Mr. Terupt Falls Again (17 page)

MR. TERUPT grabs both boys by their scruffs and marches them out into the hall
.

FADE OUT
.

“I
t’s time for you to read this,” Mr. T said, handing me a book with a red cover. “I know you’ll relate to some of it.”

The book was
Wringer
by Jerry Spinelli. Mr. T gave it to me after he gave us the making-connections assignment. I held the book, turning it over in my hands, thinking this was my chance
not
to do a major assignment so Mr. T would fail me. But deep down I knew I wasn’t failing this year—no matter what. I was upset about that, but even more upset to think about being forced to attend Riverway next year. I looked closer at the cover of the book Mr. T had selected for me. Underneath the title I found the words
Not All Birthdays Are Welcome
. Just like not all school graduations are welcome, I thought. That was the first of my many connections with this great story.

Palmer LaRue was the main character in
Wringer
and
he was someone I understood completely. I shared Palmer’s dilemma. I knew exactly how he felt. Palmer felt pressure to be what his father wanted, even though that wasn’t anything he desired. And Palmer wasn’t able to talk to his father. Boy, did that feel familiar. I really enjoyed reading the book because of my connection with Palmer, and I was glad to see Palmer’s situation turn out okay in the end, but my real-life problem was still there after I finished the last page. It left me feeling miserable and short-fused.

The stupid heat lamp for our bog didn’t turn off one night. I don’t know why, but the result was two overheated and dead lizards. I noticed them during Readers’ Workshop when I was returning
Wringer
to the book area. No one paid more attention to those lizards than Jeffrey—not even Luke, and he bought them. Naturally, Jeffrey had a strong emotional reaction to discovering the lizards. He took it out on me because I was the one back there. If it had been Anna, Lexie, Luke, or anyone else standing next to the bog, Jeffrey would have jumped all over them, too. But it was me—short-fused and miserable.

Jeffrey blamed me. He wanted to know what I had done to the lizards, like I had killed them or something. I couldn’t stay quiet about his getting to wrestle with Mr. T, about his being the pet, any longer. It went down fast, and before I even realized it, I shoved Jeffrey and then we were on the ground. I grabbed one of his legs and he draped across my back. That was about as far as it got before Mr. T started pulling us apart.

“That’s it! Let’s go, you two.” He grabbed both of us by
our shirt collars and marched us out into the hall. There was a tone in his voice and strength in his grip that made us listen. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “Huh?”

Neither one of us said a word. We kept staring at the ground.

“Peter, I’m going to have to get you to wrestling with Jeffrey so you can get some of your bottled-up energy out—in a more constructive way!”

Jeffrey and I glanced at each other while keeping our heads low. We both smiled once we made eye contact. Then Luke came into the hall.

“Mr. Terupt, I’m sorry to interrupt your conference, but Jackson and Lincoln are dead. It appears the timer malfunctioned and our heat lamp never turned off last night. They were overheated.”

Jeffrey mouthed the words “I’m sorry” to me as Luke was telling Mr. T the news. I did the same back. Then we put our arms around each other and walked back into the classroom, leaving Luke and Mr. T in the hall.

A
nniversaries. They come around every year for special events or dates. For anything that you feel the need to remember, even if you wish you could forget it. For me, there was an anniversary this month. One year ago Terupt was dropped by Peter’s snowball. I’m sure that’s why Peter was on edge. He was remembering that day, too. I should have thought about that before I blamed him for the lizards. But so much was different since that wish-you-could-forget-it day. When you stop to think about it, it’s pretty amazing how much can happen and change in the course of a year.

One year ago I was living in a silent house. Now I had a family. A year ago Terupt went from lying in the snow to lying in a coma, and now he was teaching me at wrestling practice. Ms. Newberry went from quiet tears in the hospital waiting room to crying in Terupt’s arms after saying yes to
his proposal. In a short time there would be another date to mark as an anniversary, and this would be one everyone wanted to remember.

It was decided by all of us, minus Terupt and Ms. Newberry, that a perfect wedding gift would be a bookcase. Hard to argue against that idea when they’re both teachers and love books almost as much as Jessica. We also agreed that the gift would be most special if we were the ones to design and build it. That was where I came in.

Dad and I were put in charge of making the bookcase. That decision made good sense too, since my dad already had all the tools we needed. I thought of Mom’s music box and wanted to put as much love into making the bookcase as Dad had put into that. One year ago my dad and I never spoke. Now we had a project that put us together in his workshop for hours.

We took all sorts of measurements and made the necessary crosscuts. We ripped and notched some boards. We prepared the wood by giving it a smooth sanding and staining. Then we built the bookcase. Dad made it very sturdy by securing the boards with glue and screws. It could have held an elephant. Last, we took designs that Anna’s and Danielle’s mothers had sketched. We taped the images to the sides of the bookcase and wood-burned them in. The bookcase came out beautiful.

Working with my dad was great. He taught me a lot, and I liked spending all that time with him. It also gave us the chance to have an important talk one night.

“Jeffrey, your mother and I have been discussing something.”
Dad stopped staining and looked over at me. I kept my head down and let him keep talking. “After you took your mother to the center, she took me. She wanted me to meet Asher. Right away we knew that we wanted to be the ones to adopt the little guy.” Dad put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ve helped your mother and me see a lot of things. I don’t want you to think that we’re trying to replace you … or Michael. We only have Asher because of you.” Dad started to choke up. I heard it in his voice. He turned back to his board.

“I want us to adopt him too,” I said. “I’ve hoped for that all along. I think Michael helped me find Asher. It was a miracle that was supposed to happen.”

Dad nodded. “I like that thought,” he said.

Working alongside Dad helped the two of us grow closer. The bookcase turned out just the way I had hoped.

Of course, the other thing that helped us get to know each other again was wrestling. Peter thought my wrestling was all about Terupt. While he was my coach, and I did get to spend extra time with him, I never thought about it as being the “teacher’s pet” until Peter exploded. When he shoved me I grabbed the back of his head and pulled him down to the ground. If he wanted to blame me for my wrestling then I was going to show him some of my moves. I didn’t want to fight Peter. I wasn’t going to punch him. Instead, I wrestled him. I stuffed his head under my belly and lay across his back. He had to put his hands on the ground in order to keep his face from running across the carpet, so he couldn’t try punching me either. I had him pinned like
that until Terupt collared us. Terupt escorted us out into the hall and solved our problem without even knowing it. He suggested Peter also needed to attend wrestling. We left the classroom angry with each other and reentered only moments later as buddies again.

Closer to the end of the day, when I had a chance to talk to Terupt alone, I told him why Peter had exploded and what he had said. I told Terupt that I thought Luke and the other boys also needed to be invited to wrestling so they didn’t feel left out. He agreed and said he’d take care of it. We both smiled and chuckled. I wonder if he was laughing about the same thought—Luke wrestling. This was going to be interesting.

F
inding dead animals is not a fun thing. I had the sad experience one day back in the fall when I visited Danielle on the farm and we walked the pastures with Charlie. I didn’t know what we were looking for, but Danielle and Charlie kept peering off into the distance. Well, we found something, all right. We ended up stumbling upon a newborn calf that hadn’t survived the night.

“Aww,” I whimpered.

“Probably a stillborn,” Charlie said. “Poor mother.”

The mama cow was standing near her baby, bellowing. She was nudging the calf with her nose, trying to get it to stand up. I remember thinking about how much that mother wanted her baby and how there was no dad nearby. It was sad.

So now I had a little experience with discovering a dead animal. Luke did not. After Peter and Jeffrey got into their
surprise scuffle, and after Mr. Terupt had taken them into the hall, Luke walked over to the tank and found his two lifeless lizards. You could tell he was upset, not crying upset but staring-into-the-tank-and-not-saying-anything upset. The rest of us stayed back and watched him, none of us knowing what to say or do. After a few minutes Luke walked out of the room, and then Peter and Jeffrey came back in all buddy-buddy. That was bizarre, since they had just been in a fight, but it wasn’t surprising, because Mr. Terupt knows how to fix things. Next Luke came back in with Mr. Terupt and they walked over to the tank.

“Luke, I’m sorry,” Mr. Terupt said, putting his hand on Luke’s back. “I’m not sure what happened.”

“They were cooked,” Luke said.

“I think we should dedicate our morning to honoring Lincoln and Jackson,” Mr. Terupt said. “We’ll give them a funeral service.”

Luke turned and looked at Mr. Terupt. “Okay,” he said.

So that was what we did. Mr. Terupt sent me and Danielle to the library for newspapers. The task was a cinch. Without Peter, there weren’t any crazy towers or runaway carts. I couldn’t even imagine what nutty idea he would have come up with this time. The papers came back intact and ready for use.

Danielle and I passed the newspapers out to our classmates and everyone began working. We used the papers to find example obituaries so we could write our own for Lincoln and Jackson. Jessica was the only exception. She was on the classroom computer searching for obituaries. She was an expert at finding things on the Internet.

“Did you want a paper?” I asked her.