Jumping the Scratch

by Sarah Weeks

  “We’re just thrilled that you could come!” she gushed. “I can’t begin to tell you how honored we are to have you as our guest.”

  Arthur smiled and said something back, but it was too soft for me to hear. Miss Miller took his coat and hung it in her special closet. Then her red mouth started going again, telling Arthur how excited she was and squeezing his arm the whole time she was talking. His cheeks were getting pink, as if the pressure of her fingers were rerouting all the blood up into his face. The more she talked, the pinker he got. Finally she stopped to catch her breath, and I realized I’d been holding mine the whole time. Even in those high-heeled shoes of hers, she was quite a bit shorter than he was, but the way she was looking up at him, it seemed like any second she might leap up and swallow him whole.

  “It’s very nice to meet you all,” Arthur said, turning his attention and his pink face to us. “And I’m grateful to the PTA for helping to bring me here to Pine Tree Elementary.”

  His voice was soft and scratchy, and he seemed kind of nervous. I’d have been nervous too, standing that close to Miss Miller. I leaned back in my chair and slid my thumbs over my ears. Open closed, open closed. Word slaw. I must have shut my eyes.

  “James Reardon!” Miss Miller shouted, clapping her hands right next to my head, startling me so badly, I actually jumped up out of my seat, banging my knee painfully against the sharp edge of the desk. “Have you heard one word that’s been said?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I heard everything,” I lied, rubbing my knee as I felt the color rise hot in my own cheeks.

  “Good,” she said. “Then you won’t mind repeating it for us, will you?”

  She stared bug-eyed at me, waiting for my response.

  “Um…you were saying that you’re so thrilled that Arthur, um, that it’s an honor that Arthur—” I began.

  “Excuse me,” Miss Miller said, her lips quivering with emotion. “Whom, may I ask, are you referring to as Arthur?”

  I slowly raised my arm and pointed at Arthur, who was standing right there next to her, looking pinker and more uncomfortable than ever.

  The whole class erupted in raucous laughter.

  “Who would like to explain to James his embarrassing mistake? Who would like to tell him who our guest this morning really is?” Miss Miller said, looking around. “Yes, Mary Lynne?”

  Of course it would be Mary Lynne. Miss Miller’s class pet stood up, her round face contorted in a junior version of the same contempt Miss Miller was just barely managing to contain herself. She was dressed in her Sunday best, her white-blond hair curled in ringlets and pulled back with a shiny blue ribbon.

  “Our guest this morning is Mr. Anthony Stone,” she said. “He is a published author who lives in Traverse City, and he has come to talk to all the fifth grades about how to become better writers.”

  “Thank you, dear,” said Miss Miller, before turning back to me. “Author, not Arthur,” she said. “Mr. Stone is our visiting author.”

  I wanted to cry, or scream, or beat my fists against the wall, I was so humiliated. I wanted to run out the door and keep on running, all the way back to Battle Creek. Instead I sat there pretending not to care, tasting butterscotch, and feeling the button pressing into my cheek. It had left a mark. Four round, raised bumps inside a perfect little pink circle. A reminder that no matter what, you don’t ever let anybody know how you feel.

  10

  AFTER THE LAUGHTER AND JOKING DIED DOWN, WE were told to go over to the meeting rug and sit cross-legged with clipboards and pencils in our laps. I took my usual spot in the corner as far away from everyone else as I could get and still be technically on the rug. I hated rug time. People sat so close, you could smell the soap on their skin and whether or not they’d brushed their teeth that morning. Knees and elbows were always bumping into me, and I worried about the rug’s not being clean.

  Audrey Krouch plopped down next to me in her stiff dress, the back of her neck streaked with red where she’d been scratching herself. Arthur—I never called him that out loud again, but he will always be Arthur to me—stood uncomfortably before us and started to teach.

  “Does anybody know what descriptive writing is?” he began.

  His voice was so soft, it was hard to understand what he was saying unless you kept your eyes on his lips the whole time he was talking.

  Mary Lynne raised her hand with the usual accompanying sharp gasp to indicate how eager she was to be called on.

  “Descriptive writing is writing that describes something,” she said, flashing a triumphant smile first at Arthur and then at Miss Miller, who was sitting on a chair at the edge of the rug with her own pencil poised over a clipboard, nodding approvingly.

  “Show-off,” Audrey muttered under her breath. Then she leaned closer to me and whispered, “She’s got a big wart on her finger. Did you ever see it? Disgusting.”

  “Let’s start with some examples,” Arthur said.

  He reached into his bag and pulled out a stack of books, which he placed on the corner of Miss Miller’s desk. Slips of pink paper stuck out from between the pages like little tongues marking the passages he’d chosen to read to us. I hated read aloud. Miss Miller always picked boring books, and she’d make up squeaky little voices for each character in the story, which made listening to her read unbearable. I leaned forward, putting my elbows on my knees and resting my chin on my fists, thumbs out and ready to slip over my ears the minute I needed to escape.

  “Anybody here ever read Old Yeller?” Arthur asked.

  I had—twice, actually—but I didn’t raise my hand. I never did.

  Arthur opened the book to one of the paper tongues near the beginning and began to read a passage describing the boy, Travis, building a split-rail fence. It wasn’t the part I would have chosen to read. The best part of the book comes later, after Yeller fights with the mad wolf and gets rabies, but at least Arthur’s voice didn’t irritate me the way Miss Miller’s did. He read everything in a normal tone, with no squeaky character voices.

  “I’ve never built a fence in my life,” he said when he had finished reading and laid the book down, “but I almost feel as though I could after reading that, don’t you?”

  The next book he read from was another one of my favorites, My Side of the Mountain. It’s all about this boy, Sam, who goes off to live in the woods on his own. The part he read was a description of how Sam scrapes the flesh off a deer hide and chews and rubs it to make it soft and pliable enough to serve as a door for the hollowed-out tree he lives in.

  Mary Lynne raised her hand right in the middle of it and waved it around so much, Arthur had no choice but to stop reading and call on her.

  “Wouldn’t it be dangerous to chew on an animal’s skin without cooking it first?” she asked. “My mother says you can die from touching raw chicken.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Arthur with a little smile. “I’ve read this book a dozen times, and Sam always comes through it just fine.”

  Finally, he read us a chapter from a book that he had written himself called Losing Perfect. It was about a kid who gets up one morning and comes downstairs to find that there’s nobody home. At first he thinks his parents are probably out taking a walk or something, but when he goes to look for them, he finds that all the other houses in the neighborhood are empty too. There are no kids riding bikes in the street, no dogs in the yards, or birds in the trees. There’s nobody left in the world but him.

  As Arthur read to us, his soft voice wrapped itself around each word like the tissue paper we used and reused each year to wrap up the Christmas ornaments and keep them from bumping against each other in the boxes when we put them away at the end of the season. We had always made such a big deal out of Christmas in Battle Creek. It was my favorite time of year. Considering everything that had happened that year, though, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when my mother told me we weren’t going to have a tree at Wondrous Acres.

  “What have we got to cele
brate?” she said.

  Maybe if I had begged her for a tree instead of just sulking about it, she might have changed her mind. We would have gone out together and picked out a nice big fat one and brought it home strapped to the roof of the car the way we always had before. She would have made hot chocolate and sugar cookies shaped like bells and holly leaves, and we would have carefully unwrapped all the ornaments and hung them one by one on the tree. If only we’d had a tree of our own to decorate, things would have been different. I wouldn’t have needed to go to Old Gray’s office on Christmas Eve, and if I hadn’t gone there—But there was no point in going down this road again. It was too late to change what had happened. The sudden sweet taste of butterscotch flooding my mouth, as I sat there on the crowded meeting rug that day while Arthur read to us, was the only reminder I needed that school was not a safe place to be thinking about this stuff and feeling sorry for myself.

  I let Arthur’s voice pull me out of my own head and back into his story, and after a while I found that I no longer needed to watch his lips in order to be able to understand what he was saying. I closed my eyes and began to rock back and forth to the rhythm of the words, images from the book taking shape behind my eyelids. Suddenly a hissing noise hit my ears like spit on a hot iron, and I opened my eyes to find Miss Miller glaring down at me, fiercely mouthing something with her terrible red lips.

  “Ssssit up!” she hissed. “This instant!”

  I straightened up with a jerk, accidentally bumping knees hard with Audrey. Startled, I flinched instinctively, rocked over onto one hip, and shot my legs out to the side, catching her just under the ribs with my feet. She yelped and scooted quickly out of reach.

  “Get off me!” I shouted. “Get away!”

  Everybody turned around to stare and snicker. Miss Miller pressed her lips together and shook her head.

  “As you can see, Mr. Stone, some of us are unable to behave properly when there’s a guest in the room,” she said. Then she turned to me. “Apologize to Mr. Stone for your rudeness, please.”

  “It wasn’t his fault, Miss Miller,” Audrey interrupted quickly. “It was mine. I squished his fingers by accident with my shoe. That’s why he yelled like that. He couldn’t help it.”

  I didn’t know what to say, I was so surprised. Her foot hadn’t been anywhere near my fingers.

  “Fine. Then you can both apologize to Mr. Stone for the interruption,” Miss Miller said.

  “We’re sorry,” said Audrey quickly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.” And I was. Sorry I had kicked Audrey, sorry I had interrupted Arthur’s reading, sorry I was so pathetic that a girl had to come to my rescue.

  Arthur closed the book he’d been reading and looked at me. “Okay,” he said. “It’s your turn.”

  11

  I BRACED MYSELF, FIGURING HE WAS GOING TO MAKE me read something out loud in front of everyone. Miss Miller did that all the time. Made us stand up in front of the class and recite poems or do math problems on the board. Other kids didn’t seem to mind it, Mary Lynne loved it, but for me it was excruciating to be up there in front of everyone, chalk squeaking in my sweaty hand, tripping over my own thoughts and words, terrified that somehow, as I stood there in the spotlight, they would be able to see right through me all the way to the secret I was desperately trying to hide. As it turned out, though, Arthur wasn’t talking to me in particular; he was talking to the entire class.

  “I’d like you each to try writing a description of your own now,” he said.

  A couple of kids near me groaned, but I exhaled and gave silent thanks.

  “I know,” Arthur said. “It sounds hard. But trust me, it’s not really.”

  “What would you like us to describe, Mr. Stone?” asked Miss Miller.

  “I was thinking we’d start with a place,” he said, “a place you have a good feeling about. It could be somewhere you went on vacation with your family, or maybe it’s your grandmother’s kitchen. It doesn’t matter where it is, as long as it’s special to you.”

  Pencils began scratching away before Arthur had even finished telling us what he wanted us to do.

  “Hang on,” said Arthur. “Before you start writing, I want to let you in on a little secret.”

  He went to the board and wrote:

  SIGHT

  SOUND

  SMELL

  TASTE

  TOUCH

  Mary Lynne gasped and shot her hand up into the air, but Arthur’s back was to the class as he wrote on the board, so he couldn’t see her. Finally, unable to contain herself, she blurted out, “I know! I know! Those are the five senses.”

  “Yes,” Arthur said, putting down the chalk and turning around to face us again. “And they are your five best friends when it comes to descriptive writing. If you’re writing about your grandmother’s kitchen, don’t just tell us what it looks like; use some of your other senses too. Tell us what it smells like when you walk into the room or what the countertop feels like when you run your hand over it. What sound do her shoes make when she walks across the floor to hug you hello? Using as many of your senses as you can will help make your writing come alive.”

  He gave us ten minutes to write about our special place. I spent the whole time thinking about my room back in Battle Creek.

  I thought about lying in my bed in the dark, talking to Mister. In summertime at night with the windows open it smelled like…cut grass and charcoal from the barbecue grill. Some of the older boys from the neighborhood called out to each other, laughing as they played Capture the Flag in the moonlight. I heard the sound of my parents’ voices downstairs, talking back and forth in the kitchen, water running, and the clinking of dinner dishes being washed. The warm breeze made the curtains pouf out like those skirts ballerinas wear, and crickets made the air buzz. I’d hold my fingers against Mister’s throat and feel him purring steadily like the old treadle sewing machine my mother kept up in the attic. I ticked off the senses on my fingers: one, two, three, four. Which one had I left out? Oh, right: taste. If a room could taste of something, what would mine have tasted of? Chocolate pudding and cinnamon toast, blue raspberry ice pops from the Good Humor truck, and my mother’s lipsticky good-night kisses when she and my father got dressed up and went out to cocktail parties and special anniversary dinners together.

  “Okay. Time’s up. Anybody want to volunteer to read what they wrote?” Arthur asked, looking out expectantly over the class sitting before him on the floor.

  Mary Lynne was the only one with her hand up.

  “How about someone we haven’t heard from yet this morning?” Arthur said, looking around.

  Audrey Krouch pulled at her collar and tentatively raised her hand. She had written a description of riding in her father’s car. She said that he always let her sit in the front and pick out the radio stations, and that she liked to look at the maps he kept folded up under the front seat. She said she especially liked the way it smelled like her father inside the car when you first got in. I thought it was pretty good, what she wrote, but Larry made a rude comment about how her dad must have bad BO to be able to stink up a whole car that way, and Miss Miller gave him the big fisheye for a change.

  A few other kids read, and finally Arthur called on Mary Lynne, who looked as if she might explode if she didn’t get to go next. Hers was lame. She had tried to suck up by using Arthur’s idea of writing about her grandmother’s kitchen, but she said the countertop felt like Formica and it sounded like shoes on the floor when her grandma ran over to hug her hello. I looked over at Audrey to see if she was having the same reaction I was, but she was still busy scowling at Larry Baywood for what he’d said about her dad’s having BO.

  No matter how bad any of the descriptions were, after each person read, Arthur said something encouraging. “Nice work.” “Good effort.” “Interesting choice.”

  Once they realized they weren’t going to get slammed even if what they wrote stank, they all wanted to “share,” as Miss Miller i
nsisted on calling it. Larry Baywood hammed it up when he read his, adding stuff for laughs that you could tell he hadn’t really written down on the page. Miss Miller read her description too. She wrote about the classroom’s being her favorite place and how she felt that the kids were like beautiful flowers growing in her garden. Arthur said he thought that was “a very nice image.” I wondered what kind of flower Miss Miller imagined I was.

  When everybody else had read, Arthur looked at me.

  “What about it, James?” he said.

  I was surprised when he called me by name. Then I realized he must have remembered Miss Miller had called me James when she yelled at me earlier. I shook my head no, and Arthur nodded as if to say it was okay with him if I didn’t want to read, but Miss Miller stepped in.

  “Mr. Stone has asked you to read,” she said.

  I could have done what Larry did, made up things that I hadn’t actually written down. I could have told about the crickets and the curtains and the way it felt to lie there in the dark with Mister in my old room, but instead I shook my head again.

  “I don’t have anything,” I said.

  Miss Miller pursed her lips and rolled her eyes. “Give me your paper, James,” she said, holding out her hand. I noticed for the first time that the polish on her sharp nails was the same blood red as her lips.

  I pressed the heel of my hand down on the clip at the top of my board, pulled out the blank sheet of paper, and handed it to her. She looked at it, front and back.

  “I do apologize, Mr. Stone,” she said.

  “No apology necessary,” Arthur told her. “A blank page is often a sign of something promising to come.”

  Miss Miller laughed sharply. “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” she said as she crumpled my paper into a tight ball and threw it into the trash basket beside her desk.

  12