Fourth-Grade Disasters (5 page)

She beamed at the fourth graders as the fifth
graders followed Mr. Griffith out of the music room. Mason began to feel uneasy.

“I know there are some wonderful fourth-grade voices here in this room,” Mrs. Morengo said. “So today I want to hear each and every one of you sing. All by yourself.”

Mason wondered if he could fall down in a heap and get sent home, or at least get sent to the health room. But they’d call his mother, and she’d take him to the doctor, and the day would get steadily worse from there.

“Just a few lines of ‘Puff,’ the song you already know so well.”

Mrs. Morengo looked down at her alphabetical list. “Nora Alpers, will you go first?”

The teacher’s gaze swept over the rest of the class. “Don’t worry, everybody is going to get a turn!”

Nora walked slowly to the front of the room. Mrs. Morengo, who could play the piano just fine when she wasn’t hopping around on her conducting box, pounded out the opening chords.

“Puff the Plainfield Dragon,” Nora sang. Her voice was clear and steady, her face without expression. Mason wondered what she was thinking as she
sang. That dragons were made-up creatures? That not a single word of the song was true?

Second in line, Evan Anderson had a terrible voice. How could anyone live to be a fourth grader at Plainfield Elementary without knowing the tune to “Puff the Plainfield Dragon”? It was a relief, in a way, to have such a terrible voice at the start of the alphabet. That way everyone else could think,
At least I’m not as bad as Evan Anderson
.

Mrs. Morengo didn’t say anything critical after Evan finished his verse. She just made a little mark in her notebook, the same way she had done after Nora.

Brody was the fourth to sing, after Emma Averill. Brody belted out “Puff” as if he had a full orchestra behind him and an adoring audience rising to its feet. Brody’s voice was decent, but it wasn’t his voice you noticed: it was his face, lit up with happiness to be singing about Puff! The Plainfield Dragon!

Even though Mrs. Morengo was trying not to react either positively or negatively to anybody’s singing, she did flash Brody a big smile when he finished. It would have been impossible not to.

The rest of the Bs sang, and then the Cs. No one was as awful as Evan or as enthusiastic as Brody.
Mason knew he’d fall asleep that night to the endless repetition of “Puff the Plainfield Dragon.” He’d dream about Puff. He’d wake up in the morning to a chorus of birds chirping about Puff. And Pedro the piano had complained about having to play “Chopsticks”!

Nobody was bothering to listen any longer as their classmates sang, for which Mason was grateful. Instead, they talked quietly among themselves, except for Dunk, whose voice bellowed above the others, ignored for now by Mrs. Morengo.

“Mason Dixon,” Mrs. Morengo finally called out.

It was Mason’s turn.

Like the others before him, he left his spot on the risers and came to stand next to the upright piano.

Hey, Pedro
, he thought, but he was too terrified to be funny, even inside his own head.

From over on the risers, he heard Dunk singing the first line of “I’m a Little Teapot,” as if the tune had just happened to pop into Dunk’s head.

Mason opened his mouth to sing, but instead he started coughing. The strange thing was that he wasn’t faking the cough; it just came hacking out of him of its own accord. But Mrs. Morengo would probably think he was faking, and it would be one more thing she could blame him for.

Now his classmates, once so busily chatting, had fallen silent. He could feel everybody watching in utter silence, listening to Mason Dixon cough.

From over on the risers, he heard an echoing series of coughs from Dunk. The walls of the music room seemed to ring with the sound of coughing.

Mrs. Morengo and Pedro stopped playing.

“Are you all right, Mason?” she asked.

Mason forced himself to nod. “Something must have gotten stuck in my throat,” he said.

Something like his tongue.

“All right, let’s try it again,” she said. “Children, just visit among yourselves,” she instructed the rest of the class, as if that could get them to turn off their suddenly fascinated ears.

Pedro played the opening chords of “Puff” once more. Somehow, Mason managed to get his mouth open and sing, without tipping over like a little teapot. He knew he wasn’t smiling, but he didn’t think he was frowning, either. He tried to look like Nora.

“Every day we shout hooray that Puff lives at our school!”

He had survived and could go back to the risers with the other kids, who had resumed talking once they realized that Mason’s second scene of spectacular humiliation this week had come to its conclusion.

“Mason.” Mrs. Morengo was apparently talking to him. “Once you got going, that was lovely. Have you ever taken voice lessons?”

Voice lessons!

Mason shook his head, too horrified by the question to speak. In second grade his mother had tried to make him take piano lessons, without success, but even she had not dared to suggest voice lessons.

Smiling, Mrs. Morengo wrote a name and number on a piece of paper and handed it to Mason.

“Give this to your parents—this woman is a wonderful voice teacher. One of her students now sings for the Central City Opera.”

Numbly, Mason took the piece of paper and stuck it in his pocket.

Mrs. Morengo gave him another huge smile; his crime of falling off the risers on the first day had apparently been forgiven and forgotten. “Maybe we can coax you into singing a solo for us at one of our concerts!” she said.

Mason meant to shake his head again, but it was frozen motionless on his neck, paralyzed by her words as by the bite of a poisonous serpent.

Or scalding steam from a tipping teapot. Or the fiery breath of a school-mascot dragon.

“Maybe we’ll both get solos!” Brody said as they hurried to Coach Joe’s class together.

Walking past them, Dunk sang a series of
la-la-la
s in a high, quavery, opera-singer voice. Then he tried out a line of “I’m a Little Teapot” in the same exaggerated falsetto.

Brody ignored Dunk. “I think it’s cool that you might take voice lessons. We could both take voice lessons! We could have our own singing group and take it on the road. What would be a good name for our group? How about the Singing Dragons? Or the Dragon Kids? Or—is there some way to combine our names? The Mason Brodys. Or the Brody Masons.”

“I don’t like to sing,” Mason said wearily.

“Oh,” said Brody. “I forgot.”

Right after the Pledge of Allegiance and the morning announcements, Coach Joe called the class into a writing huddle. At least today they didn’t have to sing “Puff” as part of the opening exercises. Maybe the principal had heard the distant sounds of the fourth graders’ Platters practice wafting down the hall to her office.

“How are your stories coming along?” Coach Joe asked the class.

“Good!” a few kids called out.

Coach Joe beamed. “You guys have really stepped up to the plate on this assignment, I can tell. Any questions? Any problems? Anyone stuck on base and can’t get home?”

One girl raised her hand. “Mine’s too short. I don’t know how to make it long.”

“Great question, great question,” Coach Joe said. “Here’s how you make a story longer. And better.”

He stood up and with a bright red marker wrote one word on the dry-erase board behind his stool:
CONFLICT
.

“Your main character has a problem, correct?” Coach Joe went on. “She solves it right away, end of story. So don’t have her solve it right away. Remember the old saying, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again’? That’s good advice for writing our stories. Don’t let your character at
first
succeed. Have her try, and fail. Try, and fail. And
then
, try and succeed.”

Mason thought about Pedro the piano. Pedro could break one of his strings. Then the piano tuner would come and fix it. Pedro could spill something on his keys. Then the music teacher would clean it. Then Pedro could just refuse to play.

He thought about Mason the boy. Mason started out refusing to join the Platters. Then his mother made him join. Mason hid in the second row and lip-synched. Then Dunk shoved him off the riser, and Mrs. Morengo made him stand in the front row next to Brody. Mason had his hideous coughing spasm during his private singing. Then Mrs. Morengo said he should take voice lessons and have a solo in a concert, which would be like singing all by himself in front of Mrs. Morengo and his classmates but a hundred thousand times worse.

Now Mason could—? Now Mason could what?

He leaned over and whispered to Nora, “Does your hundred-dollar bill have a problem?”

“No,” she whispered back. “You can’t have a problem unless you have thoughts and feelings. Well, I
guess you could
have
a problem, but you wouldn’t know you did, so you wouldn’t care.”

That was one of the many ways Mason was different from a hundred-dollar bill.

Mason knew he had a problem.

And Mason cared.

Saturday morning, Mason and Dog left early for a walk. On school days, it was all Mason could do to force himself out of bed, but on weekend mornings he found himself wide awake while his parents were still sleeping. And these days, the instant he was awake, Dog was awake, too.

That was one of the many satisfying things about Dog.

There was no visible activity yet at Brody’s house. Mason knew that Brody had a soccer game later that morning and an afternoon playdate with his fourth-best friend, Alastair. Mason’s mother had mentioned something at dinner last night about taking Mason to see a Japanese puppet version of
Peter and the Wolf
.

Mason didn’t think he could face Japanese puppets after a whole week of being in the Plainfield Platters. He needed an alternative plan, and he knew his mom wouldn’t think watching cartoons with Dog counted.

What Mason really needed was a second-best friend of his own.

Dog stopped to pee. Mason never ceased to be impressed at how Dog could balance so easily on his two left legs while lifting his only right leg. This was another of the many satisfying things about Dog.

Mason could probably share one of Brody’s other friends, the way they shared Dog. Sometimes Mason did join Brody and Sheng or Julio when they went to a movie, or bowling.

Still, if Mason had to have a second-best friend, the person he liked best, after Brody, was Nora. Nora was sensible. She had good ideas. Once last summer she had even come over to Mason’s house and helped Mason and Brody give Dog a bath.

Or, rather, Mason and Brody had helped Nora give Dog a bath.

Or, rather, Brody had helped Nora give Dog a bath.

Should Mason call Nora on the telephone? What
would he say?
Do you want to hang out this afternoon so I won’t have to go with my parents to see a Japanese puppet version of
Peter and the Wolf
?

Actually, when he tried out the line in his head, it sounded pretty good.

Or he could say:
Do you want to hang out with Dog and me for a while?

That sounded pretty good, too.

Breakfast was plain Cheerios and milk for Mason, tofu-and-red-pepper scramble for his parents. Mason hadn’t given the piece of paper with the voice teacher’s name and number to his parents. He had stuck it at the bottom of a pile of papers on his desk in his bedroom. It wasn’t as if Mrs. Morengo were going to call to talk to his parents about it.

Or at least he desperately hoped that she wasn’t.

After breakfast, Mason took the phone and the Plainfield Elementary directory up to his room. Dog watched him approvingly as he dialed Nora’s number.

“Hi, Nora. It’s Mason,” he said when she answered. “Mason Dixon. From school.”

“You’re the only Mason Dixon I know,” Nora said. “So you didn’t have to say ‘from school.’ ”