Gooney Bird on the Map (7 page)

"Where's mine?" called Beanie.

"Here, Chelsea, two more for you!" Gooney went to Chelsea's desk and handed her Colorado and Connecticut.

"EXCUSE ME?" Barry Tuckerman stood up and put his hands on his hips. Gooney Bird ignored him.

"And Keiko? You get Kansas."

"Thank you," Keiko replied politely, as she took the wooden piece shaped like Kansas. "It goes very nicely with Kentucky."

"I WANT ONE!" Ben bellowed.

"Me too!" Beanie said angrily.

"I'm going to tell on you, Gooney Bird!" Barry announced loudly.

"Tell what?" Gooney Bird asked.

"That you cheated! You could have used the
world
puzzle! I could have been, ah, Belgium! Or Bolivia!"

"We don't even
have
a world puzzle, Barry," Chelsea pointed out.

"Well. We
should
" Barry muttered. "I'm gonna complain to the principal. I could be Bulgaria!"

"What is Mr. Leroy's first name, Mrs. Pidgeon?" Gooney Bird asked.

The teacher thought for a moment, trying to remember. "John," she said.

"Oh," said Gooney Bird. "What a shame. No state for him, either. Well, let's have a moment of silence in his honor."

"Before we go outside and work again on our map project," Mrs. Pidgeon directed, "let's all open our dictionaries and look up the word
gloating.
." She wrote the word on the board.

"Us too? Me and Beanie and Ben? Even though we didn't get any states?" Barry asked.

"I would say especially you three," Mrs. Pidgeon told him.

All of the second-graders took their dictionaries out of their desks and began to turn the pages. Keiko, who was a very fast reader, raised her hand almost immediately.

"Let's wait until we've all read it silently," Mrs. Pidgeon said. She sat at her desk and watched all the second-graders with their heads bent over their dictionaries. After a moment she stood up.

"All right," she said. "Now let's think about
gloating.
It means to feel pretty smug because you're better off than someone else. Maybe you've accomplished something, or you have something, that another person hasn't. And the other person feels bad. Who can think of an example of that?"

Barry shot his hand into the air. "Everybody got a state except me and Beanie and Ben! And Malcolm got about a hundred!"

"Eight," Malcolm said. "I got eight."

"So he was gloating," Barry pointed out. "And Gooney Bird was, too! And she did it on purpose!"

Mrs. Pidgeon looked at Gooney Bird. She tilted her head in a questioning way, and waited.

"It's true," Gooney Bird said. "I did it on purpose. It made you feel bad, didn't it?"

Barry nodded.

"I almost cried," Beanie said. "I bit my lip really hard to keep from crying."

"I'm sorry. It was mean of me. I was getting even," Gooney Bird explained.

"For what?" Ben asked.

"Think back," Mrs. Pidgeon said. "Was there a time, not very long ago, when you and Barry and Beanie realized you had something that the rest of us didn't have? And we all felt pretty sorry for ourselves?"

"No. Never," Ben replied. "We never—"

"Yes, we did, Ben," Beanie interrupted. "It was about our vacations."

"Yes. We gloated," Barry pointed out.

"Gloat, gloat, gloat," Beanie said.

"Oh," Ben said. "I get it."

The class sat silently for a moment. Then Mrs. Pidegon said, "All right. Let's get ready to work some more on our snow map. I want you all to do some research and find an interesting, little-known fact about your state."

"Can we use the library?" asked Malcolm.

"Of course. That's the best place for research."

"And the computers?" asked Keiko.

"Sure."

"Can I use my lunch box?" asked Tyrone.

All of the children admired Tyrone's lunch box, the one with the map of the United States on it, and a star on each state. Inside each star was the name of a famous person who had been born in that state.

"Hey, Tricia: Dolly Parton was born in Tennessee," Tyrone pointed out. "I don't even need to go look. I got my lunch box memorized."

Mrs. Pidgeon gave that some thought. "You know what?" she said. "I think we should concentrate on history or geography, not celebrities."

"Dolly Parton was born in 1946," Tyrone pointed out. "That's history."

"
Ancient history!
" Tricia added.

"Nonetheless. Let's not use the lunch box. That would make things too easy. Let's do some real research and find out little-known facts about our states."

"Beyoncé was born in Texas," Tyrone whispered loudly to Tricia. Mrs. Pidgeon gave him a what-did-I-just-say look, and he raised his arms as if he were surrendering. "Busted," he said, with a grin. "Okay. No lunch box."

"Moment of silence," said Mrs. Pidgeon. "Then we'll get to work."

The second-graders all bowed their heads briefly. All but Beanie, Barry, and Ben. "What about
us?
" they asked angrily. What are
we
supposed to do?"

"Gooney Bird?" said Mrs. Pidgeon.

"Let me think," said Gooney Bird. She arranged her tiara on her head once again. "Okay," she said, after a moment. I have an idea."

The librarian, Mrs. Clancy, was happy to have the second-graders visit the library for their map project. She showed them the books about the United States, and where to find the encyclopedia, and she got some of them started on the computers. Nicholas and Malcolm sat at the same table with the encyclopedia volumes marked N and M.

"Remember," Mrs. Pidgeon instructed them. "One little-known fact! Nothing obvious! We want to surprise people! Are you all finding your states?"

The children nodded.

"Here's New Jersey!" Nicholas said loudly, looking at his volume with a grin. Then, after a minute, turning the pages, he added, "North Dakota!"

"Maine!" Malcolm announced, and then: "Massachusetts! Missouri!"

All around the large library room, children were finding their states.

"I Googled California!" Chelsea called out from her computer desk. "And there's a million different things to look at!"

Beanie, Ben, and Barry sat silently near an exhibit of igloos constructed from sugar cubes. They didn't have any research to do. They had no states. But they didn't look upset anymore. Their job was different. And for now they had to wait.

After a few minutes, Gooney Bird made her way over to them and sat down. "I got my little-known fact about Georgia.

Here—I've written it down for you," she told them, and handed them her paper.

Barry looked at what she had written. Then he grinned. "Okay," he said. "Got it."

Next, Tyrone came to the corner of the library where the three Bs were sitting. "I had Texas," he said. "Here." He gave his paper to Beanie. Barry and Ben looked over Beanie's shoulder and they read the Texas little-known fact together. Then they whispered back and forth, and finally they high-fived each other and said, "YES!"

"We got the best job," Beanie said happily to the other two
B
s.

Barry nodded in agreement. Ben whispered, "Maybe. But let's not gloat."

 

It took several days for the children to prepare their material and to memorize their parts. They had to learn, too, how to locate their states. Only the outline of the USA was marked on their map. Some states, like Florida and Texas and California, were easy to find. So was Hawaii. But North Carolina? Nebraska? Nicholas had to work hard on those, and his other N states. And Malcolm, though he had no trouble with Maine or Massachusetts, struggled with others of his
M
s: Missouri, Minnesota, and the others.

They didn't rehearse outdoors, with the real map, because they didn't want the other classrooms to see them. They wanted the event to be a surprise. But they practiced and practiced in the classroom. Mrs. Pidgeon pulled down the wall map and one by one each child went to the front of the room, announced a state, located it on the map, and recited a little-known fact in a loud clear voice.

Mrs. Pidgeon did, too. She had Pennsylvania.

The three
Bs,
Barry and Beanie and Ben, stood to the side, near the classroom door, and presented
their
part during the rehearsals.

"We have to work harder than everybody else," Barry announced one afternoon when they were all taking a break, "because we have to do every state. Our role is
huge.
"

"No gloating, remember?" Malcolm reminded him.

"I wasn't gloating. I was just saying."

Mrs. Pidgeon interrupted them. "Everyone's doing a great job, guys," she said. "I'd say we're just about perfect. And tomorrow's the big day! Last day of school before vacation! The whole school will be gathered out on the playground to watch our performance."

"I'm a little bit nervous," Felicia Ann confessed.

"Think of it as
excited
" Gooney Bird told her. "We're
all
excited."

"I wish we had costumes," Chelsea said with a sigh.

"Costumes are for entertainment," Mrs. Pidgeon pointed out, "like a circus, or a pageant. This is more serious. This is an educational event."

"But hats are always good," Gooney Bird said. "I'm going to wear a very spectacular hat. Maybe you could, too, Chelsea? Maybe
everyone
could."

All of the second-graders nodded. They liked that idea.

"But right now," Gooney Bird added, "I need to go see Mrs. Clancy at the library. So I'm putting on my white gloves." She went to her cubby.

"But we see Mrs. Clancy all the time! You don't need white gloves to see the librarian!" Tricia said, laughing.

But Gooney Bird was already smoothing her gloves over her fingers. "This is an official call," she said. "We need her help with AV."

"That's Arizona and Virginia, right?" Malcolm said.

"Good guess, Malcolm," Gooney Bird told him. "but no. It's audio-visual. Librarians are AV experts. And I think the three
B
s are going to need a microphone tomorrow.

"Be right back!" she said, and went off to the library with the white gloves on her hands.

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon. The huge ice map glistened, its oceans sparkling and blue. The black painted line around the United States was firm and wide, and the tiny green plastic palm tree, one frond missing, stood slightly tilted on a small bump that was meant to be part of Hawaii. The chopstick flagpoles that had once decorated Vermont, Florida, and Hawaii had been removed.

Bruno was sprawled, snoring, a little north of Oregon and Washington. "Bruno's in Alaska," Tricia whispered to Nicholas.

A thick orange electrical cord ran all the way from the slightly opened window of the school office, and was providing the power to an amplifier that looked like a black suitcase set against a snowbank. From the top of the amplifier, another cord stretched to a microphone that was standing beside the low mound of packed snow that the children had named Antarctica. Barry, Beanie, and Ben, wearing matching knitted ski hats, were behind the microphone, looking nervous.

"Testing, testing," Barry said into the mike, following Mrs. Clancy's instructions. "One, two, three, four..."

The microphone screeched, and the librarian adjusted the volume knob on the amplifier until the piercing screech disappeared. "All right," she said at last. "I think we're ready."

Watertower Elementary School was very small. There was only one class for each grade, from kindergarten through sixth. All eighty-seven students were gathered in the playground, facing the large map, with Mrs. Pidgeon's class in the front of the crowd. The second-graders were wiggling with nervousness and excitement.