Ms. Bixby's Last Day (4 page)

Next thing I knew, Principal McNair was walking quickly out the door, one hand over her face, just leaving us alone in the room with a blank screen, an unfinished book, and so many questions.

I'm no genius, but there is one thing I do know: I know that Ms. Bixby isn't coming back this year. I know a thing or two about hospitals and medical procedures and recovery times. I know
that sometimes it's easier to tell somebody what they want to hear or tell them only part of the truth.

There's a difference between the truth and the whole truth. The truth is Ms. Bixby is sick and she is leaving. The whole truth is that I have something I need to tell her. Something she already knows, but I feel like I have to say it out loud, in person, just in case she's forgotten, because she needs to hear it just as much as I did.

Which means, somehow or another, I've got to see her again.

DATE: FRIDAY, MAY 7. TIME: 0730. LOCATION:
Outer perimeter of Fox Ridge Elementary School, just south of the bus drop-off, and unfortunately behind some bushes with potentially poisonous berries and prickly thorns.

Special Agent Sakata and I have snuck behind enemy lines. The drop zone is clear; no sign of enemy patrols. Agent Sakata is armed with a Carhartt multitool, complete with pliers, unworkable scissors, and Phillips head screwdriver. I have my sketchbook—don't leave home without it—and a regulation-size box of raisins. The raisins are almost gone. The air is sharp with the smell of diesel and mown grass. We are already five minutes behind schedule. Special Agent Walker is late.

“Where is he?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Agent Sakata answers.

“What's his bus number?”

“I don't know that either.”

“But you know everything!”

“I don't know what bus he rides. I've never even been to his house!”

I shrug, letting Steve off the hook. It's true. Neither of us has been to Brand's house. Not because we wouldn't go. Only because we've never been invited. He's been to both of our houses tons of times in the past year (mostly mine—we aren't allowed to run on Steve's carpet because we might mess up the vacuum lines, so we don't go there much, and my parents are usually too busy to care what we're up to). Brand says he can't invite us over because his father doesn't like guests. It seems like every group of friends has one kid whose house you never go to. Plus I've heard a few things about Mr. Walker. I know about the accident and everything. I guess I'm not in any hurry to get an invite.

“If he's not here in the next five minutes, we should give up,” Steve says, looking at me nervously.

“What, you mean abort the mission and go to
school
?”

Agent Sakata shrugs.

I peer out from the hedge, spreading the branches carefully—it wouldn't pay to get stuck by a thorn and bleed out here on the school lawn before this operation even got underway. It's
business as usual out on the Ridge. The convoy is dropping off load after load: platoons of half-dead zombies marching in line, filing through the blue double doors in a shuffle step. I see lots of faces I recognize, but not the one I'm looking for. Special Agent Walker is MIA.

“I told you this wasn't a good idea,” Steve says.

I give him a dirty look, but he's probably right. This mission is already fritzled. That's a Brand word, but we all use it. It's one of the words we use so we don't get in trouble for using
other
words. If something is
really
fritzled we say it's
gefragt
, which Steve says is just the German word for “asked,” but it certainly sounds like something that is screwed up beyond repair. We aren't all the way to gefragt yet, but if Brand doesn't show up soon, we will be.

It wasn't supposed to go down like this. We had a plan. The plan was for Saturday. The plan was to lie to our parents and say we were all meeting each other at the park to play Frisbee. The plan was not to skip school. Of course, that was before we intercepted a key bit of intel between two high-ranking officials. Intel that called for a revised plan.

“I think I might vomit,” Steve says, holding his stomach, though I know it's just for dramatic effect. I've only seen him blow chunks once, and that was coming off the Whiparound at the state fair.

“Pull it together, Agent.” I slap him on the back and use my tough-guy voice, even though I feel the same. Neither of us has ever skipped before. It's against regulations. We could be court-martialed. Thrown in the brig. Taken before the principal. If found guilty, we might even be executed. At least, Steve might. His parents are pretty strict. Like marine-drill-seargeant-meets-Catholic-nun strict. I don't want to think about what would happen if they catch him skipping school.

“There's still time,” he says shakily. “The buses are still unloading. We can make it before the tardy bell and just forget the whole thing.”

I grimace and shove my last handful of raisins in my mouth, chewing them determinedly and thinking I probably should have rationed them, just in case we get stranded deep in enemy territory or something.

“Besides, we can't go without Brand. He's bringing the blanket,” Steve adds.

It's true: Agent Walker has the blanket. Our load-outs were issued the night before. Brand was in charge of the blanket. I would bring the map, the directions, and the paper plates. Agent Sakata had the music. We would all contribute the funds necessary to complete the rest of the mission, which explains the big bag of change weighing down my backpack. Most of the stuff
we really needed, we still had to acquire on the way. That was the plan.

“We can do without the blanket,” I say. The blanket wasn't a necessity. We could sit on the grass if we needed to.

Agent Walker was the necessity.

This was all his idea, after all.

Brand's idea, though I guess it was actually the sub who started it. The same temporary sub who we had had the whole week. Mrs. Brownlee was her name. Like brownie, she told us, except it sounded more like her ancestors just couldn't choose between last names. A nice enough lady, but ditzy, and a rambler, and, like all teachers, a huge gossip. You can't walk down the halls of Fox Ridge for ten seconds without hearing one teacher whispering to another about what “What's her bucket” said to “What's her face.” Except Mrs. Brownlee had no one to gossip with, so she confided in us, room 213. She told us everything she knew the minute she showed up that Monday: namely that Ms. Bixby was
not
at home reading novels and sipping tea in her backyard. She was in the hospital, earlier than expected, undergoing a “rigorous course of treatment,” whatever that meant. And she would likely be there for a while. Maybe weeks. I looked over at Brand and saw his face had gone white.

We were silent for a moment, and then Susan Sonders said, “We should make her a card.” Mrs. Brownlee thought that was a great idea, so out came the construction paper and the glue that we hadn't used since the first week of school, and we got to work as a class, making two dozen Get Well Soon cards, complete with self-portraits and bad poetry. Steve's was a little awkward, consisting of a checklist of everything Ms. Bixby should and shouldn't eat (apparently broccoli was in and fried chicken was out, which made me feel even worse for Ms. B.). I drew her a picture—a scene from
The Hobbit
. Then we stuffed the cards into a big manila envelope, and after a phone call to the secretary, Mrs. Brownlee scrawled an address on it, hospital room number and all. Steve volunteered to carry it down to the front desk. He memorized the address on the way; it's one of his things. When he got back, Mrs. Brownlee reluctantly started trying to teach us how to divide fractions but quickly gave up when she realized nobody was paying any attention—we were all thinking about Ms. Bixby in the hospital and what “rigorous treatment” meant—and sent us out to recess early.

That's when it happened—the plan. Brand was draped over the monkey bars, looking down at Steve and me through the spaces, both of us sitting in the mulch, throwing pieces of it, trying to get them into each other's collars and down each other's shirts. It was a stupid game, and notoriously one-sided as Steve
had terrible aim, but the slides were all too crowded and none of us had the energy to play kickball. I had scored my third goal when Brand spoke up.

“We should go.”

I looked at Steve, who was emptying the mulch out of his shirt, then back up at Brand.

“To the mall? To the moon? Back to bed? Where are you headed with this, Shakespeare?” I sometimes call Brand Shakespeare because of the making-up-words thing. We had to learn a little bit about the Bard this year. Namely that he made up words, wrote poems, and was in desperate need of a comb-over.

“To the hospital,” Brand said, still talking to us upside down. “To see Ms. Bixby. I want . . .” He paused, licked his lips, and took a deep breath. “I think it would mean a lot to her if we paid her a visit.”

“I'm not sure they would let us,” Steve said, scratching at his neck. “Not the whole class.”

“I don't mean the whole class,” Brand replied, looking out over the playground. “I just mean us. The three of us.”

“The three of us?” Steve repeated. It was clear he wasn't too hot on the idea.

“I don't think it's enough to send her a stupid construction-paper card, do you?”

Brand looked at me when he said it.

“Actually, my card was pretty good,” I said, thinking about my drawing of Bilbo and his ring, but I knew exactly what Brand meant. It didn't feel like enough to me either. It felt like a shortcut. Just something you do because you feel compelled to do
something
. Ms. B. deserved better.

Brand flipped down from the monkey bars and joined us in the mulch. “I feel like—after everything we've been through this year—we owe her, don't you?”

Steve made a face, but I nodded. “What do you have in mind?” I asked, thinking that it should be the other way around, that Brand should be asking me for ideas. I was the creative one, after all. But he clearly had given this some thought already.

“Do you remember a few months back, we had that one prompt on the board? With the french fries? The day I called Trevor a butt zit?”

I snapped my fingers. I knew exactly what he was talking about, and not just the butt zit part, though it was hard to forget the look on Trevor's face. Ms. Bixby had us write in our journals at least once a week for fifteen or twenty minutes. Sometimes we got to write about whatever we wanted, but most of the time she scrawled a prompt on the board for us to respond to.
Describe a time when you discovered something surprising about yourself
or
Tell me about a person you admire
. Sometimes they were
Would you rather
s
and sometimes they were just off-the-wall suggestions,
like
Pick a new flavor of bubble gum that you think nobody would ever want to chew and then write an ad for it
. (I picked pickle.) I knew exactly which prompt Brand was thinking of. It made perfect sense, and it made me a little jealous that I hadn't thought of it first.

“And you remember what-all she said?” Brand asked.

“I remember,” Steve said.

“Of course you do,” I told him.

“So . . . ,” Brand prompted, hands out, “we could totally do it. The park. The music. All of it. Or almost all of it. We could do it this Saturday. Surprise her. Just the three of us.”

I nodded, but Steve groaned. “It won't be easy,” he said. “Or cheap.” He wasn't saying no. He was just pointing out the potholes.

“Nothing worth doing is easy,” I said, using a Bixbyism against him.

Steve leaned against the ladder of the monkey bars, arms crossed, still not convinced. “I don't think it's a good idea.”

“C'mon, man. We can't do it without you,” Brand said. “It wouldn't be right. It would be like two musketeers leaving the third one at home to babysit.”

“There were technically four musketeers,” Steve said. “Plus what you're suggesting . . . parts of it . . . I'm not sure how we could even go about
getting
some of that stuff. And I don't think my parents . . .” He let his voice trail off, and he and Brand
stared at each other for a few seconds. Then Brand fell backward into the mulch, arms across his head.

“Lame,” he groaned.

“Lay off, Brand,” I said.

“Sorry,” Brand said. “But it's always the same thing. It's always, ‘I don't think my parents would go for that,' or ‘I'm probably not supposed to.' Some things are more important than following the rules.”

“Easy for you to say,” Steve countered. “You don't have to live with them.”

Brand looked like he was about to say something to that, something about what he
did
have to live with, but ultimately he just murmured, “Whatever.”

I looked at Steve. Sometimes that's all it takes. I just have to look at him and that will be enough to convince him. “He's right, you know. It would be pretty cool. If we could pull it off. Think about how surprised she would be. And your parents would never have to know.”

“
If
we could pull it off,” Steve repeated, then sighed before saying, “But you're right about one thing. You couldn't possibly do it without me.”

Brand bolted back up. “So you're in?”

Steve nodded reluctantly. I smiled. Brand started rubbing his hands together, super-villain-like. “But only if you can promise
that we won't get into any trouble,” Steve said.

I gave him my Indiana Jones smile. “When have we ever gotten you into trouble?”

“Three days ago,” he replied. “And twice last week.”

“I swear I thought Mrs. Samuelson's dog had an Invisible Fence,” I said, remembering the three of us running like mad down the street, that wannabe-ferocious little schnauzer yapping at our heels, threatening to chew Steve's shoes off his feet.

We spent the rest of recess making a list of what we'd need, using a pen stolen from Melissa Trotter and Brand's arm as paper. As his forearm filled with ink, I grew more and more amped. It was pretty epic, the plan. Dangerous, yes, and maybe a little illegal, but also fantastic. We went back to our room with a blueprint of how we'd spend the coming Saturday afternoon tattooed all over Brand's arm, Steve frowning, me smiling, and Brand looking serious as ever. Then Brand suddenly stopped in the hall. He was listening to two teachers talking, having a whispered conversation outside the room next door.

“It's getting worse,” Mrs. Lamos, one of the fifth-grade teachers, said. “They are transferring her to a new hospital all the way in Boston. She's flying out Saturday morning. She has family there, apparently.”