “Don’t worry, Grape. Tammy will be back soon, and, hey, you have the whale watching trip to look forward to.”

  “And it’s my birthday soon!”

  “Well, happy birthday, Grape.”

  Mrs. C, I was so relieved I almost invited him to my party.

  “And when Tammy returns,” he said, “that sub of yours will go back to being an aide, where she belongs.”

  Now I really wanted to invite him to my birthday party.

  “But, Grape.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t blow it.”

  Mrs. C, I didn’t blow it. I was super good during the Eskimo unit even though we made boring igloos out of sugar cubes, and even though Miss Roof stared at me and tap-tapped her red nails when she handed out the whale watching permission slips.

  “Have your parents read it carefully,” she said. “This is not a field trip to a museum or a theme park, so read it carefully.”

  She made it sound like torture.

  “You might get seasick and they might cancel because of weather conditions, and let’s hope there really are whales, because you never know. And remember, if you misbehave, the captain will return to the dock.”

  The next day I brought my permission slip and I was super good in class, and during recess, I walked right up to Clair.

  “Hey,” I said, “are you excited about the whale watching trip?”

  “Yes, Grape, I am.”

  “Cool, yeah. So am I. I mean, I like whales.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, sure. I mean, they probably have Texas whales where you live, right?”

  Mrs. C, it was the dumbest joke of the year, but she laughed.

  I made Clair laugh!

  It was going to be the two best days of my life!

  First, whale watching!

  The day after, my birthday party!

  I just had to get through afternoon math.

  Mrs. C, afternoon is the worst time for math. Everyone’s sleepy from food or tired from dodgeball, and math is boring, and Miss Roof was super boring, and I was trying really hard not to fall asleep, but a couple of times my head fell forward and I snapped awake.

  The thing is, Miss Roof really didn’t like people falling asleep, so I raised my hand and asked for a hall pass to use the bathroom.

  “Can’t you wait until break?”

  I shook my head.

  “All right, go on. But no wandering. The hall monitors have an eye on you.”

  She was right, but the hall monitors wouldn’t follow me into the bathroom, and since she never asked if I had to go number one or number two, I just sat on the toilet and looked through the high window and I could see turkey vultures circling super high between the clouds, like they weren’t scavenging but just swooping and gliding for the fun of it.

  After a while, I started back.

  Mrs. C, the thing is, the beautiful day was too beautiful. I mean, even though the classroom was a minute away, a minute was enough to watch the clouds and turkey vultures, and to think about Clair and her accent and her back full of freckles.

  I was in my own world, and I was happy.

  But there was another world.

  Lou told me about it later.

  “We were doing silent work and all of a sudden the whole class was filled with that Clair song! I looked over at Clair, and her face was so red, and Miss Roof tapped her nails a bunch of times, then she got up and opened the door and shook her head and kind of hissed at us to stay in our desks.

  “But we didn’t. Everybody got up and looked through the windows.

  “Grape, you were walking in a circle with your arms out and singing that Clair song. And everyone in the classroom was laughing except Clair, and then Miss Roof walked over to you and you bumped right i
nto her!”

  I remember that part.

  It was weird because I had never seen Miss Roof outside the classroom, and so I wondered what she was doing there.

  And then it was even more weird because I wondered what I was doing there.

  Then I looked at the hall pass.

  And then at Miss Roof’s face, and then her long red-nail finger pointing to the classroom.

  “Get in there, NOW!”

  I followed her in and sat down and stared at my fractions, and I didn’t look at anyone, not even Lou, and the thing is, I couldn’t understand why Miss Roof didn’t write out a pink disobedience sheet.

  But at the end of class, I found out why.

  “All right, everyone. Whale watching tomorrow,” she said.

  Everyone clapped.

  “Look over the checklist with your parents. The buses leave at six thirty a.m. sharp.”

  And then, in front of the whole class, she said, “Grape, you stay here. In your seat. Everyone else, have a lovely afternoon.”

  She had never wished anyone a lovely afternoon before.

  I waited in my seat until the classroom was empty.

  Miss Roof leaned against her desk and crossed her arms and stared at me.

  Mrs. C, I really wanted to explain things to her, the way you’re letting me explain things to you. I wanted to tell her about the spiders and how the sky was so pretty and the turkey vultures kind of hypnotized me, and I couldn’t get the Clair song out of my head because I was in love with Clair.

  I bet you would have understood.

  But with Miss Roof, I didn’t have a chance. The way she looked at me was terrible.

  She took the disobedience sheet out and started scribbling, and she scribbled for a long time, then she handed me the note and she said the meanest thing anyone has ever said to me.

  “Here you go, idiot. You’re clearly unfit for a boat trip.”

  “I’m sorry, Grape,” Principal Kelly said, “I can’t do anything this time. I’ll call your parents and let them know.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And I’ll let them know you have to come to school tomorrow and join the fourth-grade class. School policy. Bring a book to read.”

  On the ride home I cried.

  “Is okay, Grape,” my mom said. “Is your birthday party Saturday.”

  “Who wants a stupid whale watching trip anyway?” I said. “I would probably get seasick and puke all over the stupid place.”